Tea bowl with silvery-spotted glaze, , Southern , twelfth to thirteenth century. Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka; gift of the Sumitomo Group (The Ataka Collection).

24 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00230

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in

JEFFREY MOSER

Jeff Wall’s notion of liquid intelligence turns on the dialectic of modernity. On one side of the divide are the dry mechanisms of the camera, which metaphorically and literally express the industrial processes that brought them into being. On the other side is water, which “symbolically represents an archaism in photography, one that is admitted in the process, but also excluded, contained or channelled by its hydraulics.” 1 Wall’s attraction to liquidity is unreservedly nostalgic—it harkens back to archaic processes and what he understands as the ever more remote possibility of fortuity in art-making—and it seeks to find, in the developing fluid of the photograph, a bridge back to the “sense of immersion in the incalculable” that modernity has alienated. 2 For him, liquidity and chance are not simply of the past, they have been made past by the totality of a “modern vision” that inex - orably subjugates them through industry and design. 3 Wall’s formulation implicitly probes the semantic contradiction that imbues Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s famous passage with such force: Where, he inquires, is the liquid elided when “all that is solid melts into air?” 4 The juxtaposition of Wall’s essay “Photography and Liquid Intelligence” with his Milk (1984) raises the tension simmering in Wall’s formula. The fleeting and ineffable form of the milk ejected from the carton and suspended, midair, in the instanta - neity of the shutter-click, visualizes the dependence of the liquid object on the modern eye. Only through the invention and inter - vention of the camera are the contours of the suspended milk made apprehensible. The totality of the modern dialectic sequences both the metaphor of liquidity and the artistic means of its visualization. The closure of the aperture expresses the foreclosure of archaic processes writ large. Liquidity, in this formula, is apprehensible only in retrospect. We can see it only when we know it is no longer present. If, as Thomas Lamarre and others argue, the theoretical chal - lenge of the present is finding a way to conceptualize history which recognizes the momentous changes associated with moder - nity without presuming modernity as an explanatory framework for those changes, Wall’s liquid intelligence would seem an

Grey Room 69, Fall 2017, pp. 24–49. © 2017 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 25

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 unlikely starting point. 5 Wall’s formulation—both its dialectical structure and its teleology—exemplifies nothing so much as what Lamarre characterizes as the “totalizing” function of modernity, its colonization not only of the systems of relations between people and things but of the conceptual structures available for imagining those relations. 6 In their consistency with ubiquitous other forms of modernist nostalgia, Wall’s aesthetics of fluidity reinforce the seeming inescapability of modernity as the vector (if not the end) of history. 7 In recent years, a wide range of critiques, from domains as diverse as postcolonial theory and ritual studies, have pushed back against the epistemological colonization of world history by a framework derived from the European experience of industri - alization. 8 Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others, has drawn attention to the degree to which corrective attempts to integrate the histor - ical experiences of the rest of the world through “comparative” or “alternative” modernities necessarily retain, and thereby re- inforce, the structure of European modernity as the normative case against which all other modernities are compared, and the linguistic reservoir from which all characterizations of their par - ticularities are drawn. 9 Historians of earlier periods, especially those focused on so-called middle period (ca. 750–1550) have similarly reacted against earlier strands of scholarship that sought to demonstrate the relative precocity of their eras by mea - suring them on the teleological yardstick of early modernity. 10 How might it be possible, all have asked, to imagine a structure for world history that does not paradigmatically reinforce the conceptual separation of the West from the rest? Some concepts are so big, with roots so deeply embedded in the epistemology of the present, that no argument can pull them forth. Too many need them to exist for the world to be knowable. All one can do, in such circumstances, is to catalyze a productive erosion of the conceptual earth into which those roots have grown. This article argues that the great irony of Wall’s liquid intelligence is that it contains this catalytic potency; that its equa - tion of liquidity and fortuity gives it, by chance, the anarchic capacity to erode the conceptual structures of modernity from which it arose. The applicability of Wall’s formula to an art-making tradition far removed in time and space from modern photogra - phy suggests that nothing about his tension between liquid chance and dry procedure is inherently modern. By decoupling Wall’s dialectic from the framework of modernity on which it was assembled, this article aims to resuscitate it as an evocative, free- floating analytical heuristic and to use that heuristic to draw out an alternative teleology of manufacturing, labor exploitation, and global interconnectivity that differs markedly from conventional narratives of modern capitalism.

26 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 The tradition in question is the Chinese ceramic industry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Scholars have long rec - ognized that this period, which spans the later decades of the Mongol (1271–1368) and the first half of the (1368–1644), constitutes a critical turning point in the global history of ceramics. 11 During this era, one regional group of ceramic manufactories—located at , in what is today the southern Chinese province of —effectively monopolized the Chinese ceramic industry. This article argues that the material differences between the porcelains associated with the rise of Jingdezhen and the various ceramics that pre - ceded them stemmed from radically different regimes of making. At the heart of each regime, I propose, was a distinctive approach to the agency of the in the firing process. The rel - evance of this distinction to the wider concepts at play in this issue of Grey Room , and to the rethinking of the dialectics of modernity more generally, is that it is roughly analogous to Wall’s dichotomy between processes of “liquid” fortuity and “dry” mechanization. These two regimes may be called the catalytic and the predictive . The catalytic approach assumed variation as inherent to the process of firing ceramics, and attempted to channel variation by employing stimulants such as metal colorants or rapid cool - ing to induce chemical reactions that exceeded human agency. Success was determined by chance, and practice focused on manufacturing luck. The catalytic approach celebrated the productive potentiality of the firing process itself, and it assumed flaws and misfirings as intrinsic and necessary aspects of the process. The predictive approach, by contrast, endeavored to eliminate variation by limiting the creative agency of the kiln to its essen - tial function of vitrifying the glaze. It consistently sought to nar - row the gap between what was painted prior to firing and what was produced by firing and assumed the ideal manufacturing process was one that facilitated perfect visualization of the final piece prior to its placement in the kiln. By enabling the possibil - ity of increasing exactitude to remote specifications, it facilitated the disarticulation of design from labor and the stratification of labor into inherently unequal domains of responsibility. The two approaches were not mutually exclusive. Catalytic processing entailed making predictions about final appearances, and predictive processing recognized that accidents occurred during the firing process. But in proposing different strategies for dealing with the problem of chance, they stimulated diverging regimes of work. The operation of these two regimes demon - strates how a consideration of facture can reconfigure the agents of history.

