Advertising Ephemera and The Angel of History

positions
Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History
Tani Barlow
Criticism is not, as is often thought, to instruct by means of historical descriptions

or to educate through comparisons, but to cognize by immersing itself in the object.
—Walter Benjamin, “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus”
Over the years, positions has created a venue for theoretically informed
scholarship on the political question of Asia. Contributors have engaged in
scholarly debates with intellectual coteries sharing the same moment: dis-
integration and defunding of earlier institutional Cold War projects; the
rise of distinctive scholarship in cultural centers in Korea, Taiwan, Hong
Kong, China, and Japan; and, of course, the formation of the expatriate
Indian Marxist Subaltern Studies group. Call it what you wish, positions
appears to have conventionalized the following styles of scholarship. First,
authors are asked to be reflexive when considering the modernity question
and what preceded the modernist moment. Second, editors are committed
positions 20:1 doi 10.1215/10679847-1471396
Copyright 2012 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press

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positions 20:1 Winter 2012 112
to “the mutual alienness” of contributors as well as a lack of communal-

ity that guards against enshrining dogma.1 Third, positions’ politics is wide
and catholic, more like a seminar room than the bully pulpit; in Benja-
min’s language, the journal remains as much as possible “on trial” issue
after issue. And, fourth, this journal project committed early to the pro-
longed excavation of assumptions governing scholarship and to questioning
foundational — analytic, theoretic, ideological, empirical, archeological, and
archival — thinking.
This has allowed contributors to engage many debates: area studies;
reconceptualizing regionalism, nationalism, ethnicity, and race; sexual
difference, sexuality, and “gender”; and philosophy and political theory.
Amidst these debates, questions about regionalism (re-regionalization) and
area studies stand out, because the term area studies had revealed the face
of the adversary that we set out to displace twenty years ago. By and large,
under sustained questioning, this adversary has changed, and as the struggle
to see and understand possibilities for even deeper engagement with alterna-
tives continues, authors keep offering new critical positions.
One marked presence has been the Benjaminian project of immanent
critique as a powerful mode of history writing, probably because imma-
nent critique displaces the question of area. It refocuses on the geography
of the object, to extend the familiar Benjaminian metaphor, and leaves area
and national spaces aside for the moment. In my essay, a crucial element of
that modern urban Chinese object world, the advertisement, is engaged. To
state clearly what will become obvious in the following exposition, attention
to advertisements enables forceful wresting of images out of linear history.
That these ads are themselves illustrations of linear time in popular narra-
tives of modern history makes them complex. So the advertising images are
dialectical in usual and unusual ways, for they are evidence of the ambi-
guities illuminating a singular moment as well as evidence comprehensible
again in our present. The dialectical image, here typical advertising scenes,
is an ephemeral or transitory flash of past time as well as a rupture in our
own moment, when the possibility of reappropriating the past becomes
manifest and we grab and pull it back into today’s struggle over historical
truth and thus the possible future.
Plastered on billboards, placards, news kiosks, and trolleys; advertising

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Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 113
Sun-Maid Raisins, Ford Model Ts, Pond’s cold cream, Brunner Mond
chemical fertilizer; and ubiquitous to all forms of media; the modern Chi-
nese advertisement is a picture of and story about the industrially produced
commodity and its explosive value to “society” as such. The evidence of
advanced Chinese advertising markets in the years 1919 – 37 allows contem-
porary historians to see “society” or “the social” as it was first theorized, the
social as the sine qua non of modernity.2 Advertising objectifies society or
the social. Thus while enlightened social theory in Chinese advertising mar-
kets is a phenomenon noted here in great detail, the point is that “society”
underlies all modernist theory. The discovery of the social in philosophy
and in the dialectical advertising image during the 1920s and 1930s offers
up a possibility of critique. Since the dialectical image is not referential, a
central question that historians can address and struggle over is: what social
formation will modern commodity culture support? The image does not
determine social forms but proffers conditions in which possibilities per-
dure. If modern commodity culture supports conservative restoration, then
what sort of neotraditionalism appears in the social? If it supports revolu-
tion, then what sorts of revolution?
It would appear to be a commentary; in fact, it is meant as a critique. . . . its truth

content is bound up with its material content. If therefore, the works that prove
enduring are precisely those whose truth is most deeply sunken in their material
content, then, in the course of this duration, the concrete realities rise up before the
eyes of the beholder all the more distinctly the more they die out in the world. . . .
More and more, therefore, the interpretation of what is striking and curious — that
is, the material content — becomes a prerequisite for any later critic.
Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities”
Drawn cartoon advertising media materialized as a concrete form of

social theory in China’s treaty ports during the first third of the twenti-
eth century. At its best, the ubiquitous small commodity ad attracted the
eye because of its beautiful images, snazzy designs, and compelling slogans,
but consumers increasingly came to appreciate less tangible elements. More
mature cartoon ads posted the unfolding of progress, because they depicted
social theory’s vision of what modern society was and how moderns univer-
sally would conduct their social life. At their most complex, the ads, with

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their commercial mise-en-scène, were infused with psychoanalytic coding

for sexuality, so that the dream scenario represented in the alleged social
exchange depicted in the drawing and concerning a specific commodity
masked its actual logic of compulsory consumption.
What follows in this section are histories of advertising campaigns. The
first campaign for the British American Tobacco (BAT) New York brand
cigarettes gets attention because of its conservative orientation and its fleet-
ing existence (fig. 1). This beautiful series ran only once and then the brand
disappeared. New York brand proposes the “social” as an overtly, politi-
cally conservative space of neotraditional relations, a turn that foreclosed
social developmental transformation in favor of a logic of augmentation,
analogy, and anachronism, rendering everyday practices as alienated cliché.
The commodity nature of New York brand cigarettes is minimized and the
acute quality of the dialectical image foreshortened, since the brand prom-
ises only to reinforce the prestige of the already prestigious. By contrast,
Cutex hand-care products, Daqianmen brand cigarettes — another BAT
product — Five Continents Pharmacy tonic, and White Gold Dragon brand
cigarettes (a so-called national product) endorse the modern notion of social
development and opportunity.
This essay is intended to demonstrate the richness of immanent critique,
particularly its strategies for composing implicit histories through objects.
New York brand uncovers logics immanent to all experiments in commod-
ity selling and underlines the fact that successful corporate branding took
time, experiments, and lots of consideration. New York brand offers a rich
negative example. Sublimely anachronistic and yet fully modern, New York
brand resembles a style of modern sociality that would surface in more sci-
entized and Christianized forms in the mid-1930s as the New Life Move-
ment. The New York brand campaign structure proffered an immediately
superannuated vision of the social, a form of neotraditionalism as modern-
ism. Thus in terms of the history of media it clarified how artists and ad
strategists thought and rethought techniques for media advertising, eventu-
ally alighting, in widely repeated and successful campaigns, on a strategy
that linked personal consumption activities to Chinese modern social and
racial evolution and to the figure of the woman. Positive examples that mir-
ror the New York campaign, yet open out the dialectical image, follow an

