A hybrid entity is conceived of as an inseparable combination of components associated with two or more distinct entities—the hybrid's parents. A central feature of the hybrid is that whereas its parents are typically familiar entities belonging to well-established categories, the hybrid itself is, or at least starts out as, a novel and unfamiliar entity whose categorial membership is not immediately obvious and often never determined. The notion of hybrid is extremely broad; popular sites on the internet provide a great many different entries whose titles contain the term hybrid, addressing a wide array of items from domains as diverse as language (e.g., portmanteau terms and oxymorons), poetry (e.g., contemporary hybrid American poetics), botany (e.g., cross-pollinated plants such as sweet corn or hybrid grape), technology (e.g., a hybrid vehicle or computer), art (e.g., hybrid genres and figures), mythology and myth (e.g., hybrid creatures), education (e.g., hybrid classes), and visual and material studies (e.g., posthumanism, which analyzes cyborgs as well as rigid links between the human body and machines like cellular phones). What is more, the concept of hybridity has been attributed with an all-inclusive extension and a great many uses by current cultural studies. While hybrids have been around since the dawn of civilization, the phenomenon has reached a peak at the turn of the millennium, and claims that ours is “an age of hybridization” are expressed by theoreticians of postmodernism (Thomas 2005; Hazan 2015). Thus, the hybrid is a special but omnipresent cultural phenomenon that is the expression of a complex trait of human nature. It embodies the human aspiration and need for a well-ordered world combined with the incompatible wish to transgress the world's categories and disrupt them (only to attach them yet again to a self-conflicting but solid entity).

A major subclass of hybrids is that of visual hybrids. This issue is the first to be devoted to the characterization and analysis of the visual hybrid as a distinct phenomenon. A visual hybrid is of the kind whose medium is a visually perceivable two- or three-dimensional image or object such as a drawing or statue. Prototypical and well-known examples of visual hybrids are paintings or statues of centaurs, part human part horse; and mermaids, combining the top half of a woman with the bottom half of a fish. Visual hybrids are ubiquitous in art, religion, folklore, and popular culture. Some of the very first examples of representational visual art are of hybrids, such as the human/animal hunters of the cave art of Sulawesi in Indonesia, dated back to at least 43,900 years ago, recently reported by Aubert et al. (2019), the forty-thousand-year-old Hohlenstein Stadel lion man, and the thirty- to thirty-two-thousand-year-old Chauvet bison man. Ancient Assyrian and Egyptian religion is replete with gods of hybrid forms, such as the Lamassu, as is the mythology of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Middle Ages and the Renaissance of Western Europe, produced hybrids in the form of monsters, grotesques, and combinations of animals. Today visual hybrids can be found in all corners of the globe, ranging from the traditional cultures of New Guinea and the Amazon all the way to postmodern art and the posthuman culture of cyborgs. The widespread distribution of visual hybrids across space and time suggests that they may reflect universal properties of human cognition.

Among the various kinds of hybrids, the hybridity of the visual kind is salient because its interconflicting parts are shown forth. Thus, because all of its components are perceptually revealed at the same time, the visual hybrid brings to the fore the dialectic character of hybridity, namely, the combination of the uncombined, as well as revealing the human nature that motivates it. This issue addresses the visual hybrid in light of our universal draw toward visual order and established categories and forms, which philosophers who analyze the visual sphere and its perception emphasize time and again. It is well known that order has been considered to be the foundation of beauty by theories that run from the Pythagorean formulation of mathematical order to the idea of the aesthetically significant form that was offered by modernist formalists such as Clive Bell (1958), Roger Fry (1920), or Clement Greenberg (1986). Additionally, the renowned philosophers of design Victor Papanek and Henri Dreyfuss point to the “survival of forms” (Dreyfuss 1974: 56), namely, rigid categories that result from the fact that “we constantly try to understand our ever-changing highly complex existence by seeking order in it” (56; Papanek 2011: 4). The prominent aestheticians and philosophers of the visual Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim introduce this issue to ontology and perception. Gombrich names the epistemological frame of creative perception “sense of order” (Gombrich 1984), which is based on the perceptual expectations of serial orders (221). Arnheim asserts in his canonical Visual Thinking that “visual knowledge” and “visual concepts” are in charge of organizing the world and its perception. “Visual knowledge and correct expectation will facilitate perception whereas inappropriate visual concepts will delay or impede it” (Arnheim 1969: 93). Now, the very use of what Arnheim calls “inappropriate visual concepts” that transgress visual categories and order stands in the infrastructure of the ubiquitous phenomenon of the visual hybrid. The visual hybrid glues to one another parts of entities that are extracted from different categories, to create an entity that belongs to no category. It challenges our draw to visual order and manifests the parallel draw to visual creativity, imagination, and innovation. Moreover, as exposed in the first essay in this special issue, “How to Build a Hybrid: The Structure of Imagination” by Yeshayahu Gil and David Shen, even though the group of visual hybrids consists of entities that disrupt the visual order and do not belong to any established category, it does possess its own typology, scheme, and order, that are based on familiar ones.

