Documents found
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21072.More information
SummaryParadoxically, if the ideal of communication has been one of the most important generator as well as a major by-product of the United States' history, as American media get more and more sophisticated and spued over the world, such an ideal is thrown away, joepardized, denounced, and sometimes, hijacked by Third World countries in order to fulfill their own ideological purposes. In industrialized as well as rapidly developing societies in Europe and Asia, this American ideology of communication is astutely salvaged as contextual information for decision making by strategists involved against the United States on the international economic scene.
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21073.More information
The practice of taiji quan, with its martial aspect of hand thrusting (tuishou in Chinese), relatively uncommon in Europe, is very often the pretext for the dissemination of emphatic discourses that are part of Chinese soft power. In this article, we'll be showing how taiji quan's rural origins diverged sharply from its 19th-century recovery by Chinese scholars. Even then, theoretical discourses took precedence over practice, defining an imaginary master shaped by the context of the existential crisis that China underwent in the 19th and 20th centuries. When taiji quan spread to the West from the 1960s onwards, these fantasies were taken up by the small world of sinologists. We observe with interest the different research cultures between the rather pragmatic Anglo-Saxon world and the infatuation of some French-speaking intellectuals with the theorization of the field, in particular its highly controversial association with Taoism, shamanism or internal alchemy. In the final section, we'll try to show that the general public of practitioners acts as a sounding board for these fantasized discourses, to the point of ignoring the martial origins of taiji quan to make it a discipline essentially associated with well-being and spiritual fulfillment. Whatever these terms may mean on an individual level, we are witnessing the emergence of a religious-type discourse based on a culturally hybrid representation of the body. The Chinese master has become its epitome.
Keywords: taiji quan, taiji quan, master, maître, tuishou, tuishou, art martial, martial art, pouvoirs extraordinaires, extraordinary powers, fantasme, fantasy, bricolage spirituel, spiritual DIY
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21079.More information
AbstractIn recent years, the practice of film interpretation has come under attack by cognitive film theorists. It is said that interpretive claims are not truth-apt and have no cognitive value. This essay contests this claim by calling on the pragmatic and semeiotic philosophy of Charles S. Peirce. The essay is divided into two parts. The first part examines Peirce's pragmatism and the notion that theories are inescapably inferential and interpretive. The author distinguishes between the pragmatic and the scientific methods, examines the role of habit as a way to bridge the gap of mind/matter dualism, and considers Peirce's realism in the context of his critical common-sensism. The second section looks at some leading ideas in film/literary scholarship on interpretation. In particular, the author questions David Bordwell's critique of interpretive criticism and its reliance on skeptical and nominalist principles borrowed from Stanley Fish. It is shown how Bordwell's distinction between comprehension and interpretation in the cinema rests on the role played by sensory perception in the film experience. The distinction is criticized by adopting a form of empirism—that of Peirce—that is not limited by sensualism. Indeed, for Peirce, perception spreads continuously between the external and the inner worlds. A brief commentary on the work of Umberto Eco and the distinction between interpreting and overinterpreting then leads the author to consider the role of vagueness in interpretation and the problems raised by purpose and relevance of interpretation now defined as all that compels the mind of the spectator through direct—or even indirect—contact with a film. This turn opens up the issues of truth, rationality and normativity in interpretation. The paper concludes with the author arguing that film interpretation constitutes a process whereby signs—including aesthetic signs—can grow in rationality.
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