Laying Out a Genealogy of Universalism in Graphic Language: From Comenius to Nadia Hafid, Through Otto Neurath

Abstract

The achievement of universality that inspired scientific currents, social movements and cultural trends during the modern period has undergone an understandable decline in recent decades. But before the Second World War, when its consideration was still rising and it was possible to imagine the adoption of Esperanto as an auxiliary international language, the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath undertook a similar project applied to visual representation. His ISOTYPE system wished to become a graphic language whose understanding would be independent of the nationality or the language spoken by whoever observed its signs. In this sense, Neurath did not try to achieve a universalism related to the potential of representation, which he himself recognizes at a disadvantage compared to the verbal, but in its use. The impossible desire that guided him was to achieve de-Babelization, a latent pretext in many other attempts to establish a universal language.

The principles of design and organization in the images that Neurath created together with Marie Neurath and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz can be identified in the poetics that guide the work of some current comic book authors who, although they probably would not include the category of the universal among the driving principles of their works, in the way they manage the comic codes, indirectly advance in the same direction. This intuition can lead us to evaluate if the semiotic system of comics, to this day integrated into a globalized cultural heritage, has approached the goal that Neurath set and has even been able to surpass it thanks to the combination of the graphic and the verbal, that increase the possibilities of representation.

This text is intended to outline a genealogy of the universal in the graphic, taking Neurath as its origin of coordinates in order to look back to the past, reaching to the figure of John Amos Comenius, and towards the future, to a group of Spanish comic authors, who profess a poetics in which certain features of that underlying current of universality can be identified, among which we can mention Nadia Hafid, Antonio Hitos, Conxita Herrero, Lorenzo Montatore or Max. This itinerary will allow us to reflect on the nature of the iconic sign, its consideration as a language or system of codes and its value as an instrument of communication and education.