Despite its omnipresence and cultural role, the visual hybrid is only seldom analyzed in the literature as an autonomous subject of research. Instead, it is most often subsumed under different phenomena—usually under general iconography of Classic to Renaissance images. This volume proposes to fill in this gap. It does so by applying a multidisciplinary approach to visual hybrids, endorsing the vantage points of linguistic, cognitive studies and philosophy of language, aesthetics and iconography, visual rhetoric, visual culture, and art. The opening essay presents a structural analysis of the visual hybrid in terms of a schematological hierarchy; it is joined by essays that address philosophical and aesthetic aspects of the visual hybrid and its perception, visual hybrids’ relations to metaphors, hybrids in the visual arts, cultural analyses of visual hybrids, and visual hybrids and cognition. The issue spans such themes as categorization theories as well as technological, ethnic, and biological hybrids, which are also presented from the vantage point of artist Larry Abramson, whose essay closes the issue. The issue juxtaposes the visual with the literal and linguistic as well, asking questions about perception, communication, and expression in both media.

The first article, “How to Build a Hybrid: The Structure of Imagination” by Shen and Gil, introduces the field of visual hybrids. Defining the cognitive principles governing the construction of visual hybrids, the authors argue that “imaginary entities are derived from the forms and representations associated with ordinary familiar entities.” Drawing from evidence provided by a large-scale experiment with the participation of students from Shenkar College, Shen and Gil advance the case that “even when tasked with building a hybrid, our imagination is structured, and our creativity constrained by various cognitive principles,” defined in terms of schemas and a schematological hierarchy.

In the essay that follows, “Visual Hybrids and Nonconceptual Aesthetic Perception,” Michalle Gal makes use of the schematological hierarchy of the hybrids that Shen and Gil reveal in their research. She aims to prove that visual hybrids essentially lend themselves to nonconceptual perception, a mode that, Gal argues, organizes the perception of visual composition more generally. Gal goes on to offer a philosophical analysis of the results of experiments that show that when participants are presented with visual hybrids absent linguistic framing, the sort of conceptual hierarchization that takes effect when visual hybrids are framed by language does not take effect. These results lead Gal to argue that visual hybrids resist conceptuality and that the introduction of language has a freezing or even oppressive effect on this visual phenomenon. This resistance, Gal suggests, reveals the nature of aesthetic compositions in general. If language freezes extreme visual phenomena such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors.

The complex relation of visual hybrids to visual metaphors, as made through linguistic metaphors, is further analyzed in the issue's third essay. In “Visual Metaphors: On the Linguistic Structure of Hybrid Creatures in Art,” Garry L. Hagberg departs from Gal in laying out the case for the fundamental likeness of visual metaphors and visual hybrids, where visual metaphors are based on verbal metaphors and visual hybrids are founded on connotation, association, and implication. Hagberg argues that both visual forms, like linguistic metaphors, are constructed to send messages with connotative, associative, and implicative meanings. One of the many eye-opening analyses of visual hybrids as related to visual and linguistic metaphors—of what he names “overlayering and interweaving connotations”—is of the Medusa hybrid. According to Hagberg, the word snake, loaded with connotation, contributes to the gripping power of the Medusa, seen, for example, in Caravaggio's painting: a human face with coiling venomous snakes for hair. The connotations, transposed from word to hybrid image—from the snake into an unsettling synthesized hybrid union with the connotations of a person—yield a visceral reaction. However, Hagberg stresses that, like metaphors, visual hybrids are aimed at knowledgeable viewers. Like visual metaphors and artistic images, visual hybrids can only be created and perceived from the depth of culture.

