The Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics Volume 3 pp 163 - 177
WHAT THE IMAGE WANTS:
FROM THE PICTORIAL TO THE
SOCIOCULTURAL REPRESENTATION
Dina Maria Martins Ferreira*
Abstract
Through the
multifarious conceptual net, the first preoccupation is to limit the image
senses that will be adopted, that is, the picture, the visual, pictorial,
symbolic and those related to this semantic field. The meaning ax does not
separate the abstract-mental image from the concrete-external image, since we
cannot remove the mental perception from the external figures that surround our
social corridors. There is nothing better than the Saussurean sign to explain
this relation: a new external sonorous element (concrete) can cause a mental
stimulus (abstract), which leads us to an idea. It is from the external
figurative that I intend to cross the symbolic to reach the representation
image-representation of the exterior world made up of the symbolic, fed by the
cartoon, which, true to its own nature, criticizes and denounces
political-social situations.
Remarks
To speak of
images is to go through multiple ways, very often intertwined with knots, which
either harmonize with each other, or are tied or untied. And through the
multifarious conceptual net, my first preoccupation is to limit the image
senses that will be adopted, that is,
the picture, the visual, pictorial, symbolic and those related to this semantic
field. And, like in a semantic area, its compound signs will share the
characteristic of the “delineated trait.” This meaning ax, undoubtedly, does
not separate the abstract-mental image from the concrete-external image, since,
when you think of an image, you cannot remove the mental perception from the
external figures that surround our social corridors. There is nothing better
than the Saussurean sign to explain this relation: a new external sonorous
element (concrete) can cause a mental stimulus (abstract), which leads us to an
idea. Illustrating my argumentation: a front
page journalistic picture of an “arrastão” (Brazilian phenomenon, is like a
collective assault on everybody who is at the beach) on Copacabana Beach in Rio
de Janeiro – that picture immediately causes a mental stimulus which brings me
the idea of violence and death. In other words, the external picture (concrete)
is the printed picture in the newspaper, with traits delineated in the
photograph, and the idea of violence is the mental image of the stimulus
received by the photograph.
But, even
if the mental picture is not excluded from the external image, and in this
case, it would not actually be possible, my interest is to start from the media
visual, more specifically, from the newspaper cartoon, undoubtedly an external
and concrete image. It is from the external figurative that I intend to cross
the symbolic to reach the representation image – representation of the exterior
world made up of the symbolic, fed by the cartoon, which, true to its own
nature, criticizes and denounces political-social situations.
In view of
this proposal, what I call image in the first place is the picture, the
portrait, the drawing. It is important to clarify that, as I refer to these
terms, I am not solidifying senses or rendering them static in the apparent
immobility of the image that is fixed on paper. Quite the contrary, these
pictures are political-social senses building vectors, and at each stage in
which they are assimilated, they successively go on building values, according
to the moment and historical space in which they are consumed and fed.
And, it is
through the image, in this case the cartoon, that another field can be
reached – that of criticism to the normativizing of the difference. While the
drawing of the cartoon selected (under the theme of the ozone layer and
its charring heat plus the relation between the elite and the have-nots),
delineates graphical traits (a figurative-pictorial image), symbolic images are
being built; these images become representative of social values in a
political-historical space.
The figurative image
Image comes
from the Greek imago, which means the visual representation of an
object. So many evaluations! Plato states that imago refers to eidea, that is, the idea of something
corresponds to its image as a projection of the mind. Aristotle considers the
image as the acquisition by the senses of the mental representation of a real
object. Yet, Saussure makes the sign image a two-faced coin in which one face
does not survive without the other, the external image bringing about the
mental image and fostering it. Without lingering in philosophical issues and
establishing frontiers between image conceptualizations, many roads and domains
show up, frontiers crisscross… I see myself unable to limit conceptualizations
as the beginning of my argumentative road – keeping in mind that I am before
the problem of what comes first, the egg or the hen; I decided my point of
departure will be the external image that reveals the material expression
(limited by strokes and traits) of people and situations, drawn or
photographed. Concrete pictures are not deterred in the limit of their lines;
they move on and expand into other images, in this case, the symbolic and
representation images (no longer borderline) of a historical-political
situation, full of social assessments.
