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Playing With Otherness: Within and Beyond Stereotypes in Visual Representations
of objects—image, space, time, condition, action, proportion, thought, and lan¬
guage—can undergo distortion (Ibidem: 9).
There is also one more remark that seems to be relevant in Rivers’ suggestion
that “the key principle is not deviation from accurate realism, but deviation from
accepted representation” (Ibidem: 22). This point makes us aware that the proper
reading of a situation, the recognition of the point, can be accessed only by those
who belong to the cultural collective. They are able to recognize, then, a form of a
distortion. Rivers claimed that “we know because we perceive a deviation from some
highly recognizable norm” (Ibidem: 22). With such use of distortion, it is possible
to represent various types of Otherness.
The types of Otherness appearing on the scene of the satirical periodicals can
be classified from the point of view of territory,!! cognition, or identification, "? all
of which possess their own typical references. Both sides establish contact and, as
a result, the scope of the discussion covers several aspects: the seer, his or her way
of seeing, the eye of the seer, what and how he or she sees, how the seer visualizes
what he or she sees, how the seer represents it, and to whom he or she directs these
representations.
Seriousness Versus Lack of It
The new type of common territory, marked out by the common views and
shaped by the availability of printed material together with various ways and
conventions of employing the category of the Other, does not exhaust the de¬
scription of the context in which the discussed visual representations appeared.
In Poland, in the second half of the nineteenth century, something that Taylor
called “the culture of refinement,”'? present in western Europe already in the
eighteenth century, gained significance. The author mentions the elements of the
ideal of refinement, for example, having a well-ordered government, a certain
level of development of arts and sciences (which today we would call “technol¬
ogy”), and rational and moral self-control, together with the essential issues of
taste, quality, and sophistication—in short, a sound basis of education and polite
manners (Taylor 2010: 58).
What seems the most important is that these benefits of civilization were seen as
the result of discipline and education. Refinement was understood primarily as an
N, which is cultural in the sense that it is usually metonimically associated with a non-native ter¬
ritory and its inhabitants” (1991: 310).
'2 Refers to the narrative techniques of stating the order of figures, exaggeration (hyperbole), creation
of an antonym (a world turned upside down), fantastical deformations, enumeration techniques as il¬
lustrating strategies and symbolization strategies (allegories, parables, meaningful anachronisms) in the
translation of the unknown into the known.
'3 In this sense, courtesy begins to be associated with another expression—civilitas (refinement). This
expression also has a long history, from Renaissance-period civilitas as an ancestor of our “civilization,”
fulfilling a similar function (Taylor 2010: 54).
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