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 27

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 Setting the Scene The rise of Jingdezhen remade the landscape of Chinese ceramic production. Whereas the manufacture of high-end ceramics— wares valuable enough to warrant the expense of transporting them to markets across the empire and beyond—had been widely distributed during the preceding Song dynasty (960–1279), with major regional manufactories scattered across China, over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the wares produced by these other steadily declined in quality. Some operations disappeared altogether, others eked on into late impe - rial times by producing rougher, lower-quality wares for local markets. Some higher-quality production survived at the Longquan kilns through the Ming dynasty, and a handful of other significant centers remained at places like Yixing and Dehua, but by and large the situation outside of Jingdezhen was one of retrenchment and decline. The manufactories at Jingdezhen, by contrast, thrived, making a series of technical innovations that enabled the sustained production of new kinds of ceramics— most notably, blue-and-white porcelain—in spectacular numbers. The developments of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries set the stage for Jingdezhen’s domination of the global porcelain trade from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. For the gen - erations of Europeans who endeavored to unlock the mysteries of porcelain manufacturing, from the sixteenth-century Portuguese Dominican Gaspar de Cruz to the eighteenth-century French Jesuit François Xavier d’Entrecolles, all eyes focused on this one place. In his influential account of 1638, the Portuguese mission - ary Álvarez Semedo recognized the centrality of the Jingdezhen region in succinct terms: “The province of Chiangsi . . . is famous . . . for the Porcellane dishes (indeed the only work in the world of this kind) which are made only in one of its towns [Jingdezhen]. So that all that is used in the kingdom, and dispersed through the whole world, is brought from this place.” 12 The transformations in Chinese ceramic manufacturing of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are typically attributed to an interrelated series of changes in technology, taste, and patronage. Much of the discussion of technology has focused on the ques - tion of origins. The when and where of the first “true porce - lain”—typically understood as a high-fired pure white body of crushed porcelain stone ( petunse ) or kaolin clay, covered with a fully vitrified and impermeable layer of clear glaze—has been hotly debated for centuries. A similarly vast literature exists on the origins of the underglaze cobalt blue painting that constitutes the signature feature of blue-and-white porcelain. 13 Much of the research on Chinese ceramic technology is teleological—focused on how the practical obstacles to the production of “true” blue- and-white porcelain, such as the control of kiln temperatures and

28 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 oxygen levels or the purity of clay and glaze, were overcome. In this way, modern scholarship on Chinese ceramic history has inherited the predispositions of the early European scholars like de Cruz and d’Entrecolles who endeavored to reverse-engineer the technology. The relationship of these technological develop - ments to the wider historical circumstances of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is less often examined. Part of the reason more contextually focused inquiry into the history of Chinese ceramics—scholarship concerned less with progressive techni - cal innovation and more with the networks of commerce and patronage in which ceramics were embedded—has yet to develop a comprehensive explanation for the rise of Jingdezhen stems from the limitations of the documentary record. An obvious potential motivator of change in a given manufac - ture is change in demand. But as the work of Craig Clunas and others demonstrates, external evidence for changing taste in the consumption of ceramics, in the form of literatures of connois - seurship and appreciation, does not achieve critical mass until the late sixteenth century. 14 Although the disposition of ceramics in archaeological contexts of use—mostly tombs, hoards, and ports—has been the subject of sustained investigation, archaeo - logical distribution is better suited for identifying what changed than explaining the reasons for those changes. Although it is widely assumed that changes in taste encouraged the develop - ment of blue-and-white and discouraged the continued produc - tion of older wares, it is difficult to identify these changes without falling into circular reasoning. To discern changes in taste from changes in form and then turn around and attribute those changes in form to changes in taste is logically untenable. Independent evidence is needed. The most frequently cited external variable, invoked in virtu - ally every history of Chinese ceramics, is imperial patronage. The role of the imperial state in managing the official kilns ( guanyao ) at Jingdezhen is well documented, especially during the heyday of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when imperial overseers at the kilns produced a steady stream of official corre - spondence and administrative documentation that survives in the archives of the Qing (1644–1911) court. 15 Although the struc - ture of imperial administration is less well documented for the preceding Ming dynasty, it is generally accepted that official patronage was a driving force behind the technical innovation and industrial expansion of the kilns. 16 The Ming witnessed the emergence of improved kiln technology in the form of distinc - tively egg-shaped firing chambers, which made it easier for potters to modulate firing temperatures. 17 The Ming also provides the earliest direct evidence of the so-called private fulfillment of official orders ( guanda minsh ao) system, which served as an

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 29

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 important conduit for the sharing of artisanal practices between the official and commercial kilns at Jingdezhen. 18 However, as one moves further back in time to the early Ming, and especially the critical years of the Yuan, when the large-scale production of blue-and-white porcelain began, the evidence grows much thinner. We know that the Yuan established an official porcelain bureau ( ciju ) at Jingdezhen in 1278, immediately following their conquest of the region, and that ceramics were one of the many artisanal industries in which they actively intervened. But the precise nature of their intervention remains a subject of much speculation. 19 In light of the obvious consistencies in design and process between Yuan porcelain and the Ming-Qing wares that followed, and the direct involvement of the court in the produc - tion of those later wares, the structure of Yuan imperial patron - age likely foreshadowed the better-documented systems of later centuries. But it is important to remember that our knowledge of Yuan kiln administration is primarily based on retrospective extrapolations from later developments. In all three cases, then—technology, markets, and patronage— the story of the critical changes associated with the fourteenth and fifteenth century rise of Jingdezhen is largely based on read - ing back into history on the basis of what came to be. The way the industry operated for the artisans responsible for these innova - tions—artisans who did not know that their wares would even - tually monopolize world markets and define the global porcelain imaginary—remains largely a mystery. Written accounts of arti - sanal practice at Jingdezhen contemporary with the radical changes that occurred there in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen - turies are almost completely nonexistent. What does survive, in abundance, are the actual products of the kilns themselves. Although the striking visual and techno - logical differences between blue-and-white ware and the various ceramic traditions that preceded it, both at Jingdezhen and else - where, are universally acknowledged, the distinctive regimes of work implied by these differences remain underappreciated. The tendency to tell the story of Chinese ceramic technology as a story of progressive innovations has a way of encouraging the notion that artisanal effort was consistently directed toward ever-greater control over the refinement of raw materials and the regulation of the kiln environment. The obvious differences between the lusciously glazed, monochromatic ceramics of the Song and Yuan periods and the glossy, contrastive patterns of blue-and- white porcelain are more typically associated with changes in period style and the aesthetics of the age than they are with the transformation of artisanal labor. Progressive histories of techni - cal innovation, with their concomitant focus on trace evidence of early experimentation with painted underglaze blue decor, imply

30 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 that ceramicists elsewhere and earlier would have made blue- and-white porcelain if they could have. But the actual facture of the vast majority of the wares they did make indicates the desire for blue-and-white was far from omnipresent. In what follows, I will attempt to move past the evidentiary lacunae and teleological reasoning that challenge the historiog - raphy of Chinese ceramics by proceeding from the facture of the objects themselves. In so doing, I echo the technological empiri - cism that characterizes certain strands of contemporary art historical and media theory, while recognizing the efficacy of dialectical abstractions in the explanation of historical change. 20 Although ample circumstantial evidence supports the contrast I draw between catalytic and predictive manufacturing—drawn from the history of the porcelain trade, the evidence of imperial patronage, and the aesthetics of ceramics appreciation—the key is that my argument relies exclusively on what can be extrapo - lated from the material qualities of the ceramics themselves. Even if we did not know anything about the historical reception, con - sumption, and promotion of ceramics, we could derive this dis - tinction between the catalytic and predictive approaches. The facture of the wares alone implies a different kind of relationship between the potters and the kiln, between the potters and one another, and between the whole manufacturing apparatus and the problem of chance. This is what makes it a useful dichotomy for mobilizing ceramics as evidence of historical change.