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analysis of the philosophic project of vernacular sociology. Both social the-

ory and social advertising image characterize the historical moment. Having
established a certain kind of social theory encrypted in commercial arts, the
essay turns finally to a discussion of Benjamin’s angel of history.
New York Brand Cigarettes
In 1919, British American Tobacco (BAT) ran an advertising campaign in

the the Tianjin-based, British-owned daily newspaper Dagongbao (DGB,
The Impartial). The New York cigarette brand campaign was singular
because it pictured a world of purchase where the invitation to buy machine-
Figure 1 New York

Cigarette, cell 9;
Dagongbao,
May 17, 1919

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Figure 2 Sincere
Department Store girl,
Funv zazhi August, 1931
rolled cigarettes rooted itself in what designers felt presented as an existing,

fraternal order. In cell 9 of the long advertising campaign men compare the
art of choosing a branded cigarette with natural world and natural law of
filiality. The decorative and imagined social order depicted hews strictly
to what would become, in 1920, an equally heavily theorized but negative
vision where this same old society was pictured in the eyes of modernists
who thought that, as one famous 1930s-era Sincere Department Store ad slo-
ganized, “the more advanced commodities you buy at Sincere Department
Store the more social evolution will progress” (fig. 2). Both the social order
depicted in the archaic, orientalist, elegant New York cigarette advertising

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Figure 3 New York Cigarette, cell 8; Figure 4 New York cigarettes, cell 22;
Dagongongbao, June 4, 1919 Dagongongbao, June 5, 1919
campaign and the diction of the ad copy are light-hearted and amusing in
an arch, insider style: they are clichés that formalize and designate in line
drawing the imagined world of elite everyday life as it positions an indus-
trial commodity in a world already gone anachronistic.
The New York cigarette campaign presents a homosocial world of men
whose hobbies, clubs, and expectations support a logic of connoisseurship
rather than commercial consumption. Generically, the men (only two cells
of forty depict the women’s quarters; one compares bound foot shoes to
the packaged cigarettes and the other instructs the woman how to choose)
appear in a series of clichéd fraternal tableaux (figs. 3 and 4). Along the

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top of the cell and along the left-hand side, slogans appear that often form
a couplet, provide a contrasting idea, or reinforce analogically the impor-
tance of the branded commodity using a funny aphorism or platitude. The
smaller font block of text gives various descriptions or information about
the product (often that it comes in a famous blue tin container) and extols its
taste and value to smokers. The slogan alongside the box of cigarettes says
“British American Cigarette Company,” and above the box in the ellipse is
the statement that the price is worth it, or this is a fair price for this won-
derful product. Each drawing of the New York cigarette package includes
the Manhattan skyline. It is the only indication of urban modernity in the
advertising.
Overwhelmingly, these images reiterate an imagined, cloistered world of
men interpretable through the dyad of the junzi or gentleman and xiaoren
or mean person, the Three Bonds and Five Relationships (which form the
core relationships of filiality), the world of flora and fauna and learned skill
of connoisseurship. The Three Bonds and Five Relationships analogize
social relations to the world through a set of primary, unequal, “social”
dyads of monarch to minister, father to son, husband to wife, relations of
brothers and friends stacked hierarchically by age, and by a second analo-
gizing move to the natural world of gentlemanly farming, householding,
cultivation, well digging, and other manly domestic arts. Implicitly, each
image plays on the common adage that the junzi is able, while the xiaoren
is clueless and uncultivated.
Cell 28, for instance, places the male friends in an inner chamber with
objects of art and collections (fig. 5). The slogans draw attention to the rela-
tion of concentration and skill; things are easy to do when you pay atten-
tion: the junzi will naturally select the superior brand of tobacco because he
will pay attention and refrain from randomly smoking common cigarettes.
Analogically, the skills of the refined gentleman are as easily applicable to
smoking as to discriminating among collectables and modes of intellection.
Smoking machine-made cigarettes is similar to choosing good artifacts.
Cell 5 integrates the commodity image into a clever ditty about filial
manners, fraternity, and smoking (fig. 6). In it the analogy is drawn between
respectful and orderly social relations and the dependably excellent cigarette
tobacco, chosen with care and always of the highest quality. The manly vir-

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Figure 5 New York cigarettes, cell 28; Figure 6 New York cigarettes, cell 5;
Dagongongbao, June 3, 1919 Dagongongbao, May 18, 1919
tues of dependability and reciprocity are mirrored in the relations of frater-

nity and the skill of the host to choose a tobacco appropriate to the occasion.
The image shows a group of men greeting one another or perhaps leaving
after a session of drinking wine and smoking New York brand cigarettes,
saluting one another in a family hall hung with the usual slogans regarding
filiality, quality, and the Five Constant Virtues.
Cell 13 (fig. 7) announces that the great man, the husband, can establish
a family — a profoundly filial act — with ease, so how hard could it be for
such a superior man to exercise will, that is, the act of choosing the right
brand commodity? By the logic of analogy, then, while it is not hard for any-

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Figure 7 New York

cigarettes, cell 13;
Dagongongbao,
May 26, 1919
one to smoke, it is relatively more difficult for inferior people to choose good
cigarettes, an analogy suggesting that primary dicta of masculinity tasks the
gentleman or junzi with discerning ordinary from outstanding objects and
brands. Or to play the analogy slightly differently, smoking is analogous to
all the other skills that the elite man masters. He establishes the household,
defends against outside intrusion, lives a peaceful life with fowl in the yard,
and achieves the good life with facility and no special effort. Smoking this
elite brand of cigarette is consistent with his achievements and is only an
extension of what is already the norm.

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Figure 8 New York

cigarettes, cell 22;
Dagongongbao,
June 6, 1919
Moving outside the family compound, cell 22 depicts most likely an ama-
teur opera recital or perhaps a political or civic meeting of elite men (fig. 8).
Again, while the scene depicted is extra-domestic, it does not step beyond an
imagined world of cloistered gentry men. The slogan draws its analogy from
the ease with which the cultivated can select the diamond from the dross: if
in operatic performance then even more easily in the relatively trivial matter
of purchasing and smoking a cigarette. Here, the regime of cultivated play is
extended into an analogous regime of purchase. Note again that the image
portrays the brotherhood of elite men whose tastes and discrimination make

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Figure 9 New York cigarettes, cell illegible; Figure 10 June 2, 1919, cell 2;
Dagongongbao, May 24, 1919 Dagongongbao, May 10, 1919
them good judges no matter what regime of cultural life they are depicted
to inhabit (figs. 9–10). Family formation is analogous to excellent hospitality
is analogous to connoisseurship, is analogous to worldliness and globality is
analogous to an inbred inclination for the cultivated person to discriminate
what is naturally good from the ordinary, whether it be a plant, friend, son,
performer, or fellow collector.
Although many images would reinforce the implicit assumptions driving
this advertising campaign, figure 11 focuses on labor. In this campaign, the
analogy between physical labor and the activity of rolling a paper around
tobacco emerges several times. This iteration is particularly explicit. In this

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Figure 11 New York

cigarettes, cell illegible;
Dagongongbao,
May 24, 1919
cell, two men watching a third man carrying a heavy load. The banner
states that there is no reason to roll one’s own cigarettes, since labor is the
job of the xiaoren. This is the reason the elite man buys already-rolled ciaga-
rettes. It is actually a complex point, since most tobacco, before it became
packaged and commodified sticks, was consumed in pipes; the analogy of
rolling cigarettes to carrying a heavy load passes right over the inexplicabil-
ity of tobacco use at all in the form of the industrially produced cigarette.
Other images correlate labor, smoking manufactured cigarettes and filial
improvement in the social setting, as with references to well sinking and
gold smelting.

