Red Aesthetics, Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract: This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptua- lised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or con- structs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s

Essentially biased: why people are fatalistic about genes

We propose that people are genetic essentialists—that is, they tend to think of genetic attributions as being immutable, of a specific etiology, natural, and dividing people into homogenous and discrete groups. Although there are rare conditions where genes operate in these kinds of deterministic ways, people overgeneralize from these to the far more common conditions where genes are not at all deterministic. These essentialist biases are associated with some harmful outcomes such as racism, sexism, pessimism in the face of illnesses, political polarization, and support for eugenics, while at the same time they are linked with increased tolerance and sympathy for gay rights, mental illness, and less severe judgments of responsibility for crime. We will also discuss how these essentialist biases connect with the burgeoning direct-to-consumer genomics industry and various kinds of genetic engineering. Overall, these biases appear rather resistant to efforts to reduce them, although genetics literacy predicts weaker essentialist tendencies

The mean, nature, and self-realization European translations of the Zhongyong

Le Zhongyong, qui a une importance intrinsèque dans l’histoire de la pensée spéculative chinoise, occupe un rôle central dans l’histoire des échanges intellectuels entre la Chine et l’Occident. Ce texte ne présente pas de grandes difficultés philologiques. La question qui se pose est celle de la valeur interprétative des équivalences de termes qui semblent s’imposer trop facilement.Les nombreuses traductions en langues européennes (latin et français du xvie au xviiie siècle ; anglais, français, allemand, russe au xixe siècle ; essentiellement anglais ces dernières décennies) offrent tout l’éventail des stratégies possibles.Sont examinés successivement les trois mots zhong, xing, et cheng. La traduction de zhong par « milieu » ne semble pas choquante si l’on donne à ce terme la valeur attachée à la notion aristotélicienne de meson telle qu’elle est exposée dans l’Éthique à Nicomaque.Le parallélisme étymologique qui suggérerait de traduire xing par « nature » (les deux mots sont dérivés de « naître ») serait un argument insuffisant face à l’objection des sinologues selon qui la notion de « nature créée » est étrangère à la cosmologie confucéenne, non théiste. Cependant une analyse textuelle des occurrences de xing dans le Zhongyong montre qu’il ne faut pas simplifier excessivement les spéculations cosmologiques chinoises primitives. Les premiers traducteurs du Zhongyong, nourris de pensées médiévales et de la Renaissance, avaient associé xing à « raison naturelle ». Puis étaient intervenus les débats sur « les lois de la nature ». En définitive, la traduction de xing par « nature » semble la plus acceptable.L’usage de traduire cheng par « sincérité », valeur que ce mot a en chinois contemporain, ne semble pas justifié. Les différentes occurrences du terme dans le Zhongyong manifestent tout un jeu grammatical. Cheng ne renvoie pas dans ce texte aux notions de vérité ou de sincérité mais décrit un processus de culture morale par lequel l’homme rivalise avec la centralité spontanée attribuée au Ciel et aux schémas immanents de l’univers naturel

Adaptive Immune Regulation of Mammary Postnatal Organogenesis.

Postnatal organogenesis occurs in an immune competent environment and is tightly controlled by interplay between positive and negative regulators. Innate immune cells have beneficial roles in postnatal tissue remodeling, but roles for the adaptive immune system are currently unexplored. Here we show that adaptive immune responses participate in the normal postnatal development of a non-lymphoid epithelial tissue. Since the mammary gland (MG) is the only organ developing predominantly after birth, we utilized it as a powerful system to study adaptive immune regulation of organogenesis. We found that antigen-mediated interactions between mammary antigen-presenting cells and interferon-γ (IFNγ)-producing CD4+ T helper 1 cells participate in MG postnatal organogenesis as negative regulators, locally orchestrating epithelial rearrangement. IFNγ then affects luminal lineage differentiation. This function of adaptive immune responses, regulating normal development, changes the paradigm for studying players of postnatal organogenesis and provides insights into immune surveillance and cancer transformation