The imagetic sense, whatever the dimension we attach it to, is always
under construction.
By the
external route, you can snap up commercials, magazines, movies television, and
so forth, for all of these paths follow the representation of an external
object expressed in communicative vehicles. Visual communication is, then,
reached, insofar as there is a meaningful expression which uses signs,
drawings, charts, etc; in short, what can be seen by the human eye.
And, in
this universe of visual communication, you can see the cartoon. Although
I am not discussing discursive genres, it is mandatory to include the cartoon
as one of them, an illustration style which has the purpose of satirizing a
current event by means of caricature. In Portuguese the word used for cartoon
is etymologically of French origin: the term charge means load and, as
such, it exaggerates the traits of people and spaces so as to render them
burlesque – a burlesque that is incisive in its criticism. As the meaning of
load it “represents an attack where reality
is presented again with the help of images and words” (Santos, 2007: serial);
as a matter of fact, it is a satirical genre propitious to situations of
political-social criticism.
More than a
simple drawing, a cartoon is strong social criticism, censor of political
practices; it has “the capability of approaching controversial themes like
politics, religion, social conflicts, etc (Santos, 2007: serial); cartoons are
almost always “present in the everyday, in newspapers, magazines, billboards,
in addition to creating humor and, consequently, bringing the reader pleasure”
(Pereira, 2006, p. 102)
In addition
to its effect of laying bare situations and criticizing them, I reaffirm that a
cartoon is a pictorial image, drawn by pigments on some kind of support, using
drawing techniques. It would, then, be a pictorial figurative image
representing something materially existant: people, the political-historical
demonstration space, building a relation between the producer and receptor to
unveil the nonmanifest, hidden, but not less known: “The cartoon does not limit
itself to speak ironically, but it adds to the comic, created by the
disfigurement of the image, a singular datum: criticism, which aims to lead
readers to solidify their positions concerning a specific aspect of reality, in
that the main focus is political facts
(Santos, 2007: serial).
The symbolic image
If the concrete image is
made up of drawn lines, its linear trait net will be building meanings which,
very often, organize themselves in the configuration of the symbolic image. The
image notion begins to expand. I would like to call attention to this issue,
owing to the fact that I am working with the external image, in principle of
iconic nature – imagetic representation of the real. Nevertheless, its
iconicity is not imprisoned in the borders of its strokes.
According to Barthes (1989), the symbolic is built by
the superposition of signs. In other words, on the first level, the signifier
and the signified interact in the composition of the denotative meaning. The
second is built by the sign on the first level, now the signifier (Ser) of the
added signified (Sed); this is the connotative level. Yet, on the third level,
the symbolic follows the same process: it snaps up the connotative sign, already
expanded, and transforms it in signifier for another signified. All told, an
ideological escalade, nurtured by sociocultural stratification. A chart, which
should be read bottom-up, clarifies the meaning attribution gradation:
|
symbolic level |
<{[Ser]} |
Sed1+Sed2 +Sed> |
|
|
connotative level |
{[Ser] |
Sed1+ Sed2} |
|
|
denotative level |
[Ser+Sed1] |
|
|
For the
sociocultural stratification character that constitutes the symbol, we, very
often, attribute a fixed and permanent nature to it. Actually, what is called
permanence is the durability the sociocultural provides. A symbol, would, then
characterize itself by two properties: durability and equivalence, attributes
that already demonstrate the fluidity of its limits, without denying the
cultural morphology that constitutes it due to this fluidity. “Symbols are
experienced and valued diversely: the product of these multiple updates largely
constitute the ‘cultural styles’(…) [and] as historical formations, these
cultures are no longer interchangeable; being already constituted in their own
styles, they can be compared at the level of
Images and of symbols” (Eliade,
1996, p. 173).
