Indanthrene Blue: Molar Wars and the Molecular Movement
Resource
中外文學, 44(2), 143-178
Journal
中外文學
Journal Volume
44
Journal Issue
2
Pages
143-178
Date Issued
2015-06
Date
2015-06
Author(s)
Abstract
The chemical dye of Indanthrene was invented in European laboratories
at the turn of the last century. It helped to deterritorialize the linkage between
dye and plants, animals and minerals by creating a new bloc of
becoming among dyes, lab tubes, and fashion sensibility. It also brought in the
scientific progress and production speed of “newer and faster” and re-coded
the assemblage of nation states and chemical industry conglomerates that
ultimately made Indanthrene well-known as “the German Indigo” world-wide.
Under the context of this global history, this paper attempts to explore the
microhistory and micropolitics of the chemical dye of Indanthrene blue when
it entered China and became the most representative and fashionable color
during the 1930s and 1940s. With the focus on this single chemical molecule,
the paper plans not only to foreground the politics of details in everyday life
and material culture, but also to bring in the concept of the molar and the
molecular chiefly developed by Gilles Deleuze to theorize fashion as a folding
force of deterritorialization, becoming, and open connectivity.
Therefore, the paper will take the historical period of the 1930s and
1940s as its point of departure to map out the imminence and the final
outburst of the Sino-Japanese war and the social, political movements enacted
in-between, including the “National Product Movement” that boycotted
imperialist commodities and the “New Life Movement” that militarized the
body of the national subject. On the one hand, it will start with the macroscale
of the “molar” to see how the dye of Indanthrene blue entered China,
how to monopolize the market, how to connect the military war and the
commodity war, how to construct the modern visual regime and the body of the national subject, and how to assemble successfully various capitalist
and nationalist coding, such as importing company-beauty calendar-modern
consumption, Indanthrene blue-cotton clothes-cheongsam-patriotism, and
student uniform-war fashion. On the other hand, it will disclose the microscale
of the “molecular” to see how the dye of Indanthrene blue infiltrates the
cotton fiber, how to give the affective intensity of brightness, how to shift the
focus from fabric and style to the changing contact surface of skin-clothesretina-
cerebral cortex, and also to the subtle differentiation of color in hue,
colorfulness, and brightness. It will thus make “fashion” less the fleeting
novelty manipulated by capitalist industry, less the strategic construction of
the new uniform and the new subject in the power deployment of nationalist
ideology, than the molecular movement of “becoming-Indanthrene blue” that
can make the body as the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness,
the increase of decrease of intensity, and finally make history a force field of
becoming and affectivity.
Subjects
德勒茲，戰爭，染料，旗袍，時尚，現代性
Gilles Deleuze, war, dye, cheongsam, fashion, modernity
Type
journal article
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