Catalytic Design Three sets of examples will suffice to illustrate the essential trajectory of the catalytic approach. The first are the black tea wares produced most famously at the Jian kilns, located in what is today northern province, between the tenth and four - teenth centuries CE, but also associated, to a lesser extent, with several other regional manufactories. The quintessential product of this tradition was a small tea bowl, measuring roughly twelve centimeters in diameter. The bowls were heavily potted using a local, iron-rich clay and then coated with a glaze whose original recipe is lost but which was conceivably composed of a mixture of the same iron-rich clay and wood ash. This mixture was poured into the bowl and swirled around until all interior sur - faces were coated. The bowl was then inverted and glaze was poured over the outer wall until the entire surface save the ring foot and a small band of the body above it was coated. 21 Each bowl was then placed in a separate , the were stacked in the kiln, and the kiln was fired to a temperature of roughly 1300–1330° C. During the firing, iron-rich droplets formed within the molten glaze. Bubbles rising through the glaze carried some of these droplets to the surface. As the glaze matured, these

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 31

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 droplets were typically pulled down the sides of the bowl by the force of gravity, developing fine, longitudinal streaks. As the glaze cooled, the iron oxides in these streaks crystallized into various iron-rich minerals, which took on an alternately brown or silver hue (depending on the relative degree of oxidation) that distinguished them from the surrounding black glaze. Traditional Chinese connoisseurs refer to these fine streaks as the “hare’s fur” ( tu hao ) effect. Gravity operated simultaneously on the remaining glaze, drawing it down from the lip so that it pooled in the bottom of the bowl and swelled just above the foot on the outer wall. Sometimes, the accumulation on the outer wall was so great that one or more pendulous drops began to form at the extreme edge of the glaze. 22 If the kiln temperatures fell while the glaze was still boiling, the iron droplets on the surface could “freeze” in place before gravity took effect. At times, when the iron in these drops crys - tallized, they developed a silvery, iridescent sheen that contrasted elegantly with the surrounding black glaze. Many of the finest of these bowls made their way to Japan, where this “oil spot” (youdi ; Jap.: yuteki ) effect was particularly prized. One of the best examples, which passed through the collections of, among others, the powerful daimyo kinsman Toyotomi Hidetsugu (1568– 1595), demonstrates the chromatic range of the light refracted through these silvery drops. The gold metal band encircling its lip, a later addition, masked the slightly rough character of the lip, from which most of the glaze retreated as it liquefied and gravity took effect. Now a designated National Treasure, the bowl is, from the perspective of mainstream production at the Song-era Jian kilns, literally one-in-a-million. Although potters in North China eventually found a way to consistently reproduce the oil spot effect, the original Jian potters do not appear to have ever succeeded in regularizing its production. 23 For them, oil spots remained chance occurrences within the wider group of “hare’s fur” and other iron-rich glaze effects. Moreover, as the excavation of the Jian kilns and the recovery of their wares from sites else - where in China have increasingly shown, even consistent crys - tallized iron effects like “hare’s fur” are themselves relatively uncommon. Most of the wares produced by the kilns have an unremarkable brownish-black to black glaze with a matte or mostly matte finish. What won the kiln acclaim were the occa - sional standouts from the ranks of the mediocre. Similar questions of regulated production versus incidental effect surround a category of celadon wares that has, at least since its discursive formalization in the late sixteenth century, been known as . The origin of the ware is the subject of ongo - ing controversy. Some contend it is simply a variant of the less flamboyantly crackled , fired at the same kilns but

32 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 Bowl with celadon glaze under slightly different conditions. Others propose that it is a dis - and foliated rim, Ge ware, tinctive, relatively late (i.e., fourteenth century) ware designed to Southern Song dynasty, elaborate and thereby capitalize on the fame of the delicate craz - twelfth to thirteenth centuries. Metropolitan Museum of Art, ing that characterized its celadon forerunners. 24 Whatever the New York; Rogers Fund, 1918. case, all agree that the ware is principally distinguished by dense, crisscrossing networks of cracks running through multiple layers of glaze. Two networks can typically be distinguished: a looser pattern of dark crackle and a tighter system of beige crazing, which is typically and evocatively referred to in Chinese as the “gold thread and iron wire” ( jinsi tiexian ) effect. Cracking is a common effect that occurs when the body and glaze cool at suf - ficiently different rates. As cooling proceeds, new networks of cracks can form hours or even days after the ceramic item is removed from the kiln. In the case of Ge ware, the initial crackle was instigated, most likely by rapid cooling, and then accentu - ated by dipping the pieces in an ink or other dark solution that stained the cracks. Subsequently, more natural crazing (possibly enhanced with lighter stains) presented fine pale networks within the darker overall pattern. From a manufacturing standpoint, the process involved con - siderable risk. If the ceramics were cooled too quickly, the entire piece, not just the glaze, could crack and even shatter. As with the Jian tea bowls, the potters were only instigators for a process that ultimately exceeded their capacity to command. If they managed the temperature correctly, they could produce a relatively even crackle, but the play of the lines was beyond their control. In dye - ing the cracks, they transformed the minute variations in the play of heat from one vessel to the next into the principle subject of visual interest. A final example is , associated with a cluster of kilns in what are today the northern provinces of Henan and Hebei. From the late eleventh to early fifteenth centuries CE, potters at these kilns produced a series of ceramics with cool opalescent

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 33

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 glazes that varied from moon white to azure and, eventually, even laven - der and purple in hue. The essential Jun form was a heavily potted vessel with an equally heavy application of glaze. The signature colors of these glazes were produced by optical rather than true pigment effects. Microscopic spherules of glass sep - arated from and became suspended in the glaze during firing—a process known formally as liquid-liquid phase separation. 25 In sufficient number, these spherules scatter light that, depending on the size of the spherules, varies from white to sky blue in hue. As a result, Above: Bowl with sky-blue glaze, on those areas of the vessel where the glaze has run thin and the Jun ware, Jin dynasty, twelfth spherules are insufficiently numerous, the glaze becomes trans - to thirteenth centuries. National , Taiwan. parent, revealing the warm tones of the clay body beneath. This Opposite: One of the David produces a delicate graduation from the warm buff of the lip to Vases, porcelain with underglaze the sensuous blue of the torso. blue painting, 1351. Percival As with Jian ware, the thickly applied glaze of Jun ware tended David Foundation of Chinese Art, . to accumulate and congeal on the underside of the vessel. The accumulation could produce pendulous drops of free-hanging glaze. Capturing the drop just before it slipped from the bowl was no easy matter. The wastage at Jun and other kiln complexes demonstrates that the drops often reached the floor of the saggar and fused to its rough clay, forming a column of glaze that had to be broken to release the bowl, ruining the smooth integrity of the glaze surface. Although the application of a heavy coating of glaze was necessary to achieve a desirable color, it was simulta - neously a source of elevated risk. The inherent variability of the process meant that hundreds of vessels had to be made to achieve just one instance of perfectly balanced drops. In the catalytic mode, symmetry was fortuitous. Irregularity, unevenness, and imperfection were the anticipated norm. An important commonality of all of these wares, and indeed of virtually all ceramics made in China prior to the advent of blue-and-white porcelain, is that they were exclusively made using locally sourced raw materials. Many of the variations seen in ceramics of the Song and earlier periods stem from the inherent differences in the chemical composition of locally avail - able clays. Artisans at the Jun kilns took advantage of their clays’ tendency to reoxidize at high temperatures to produce comparatively warmer-hued wares, while ceramicists at the Jian kilns mobilized the high quantities of iron in their clays to pro - duce intense, brown-black glazes. The ready availability of raw

34 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 materials mitigated the loss associated with failures and misfirings and thus helped to sustain the economic viability of the catalytic mode.

