In-Between Inhuman Extremes: Focal Images of the Domination-Alienation Nexus. Workshop with Jamin Pelkey
Abstrakt
Workshop with Jamin Pelkey focused on the transdisciplinary dialogue between semiotics, anthropology, philosophy and iconology regarding "Focal Images". The workshop has been attended by the actively participating members of the grant project Ondřej Váša, Martin Švantner, Tomáš Kobes and Jakub Chavalka.
Abstract of Jamin Pelkey's entry, responding to the grant project's topic of inhuman focal images: 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".