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Figure 12 New York cigarettes, cell 21; Figure 13 New York cigarettes, cell illegible;
Dagongongbao, May 21, 1919 Dagongongbao, May 20, 1919
Importantly, analogical reasoning never links the cigarette or the brand to

any modern commercial framework. The issue of price is delicately phrased
as a version of “you get what you pay for,” but the reference in the analogy
is to certain social skills and a nonmarket reason that bridges the transition
of the cultivated man from older smoking habits into a habitual preference
for manufactured cigarettes. Here, the scene and the clever sloganeering
integrate a markedly modern sign (Manhattan) into an allegedly contempo-
rary, allegedly familiar scene that in fact reinforces a stipulated “tradition”
of oppressed, cloistered women, and gentlemanly, familistic, self-confident
world of educated, wealthy, rural clansmen.

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In New York brand’s advertising hallucination, the modern commodity

story introduces absolutely nothing new into everyday life. In fact, at a time
when an entire generation of elite women had published liberation mani-
festos, demanded universal suffrage, attended state academies and private
normal schools, pressed the anarchist argument for women considered as
labor power, just to mention some of the known activities splashed across the
press of the time, New York brand’s “society” is incomprehensibly nostalgic
(though to what alleged viewer is unclear). The campaign does establish a
benchmark for the quotidian. But its structuring logic is analogical. Since
no sign of any social existence beyond this set of archaisms appears in the
images, the likelihood is that local pundits and an enterprising Orientalist
advertising agent (perhaps working in the Carl Crow studio) formulated
a prima facie “contemporary” in this formalistic, anachronistic, dogmatic
mode. In fact, the New York campaign strains to the utmost to mask the
reality of how the machine-made cigarette came to be available, of what
new commodity markets look like, and that corporate imperialists like BAT
were methodically building them.
It does, however, portray a “society.” Through the devices of analogical
reason and archaistic line drawing, the New York brand advertisers sought
to establish an illusion of predictability, comfort, and stability, and to attach
defunct clichés of elite patriliniality — scholar’s study, host-guest sociality,
female seclusion, occlusion of extra-family social life, and constant references
to the natural desire of gentlemen to know value in tobacco and the arts,
and to select value as naturally as the birds build nests and lightning pres-
ages rain — to a commodity. Where other advertising campaigns focused
on word play or a Jugenstil plant life aesthetic introduced from Japanese art
deco, the New York campaign is a drawn brief for a particularly neotradi-
tionalist way of social life. It is in this regard a modernist vision. It is even
possibly an anthropological vision of “Chinese culture.” Possibly drawn at
one of the four great advertising agencies in Shanghai (three foreign owned),
the British company Millington or the agency owned by C. P. Ling (a Chi-
nese citizen educated in the social science of advertising) or at the Carl Crow
studio (which employed many Chinese illustrators), the ad includes claims
and drawings that are sophisticated Orientalist figurations bound to a grow-
ing expectation that humans lived in societies, with classes, sexes, kinship

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networks, evolutionary expansion, national characteristics, singular cultures,

and so on.3
The ad campaign set off a crisis of the social as such. With the invention
or the discovery of society, it became possible to contest what constitutes
social life, what norms of social behavior ought to be, how social regulation
works or has failed, and most importantly of all for progressivist notions, the
imperatives of social evolution. The next section examines in detail how the
progressivist social theory and vernacular sociology created ways of think-
ing about human intervention in a modern social world. The discussion
helps to explain the historically reactionary script that the New York brand
set in motion, and why it is understandably idiosyncratic — out of time, out
of space — and anachronistic in a contemporary sense. Certainly, the most
obvious archaism of all had to do with the role of the female figures in the
social life of the allegedly normative “traditional society.”
Vernacular Sociological Theory, 1890 – 1920
At the turn of the twentieth century, what concentrated the attention of

urbane or likely consumers was not the past but the future. Modernist intel-
lectuals and readers came quickly to presume a generalized, systematic, yet
aspecific space that by a consensus finally struck in the 1910s came to be
known as shehui or society. Unconstrained within the university system,
vernacular sociology’s central concern, society, was the pivot for airing elite
ideological concerns.4 Vernacular sociology refers to this body of analysis and
critical insight into the space where human life allegedly unfolds, the society,
and society’s laws and its spirit or soul. In vernacular sociology are the core
philosophic debates and the theoretical rationalization of popular ideologies
regarding human sexuality, social evolution, social relations, natural and
positive law, rights and personality, psychology of drives, instinct in public
life, and so on. Because vernacular sociology arose in the context of older,
ongoing debates among Japanese scholars about Enlightenment philosophy,
which Chinese migrant intellectuals abruptly joined in Tokyo, it furnished
educated popular opinion with a universalizable, exhilarating new vocabu-
lary, a flexible mode of expression and invention.
In 1903, Wang Rongbao (王榮宝) and Ye Lan (葉瀾) published a dictionary

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of key Enlightenment terms entitled the New Erya (新爾雅).5 Written in the
future anterior tense, using the nineteenth-century language of the Japanese
and European Enlightenment, this volume redefined all key philosophic
and theoretically central terms.6 In entries that explain modes of thought
such as Greek logic, geometry, planetology, chemistry, or zoology (e.g., the
study of fauna), there is a sense that from this moment of definition forward,
terms will have changed; future readers of the text henceforth will have
been renewed intellectually through their contact with it. I underscore this
element in New Erya to foreshadow a quality rampant in theoretical work
during this era. It presumes that new terms match a reality: the solidity of
the universe of stars and thus the truths of astronomy, or the universality
of social groups and thus of sociology, or the laws of nature and the tangi-
ble, visible (under the microscope) tactility of streaming blood platelets and
other physiological processes. To establish the stability of the sign system in
relation to the actual world is the aim of the social science project. Beyond
that, the visionary writers crafted into their terse explanations an assump-
tion that from here into the future the specified relation of empirical fact
and scientific definition will hold true.
New Erya is an emblematic text for a period during which “sociology”
in its broader sense first materialized as an urgent though unfocused prob-
lematic. The 1895 Japanese military defeat of Chinese troops in the struggle
for Korea was also a creative moment when interest in European, North
American, and Japanese modern thought reached a zenith, as Frederico
Masini’s study of the Japanese role in the formation of Chinese as a national
language has established.7 While associated with the New Erya group, Yan
Fu (1853 – 1921) translated into Chinese all the forerunners of sociological
and social theory in Europe, thinkers who sociologists even today single out
as foundational to social sciences’ focus on society. Yan introduced Herbert
Spencer’s social biology and evolutionary sociology. But his Thomas Henry
Huxley text, On Evolution (天演论), Yan’s most influential piece of writ-
ing, was in fact a treatise not on evolutionary theory per se but rather an
imaginative rumination about how society comes into existence and how it
works.8 Theoretically this writing sought to establish the elements of human
society that distinguish it from the societies of social insects and primates.
Yan Fu’s breakout position was thus his theoretical empiricism. He stated