Predictive Control One need only look at a piece of blue-and- white porcelain to realize that the margin of error was considerably narrower for the potters at Jingdezhen. The finest early blue-and-white wares, such as the David Vases in the British Museum, demonstrate the visual ideal: fine lines and carefully outlined forms that appear glossy under the overlaying glaze but remain crisply dis - tinguished from the cool white ground. Diffusion occurs within rather than on the boundaries of areas of color, creating gra - dations of tone that give such details as the blossoms encircling the neck or the dragon’s scales a sense of volume. The densest applications of cobalt bleed but remain within the outlines. The wider corpus of early blue-and-white wares demonstrates how difficult it was to achieve such sharpness. Consider a diminu - tive stem cup recovered from the ruins of the fourteenth-century city of Almaliq, located in the far west of what is now the Chinese province of Xinjiang. The cup was manufactured using the same technique as that of the David Vases, by the same com - munity of potters working at the same place at roughly the same time. As with the vases, the stem cup was made from a mixture of porcelain stone and kaolin clay, filtered to remove discoloring impurities. Once the body was dry, the design was painted with a pigment derived from cobalt ore with significant iron content. The designs were then covered with a clear glaze and fired once, in a low-oxygen “reduction” atmosphere, at a temperature of approximately 1300° C. But whereas the crisp painted designs of the vases survived the firing, those of the stem cup collapsed into a blurry mess. Although the forensics of the failure are impossible to reconstruct with absolute precision, it appears that a combination of factors, possibly including a slightly higher than ideal proportion of iron, excessive lime in the flux, and slight overfiring conspired to blur the underglaze painting. Too much lime caused the glaze to become opaque in places, muting the tone of the underglaze blue, and overfluxed the glaze, liquefying

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 35

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 it at the height of the firing so that it absorbed and diffused the cobalt to create the pale blue misting effects seen around the rim of the cup and in the band running from ten to five o’clock across its inner face. The liquidity of the glaze coating also exacerbated the blackish-blue mottling of the magnetite crys - tals in the areas of greatest pigment concen - tration, exerting a downward drag on these particles that further blurred the design. Thus, subtle variations in substance, heat, and time took what had been a crisply out - lined, finely gradated painting at the time of execution and transformed it into a chromatic landslide of aquamarine mud and azure ooze. We know from the Above and opposite: extensively excavated refuse piles at Jingdezhen that most flaws Porcelain stem cup with of this sort were sufficient to earn a piece of blue-and-white ware underglaze blue painting, ca. 1320–1370. Xinjiang Uygur a short trip to the trash heap. That this particular stem cup sur - Autonomous Region Museum. vived and found its way to Central Asia presumably resulted from the happy coincidence of its small size and the still relative novelty of the blue-and-white technique. Yet despite its survival, we can say with some certainty that no one, then or now, could have looked at the stem cup alongside pieces like the David Vases and not seen it as deeply flawed. What is most striking about the stem cup, from the wider perspective of Chinese ceramics production, is that the chemical reactions responsible for its “flaws”—the tendency of glaze to run, diffuse, and cloud, and the separation and crystallization of metallic oxides—were precisely the reactions that catalytic potters mobilized to create their most successful and celebrated wares. What had been the wellspring of success at the Jun, Jian, and Guan kilns became the harbinger of failure at Jingdezhen. The decision to pursue blue-on-white painted decor at Jingdezhen thus had profound implications for the relationship between the potters and their work, relations between the potters and their managers, and the attitude of the entire regime toward the problem of chance. Once variation from the prefired surface was transformed from the necessary precondition of aesthetic appeal into the source of error, the natural experimentation that flourished under the catalytic regime had to become ever more precisely and narrowly focused on problem solving and trial by error. The fluidity intrinsic to melting glaze became a risk to mit - igate rather than a variable to exploit. We know from later records that, at least by the later Ming dynasty, the division of labor at Jingdezhen was highly specialized. What we can surmise, based solely on our understanding of process, is that the division involved both task and status. This is because the production of

36 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 blue-and-white, by its very nature, implies labor inequality. Whereas earlier ceramicists—those who dug the clay, mixed the glaze, dipped the vessels, and stoked the kilns—had all contributed, more or less equally, to the complex of variables that generated the best pieces, now one group—the painters—made the designs that garnered praise, and all others succeeded only when their labor was invisible. Instead of play - ing with chance, they worked to new, unforgiving standards. The kaolin clay had to be completely filtered of impurities, the cobalt thoroughly refined, and, most important, the temperature of the kiln precisely modulated. When serendipity became error, artistry and labor parted company. Exacerbating these challenges was the rarity of the cobalt itself. Although the sourcing of cobalt varied over time, with domestic mines utilized when access to Central Asian sources was interrupted or alternative tones desired, throughout the history of manufacturing at Jingdezhen cobalt remained a com - paratively rare and costly material. This distinguished it from the relative abundance of the raw materials used in earlier ceram - ics. The location of kilns, including those at Jingdezhen, was largely determined on the basis of whether they provided ready access to raw materials—principally clay and fuel. Abundance reduced the opportunity cost of experimentation and ineffi - ciency. Jingdezhen was itself located near enormous deposits of porcelain stone and kaolin clay. What changed with the advent of blue-and-white was the introduction of an ingredient that encouraged conservation. Cobalt helped transform the glazing of ceramics into a conservative endeavor.