The
symbolic durability lies in part in the nature of the conventional, which
renders the symbol dense and difficult to take apart in the historical
route. Insofar as a symbol is understood
as a crystallization and solidification of cultural meaning, the symbolization
process presupposes the possibility of meaning stabilization in detriment to the
signifiers that glide through social instants. An example helps this
argumentative road: a crown is that which is put on the heads of the people we
want to pay homage to, like leaders, noble people, kings, queens; in brief, it
is an object that shows that the subject who is wearing it on his/her head is
important. Not taking into account if you have in mind the times of the
Pharaohs, the Caesars, of European nobility in golden centuries and currently,
the crown symbolizes, at all times, at least in the Western world, royalty,
that is, ‘being above others.’ The signifiers change, but the symbolic meaning
attribution ax can cross other times and spaces because it sticks to the
meaning ‘being above others.’ The symbolic movement is anchored on concrete forms
(performativized in each period) which expand themselves abstractly in
direction of the signified: the bay leaf crown of the Caesars, Queen Elizabeth
II’s crown of gold and precious stones
of oval-triangular format are specific
historical morphologies which expand
their signifieds in direction of
the trans-historical meaning of
‘being above others’.
It is in
this process that the residues of symbolic meaning attribution are established:
durable, once the meaning attributions of cultural life are not triturated and
dissolved immediately after the time plow goes by; residues set as gems in the
cultural furrows, whose deep marks of meaningful expansions are remembered in
signifiers suitable to their historical context.
Within the
issue of the durability of symbolic meaning, the etymology, itself, of the term
symbol, already ratifies its ecological nature-the recycling of meanings. The
Greek term sýmbolon (syn, together,
with and ballein, hurl, throw)
has the meaning of ‘throw with’, hurl simultaneously, ‘play-with’. At the
beginning, it was a sign of recognition: an object divided into two parts whose
adjustment, confrontation, allowed the carriers of each one of the parts to acknowledge
each other. The symbol is, therefore, the expression of an equivalence concept” (Brandão, 1986, p. 38) (my highlighting).
When you
permit meaning equivalences, the symbol does not immobilize itself in the time
and space where it manifests itself. Its stable (not eternal) nature, in
addition to ‘play with’ meanings allow it to move on in search of
continuous manifestation in the historical, social and political space where it
is living.
It is,
therefore, ratified that the symbolic image built on the drawn image,
attributes meaning by the durability and equivalence of meaning attributions:
durability that can be not only in the repetition of the drawn traits, but in
the meaning attributions, and equivalence that presents itself in the abstract
dimension of the signifieds, which searches a mode of existence in the relation
with other meaningful forms. Neither of the movements – concrete towards
abstract and abstract in search of the concrete – becomes more relevant than
the other; neither preexists the other, for they are in continuous and complex
intertwining. Concrete and abstract, form and content, are constituted like
threads of a net that is configured in the texture itself of its lines. There
is no saturation point in the meaningful network, since it is “situated in and
sensitive to contingent factors of spatial-temporal coordinates which mark
their production (…) It is dispersion and dissemination in an interminable
process” (Rajagopalan, 2003: 3)
So far, I
have demonstrated that the image drawn by lines can build a symbolic image:
first a figurative-pictorial image drawn on the shape level, whose expression
disseminates the symbolic and which is articulated not only by lines, but by
contents, where content is understood as a web of sociocultural value
attributions. As we are in a universe of line and sense frontier mobility, the
symbolic image can build images representative of the social, especially
because the nature of symbol equivalence allows for that; in other words,
meaning attributions exhaled in the drawn lines escape to the social world in
search of figures and situations they can represent. This is equivalence
fighting on the social-political tatami.
The image of social representation
And we reach the world of representation. Considering
that the symbol is a sociocultural construction, representation is also carried
out socioculturally, heading towards the political space: space is history and
history is a political manifestation.
To the extent that I am attempting to reach the image
cartoon as convergence point of the pictorial, symbolic and representative images,
a fragment of the speech of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (“The revitalization of
political art”, University of Stanford, 1996), the incumbent President of
Brazil at that time, raises issues of political representation: “It is becoming
increasingly difficult to harmonize, within public space, the action of social
agents and cultural identities. This is the essence of the difficulties that
the classical representation tools face, because many demands, although
legitimate, are partial and do not reflect the set of values linked to an
economic-cultural identity. The polis has been fragmented;
political mediation, in which the idea of representative democracy, itself, is
seated, no longer fulfils, except imperfectly, its role of changing individual
interests into collective ones”.