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that what had transformed older and Chinese understanding of reality was
the reemergence of a theory that fits the evidence. Darwin’s Origin of the
Species is the logos and theory of breeding. It came to Darwin because he
developed logic and extended an incipient inductive or scientific theory, but
equally because Darwin had an unparalleled capacity to observe differentia-
tion as it truly exists in the natural world. In Yan Fu’s implicit argument as
voiced in his commentaries and generalized summaries of Huxley’s points,
there are three significant levels of analysis in empirical theories of evolu-
tion. These are the levels of the astral (the Copernican revolution in space
and modern astronomy), the bio (natural selection), and the socio or the
social problematic. While one can certainly borrow analogically from level
to level, as Spencer had made use of the metaphoric atom to describe how
human societies were constellated in the primitive era, in fact these are and
should remain discrete levels. The astral level has atomic theory and chem-
istry, the biological focuses on natural selection, and the social revises evolu-
tion, as social progress resting on the human capacity to put labor into the
natural world and build a social world amidst nature. According to Feng
Junhao (冯君豪 ), Yan Fu found Spencer’s categorical messiness intolerable,
which is why Yan decided to focus on Huxley, who corrects this error.9
Most pertinent for this essay is Yan Fu’s interpretation of Huxley on the
social life of humanity. In chapters 6 through 13 (Yan Fu inserted his own
metaphoric chapter titles and did not follow Huxley’s table of contents), Yan
constructed a historical argument that goes like this: As humanity learned
how to invest its essence into nature, the achievements of socialized humans
accelerated, and the population expanded to such an extent that Europe-
ans were forced into a colonization project; humans selectively prolifer-
ated. Given the historical propagation of European colonialism, humanity
confronted two problems. Since unlike workers in the beehives, humans
become more human and less animal as an effect of living in groups, the
problems are (a) it is not ethically or zoologically feasible to breed humans
as humans breed insects, plants, and animals; and (b) since humans, unlike
bees or other social insects, do not face physiological constraints on the abil-
ity to actively change, one can say that humans have the capacity to continue
evolving socially.
It is worth spending time on this point, because Yan Fu shared the prob-

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lem of society with dozens of Japanese social scientists, in writings that were
either translated into Chinese or that Chinese scholars read in Japanese.
This was why ad campaigns for the New York brand embed in their figu-
ration social categories such as class, gender, labor, generation, and so on.
As Michael Burtscher has correctly noted, “The idea that ‘philosophy’ not
only was of utmost political importance but also possessed truly galvaniz-
ing potentials was widespread in Meiji Japan from the mid 1880s onward,”10
and this Japanese supposition infected the expatriate scholars with enthu-
siasm. In Yan’s work, society emerged as the great historical catachresis,
the “present day . . . images . . . [the] now of a particular recognizability”
or constellation that underwrote key debates, from sovereignty and politi-
cal organization to social psychology and modern subjective behavior, from
the woman problem to the youth question and its satellite problems of love,
marriage, self-willed eroticism, and so on.
In the chapter Yan Fu entitled “Human Society,” he directly addresses
the question of the humanity of the human animal by invoking society.
Humans are the bio elite, because human society facilitates progressive
development. Because humans can advance at the levels of the biological
substrate and the social organization, the astral level of knowledge is increas-
ingly open to human empirical scientific understanding and to ontological
speculation. While other animals and particularly insects can be said to have
“society,” organisms other than humans must, like bees, struggle against
the constraints of their bodies while the bodily nature of humans makes it
possible for us to develop socially as we also evolve biologically. This was a
foundational and an epistemic move and is probably the reason why, despite
his eccentricities, Yan Fu is a major contemporary intellectual figure.11
The division of the astronomical, social, and biological frames places Yan
Fu in the mainstream of major European sociological theorists of the late
nineteenth century. In this school of thought, human beings possess social-
ity, as both tool and inherent source of our humanity. In this respect also,
Yan Fu differs in almost no fundamental way from Swiss sociologist Jacob
Bachofen (1815 – 87), English sociologist of law Henry Maine (1822 – 88),
or US anthropologist Henry Lewis Morgan (1818 – 81). Yan’s position is
markedly contrary to theoretical projects rooted in Thomas Hobbes, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, and Jeremy Bentham, whose works were also circulating

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in Chinese intellectual circles and who each “present the individual as born
free and master of his destiny,” in Gerald Gaillard’s words. That is in part
because sociological philosophy is unambiguously a social theory; it starts
from the assumption that society originated in primitive collectivities and
that these “were unified by status rather than contracts, with a ‘despotic
patriarch’ ruling over a family made up exclusively of males.”12 One may
argue as Maine did, that society evolved from status hierarchies to contrac-
tual relations, but the point to be taken is that social relations in these theo-
ries begin with the horde and not the individual.
Yan Fu not only translated Spencer’s Sociology and corrected alleged
errors with his meditation on Huxley, he also translated Charles Montes-
quieu’s Spirit of the Law and John Stuart Mill’s Logic. To this day, these
books are recognized as the origin point of both speculative and professional
forms of sociology.13 A French Enlightenment genealogy would begin with
Auguste Comte, but for the anglophone world Yan selected the canonical
figures in his time. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that Mill’s Utili-
tarianism marks the first modern use of the word society in 1861, preceded
by Mill’s first use of the English term sociology in 1843 in his Logic, and
followed by Spencer’s use of the term in Studies in Sociology, as well as, inter-
estingly, Lester Ward’s 1897 use of the term in his volume Social Philosophy.
In Montesquieu it is the soul or spirit of social life as such that pervades as
“law” or regulatory force. That is why he investigates in analytic detail the
social life and styles of people organized under various kinds of political or
sovereign states or radii of power. The social dialectic revolves around laws
that incorporate the intangible possibilities for life and are adjudicated in
courts, which lead in turn to societies in which virtues, vices, and authority
of many kinds abound.14
Let us underline this point. What Yan Fu did in the pattern of his trans-
lations and his meditations on the question of social life is to join forces
with an international elaboration of the problematic historical catachresis,
“society.” The point at stake is, as Raymond Williams adeptly puts it, that
by the nineteenth century, “society can be seen clearly enough as an object
to allow such formations as social reformer” and that “in seeing society as an
object (the objective sum of our relationships) it was possible, in new ways, to
define the relationship of man and society or the individual and the society as