Reticulated Regimes Doron Bauer has suggested, through reference to Jeff Wall and Timothy Ingold, that all art making, from the developing fluid of the photographer to the pigments of the painter and the percus - sive waves of the stone knapper, is “nothing but hydraulics.” 26 At their most fundamental level, ceramics buttress this generaliza - tion. Compositionally, the essential change that occurs when clay is heated in a kiln is the evacuation of water. The water in sculpted clay exists in three states: mechanically combined water, which has been mixed into the clay to make it more pli - able; absorbed water, which adheres to raw clay; and chemically combined water, which is bonded to the minerals in the clay at

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 37

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 the molecular level. Not until all three are removed does true ceramic change occur. 27 Additionally, although the melting of fluxed glaze does not literally involve water, on an abstract level its liquidity is as “hydraulic” as the knapping of stone tools. So, thinking through the agency of the kiln in terms of liquid dynam - ics is appropriate. The problem with the hydraulic generalization is not its inac - curacy per se but its inability to account for change. Using Wall to highlight the liquidity of all artistic processes does not help to explain why one process supplanted another. For addressing questions of change, what matters is not Wall’s liquidity so much as his contrast between the incalculable and the hydraulic—the liquidity that overcomes us and the liquidity we channel. To my mind, that contrast suggests a shift in the relative distribution of agency among the various volitional forces and reactive materi - als party to any technical process. The other productive feature of Wall’s conflation of the liquid and the thinking is its implicit rejection of hylomorphism—the notion that abstract, a priori forms precede their substantiation in matter. Thinking, for Wall, is immersed in and inseparable from the process of making itself. What this implies, analytically, is that our reverse engineering of ceramic facture should aim not for some abstract mentality or explicitly cognitive process on the part of the potters but for a structure for understanding their work as an interdependent web of actions, outcomes, and responses. The work of Gilbert Simondon (1924–1989) offers a useful avenue for thinking through these interdependent networks. As one of the twentieth century’s most explicit and influential critics of hylomorphism, Simondon offers the conceptual tools necessary for expanding Wall’s evocative ideas into a practicable framework for theorizing ceramic facture. 28 In Du mode d’exis - tence des objets techniques (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects), Simondon posits “technicity” ( la technicité ) as a term for the normativity that underlies and is intrinsic to all technical objects. 29 This normativity is not particular to any individual object; rather, it sets the common horizon of possibility for all objectifications that emerge from it. For Simondon, technicity is not socially determined or otherwise external to the process of making as such. 30 He understands it as a reticularity—a web or network—that necessarily structures the actions of anyone who attempts to produce things by means of the technologies common to it. 31 The network imagined here, as Muriel Combes explains in her lucid exposition of Simondon’s dense theory, exists as a complexly interrelated and interdependent sphere with the “capacity to condition human actions as such.” In this way, it is “not the means of the act but its milieu.” 32 Simondon developed his ideas on technicity and reticulation

38 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 in the course of philosophically advancing an ethics of the col - lective. My aim here is narrower and admittedly appropriative. 33 As an analytical construct for generalizing from the facture of material artifacts, the value of Simondon’s reticulated technicity, and what differentiates it from other constructs like Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, is that it precedes (and indeed gen - erates) the social. 34 This makes it useful for extrapolating condi - tions from objects when our knowledge of the social frameworks in which those objects were produced is circumscribed by the intrinsic limitations of historical evidence. Because the ceramics themselves vastly exceed the documentary and archaeological evidence associated with their making, a theory that proceeds from the observable qualities of their facture would seem best suited to the inherent historiographic challenges of the material. It also establishes the materiality of the ceramics as an indepen - dent body of evidence against which the conclusions of archaeo - logical and textual investigations can be rigorously compared. Thinking in terms of reticulated networks of interdependence conveys a coherent logic to the empirical evidence of Chinese ceramics manufacturing. It draws attention to the dependence of human agency on the inherent constraints of the technology of blue-and-white porcelain itself, and it links that technology to Jingdezhen’s subsequent monopolization of the global porcelain industry. Attempting to produce crisply delineated pictures in the medium of glaze, whose fundamental nature is diffusive and whose natural tendency is to run, dramatically increases that medium’s capacity to frustrate artisanal ambition. In so doing, it transforms the artisan’s experience of that medium and encour - ages adaptations that ameliorate the intensifying sense of danger and precarity: greater delicacy in the movements of the hand; new sensitivity to the texture of the unglazed body, transformed now from an object for dipping into a ground for painting. The adoption of scarce raw materials encourages a narrowing of the parameters of experimentation to mitigate waste and reduces the space available for play. The elevation of the painter as the principle agent of positive difference between products encour - ages social distinctions between painters and all other cerami - cists, which in turn creates an incentive for painters, as the beneficiaries of these distinctions, to innovate in ever more painterly ways. The division of labor necessary to invest the aggregate skill sufficient to consistently manufacture blue-and- white porcelain thus encourages the production of more blue- and-white. The inefficiency and precarity of the process, when understood within the wider reticularity of relationships that sustain it, ironically re-present themselves as the avenue of least resistance. Blue-and-white generates its own path dependence. The logical vector of this path, which in the face of new exter -

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 39

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 nalities encourages a return to the basic mechanisms of the pre - dictive mode, corresponds well with the empirical history of Chinese ceramic manufacturing and appreciation. Within a given reticularity, change does not happen all at once. It is slow, so slow that no individual human being was probably ever aware of it happening. We would not expect it to emerge as an explicit object of discourse in the documentary record. It amounts to countless micro-adjustments and adaptations to a new milieu that are indi - vidually imperceptible but in the aggregate inexorable. The nature of the new milieu would only be apprehensible in retro - spect and contrast. When we survey the history of later Chinese ceramics, we see this pattern of inexorable intensification and delayed reflexivity repeating itself over and over again. We see it in the facture of the ceramics themselves, in the objectification of the division of labor as a subject and mechanism of representa - tion in its own right, and in the nostalgia for catalytic ceramics that emerged once Jingdezhen’s domination of the manufacturing landscape was complete. Innovation at Jingdezhen following the advent of blue-and- white had three key dimensions. The first was the development of new kiln architecture, which culminated in the sixteenth century with the so-called egg-shaped kilns, which enabled both greater control over kiln temperatures and the ability to simulta - neously create different environments in different areas of the kiln gauged to the particular needs of distinctive wares. 35 This facilitated control, thereby eliminating risk, and increased effi - ciency, thereby cutting fuel expenditure. The second major area of innovation was in the reduction of impurities. During the Yongle (1403–1424) and Xuande (1426–1435) eras of the early Ming dynasty, the Jingdezhen potters were plagued by impurities in the cobalt that burst during firing, generating metallic crystals that sank under the weight of gravity, appearing as tiny dots pulling on the lower edges of the painted designs. By the later decades of the fifteenth century, during the celebrated Chenghua reign (1465–1487), the potters succeeded in eliminating this “heaped-and-piled” effect. 36 The third, most visually obvious and novel innovation was the development of new color palettes, cul - minating in the baroque, polychromatic painted designs of the Qianlong era (1736–1795). Yet even here, the essential driving force of chromatic innovation was the desire to eliminate chemi - cal variation. The early production of painted underglaze decor at Jingdezhen involved experiments with copper, which under ideal circumstances had the capacity to turn dark red when fired in a low-oxygen, reduction environment. But copper was unsta - ble, and the patterns more often emerged black or grey and tended to diffuse into the surrounding glaze, blurring the design. When the potters, in the early fifteenth century, finally succeeded

