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Playing With Otherness: Within and Beyond Stereotypes in Visual Representations of objects—image, space, time, condition, action, proportion, thought, and language—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 description 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 “technology”), 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 territory 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 illustrating 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). 73