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a problem (my emphasis).”15 Once this move was achieved, no matter where
or through what processes of translation, the same chiasmus opened; the
historical problem of the historical catachresis “society” becomes the intel-
lectual point of vacuity where an axiomatics of social life, social laws, social
reform, and, for my purposes, social problems emerge to paper over the
eruption of the new.
Wang Xiaodan (王晓丹)’s 2000 publication, a largely chronological history
of social science translation in this era, clarifies how closely the interests and
projects of the British-educated Yan were paralleling the activities of the
Japanese students who had been educated overseas.16 After all, Wang notes,
the shift of focus from military technology and natural science in the latter
half of the nineteenth century to the logos of social science and progressive
social theory that erupted in the wake of China’s catastrophic loss to Japan
in 1895 meant that foremost in everyone’s mind was the question, What are
the intellectual roots of power and how is power established? The regnant
Qing administration itself turned toward (a) the social sciences in which
ideologues thought the secrets of wealth and power might lie, and (b) the
“shortcut” they saw in the extant Japanese social sciences, the crown jewel of
the state-guided Meiji Restoration. Under Qing sponsorship, Japanese schol-
ars such as Yanai Tsunotoki (枊井纲斋), the social democrat and later anarchist
martyr Kotoku Shusui (幸德秋水, 1871 – 1911), and Murai Tomoyoshi (村井知至),
a theorist of British aesthetics and introducer of John Ruskin and William
Morris as socialists in 1899, were all targeted for translation. Later, as the
number of Chinese students and scholars in Kyoto and Tokyo shot through
the roof, individual scholars and students selected their own favorites to
translate and publish. But in both the official and the self-selected transla-
tion projects, it appears that scholars expected the Japanese texts to give
unmediated access to the social theory underlying English and European
“wealth and power.” The second implication, as Wang’s chronology makes
clear, is that the larger translation project, including Yan Fu, formed what
Wang calls an entire cohort of new social science-oriented intellectuals (“新的
知识分治群”),17 and this cohort was actively translating Montesquieu (under the
title 万法精意), Mill (自由原论), and Spencer (代议政体) among others, and some-
times in advance of Yan Fu and as early as 1903 in their newly founded
journal Translation Compilation ( 译书汇编). Figures such as the enigmatic Ma

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Zhunwu (马君武), for instance, who undertook the first translations ever of
Darwin into Chinese, flourished during this decade.18 Mai Zhonghua (麥仲华)
published a translation of Ariga Nagao’s On Social Evolution.19 In 1903, Hou
Saduan (侯薩端) published his own translation of the same book.20 A revised
version of Hou’s title reappeared in 1915.21
Ariga was a complexly situated social philosopher who, with Inoue Tet-
sujiro and Toyama Shoichi, authored the major attacks on Chinese learning
in the 1880s.22 Ariga’s On Social Evolution sketches out the argument in gen-
eral terms, so Chinese readers could not have escaped the knowledge that
in Ariga’s thought the Chinese language and civilization rely “on physical
form to indicate the abstract” and thus restrict the power to generalize, to
“describe abstract relations and hence to develop science and foster prog-
ress.”23 The 1877 Japanese translation of Herbert Spencer had stabilized the
society as “shakai” (社会). Ariga’s 1883 publication of Sociology (社会学) and his
part in the renaming of Tokyo Imperial University’s department of sociol-
ogy as Shakaigaku (社会学) confirmed that shakai would henceforth refer to
what Douglas Howland calls “the preferred term for the new abstraction
‘society.’ ” Society was seen as a reified, organic entity amenable to scien-
tific law and political praxis, which enabled Japanese intellectuals to rethink
Japanese society on a new scientific basis and produce new interpretations
of Japan’s past, present, and future. As an alternative to the concept of “the
people” or even “the nation,” society facilitated new forms of human agency
and authorized political proposals intent on guiding the general course of
social development.24
The creativity of Japanese social theorists detracts nothing from Yan Fu’s
achievement. If anything, Yan’s view on society as such was a more liberal
construct. Nor does it suggest that in translating Japanese social science texts
Chinese translators were duped. It means that Japanese social science was not
transparent. It was a mature, politically viable synthesis that situated “society”
at the root of activist social theory and discriminated among the natural and
social sciences, the social sciences themselves, and forms of reasoning that
properly belonged to each of the disciplines. The mark of this sophistication
was, as Gerald Figal has observed, that the gifted natural and social scientist
Minakata Kumagusu (1867 – 1941) could find in the incongruous relation of
social and natural science a source of creative sociological speculation.25

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The repeated translations of Ariga Nagao’s On Social Evolution (社会进

化论）published in China between 1903 and 1915 suggest that the text was
profitable and popular.26 The primary questions are first, why readers liked
it so much, given Ariga’s position on the double obscurantism of Chinese
civilization and the disparaging term Zhina (支那) used throughout, and, sec-
ond, how deeply texts like this one affected Chinese readers of what shortly
became vernacular social theory. As one would expect, Ariga begins the
book declaring that “the phenomenon of human society exists in truth and
it compels a rational analysis to fix the meaning of social phenomena which
is why we have sociology.”27 Sociology’s special mission, the thing that other
social science disciplines cannot do, is this sociology of ordinary phenom-
enon. Sociology of ordinary phenomenon does not mean particularism,
however, or the worship of archaic facticity (an inherent failing of Chinese
intellectual practice). Rather, phenomena are comprehensible in relation to
larger or more abstract categories that it is the central task of sociology to
establish. Ordinariness or concreteness means that social investigation shares
common techniques in part because society is organistic, like a living organ-
ism in some respects, as Spencer had argued. But societies are not exactly
organisms, and thus sociology cannot be the same as physiology.
Practically speaking, although sociology’s focus as a discipline is to recon-
struct national society in social evolutionary progress (parallel but differ-
ent from the relation of natural scientists to natural phenomenon), the facts
about ordinary phenomenon are used to build patriotism. That is because,
according to Ariga’s historical sociology (and in canonical sociology gener-
ally speaking), during the passage from rampant social life to the advent of
regulated societies rooted in the evolution of property relations, the society
is joined to the nation; society becomes isomorphic with the state, and the
persons, now bound by contractual relations rather than kinship or status or
developmental status as per proto-humanity, become citizens.28
Two points follow, according to Ariga’s account. One is that it is pre-
cisely the work of historical sociology to determine which factors have been
at work in the rise of the fittest nations — like Japan and Britain — and
the decline or even the incorporation through imperialism of weaker ones,
such as Greece and Rome (the analogy of Japan to China is palpable). The
second is that “society” is itself an agent or comes to possess agential quali-