40 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 in creating crisp red designs through the use of an iron-rich enamel painted over the glaze and set in a second, oxidizing firing, they established a technological basis for the subsequent development of enamel palettes that enabled a much wider range of chromatic possi - bilities. Although overglaze enameling is without ques - tion the technological Small porcelain bowl with over - innovation on which the subsequent development of Jingdezhen glaze painting of plum blossoms, porcelain depended, from the perspective of the potters who , Yongzheng reign mark and period, 1723–1735. developed it, the innovation was apparently an attempt to elimi - Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. nate the chemical risk that had long plagued the firing of all Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian underglaze colors except black and blue. Institution, Washington DC; Purchase—Charles Lang Freer By facilitating control over the chromatic changes that occurred Endowment, F1934.2a-g. during firing and expanding the range of colors that could be applied to a single object, enameling made it increasingly possi - ble to treat glaze as if it were paint. It became possible to think of ceramic decoration in terms of palettes rather than combinations of glaze effects. As time progressed, this encouraged the further separation of painterly from potterly labor. During the eighteenth- century heyday of the enameling regime of the official kilns at Jingdezhen, the finest wares were decorated by painters at the imperial painting atelier in . 37 For these most exclusive of all porcelains, the expressivity of the potters at Jingdezhen was limited to the exacting and unvarying task of producing a pure white ground for remote artistic embellishment. The reimagin - ing of the ceramic body as a painting ground also enabled the rampant skeuomorphy of Qianlong-era imperial ceramics, which transcribed the intrinsic material qualities of other objects—the grain of wooden barrels, the striations of marble, the gradations of ink painting—onto the porcelain surface in the form of painted ornamentation. The alienation of superficial, painterly labor from the substance of potting saw its most extreme expression in the armorial porcelains commissioned for European aristocracy, the crests and insignia of which were drafted in Europe for anonymous execution by the potters of Jingdezhen. In sum, the defining characteristics of High Qing porcelain—its painterly decor and skeuomorphy and its integration into networks of global patronage—are all consistent with the internal logic of the predictive reticularity.

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 41

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 Predicated Representation A similar pattern of gradual intensification and delayed reflexivity can be seen in the representation of the porcelain industry. Although the essential technological foundations of Jingdezhen’s dominance were laid in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was not until the seventeenth century that the processes employed at its porcelain manufactories emerged as the subject of sustained literary and visual representation. These represen - tations include the seventh fascicle of Song Yingxing’s monu - mental Exploitation of the Works of Nature (Tiangong kaiwu ; 1637), as well as a series of illustrated albums made in the 1730s and 1740s for imperial patrons and European clients. 38 Much of the visual interest in these portrayals stems from their mobiliza - tion of the episodic nature of the album-leaf format to represent porcelain manufacturing as a progression of discrete, labeled stages. As Yu Pei-chin’s recent study of the imperial commis - sioning and administrative execution of one of these albums demonstrates, the segmentation inherent in the manufacturing process itself not only encouraged the adoption of a representa - tional format that highlighted its modularization, but even stim - ulated modularity within the stages of representation themselves. 39 In a 1743 edict, Emperor Qianlong (r. 1735–1796) commanded the imperial kiln administrator Tang Ying (1682–1756) to add written descriptions to each episode in a twenty-leaf album of paintings depicting the stages of porcelain manufacturing at Jingdezhen. He instructed that each step “should be described in detail, using literary language and a consistent number of words for each step. Ten or so more [words per leaf] or ten or so fewer is acceptable.” 40 Although this instruction was no doubt intended to ensure a visually balanced presentation of text and image on facing leaves, the striking thing is that its demand for detail is countermanded by its desire for modular balance. As earlier representations of the process, such as those by Song Yingxing, demonstrate, the num - ber of words needed to describe each step was not inherently consistent. Some steps were more complicated than others. Imposing a word count introduced an additional interpretive layer between the emperor and the subject of representation. It distanced him from the process. And yet this distancing is con - sistent with the intensifying, path-dependent logic of the predic - tive reticularity. When faced with the challenge of visualizing a modular process, the response was a representational mode that highlighted its modularity. When faced with the challenge of verbalizing these representations, the response was an expressive mode that conformed to the modular unit of the page. Modularity begat more modularity. In this way, the alienation of art from labor within the industry was echoed in the alienation of repre - sentations of the industry from the industry itself.

42 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 The clearest evidence of the reticularity and delayed reflexivity of predictive manufacturing comes from the history of ceramics apprecia - tion. The categorical distinction between Jingdezhen blue-and-white and earlier Song ceramics is as old as the discourse of Chinese ceramics connoisseurship itself, which emerged in the final century of the Ming dynasty (ca. 1550–1644). The connoisseurs of the late Ming were responsible for formulating what ulti - mately came to be known as the “Five Famous Wares” of the Song dynasty—Ru, Guan, Ge, Jun, and Jian—as the apogee of ceramic artistry. These five wares shared two things in common. First, all were characterized by the running glaze, crazing, and other stimulated reactions that I have associated with the catalytic regime. Second, none were still being manufactured by the late Ming. In other words, the aesthetic val - orization of stimulated serendipity coincided with the final banishment of this serendipity Porcelain vase with “kiln transfor - from the stage of contemporary ceramic manufacturing. Aesthetic mation” glaze imitating Jun ware, recognition of a fundamental break between the wares of Qing dynasty, Qianlong reign Jingdezhen and those that preceded them trailed the actual break mark and period, 1736–1795. National Palace Museum, Taiwan. by more than two centuries. Here again, change became percep - tible only in retrospect. Late Ming ceramics connoisseurship laid the foundation for the aesthetic judgments of the eighteenth-century Qing court. 41 One of the many demands that the made of the official ceramicists at Jingdezhen was that they imitate the run - ning glazes and chance effects that Ming connoisseurs had praised so highly. The problem was that the methods of generat - ing these once ubiquitous effects had been entirely forgotten by the eighteenth century. The immersion of later ceramicists in the predictive regime was so complete that it was now the ostensibly less-exacting catalytic mode that proved the greater challenge. The most revealing of the various attempts to replicate Song wares undertaken by the eighteenth-century imperial kilns was their effort to imitate Jun ware. The language of their endeavor reflects an awareness of the unpredictable agency of the kiln in the process. Qing administrative documents refer to Jun-type glazes as “kiln transformation glaze” ( yaobian you ). The term kiln transformation had circulated as early as the twelfth century as a term for miraculous, unanticipated transformations that occurred in the kiln. 42 Although the Song and Yuan ceramicists who had produced the original Jun wares knew what they were doing, the decision on the part of the eighteenth-century regime to charac -