Given the imperfection of an ideal representation, it is the symbolic that comes into operation to compensate for this deficiency. Hence, the polysemous skill of the symbolic to fulfill innumerable representations. Even if the symbolic starts acting in representation, there is the clash between individual and collective, for, as Fernando Henrique stated, the imperfection of representation very often lies “in the role of transforming individual interests into collective ones”. Durkheim questions the relation between individual and collective. For the Author, the collective “has more stability than feelings or images (...) because collective representations are more stable than individual ones, for, while the individual is sensitive to even small changes that occur in his/her internal or external environment, only very serious events are able to affect the mental balance of society (Durkheim, apud Moscovici, 2001, p. 48).
When the quality of stability is attributed to the
collective, it can be linked with symbol durability, further notifying why the
social continuously requires the symbolic. If symbolic meaning attribution is
durable, this durability becomes united to stability, attributes which are very
close. It is at this level that many individual interests take the place of the
collective, granted that the symbology is there to assist this road. So much so
that an individual picture, very often, represents the collective, whether it
is actually a representation of the collective or of individual interest.
Symbology, per se, fills in the blanks in history, in the social and cultural:
that is where the representative body is established. Durkheim, himself, even
in the individual/ collective dichotomy, acknowledges the difficult dissociation
between the two levels: “You
can ask if individual and collective representations do not, however, fail to
unite, due to the fact that both are equally representations and, if in the
sequence of these similarities, some abstract laws would not be common to both
realms. The myths, popular legends, religious conceptions of all kinds, moral
conceptions, etc express a reality that is not the individual one; but maybe
the way in which they attract and repel one another, unite or separate is
independent of their content and is just linked to their general quality of
representations” (Durkheim, 1963: XVIII) (Durkheim apud Moscovici, 2001, p. 59).
Beyond the
abstract laws related to representation, there is the individual body of
representation, which escapes from abstract laws, in spite of being fed and
built by it – symbols, myths, beliefs, desires. But the game does not end in
the individual and collective relation, owing to the fact that “collective
representations [will] make way to social representations” (Moscovici, 2001, p.
62). According to the Author, “a modern society manifests and expresses itself
through communication. In this sense, social representation is not only the
reflex of a collective, profiled as preestablished and static or even as
substratum of the social, but, as a process of continuous construction in the
interactions in which it is processed. Social representations are more than
individual or group supports due to the simple and complex fact that they are
elaborated in the course of political exchanges and interactions” (Moscovici,
2001, p. 62).
And when political interactions are approached, you
cannot exclude the picture that plays the role of representative in these
interactions. It is at this instant that
the issue of corporification in/ of social
representation takes the stage. If social representation is, very often,
carried out by an individual, the individual level is not detached from the
concept of social representation; there is the emergence of an individual that
has a voice, body and face inserted in a sociopolitical space; it is an
individual whose body is made up of lines, scribbling, which is carried out in
pictorial image and which exhales the symbolic image to reach the image
representative of a social level.
The body in social representation offers a conceptual
triad: corporality, corporeity and corporification, vectors that modalize
within the representative figure. Corporality would be linked to the body
proper, to the flesh that bewitches, which allows itself to be touched by
emotion; it is the body which, “in its vital movement, produces its texture”
(Souza, undated). Corporeity would be in relation to an iconic link between
the sensitive body – the flesh – and the image it projects; it is “the body as
image, reference or inspiration, denoted in descriptive processes or plastic
forms which recover the image of the human body, be it figuratively, be it so
as to dilute corporal references, to a greater or lesser extent” (Souza,
undated); in conclusion, an image of the body projects sociocultural images of
the everyday it inhabits. Associated with corporeity (expressive values
of the body in its exteriority) is corporality (both under the statute of
physicalness), which is evidenced as “the construction of a corporal score”
(Souza, undated) within a political-social scene, whose body moves
connotatively, performativizing, building and claiming
ideological-political-social meanings.