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ties. Although humans are essentially social animals, the evolutionary drive,
which is to say, the survival of the fittest, establishes humanity into more
and more complex social formations. These formations struggle and excel
in order to survive, and one of their strategies, a strategy that Ariga explic-
itly endorses, is to incorporate the more primitive proto-human horde, the
barbarous, the despotic, the national, and so on into itself or its better, more
finely developed self. Ariga’s strategy of centering discussion on how society
emerges historically from its proto-human form into the highly articulated
relation of individuals to one another and masses to the social whole is a
flexible and sophisticated one. He is as conversant with the social evolu-
tion of the American aboriginal Comanches and Dakotas as he is with the
Madagascar primitives, as a good Spencerian philosopher would have to be.
The motility of societies as units of competitive drives offers the possibility
of accelerating development. Given this, it is perhaps the case that what Chi-
nese readers found most centrally interesting was the logical connection that
Ariga drew between accelerating development of the society and the need to
enlarge and improve patriotism (爱国之心) by expressing patriotism through
disciplined industry, scholarship, and aesthetics.
And the preoccupations and interests of Japanese social theory — from
philosophic anarchism to racial theory to bureaucratic colonial policies and
state consolidation — can be clearly seen in the examples of Shibue Tamotsu
and Ariga Nagao.
Shibue Tamotsu was a race theorist, translator, and social theorist, appar-
ently of no particular repute. According to Yasuko Takezawa, Shibue
included in his 1893 geography textbook a version of physiologist Johann
Friedrich Blumenbach’s (1752 – 1840) infamous 1865 “five-fold classifica-
tion,” which many other Japanese translators, theorists, and commentators
had sought to inject in the emerging Japanese national tradition of social sci-
ence reasoning as early as the 1870s.29 This well-known five-fold classifica-
tion established Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan
as world racial stocks.30 Shibue also translated Sir Daniel Wilson’s 1885
book Anthropology into Japanese under the same title (人类学) in 1894, which
was reprinted in 1903 and focused on the craniology of the ancient British
“race.”31 What interests me about Shibue, however, is Sociology (社会学), a
work published in 1902 under his name.32 Assuming this book was Shibue’s

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own masterpiece and not a plagiary, it is likely that his Chinese transla-
tor, Ms. Jin Mingluan, found Shibue’s sexual theory of social agglomeration
most attractive and chose to translate this “brief for sociology” (社会学之论证)
for its insights into the centrality of the sexual couple and race purification.
The volume is a “brief” for core sociological truths, beginning with the
sine qua non of sociological reasoning that all biological organisms, from
fish to birds to humans, have a natural disposition to live in groups. That
is why the natural grouping without which humans cannot live is called
society and why humans are called the social animal (名曰社会，社交之动物).
Thus the book outline consists of definitions of society, sociology, and of
the major social phenomena (included here are primitive or proto-human
physique, intellectual, spirit, and concepts). Chapters are devoted to such
arcana as unconscious concepts, concepts of the afterlife, the spirit world,
hell, rebirth, the full range of primitive religious ideas, and, in later chap-
ters, social evolution, the organismic quality of the social totality (社会者一
种之有机体也), and the structural functionalities (social growth, social structure,
social systems, social characteristics, and so on) that lead to the argument
that understanding the social totality requires a focus on sexuality and race.
Thus we find in a section on kinship, chapters on sexual difference (男女之异
同), racial continuity, the categorical relations of the male and female, exog-
amy and endogamy, polyandry, polygamy, and monogamy, so on, as well as
prolonged discussions of the intrasectoral relations of the social organism.
Because this is sociology and not anthropology, Shibue goes to great
lengths to distinguish and define terms. Society as such is declared to be
distinct from what he terms 国家 (state) and 国民 (nation) inasmuch as the
nation is defined by its ownership of land, the state is rooted in the nation,
and nations such as Japan, England, the United States, and Germany strike
contracts with their citizens to establish personal rights ([sic]个人权力). Soci-
ety, on the other hand, is the condition of humanity, established when peo-
ple live as a group. Yet, while human societies are categorically similar to
the societies of other animals (禽獸), and unlike ants who are constrained
by physique and species endogamy, human society is relatively flexible
and can be easily proven to have evolved progressively, as human societies
established language and various other social tools. Shibue establishes that
the study of society is called sociology, and he defines it as both 社会学 and

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世态学. Since empirically, the study of social phenomena requires dividing the
object of study into constituent pieces, Shibue makes a strong argument that
the study of psychology and physiology are the sine qua non for sociologists
to begin the task of accounting for society as a whole, as an organism. To
reinforce this point, Shibue reviews the genealogy of sociological thought
in Europe, anchoring his case in Comte, Spencer, and the post-Comtean
sociological tradition. Later in the book, he engages in a running commen-
tary on the historical sociology of England’s organization of the means of
production in relation to the social evolution of human self-ownership.33 In
these discussions, the creative dialectic of natural conditions and human
labor figures prominently, complete with references to comparative climate
studies, Arthur de Gobineau, and Montesquieu. Mixed into the Spencerian
discussion of the evolution of human physical stature is an argument about
phylogeny and the study of contemporary primitive peoples.34
As his argument builds toward the question of the singularity of human
over other kinds of animal and insect sociobiological communities, Shibue’s
interest in the specificities of human social groups and social dynamics also
accelerates, and on the basis of the argument that the human organization
of societies evolves, he begins a discussion of various social specimens or
社会之标本.35 The “laborist” versus the “militarist” form of social organi-
zation (尙工社会,尚武社会) and the simple versus the complex social forms
are laid out neatly in orderly charts with examples attached.36 The core
of the book, however, and perhaps the element that recommended it to
Chinese readers, is the third section comprising chapters 10 – 16, which
deal with sexual and social reproduction in relation to the laws of soci-
ety and the study of sociology. In this section, entitled “Family Relations”
(家族之关系), the relative strength of the maternal force in social development
is linked to the continuity of the race. While noting that, according to a
report, all men love women, but there exist communities of women who do
not reciprocate this love, Shibue makes the general point that in the sexual
reproduction of human society, women desire strong men and men love
beauty in women, which has led to stable social reproduction, the genera-
tion of improved humans, and social and racial progress.37 But what had
happened in the past in Japanese feudalism was the quashing of the female
force, and now in the Meiji Restoration period the women must seize the

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rights and powers of the new order to overcome the primitive barbarism of
feudal relations as well as the crude biological subordination of other animal
societies. It is not so much that primitive societies of the past (and Shibue
takes pages of prose to elaborate all the various historical patterns) were evil
but rather that they were barbarous, as exemplified by a Chinese marriage
custom in which one man married a wife and several concubines. Various
forms of marriage must now be understood sociologically as adaptations and
stages in evolutionary social development. For when “women are accepted as
half of human society, respected and valued, then the social form [of mar-
riage] will without question be one wife and one husband.”38
The explicit criterion that led Jin Mingluan to translate Shibue’s text
might have been her concern to establish the evolutionary basis for new doc-
trines of women’s liberation and family reform. The year 1902 marks the
beginning of a surge of publication, which would lead to both nationalist
and anarchist positions on this question.39 However, here the immediate
question is the implicit framework that Jin transported into a debate his-
toriographically denoted as being “Chinese.” In this regard, as Howland
makes unequivocal, Shibue is reworking the framework that Ariga, Inoue
Tetsujiro, and Toyama Shoichi and their students had begun to establish in
the early 1880s. This set of assumptions included the idea that English and
European social theory supplanted Chinese pretensions to universality with
European ones. It included the complex politics of translation leading to the
formation of Japanese as a national language as well as a didactic project
focused on modifying the national character in Nishi Amane’s analog trans-
lation style. It was this style of thinking that Yan Fu found objectionable.
In other words, this Chinese translation brought into play two decades of
concentrated, Japanese elite intellectual effort at newly established national
universities to establish a nativist political idiom in relation to European
political theory.40
The last point here involves New Erya (1903) in relation to moral edu-
cation and the founding of modern subject forms. To this point, in our
country, the Erya authors wrote, we have educated people using the lessons
of antiquity. Actually, education means “to nurture,” as in the Latin “edu-
cere”; English, French, and German all draw on this root. To follow this
more future-oriented and scientific interpretation of education is a boon to