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 43

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 terize the glaze as a matter of “kiln transformation” signaled its awareness of the challenge implicit in its reproduction. The qual - ities of the original ware—its opalescent transparency and its warm, variegated buff undertones—had everything to do with the particularities of the clay and other raw materials used at the Jun kilns. Trying to re-create these qualities with the familiar materi - als and mechanisms of Jingdezhen was like imitating a timber dwelling in concrete. An eighteenth-century vase manufactured at the imperial kilns of Jingdezhen and decorated with Jun-style “kiln transformation” glaze reveals the limitations of the predic - tive regime as an instrument of catalytic craft. While the vase shares the essential chromatic range and running glaze effect of classical Jun ware, its glaze lacks the depth and transparency of the genuine Jun bowl described above. Instead of a transparent flow that accumulates unevenly and acquires hue as it deepens, we are presented with an opaque patina of uniform thickness over a bone-white ground. Superficial visual correspondence veils fundamental differences in effect, and these differences, in turn, highlight the discrete reticularities of the two successive regimes. The power of Song glazes was their transparency—their capacity to convey, in shadow, the complexity of the underlying substance of the pot. The painted decor of the predictive regime, by contrast, was opaque, drawing its appeal from the sharpness and clarity of its contrast with the surrounding ground. Even though the ceramicists succeeded in catalyzing the effect of running glaze, the flatness of the vase’s surface betrays its predi - cation on the predictive mode. Even when the express goal of the potters was to emulate a catalytic process, the predictive reticu - larity in which they operated ensured that in the end, all they were capable of achieving was a superficial semblance. The more they struggled against it, the more they revealed their entangle - ment in the predictive net. In sum, the empirical evidence of ceramic manufacturing and appreciation following the development of blue-and-white endorses the conceptualization of the regime responsible for that develop - ment as a reticulated technicity. The interdependence and pro - gressive logic of the innovations at Jingdezhen suggest that the ultimate source of volition—the engine driving change—was the predictive regime itself. The alignment of the representation of ceramic manufacturing and aesthetics of ceramic appreciation with the logic of the predictive reticularity suggests that these representations and aesthetics should be understood not as evi - dence of external institutional or cultural forces influencing the production of ceramics, but as second-order institutional or cul - tural manifestations of predictive work. This in turn suggests that the cusp of change that really matters is not the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century integration of Jingdezhen into global networks

44 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 of “early modern” exchange, but the less familiar moment two hundred years earlier when a still uncertain concatenation of forces sparked a new regime of facture. In tracing the conventional account of aesthetic transforma - tion in Yuan ceramics to a paradigmatic reordering of facture, this article has proposed a model for narrating a history of inten - sifying, globalizing exchange through the physical evidence of labor rather than the documentary traces of capital. But elaborat - ing this story into a genuinely robust, compelling alternative to the paradigm of early modernity will require far more evidence than I can muster in these brief pages. More importantly, it will require that we accommodate the evidence of objects—not merely the contextual evidence of their archaeological or historical situa - tion, but the material character of the objects themselves—as gen - uine historical evidence with independent explanatory potency. Which brings us, full circle, back to Wall. In the end, what matters most about his liquid intelligence is not its conceptual underpinnings, or its dialectical logic, but the challenge it poses to history. By conceiving intelligence as fundamentally embed - ded in the materiality of work, Wall implicitly resists the form- matter distinction of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Instead of human intelligence imposing form on insentient matter, he locates intel - ligence in the space between the matter of the hands and the matter of the art. The metaphor of liquidity in his telling operates by calling attention to the formlessness of the intelligence he imagines. What this suggests, historiographically speaking, is that the linguistic categorizations and significations of the textual record are further removed from lived intelligence than the man - ufactured objects of the material record. If this is the case, then it follows that a history that recognizes thought as an agent of change must reckon that thought through the material traces of the past. Instead of treating objects as ancillary evidence to fill in the gaps and address the partialities of the written record, history should mobilize them as the mechanisms through which the written record is interpreted. As the most ubiquitous and persis - tent of all material traces, ceramics provide a deeper and more consistent body of evidence for tracing patterns of intelligence than any other category of historical evidence. If Wall is right about the liquidity of intelligence, they deserve a central place in our accounting of the past.

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 45

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 Notes I am grateful to Matthew Hunter, whose stimulating questions prompted this essay, as well as to the other participants of the symposium “Liquid Intelligence and the Aesthetics of Fluidity,” held at the McCord Museum, Montreal, on 25–26 October 2013, whose collective responses to my earliest iteration of these arguments challenged me to think more seriously about, among other subjects, the issue of labor. I am also indebted to Thomas Lamarre, who guided me to the work of Gilbert Simondon, and to the three anonymous Grey Room reviewers, whose comments and criticisms helped me clarify and elaborate the theoreti - cal valences of my argument. All oversights, omissions, and errors are exclu - sively mine.

1. Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Jeff Wall , ed. Thierry de Duve et al. (London: Phaidon, 1996), 90. 2. Wall, 91. 3. Wall, 90. 4. Peter Osborne argues that, in the wake of Marshall Berman’s radical dehis - toricization of the Communist Manifesto into a statement of the perpetual “experience of modernity,” Wall sought to restore a sense of futurity to mod - ernism. Whereas Berman reads the “all that is solid” passage of the manifesto as a figure for permanent disintegration, Wall treats formal innovation as “a constructive . . . medium for the expression of the contradictions of historically specific social relations.” From this perspective, Wall’s notion of liquid intelli - gence can be read as an archaizing iteration of Marx and Engels’s teleology, looking back for direction along the same vector of progress. See Peter Osborne, “Remember the Future? The Communist Manifesto as Historical and Cultural Form,” in Socialist Register 1998: The Communist Manifesto Now , ed. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (Rendlesham, UK: Merlin Press, 1998), 190–204; and Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982). For a more extensive analysis of the political implications of Wall’s commitment to “good” forms, see Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 28–35. 5. Thomas Lamarre, “Introduction,” in Impacts of Modernities , ed. Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 4–7. 6. Lamarre, “Introduction,” 4. 7. Osborne, 200. 8. Michael Puett, for example, has repeatedly sought to demonstrate how setting aside the traditional/modern dichotomy opens up early Chinese texts as resources for new theorizations of religion and ritual. Regardless of whether one agrees with his conclusions, the very possibility of their imagining demon - strates the productivity of his resistance to the dialectic of modernity. Michael Puett, “Innovation as Ritualization: The Fractured Cosmology of Early China,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 1 (2006): 23–36; Michael Puett, “Critical Approaches to Religion in China,” Critical Research on Religion 1, no. 1 (2013): 95–101; and Michael Puett, “Economies of Ghosts, Gods, and Goods: The History and Anthropology of Chinese Temple Networks,” in Radical Egalitarianism , ed. Felicity Aulino, Miriam Goheen, and Stanley J. Tambiah (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 91–100. 9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “In Defense of ‘Provincializing Europe,’” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (February 2008): 85 –96, in response to Carola Dietze, “Toward