In her essay “Visual Hybrids as Constitutive Rhetorical Acts: Rhetorical Interplay between Unity and Difference,” Petra Aczél embraces and elaborates on Hagberg's model of visual hybrids as communicative entities with her own theory of hybrids, formulated within the framework of visual rhetoric studies. Like Shen and Gil and Gal, Aczél points out the pervasiveness of the use of the term hybrid, claiming that hybrids are all around. Yet the range of usages may rather have a dynamic that functions to empty the term of meaning rather than enrich its semantic possibilities. It is within this context of a too-pervasive use of the term that Aczél launches her own effect to characterize the essence of visual hybrids. Aczél defines two kinds of visual hybrids: products/procedures and processes of recognition and meaning making. Visual rhetoric, as an instance of social intelligence and sensitivity as well as an ongoing mutual creation of meanings by both the sender and the perceiver, supplies the framework concepts of “ingenium” and “multimodality” in the visual and sensual in order to classify the visual hybrids. “Multimodality opposes the exclusivity or privileging of verbal communication, while ingenium confronts rationality with imagination in cognition.” Both prove that discourse is not exhausted by language but rather contains essential sensuous elements.

In their essay entitled “Why Monsters Are Dangerous,” Olivier Morin and Oleg Sobchuk address this question, in which the term monster includes, though is not limited to, hybrid animals (which they refer to as composites”). Their question, they suggest, invites two other essential questions: What are the properties that make some real animals “‘good to think with’”? and Do imaginary animals possess those properties? In approaching these interlinked questions, Morin and Sobchuk turn their attention to the anomalousness of monsters, their counterintuitive qualities, and their predatory nature, and seek to make sense of the ways in which these properties work together to make monsters objects of intense analytical interest. The answer that they provide takes the form of a synthesis of these properties, to the effect that monsters are considered to be dangerous precisely because “the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together.” Morin and Sobchuk's abstract account of the character of monsters finds a counterpart in Guy Tal's interpretation of representations of monster hybrids in art.

Tal's essay “Magical Monsters: Hybrids and Witchcraft in Early Modern Art” brings a longer art-historical arc to the analysis of visual hybrids, turning his attention to sixteenth-century representations of hybrid creatures in witchcraft imagery. Tal argues that the concept of iconography does not offer an adequate paradigm for making sense of multilayered hybrid imagery. Instead, he argues, intention, production, and reception are essential to hybrids and are enabled by “formal and compositional aspects that distinguish one hybrid from another.” Offering granular readings of Italian, German, and Dutch images of human-animal hybrids, Tal examines the ways in which these early modern European hybrids bring together the stability associated with an essentially spatial model of hybridity and the temporality and ephemerality associated with the concept of metamorphosis.

The illuminating artistic progress of the practice of hybrid making in modern art is explored in the interview that follows, in which the renowned painter Larry Abramson engages with a fictional hybrid named Theolonius Marx, whom Abramson created in his own early work. In “Hybridity and the Unifying Space of Painting: Larry Abramson in Conversation with Theolonius Marx,” Abramson makes the case for understanding his own entirely visually painted hybrids through the analytical matrix of “the combination of different languages.” By “different languages,” he refers to both visual and textual languages, claiming that “though it violates the values of uniformity and purity, every hybrid is a reaffirmation of the essential and vital relationship between the whole and its parts.” Abramson's account of visual hybrids begins in 1913, when “Marcel Duchamp made his groundbreaking ‘readymade’ of a bicycle wheel placed atop a kitchen stool”; and continues to the late 1920s, when Francis Picabia's “paintings and drawings constructed of separate and discrete superimposed layers of images, which, when viewed together, produced an unsettling visual ‘monster’”; ending at the postmodern painting, which according to Abramson is essentially hybrid. “Surprisingly,” he asserts, “to take a critical position regarding postmodern culture, you need a medium that can resist the relativistic mechanisms at work.”

Opening with cognitive studies and closing with art, we offer a somewhat hybrid special issue on visual hybrids, which, we believe, offers a diverse but coherent portrayal of this wonderful phenomenon.

We are grateful to Poetics Today's editors Milette Shamir and Irene Tucker and editorial assistant Ya'ara Notea for their labors in bringing this issue to publication.

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