Spivak (1994), when formulating two processes
constituent of representation (“speaking on behalf of” and “representing”)
shows the relevance of the body in social representation. The representative
figure must represent, that is, once more present its body, whose lines and
contours, its drawing and photograph should reflect the necessary symbolic
image so that its social representation can be suitable to the interests of the
historical-political moment. A significant example is Franz Fanon (undated): a
picture presents black corporality, whose corporeity is in his history – a
person who lived in Algeria, who suffered exclusion for being black and for
being in a country that was colonized; these ingredients render his corporality
acknowledged and identified with the representation of the colonized Negritude
that fought for inclusion. The image of social representation is validated in
corporification.
What does the image want?
I will take
up the epigraph and inquire what the image means, what it wants and what it
does. This inquiry allows you to look at the issue in two different manners:
the meaningful route of the image considered as object
seen/constructed/assimilated by the subject, and the subjectivized image, the
image as social agent.
In the
first route, the object-cartoon image, what you can find is the pictorial
image, the one drawn by a set of colors and traces. What is configured is a
couple at the top of a glass tower looking at other towers distributed in an
urban space meant for the gathering of residence-towers. The glass house, where
the couple is, is supported by a tall column whose top part is haloed by a
pointed-edged chain. Under the column, a multitude of ‘people’ with brownish
skins (color indicating the beginning of the charring of the human body) and
lifted arms, trying to climb up the column. This is the start of the pictorial
image meaningful process as it joins the linguistic component, whose role is
that of expanding the meaning of the lines drawn. Independent of the linguistic
component, the face of the couple in addition to the distribution of the
‘houses’ in a futuristic city, refer to the Jetsons animated cartoon. Sense
associations were triggered. The connotative world invades the traces of the
drawing.
Cartoon, Angeli, Folha de S.Paulo Newspaper, April 13, 2007, A2,
To clarify
one of many associations, it is worth summarizing the ‘universe of the Jetson
family’. The Jetsons picture a family in a fantastic view of the XXI century,
when robots and supermodern devices make life easier and more enjoyable. (It is
worth remembering that the production of this series ended in 1957, i.e. in the
middle of the XX century; for that reason, there is a futuristic idea of the
XXI century). In the world of the Jetsons, people float all the time, and have
no contact with the ground; when the father comes home, he gets into the house,
but he does not need to walk to the armchair, for a conveyor belt does the job
for his legs. They are served by a robot which pushes buttons in a machine that
releases tablets tasting of protein, sandwiches, vegetables and chocolate. In
this family, superiority is evident, since it refines ‘humans’ with such
perfection and privileges that the dog is a robot with feelings, but it can be
disconnected when they wish.
A
‘photographic’ representation of a futuristic family immediately reveals the present
of the XXI century: the elite is saved by technology while the have-nots die
charred by the heat of the ozone layer; the elite is saved by the possibility
of having access to economical gains, of having a pet (known as affective
company to humans), which can be disconnected by a button. The have-nots cannot save themselves, for
they are unable to climb the tall column and, even if they were, they would not
go beyond the claws of pointed iron.
The
symbolic image of the social differences in Brazil is constructed as follows:
the haves at the top and the have-nots at the bottom. The Jetsons ‘nonreal’
life would be the symbol of the facilities for those that can reach them and
the arms bare of flesh, almost charred, symbolize the masses – an image of segregation
and exclusion. And, through these symbolisms (and many others that could be
discussed), a representation of the sociopolitical Brazilian situation is
gradually built.
Deconstructing
the symbolic and representational senses of segregation, exclusion, Santos
(2006) helps us in his propositions about difference and inequality. According
to him, “inequality is a socio-economic phenomenon, whereas exclusion is mainly
a cultural and social phenomenon, a civilization phenomenon” (Santos, 2006, p.
280-281). Nevertheless, in social practices these two levels are mingled,
since, for example, a person that is in inequality of purchasing power, the
social class of the poor (compared to that of the rich) can suffer exclusion
due to cultural norms that the value of a person lies in his/her skills of
acquiring assets: “social practices, ideologies and attitudes unite inequality
and exclusion, subordinate belonging and rejection and the forbidden” (Santos,
2006, p. 282).