46 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 a History on Equal Terms,” History and Theory 47, no. 1 (February 2008): 69–85. 10. Richard von Glahn, “Imagining Pre-Modern China,” in The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History , ed. Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003), 35–70. 11. The classic overview of the development of ceramics during this period is Feng Xianming et al., Zhongguo taoci shi (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1982), 331–414. Other important surveys include Liu Zhaohui, Ming Qing yi lai Jingdezhen ciye yu shehui (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2010); and Wang Guangyao, Mingdai gongting taoci shi (Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2011). For relatively up-to-date overviews in English, see Laurie Barnes, “Yuan Dynasty Ceramics,” in Chinese Ceramics , ed. Li Zhiyan, Virginia L. Bower, and He Li (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 331–385; and Li Zhiyan, “Ming Dynasty Ceramics,” in Chinese Ceramics , 386–457. 12. Alvarez Semedo, The History of That Great and Renowned Monarchy of China: Wherein All the Particular Provinces Are Accurately Described: As Also the Dispositions, Manners, Learning, Laws, Militia, Government and Religion of the People: Together with the Traffic and Commodities of That Countrey , trans - lated from Italian (London: printed by E. Tyler for John Crook, 1655), 12, quoted in Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood, Ceramic Technology , vol. 5, pt. 12 of Science and Civilization in China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 744. 13. Evidence of the use of cobalt blue for ceramic decoration dates back as far as the late first millennium BCE. Kerr and Wood, 658. For an exhaustive examination of the evidence for Song-era blue-and-white wares, see Adam Kessler, Song Blue and White Porcelain on the Silk Road (Leiden: Brill, 2012). The question, however, is not whether cobalt blue was ever applied to white- bodied ceramics prior to the fourteenth century; it most assuredly was. The issue is at what stage ceramicists stabilized the process sufficiently to begin pro - ducing large quantities of blue-and-white at a consistent standard. For that, the evidence still points to the early fourteenth century, around the year 1320. For details, see Shi Jingfei, “Yuandai Jingdezhen qinghuaci zai guonei shichang zhong de jiaose he xingzhi,” Guoli Taiwan daxue meishushi yanjiu jikan 8 (March 2000): 137–185. 14. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 8–39. 15. For a survey of the history of imperial involvement in the manufacture and consumption of Chinese ceramics, see Wang Guangyao, Zhongguo gudai guanyao zhidu (Beijing: Zijincheng chubanshe, 2004), 10–21. 16. Margaret Medley, “Imperial Patronage and Early Ming Porcelain,” in Transactions of the Oriental Ceramic Society 1990–1991 (London: Oriental Ceramic Society, 1992); and Wang Guangyao, Mingdai gongting taoci shi , 115–57. For the history of official kiln administration at Jingdezhen, see Kerr and Wood, 184–213. 17. Kerr and Wood, 366–372. 18. Kerr and Wood, 200–201. 19. Shi Jingfei highlights the limitations of our knowledge of Yuan ceramic manufacturing at Jingdezhen in her important article “Meng Yuan gongting zhong ciqi shiyong chutan,” Guoli Taiwan daxue meishushi yanjiu jikan , no. 15 (September 2003): 169–203. 20. I am particularly attracted to media archaeology’s attention to the “already known” as the wellspring for disruptive counternarratives—what Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, citing Siegfried Zelinski, characterize as an “anarchaeology” that endeavors to “dig out secret paths in history, which might

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 47

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 help us to find our way into a future.” See Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 1–21. 21. Nigel Wood, Chinese Glazes (London: A and C Black, 1999), 148. 22. This synopsis of the chemistry of jian -ware glazes is based largely on Wood, Chinese Glazes , 145–149. 23. Wood, Chinese Glazes , 149. 24. For a succinct synopsis of the debate, see Kerr and Wood, 265–66. For a more thorough treatment, see Shane McCausland, “An Art Historical Perspective on the Guan–Ge Controversy,” in Song Ceramics: Art History Archaeology and Technology , Colloquies of Art and Archaeology in Asia, no. 22 (London: Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, 2004), 29–47. 25. The presence of liquid-liquid phase separation in Jun glazes was first observed under electron microscope by Robert Tichane, Those Celadon Blues (Painted Post, NY: New York State Institute for Glaze Research, 1978). My understanding of the phenomenon derives from Kerr and Wood, 470–473 , 534–535, 597–597; and Wood, Chinese Glazes , 118–125. 26. Doron Bauer, “Geological Imagination in Romanesque Sculpture,” Materialidades: Perspectivas actuales en cultura material 3 (2015): 116–119. For Timothy Ingold’s percussive waves, see “On Making a Handaxe,” in Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 34–45. 27. Kerr and Wood, 55. 28. A useful introduction to Simondon’s thought and its relevance to con - temporary theory is Brian Massumi et al., “‘Technical Mentality’ Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon,” in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology , ed. Arne de Boever et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 19–36. 29. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier , 1989), 159. 30. Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual , trans. Thomas Lamarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 67. 31. Simondon, 167–168. For discussion, see Combes, 66–67. Simondon’s reticulated technicity is echoed in the “recursive operative chains” of Bernhard Siegert’s more recent notion of cultural techniques. Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real , trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1–17. But whereas Siegert approaches technology as the materiality that conditions the production of meaning, Simondon looks to the normativity that underlies multiple technologies. Following Siegert, we would consider the way in which potting, as a practice, conditions symbolic operations. Following Simondon, we would seek the structure that conditions the making of pots. The latter, to my mind, better facilitates attention to ways in which conditions substantiated in ceramics may bear on domains beyond the ceramic. 32. Combes, 66. 33. Combes argues that Simondon’s theorizations of the collective and tech - nics, respectively, constitute two “incompatible tendencies of thought . . . lead - ing in such divergent directions that engaging in one would necessarily amount to betraying the other.” But, as her argument shows, it is precisely this tension that signals Simondon’s core ambition of overcoming the epistemological divi - sion of the human and nonhuman by reengaging the technical as ontologically inherent in all being. Simondon’s aim, in other words, was to recognize the

48 Grey Room 69

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021 apparent distinctiveness of the technical as arising from individual and social processes of structuring the world into subject-object relations. For Simondon, this realization carried the potential to overcome the conflicts in our present being by recognizing that although these conflicts stemmed from ontologically real, necessary processes, the conflicts themselves were epistemological in nature, and thus amenable to action. In taking up the technics of Simondon’s thought in isolation from this wider “philosophy of the transindividual,” my aim is not to decontextualize them but simply to focus on those elements most immediately relevant to the challenge of reverse-engineering facture. In this paper, I am using Simondon as a tool for thinking ceramics, but there are ways in which ceramics might be utilized to elaborate Simondon’s ideas. The articu - lation of the technicity of temporally remote artifacts may well be an effective means of extricating Simondon from the modernity implicit in his characteri - zation of industrial mechanization as the essential moment of human alien - ation. But developing such an argument would require a much more sustained and critical reading of his work than I can offer here. 34. Latour recognizes that the social is always in the process of becoming, and he mobilizes notions of assemblage and interdependence analogous to those of Simondon. But as a practical matter, his approach requires thickly descriptive accounts of human interaction that are largely unavailable to histo - rians working on periods prior to 1800. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005). 35. Kerr and Wood, 366–372. 36. Wood, Chinese Glazes , 66. 37. Feng Xianming, 426. 38. For the Tiangong kaiwu , the essential reference is Dagmar Schafer, The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth- Century China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 39. Yu Pei-chin, “Taoye ‘Taoyu tuce’ suo jian Qianlong huangdi de lixiang guanyao,” Gugong xueshu jikan 30, no. 3 (Spring 2013): 185–220. The invoca - tion of modularity in reference to Chinese art has flourished under the influ - ence of Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Ar t (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Ledderose, however, presents modularity as an effectively timeless, fundamental quality of Chinese facture, emerging ultimately from structures of cognition tied to the , whereas I see it as a specific historical phenomenon with implications for the narration of change over time. 40. Quoted in Yu Pei-chin, 187. 41. Xie Mingliang, “Qianlong de taoci jianshangguan,” Gugong xueshu jikan 21, no. 2 (Winter 2003): 1–38. 42. Feng Xianming, Zhongguo gu taoci wenxian jishi , vol. 1 (Taipei: Yishujia chubanshe, 2000), 35.

Moser | Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics 49

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00230 by guest on 30 September 2021