Liquidity, Technicity, and the Predictive Turn in Chinese Ceramics

Tea bowl with silvery-spotted tenmoku glaze, Jian ware, Southern Song dynasty, 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 Chinese Ceramics 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 reinforce, 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 China (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 Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and the first half of the Ming dynasty (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 Jingdezhen, in what is today the southern Chinese province of Jiangxi—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 kiln 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 kilns steadily declined in quality. Some operations disappeared altogether, others eked on into late impe - rial times

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