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Workshop Summary

Vin Diesel’s ‘Xander Cage’ of the blockbuster movie franchise xXx and Rami Malek’s ‘Elliot Anderson’ of the award-winning streaming serial Mr. Robot are on opposite poles of a inhuman continuum. They are also mutually defining pairs that serve to undermine vital ultra-human archetypes of their own (Xander Cage as the anti-James Bond; Elliot Anderson as the anti-Clark Kent). Paying close attention to these interrelations, their sources and consequences, provides layers of insight into the contemporary human predicament and its deep evolutionary roots. Serial promotional posters for blockbuster movie franchises and seasonal streaming programs provide ‘Focal Images’ (following Váša) of the human condition by coalescing in memory as general symptoms (or ‘Indexical Legisigns’), pointing not only to the polysemiotic narratives they advertise but also to the psychosocial realities and developmental processes that inform their analogous interpretants across a given population. In this talk, I juxtapose the two sets of promotional posters in question to serve as a kind of focal parallax for understanding the embodied dynamics of chiastic extremes and reversals that inform our experience of the domination-alienation nexus uniting phenomena as diverse as hyper-modernism, late capitalism, extreme individualism, and nominalist epistemology. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce, A. J. Greimas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, and others, I argue that the dehumanizing plight in question traces back to experiential paradoxes of full-body threat display that are eventually manifest in perverse dynamics that poet Wallace Stevens sums up as “the vital, fatal, arrogant, dominant X”.

Dr. Jamin Pelkey is Associate Professor and Program Director in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures and a core member of the Ryerson-York graduate program in Communication & Culture. He joined the department in 2013 following five years of university lecturing in British Columbia and more than a decade of field experience in China, Thailand, and Australia. Dr. Pelkey holds a PhD in Linguistics from La Trobe University, Melbourne, funded in full and awarded with merit in 2009. His areas of specialization include philosophy of language, embodied cognition, Tibeto-Burman linguistics, historical linguistics, C. S. Peirce, and semiotics. He is an award winning teacher and researcher with three federal grants, two Dean's Awards (for teaching and research), the Mouton d’Or Award for best article in Semiotica (2017), and the Ryerson University Early Research Career Excellence Award (2018). He is currently editing Bloomsbury Semiotics, a major reference work in four volumes.

Dr. Pelkey's first two published monographs (incl. Dialectology as Dialectic, De Gruyter 2011) define the Phula ethnolinguistic groups of China and Vietnam, identifying 18 new languages through mixed-methods fieldwork and analysis. His latest research focuses on language evolution and embodied cognition, leading to the publication of his third authored book, The Semiotics of X (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). 

The event is funded by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic, project GA ČR 22-17984S, Focal Images: Violence and Inhumanity in Contemporary Art and Media Culture.