The cartoon
puts together two phenomena: there is class inequality between the rich and the
poor (the latter below and the former above), while segregation is brought into
effect, considering the pointed-edged iron chain, which hinders the entrance of
the poor into the universe of the haves.
As Santos (2006, p. 282) specifies, “the extreme degree of exclusion is
extermination (..) the extreme degree of inequality is slavery”. If you want to
check the symbolic image of exclusion, there are the lines and colors that draw
the ‘people’ with squalid arms, already charred. What consumer, at least the
one who knows a bit of history or who has watched lots of films about World War
II, fails to make the symbolic equivalence between the arms and bodies of the
cartoon-picture and the bodies of concentration camps? The extreme
degree of exclusion is emphasized by the linguistic “by the time they reach us,
they will have melted,” a reaching that is a nonreaching, considering that they
will have been exterminated by the heat.
The idea of
extermination is so clear that the sharp-pointed claw between the two levels
leads us to think about the universalism of difference; in other words, the
difference is there for everyone to see; it is not discussed; what is the
problem? Whoever does not fit in a specific social level is, in principle,
eliminated from the top. According to Santos (2006, p. 283), “the ideological
device managing inequality and exclusion is universalism, a form of
essentialist characterization, which, paradoxically, can assume two forms in
contradictory appearance: antidifferentialist universalism, which operates
through the denial of differences and differentialist universalism, which
operates by the absolutization of differences”.
The cartoon
is not demanding the antidifferentialism, which operates by the denial of
the differences. Quite the contrary, what occurs is the absolutization of differences, a
determinist social position which affirms that
differences exist, will continue existing and there is no solution for them, which is shown by
the pointed claws, as they deny the possibility of the
inclusion movement. The cartoon, at that moment, is the social representation
of the social exclusion system, which establishes the essentialism of
differences and advises of the normality of differences. The universalism of
differences is, thus, settled.
To confirm
the cultural symbolization (now in its representational image of the
absolutization of differences), the symbol manifests itself more condensed,
portraying the social supply, which it uses. A pragmatic example, taken from
the everyday, is the case of a student during a debate on social exclusion: you
know, teacher, my domestic help decided her daughter is not going to school any
longer, justifying her attitude in a very assured manner, and saying that the
poor do not need to go to school; they will die poor and need to work from
childhood. Such assertions have reflected and sedimented sociocultural values for generations,
positions that the subjects gradually assume and incorporate. Essentialism and
normativization immobilize the oscillating movement, positive or negative,
characteristic of class differences.
And, as
caricatural drawing itself shows, the cartoon is expressed by irony,
whose humoristic practice is shored on political criticism. Laughter and
violence inhabit in caricatural humor. Laughter lies in the ambiguity,
deliberately contradictory between what is said and the sense you want to put
across. (Brait, 1996) Maybe laughter lies in the convergence of two divergent
themes: what do the Jetsons have to do with the ozone layer? What does an easy
and technological life in the XXI century, configured by an animated cartoon,
have to do with the seriousness with which scientists warn about global warming
and its consequences? An animated cartoon together with science? Nonsense!
This nonsense promotes
laughter. Ambiguity is constituted. And nonsense in ambiguity begins to build
the sense of criticism.
But the
nonsense of laughter also joins violence, whose resources from language fencing
establish the derision of the signifier, i.e., a “mixture of humor and
violence” (Courtine, 2003). In the verbal, “Do not worry about that, my
dear! By the time they reach us, they
will all have melted due to global warming”, the term “melted” makes you aware
of the real consequences. The nonverbal, the pointed iron ring, which hinders
the salvation of those that stretch their arms in search of help, is linked to
the brownish color of burns, and, in the relation of the imagetic with the
verbal; the begging arms brown from the burns designate the “melted.”
Inequality
of themes and inequality of situation reveal exclusion, because irony becomes
the expression of difference – essentialized and universalized by the frontier
of pointed iron. Emphasizing: in laughter lies insensitivity (Bergson, 1983),
which naturally, comes together with it, and in violence, lies pain. Irony is a
sense strategy, so as to make sense not only to me, but, to the other. While
laughter lies in the effect of imagetic practice, violence lies in social
practice, and it seems that this is what the cartoon proposes: sense
interpretation which is exposed until the arrival of an inverted sense. It does
not matter in what category we are, comicality does not occur outside the
human. According to Bergson (1983), comicality is a touch in the human which
leads to laughter: either to suffered or perplexed astonishment. Laughter
remains on the surface and irony is part of the criticism and denunciation of a
social situation.