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Chinese society, because the Latin-derived terms indicate that the point of
education is to create character in children, who will become members of
a national society. Pedagogy must therefore be reinvented to nurture indi-
viduality and personality in children. To raise individuals capable of par-
ticipating in the national society will require producing people who can
stand on their own. This is the objective of education. And this in turn will
lead to individuals in society who possess their own will, to say nothing of
a society that possesses a will of its own. In the course of the argument, the
focus shifts to the professionalization of education and then to disciplines as
such, many of which are elements of education, such as ethics, psychology,
sociology, and finally, the practical question of application. Little further
needs to be said on this point. It is enough to say that in this entry, New Erya
reproduces in capsule form the entire Cartesian discourse of the subject and
the object, of excitation and consciousness of the organism. And it does this
in tight, focused language for eleven full text pages.41
However, in a related entry it transpires that “groups” and “society” are
the consequence of the collaboration of people. More than two persons liv-
ing together in a group is called society. The discipline for studying people
in groups or society is called either 群学 or 社会学. The object of sociology is
to address what is called a subject of consideration or 对象. The question that
sociology addresses in its objective sociological research is called sociological
subject, and the item (事項) is called a social problem or a sociological problem.
And so it goes for many pages in which methods are delineated in capsule
form (the rational method and the experiential method), and the difference
between the scientific inductive and deductive or nonempirical methods are
laid out carefully. It ends with an important discussion of how to grasp
and understand social realities, social principles, and the investigation of
the question of social evolution. Each element of the modernist lexicon is
carefully burnished and defined. Reproduction, the line separating humans
from the other mammals, and the status of the body: these are not simple
vocabulary lessons but a series of toeholds into the great façade of vernacular
sociological knowledge. This is the ideology that would continue to cycle
through the political struggles of the May Fourth uprising and that sup-
ported the event of women as a foundation supports a building, a taproot
the tree.

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There came a time when educated people and professional sociologists

in particular disparaged the crude way that mass media talked about both
society and its drives. Fan Jichang’s attack on instinct theory is a good
example of how professional social scientists came to view these increasingly
middlebrow assertions. Published in the Winter 1924 issue of the profes-
sional journal Social Science Quarterly, Fan’s “Social Science and the Instinct
Problem” directly attacked the idea that erotic desire and thus mammalian
instinct is the motive force that organizes society, and that instinct could be
used to explain all social phenomenon. Whenever inept social scientists can-
not resolve something, Fan acerbically noted, they call on so-called instinct
theory as a backup. They fetishize the centrality of the two sexes in social
theory and return to the sexual instinct as the only explanation for social
evolution. This is particularly acute in the social science of psychology (and,
as we know from the case of Pan Guangdan, eugenic psychology was one
of the most popular of the vernacular orthodoxies). “Social science should
basically get rid of talk about instinct,” Fan argued. “Theory of instincts
in psychology was originally an ‘as if’ proposition not a fact. Hypotheses
( jiashe) in science are often an absolutely necessary tool, used to explain and
analyze actuality. But a hypothesis can never simply be used indiscrimi-
nately to explain a phenomenon.”42
Dialectic at a Standstill and Successful Campaign Strategies
It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is
present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has
been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In
other words, image is dialectics at a standstill . . . . What distinguishes
images from the “essences” of phenomenology is their historical index.
(Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly
through ‘historicity.’) . . . For the historical index of the images not only
says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain
to legibility only at a particular time. And indeed, this acceding “to legibility”
constitutes a specific critical point in the movement of their interior. Every
present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each
“now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charted to

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the bursting point with time, the time of truth. . . . For while the relation
of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been
to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only
dialectical images are genuinely historical — that is, not archaic — images.
The image that is read — which is to say, the image in the now of its
recognizability — bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous
critical moment on which all reading is founded.43
Seen in light of contemporary debates about “society” and the social under-
taken in many of the same media where the dialectical image of the adver-
tisement appears, the neotraditionalism of the New York brand scenario is
now clarified. The staging of the “traditional society” came together with
other advertising images of the contemporary or the future or the transi-
tional societies to come. This is the flash, the historical standstill. To recu-
perate these new constellations, and consequently what is genuinely histori-
cal, let us turn briefly to 1919 and 1920s advertising campaigns that posted
society in transition, the futurity of commodity-enriched modern society,
and its alleged impact on national social evolutionary development. Like
the neotraditional New York brand campaign, the images selected here also
forward a modern notion of the social, but unlike New York, the prepon-
derance of more successful campaigns designate a link between the modern
woman and the modern society.
In commodity ads dating from the turn of the late nineteenth century,
figurations of women were commonplace. While association of feminine
figures and commodities would constellate into a singular form in the wake
of the New Culture Movement starting in 1919, predecessors’ images can be
found scattered throughout Shenbao, Shanghai’s leading commercial press,
which began running ads in 1872 when British businessman Ernest Majors
founded the newspaper. By the time the New York brand campaign started
in spring 1919, the advertising industry had been buying ad space for nearly
two decades.
Shortly after the collapse of the New York brand campaign, Cutex adver-
tising planners launched a campaign of forty or so cells in a social evolution-
ary framework. Details about the particular form and arc of the story line
appear elsewhere, but the story of the evolution of social norms of beauty

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stressing scientific development of global beauty products and the impor-

tance of branded beauty commodities to China’s social evolution mark the
campaign’s significance.44 There are two primary points to take here. First,
the Cutex campaign directly invokes social evolution and the evolution of
Chinese “society,” and second, social evolution and futurity of the social are
firmly linked to the appearance of explicitly drawn female figures, such as
the Sincere Department Store figure referenced in figure 2. What follows
are characteristic cells from the Cutex campaign.45
The earliest cartoons in Cutex’s major 1920s advertising campaign (fig.
14) trace the archaic history of Chinese beauty practices through the Han
dynasty, the later Han dynasty, the Shu Han dynasty, and so on, noting
in each case that while the tradition had its virtues, beauty culture way
back when was not always perfectly safe and also usually secret, personal,
and perishable. For instance, cell 3 warns us not to copy the fairy princess
Fengxian but rather to use Cutex; we learn about having white hands with
Cutex like the beauties of old in cell 4. Cell 5 shows a cartoon of Li Zhuan,
Emporer Han Wudi’s lady-in-waiting, whose alabaster jade skin does not
compare to today’s hand-care techniques. In cell 6 Wang Magu appears just
before she turned into a celestial and took her beauty secrets to the Great
Beyond. Cell 7 juxtaposes the imperial beautification practices to attract the
attention of the emperor with a self-grooming manicure. Over and over the
point is that all societies evolve. They move from traditional practices (good
at the time but scientifically obsolete) to universally available products that
anyone can buy in a department store. History overcomes the defunct (albeit
praiseworthy) elite beauty practices of the past and leads in evolutionary
time to the comingling of the sexes in the present in cell 10.
The cells set in the present set up a gradual transformation stressing the
sanitary possibilities and progressive social life of the now, which are sup-
planting the often excellent but now lost beauty secrets of the predecessors.
The campaign links social evolution to female-body culture. The duration
and magnitude of the Cutex campaign suggests that buyers enjoyed the evo-
lutionary story about female social development. Indeed, the story about the
positive evolutionary impact of women’s entry into society and particularly
their ability to buy things resonated throughout both advertising industry

