Making Sense with…

Q&A by Jamin Pelkey, Posted March 20, 2024

Photo courtesy of Jamin Pelkey

What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

Toronto…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

JAMIN PELKEY

I grew up “country” as they say in rural America. Born in the deep south, between the birthplace of Elvis Presley and the home of William Faulkner, I came of age steeped in the vibrant vernacular, ideological, rhetorical, and cultural stew of north Mississippi. Raised as the son of a Baptist preacher to top it off, the relentless layers of meaning and my desire to make sense of it all (especially all of the extreme oppositions, tensions, complementarities, and contradictions) came to seem more and more urgent to me the more I grew. As a result, the questions that came to matter the most to me all circled back to the meaning of life, or the nature of experiential and practical meaning: how things mean what they mean, the feelings and patterns of aesthetic experience, the neglected cultivation of wonder, ruptures of sublime experience, entanglements of beauty and horror, a growing suspicion that certainty was often misplaced, and endless fascinations with the unity of opposites: from polysemy, ambiguity, and variation on one hand to universal tendencies suggesting patterned coherence in spite of the mess on the other (something C. S. Peirce would later teach me to call “continuity” and “fallible realism”).

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

JAMIN PELKEY

During my undergrad years, I moved to the Rocky Mountains. I wanted to lose myself in the wilderness while searching for more perspective on all the questions generated by my upbringing, so I ended up doing a double major in Philosophy and English Literature at Montana State University. In the process, I took a course in Linguistics and another course in Mythology. Both introduced me to elements of semiotics (the first via Saussure and the second via Barthes). Remarkably, I was repelled by both (not language and myth but linguistics and semiotics as approaches to language and myth). Instead, after spending a summer abroad, I fell in love with China and threw all of my energies into learning Chinese language and culture.

So it’s funny, in retrospect, that the two fields or domains of intensive exploration that have most come to typify my career (linguistics and semiotics) both left bad tastes in my mouth as a university student. That’s a good thing in more ways than one. Most of all, those memories help me relate to anyone who finds intensive applications of linguistics or semiotics off-putting.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

JAMIN PELKEY

In some ways, I was doing ad-hoc semiotics all along by pursuing questions about the ultimate nature and endless patterned connections of meaning. Not until I was nearly finished with my PhD (in linguistics) did I start to take semiotic theory seriously though. One of my supervisors observed that my approach to linguistic analysis was a lot like the pragmatist approach of Charles S. Peirce. Soon after, I found references to Peirce in novels and essays of Walker Percy (who I was reading at the time in an attempt to stay sane). These connections led me to start reading Peirce himself — and then Peircean semiotics, and then semiotics in general. The rest is history, as they say, since it was impossible for me to read semiotics without putting it into practice and then gradually letting it take over my life (including my career). In short, I found my way to doing semiotics since semiotics made the most sense of things to me in the end.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

JAMIN PELKEY

Attention: the kind of intense attention that will return to a topic of inquiry over and over, refusing to be done with it — in spite of what other people think or don’t think about it — always assuming that one is still just beginning to understand. In qualitative research this is known as “iterative” inquiry, but iterative inquiry can only be sustained by a devoted sense of curiosity and fascination.
Distance: an abiding sense of mistrust (or even scorn) toward those people, fashions, or power structures that wish to dictate what we’re s’posed to think and interpret or do and be. To hell with normative ruts. The real trick here though is to recognize that we ourselves are included in, and guilty of, such practices — so disdain for our own normative ruts needs to be foregrounded too.
Inquiry: undertaking the serious pursuit of understanding focused on specific questions of intense interest and driven by a sense of persistent assurance that the careful application and development of semiotic theory (requiring one to become a student of semiotics) can lead to discoveries of patterned relationships between things (and ideas, and processes) where no previous relationship had been considered.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

JAMIN PELKEY

There are too many to limit to three, sorry; so let me mention three areas instead with a few suggestive examples from each?

Books about meaning written by people who don’t identify as semioticians (but need to be integrated with semiotics). Some of the most helpful books in this category for me have been books like The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (by Iain McGilchrist) and books by linguists and philosophers in cognitive semantics such as Mark Johnson (e.g., The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding); but other candidates range from Giambattista Vico in the late medieval period to Marshal McLuhan and the study of media more recently.
Books about the nature of meaning by those who identify as semioticians. Others in this series have mentioned Barthes and structuralist semioticians in answer to this question, for good reasons; so to balance the scales let me mention the work of John Deely (e.g., his Basics of Semiotics and his book Purely Objective Reality), along with the first and second volume of the Peirce Edition Project’s Essential Peirce — all of which also reward close readings.
Edited collections on semiotics. Here let me at least mention Paul Cobley’s Routledge Companion to Semiotics and my own four-volume set on semiotics in the disciplines, Bloomsbury Semiotics. Encyclopedias of semiotics are enormously helpful as well, such as those by Paul Bouissac, Marcel Danesi, and Winfried Nöth.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

JAMIN PELKEY

What if you could learn ways of thinking that could help you better understand everything from the meaning of words to the meaning of life all at once? Would you be interested? That’s semiotics.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

JAMIN PELKEY

The most enjoyable semiotics-driven projects for me are those that absorb me the most fully. This has shifted through the years from a desire to define the Phula languages of China to the desire to understand the meanings of spread-eagle brandmarks and their relationship to the X mark.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

JAMIN PELKEY

Until I recall that I was repelled by semiotics too at first, it can seem frustrating that most people seem repelled by it. Doing deep dives into the nature of meaning seems to go against our nature. Meaning, like language, seems to work best to the degree that we don’t focus on it. Admitting dynamics like these could be helpful since this admission could provide points of connection, empathy, and even compassion, that are naturally more relatable for those who don’t immediately see the point.

One recent analogy that helped me with this was watching the Netflix film, The Wonder. The whole film is a layered feast of symbol, myth, imagination, and the meaning of life. I was overwhelmed by it — except in the opening scene. The film opens on the movie set itself — as a kind of reflexive peek behind the scenes of the warehouse and scaffolding holding up the primary edifice that will be featured in the film while a voiceover remarks on the nature of narrative. When watching the film the first two times, I felt repelled: while the camera panned across the set, to a below-deck scene shot on a sea voyage, it all seemed like a waste of time — until the story itself started and I began to feel immersed.

Not until several weeks later did it occur to me that this layer of The Wonder was at the core of human wonder itself: the wonder of reflexive imagination. Semioticians are in awe of how imagination works and what it can do. Most people (semioticians included) prefer the awe of being immersed in imagination itself.

SEMIOVOX

Peirce or Saussure?

JAMIN PELKEY

Yes, please: both. Saussure’s insights continue to inspire generations of thinkers who are giving us profoundly important theories and methods for identifying and dealing with patterned socio-cultural ideologies. Peirce’s insights continue to inspire generations of thinkers who are showing us how to understand the nature of human cognition and heal traumatic splits between subject and object, culture and nature. My own research is helping to show how both approaches are implicated in the dynamic memory structures of embodied cognition.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

JAMIN PELKEY

Reading is a good way to start, but finding ways to meet semioticians in person and ways to learn about theories in context — and especially in application — is helpful too. Keeping an open mind by being willing to return to difficult works later is a good idea. If something isn’t resonant or compelling at first, set it aside for later without dismissing it forever.

Also see these series: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE WITH… | COLOR CODEX

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