And,
accordingly, I will begin the second route, that of considering the image (not
only pictorial, symbolic, representative) not as an object, but as a social
agent. Through laughter, through violence and denunciation, the image acts: it
wants and carries out denunciation, interfering in difference absolutization.
Situated in a socio-historical context, the cartoon-image promotes not only the
interaction between traces and colors and the social subject, but, especially,
it gives the pictures voice and movement.
According
to Walter Benjamin (2001), human language can attribute names; however, would
there be other languages even if they do not have designating skills? To
him, objects also speak to humans. They are the ‘beings’(onto) that make humans
attribute a name and sense. If things can do this, they are also sense agents.
The object also looks at humans; not only humans look at objects. “Why
designate? What do humans communicate with? But is this issue in humans
different from that of other kinds of communication (languages)? What does the
oil lamp communicate with? What about the mountain? And the fox? The answer is
the following: with humans. This is not the case of anthropomorphism. The truth
of this answer manifests itself in knowledge and maybe also in art. In
addition, if the oil lamp, the mountain and the fox did not communicate with
humans, how would communication designate these objects? But it designates
them: humans communicate naming them. Who do humans communicate with?”
(Benjamin, 2001, p.180-181).
The
communicable strength of objects can be considered, insofar as they promote the
creative strength of designative humans. This position (the object acting) does
not take away from the subject his/ her
intervention in the world, but neither
does it nullify the actantial strength of objects, in this case, censors of
world senses. The objects are there, in front of us, built by humans or not,
and somehow these objects generate agencies. Considering that senses can be
analyzed in objects, why can’t these objects be agency vectors? “Language
communicates (…) simply a communicability”
(Benjamin, 2001, p. 183), and it is in the communicability process that
the object is also rendered the subject’s agent-partner: “The differences among
languages are those of the media., which, as it were, differ according to their
density, that is, gradually: and this is valid both in the sense of the density
of the communicant (…), and in that of the communicable (…) in communication”
(Benjamin, 2001: 183).
The object would be the communicable and humans, the communicants, who through interaction constitute the communicability process. If communicability is interaction, both elements that constitute it are communicative praxis vectors.
According
to Mitchell’s approach (2005), a lot is said about the action-image with
suspicions of fetishism, idolatry, animism and/or even as personification. I am
not talking about this action, much less about the image treated as a dumb and
silent sign, incapable of speech, sound or denial. What I propose is the image
that wants an enunciative voice: “Every advertising executive knows that some
images, to use the trade jargon, “have legs” – that is, they seem to have a
surprising capacity to generate new directions and surprising twists in an ad
campaign, as if they had an intelligence and purposiveness of their own (Mitchell, 2005, p. 31).
There could
also be the great temptation of understanding the image as an agent of
manipulation. I do not deny this avenue; nonetheless, what I want to ratify is
that the image is not necessarily the representation and/ or symbology of what
it portrays, but, also an act, an agent. This avenue is possible so much so
that the cartoon becomes an act of criticism, an agent of
violence, a punch in the stomach as we are ‘awakened’ by the denunciation of
the absolutization of differences. Couldn’t the images, not only the cartoon,
be power agents of a desire, the model of a subaltern being questioned or
invited to speak? Wouldn’t the cartoon-image be the power of the weak, power
that would correspond to a strong desire? It seems to me that the cartoon gives
voice to the subalterns that raise their squalid arms up, screaming: we are
here.
There is no
doubt that representationalism is a lament, not a desire, that is to say ,
representation is the only presumed way
to access the essence, since the essence is not reached: “The thesis of
representationalism is, at a time, a lamentation and an expression of desire. It
is a gesture of lamentation because it affirms the incapability of human beings
to apprehend the numenal world as is […] On the other hand, it is also an expression of a desire, for it elects
total transparency as the ideal condition of language” (Rajagopalan, 2003, p.
