英文摘要 |
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, 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. 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. |