31).
Even if
social representation is considered as a picture of the real, not the ‘real,’ it is through this absence that
the image acts. “The picture wants in terms of lack” (Mitchell, 2005, p. 37),
and wanting this lack, it acts through it. And the picture cartoon acts:
for the lack of air conditioning, of the protection of a tall house with glass
windows, for the lack of tools to destroy the pointed iron ring, for this lack,
it screams. The image is more than a wish of looking at them as sense vehicles
or power tools. “Pictures would want to be worth a lot of money; they would
want to be admired and praised as beautiful; they would want to be adored by
many lovers. But above all they would want a kind of mastery over the beholder”
(MitchelL, 2005, p. 36). In the abode of
desire, lies its action.
An image is
not only a picture or a photograph; a network of scribbling is not in vain in
social practice. From the pictorial image the route is very complex until you
get to the endless network of images that is built and modified each instant in
which it is established in the historical-political space. It makes no
difference if you make use of the ethnocentrism of the subject that commands
the production and the sense of the image; the image also has the power to
create other voices and other bodies. Whether external images, of the
pictorial, symbolic and representational order, whether mental images, they
connect themselves by means of the “delineating trait” axis, a delineating of
world significance.
References
Barthes, R. (1989). Elementos de Semiologia. [Elements of Semiology] São Paulo,Ed. Cultrix.
Benjamin, W. (2001) Sobre a linguagem em geral e sobre a linguagem humana.[On language in general and on human language] In Sobre a arte, técnica, linguagem e política. [On art, technique, language and politics]. Lisboa, Ed. Relógio d’Água.
Bergson, H. (1983) O riso
– ensaio sobre a significação do cômico. [Laughter- an essay on
the meaning of the comic] Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Zahar.
Brait, B.(1996). Ironia em perspectiva polifônica. [Irony under a polyphonic perspective] Campinas/SP, Ed. Unicamp.
Brandão, J.. de S. (1986) Mitologia Grega [Greek Mythology], Volume I. 2a.ed. Rio de Janeiro, Ed. Vozes.
Courtine, J. J. (2003) A política como espetáculo [Politics
as a show] In:Gregolin, M. do R. Discurso
e mídia – a cultura do espetáculo. [Discourse and the media- the
culture of shows] São Carlos/SP, Ed. Claraluz.
Durkheim, E.
(1963) [1895] Les règles de la méthode
sociologique.[The rules of the sociological method] Paris, Ed. PUF.
Eliade, M.(1996) Imagens
e Símbolos.[Images and Symbols] São Paulo, Ed. Martins Fontes.
Fanon, F.
(undated) Peles Negras e Máscaras
Brancas. [Black Skins
and White Masks] Porto, Ed. A.
Ferreira.
Mitchell, W.
J. T. (2005) What do pictures want.
USA, The University of Chicago Press.
Pereira, T. M. A. (2006) O discurso das charges: um campo fértil de intertextualidade.[ The discourse of cartoons: a fertile intertextuality field] In: Silva, Antonio de Pádua Dias da et al. Ensino de língua: do impresso ao virtual.[Language teaching: from printed matter to the virtual] Campina Grande, PB: EDUEP.
Rajagopalan, K. (2003) Por uma lingüística crítica – linguagem, identidade e a questão ética.[Towards a critical lingusitics- language, identity and the ethical issue] São Paulo, Parábola.
Santos, B. de S. (2006) A gramática do tempo: para uma nova cultura política.[The grammar of time: towards a new political culture] São Paulo: Cortez.
Santos, E. P. (2007) Gêneros textuais e o discurso das charges: um campo fértil de intertextualidade . [Textual genres and the discourse of cartoons: a fertile intertextuality field ] Webartigos.com . Link Educação.
Souza, A. Texto e cena: operações tradutórias da corporalidade [ Text and scenario : operations translating corporality] www.conexaodança.art.gr
Spivak, G. C.
(1994) Can the subaltern peak? In: Williams, P. and Chrisman, L. Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory,
a reader. USA/New York, Columbia University Press.