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Figure 15
Figure 14 Composite Cutex Handcare Products, Funv zazhi, cell 3, October, 1924; cell 4, November, 1924;
cell 5, November, 1924; cell 6, January, 1925; cell 7, February 1925; cell 10, May 1925

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Figure 15
Daqianmen Cigarettes;
Dagongongbao,
April 17, 1930
and vernacular sociology. New York brand’s story line had little appeal in
this general environment. When a patrilinear family image appears in suc-
cessful campaigns it looks more like the image below for British-American
Tobacco’s Daqianmen brand. The sexualized nuclear family illustrates the
same evolutionary social theory but in a highly condensed fashion. This
indirectly suggests that branding did have an impact on the way people
chose objects to purchase. It would appear that consumers did not care to
buy cigarettes branded as conventional or as comfortable or as old fashioned
or — interestingly — as sex segregated.
This is a mature, establishing ad for the decades-old BAT brand, Daq-
ianmen cigarettes (fig. 15). The 1930 ad slogan simply claims that the family

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that smokes this brand will be happy and satisfied. The image is ambigu-
ous, but it could be read in the following ways. A married couple looks
over the head of a wizened and diminished father figure as they care for
him filially, satisfy themselves, and share with the older and now redun-
dant generation the same brand of excellent smokes. Equally feasible, this
ad could be depicting sexualized individuals in unclear social formation: is
this the maid and the son looking over his father’s head; is this the old man’s
concubine looking over his head at his son; is the old man erotically involved
with the boy or the girl, and so forth. Foundationally speaking, no matter
what normative or perverse dynamic is animating this scene, what draws
the addressee is a modern nuclear family scene in which women and men
are living together in an abbreviated or stem family and not what the urban
bourgeoisie would excoriate as the “traditional large family” in 1919. The
gaze of the boy and girl figures is obvious; sexes are not secluded, and an
allure of an aspecific eroticism suffuses the drawing. The sofa and bowed-
leg European coffee table reinforce the Shanghai modern style. One need
not strain to imagine the modern city outside the four walls of this room,
outside the curtained window.
One obvious element distinguishing New York and Daqianmen brands
is the latter’s sexual coding. Research suggests that coding for modern sexu-
ality is overtly eugenic in the sense that modernists believed that human
development rested on free-choice heterosexual coupling, which brought
into being positive racial and evolutionary changes.46 What Benjamin is
describing in the long quote above is a legibility that exists dialectically, in
frozen time, but inhabits all the BAT advertising images as a cryptic form
of knowledge. The job of the historian is to read the image “in the now
of its recognizability” so that the encrypted knowledge is released and the
recovered and struggled over. A central key to recognizability is the doctrine
of eugenic and freely chosen heterosexual congress. So while New York and
other BAT brand campaigns were contemporaneous and depicted modern
social relations, the former reified a logic of male sodality while the latter,
more successful brand accentuated a singular figuration of the sexual. A
concise version of that singular sexuality is expressed grossly and clearly in
the ad for Five Continents Pharmacy (fig. 16).

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Figure 16 Five Continents

Eugenics Girl. Dongfang
zazhi
In this astoundingly obvious ad, one of many in a campaign for the

Chinese-owned brand Five Continents Pharmacy, not only does a woman
appear clad in nothing more than contraceptive sponge, but the text begins
with a bid to increase eugenic conceptions to improve the Chinese race.
Encoded in this dialectical image, in other words, are the elements of scien-
tific birth control, reproductive health, modernist femininity, perhaps even
the progressive feminism of the 1920s and 1930s that offered a scientific jus-
tification for the free love of youth, the social availability of women, and so
on. All these building blocks were incipient, available at the time the New
York campaign began and ended: erotic gazes, mingling of the sexes, and
eugenic truths.

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Figures 17 and 18 White Gold Dragon Cigarettes, NationalProduct; Dongfang zazhi, December 1, 1927
The vernacular sociologists discussed at length in the middle portion of

this paper confronted the social evolutionary question of what to do about
women. No doubt more remains to be written about this association of the
liberation of women into society, the establishment of the social as sine qua
non of human evolution, and the invention of society as that tool enabling,
as Yan Fu recognized, the intervention of humans into social reorganiza-
tion (thus his repeated statement that the human body is superior to those
of insects because humans can alter the social environment). Here it is also
useful to note that all corporate advertisers, not just the corporate imperial-
ists, drew on the newly established association of social progress and the

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agile, independent, and eroticized girl. In these national brand images, the
mobilization of women’s bodies for the reproduction of the new social gen-
erates the dialectical image around the iconic modern woman. When these
images appear ubiquitously, they reference not simply the availability of sex
but probably more importantly the presence of “society” enabling and even
mobilizing Chinese women into the struggle for evolutionary progress (figs.
17 and 18).
Of immediate concern, however, are the elements of the common leg-
ibility: how the New York, Cutex, Five Continents, Daqianmen, and White
Gold Dragon campaign ads are historical; how these dialectical images at
a standstill constitute the “nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower
and the known alike,” which historians excavate.
Women in Society
The concept or category (in Benjamin’s language the image or, in mine, the
historical catachresis) of “society” dominated the new representational order
of colonial modernity in visual culture and in ideation. However, joining
society required special kinds of action. The direct route was to buy and
smoke machine-produced, branded cigarettes, read capsule social theory,
eat Kellogg’s corn flakes, choose one’s marriage partner, shop in department
stores, attend a sex-integrated school, cut one’s hair in a bob, drive a Ford,
ingest Jintan tonic, go to the movies, learn a foreign language, or invest in
real estate. The subject consuming branded, industrially produced, modern
commodities emerged not simply through purchase, but more complexly in
media discussion — from elite to popular levels — about modern society and
the situating of these discussions in dialectical images of that society.
At this point it is important to keep in mind by comparison the playful,
highly charged small ad for Daqianmen brand and the earlier New York
brand, both BAT brands. New York Brand cigarettes can on this basis be
characterized as lacking what became normative in cigarette advertising;
there was no feminine avatar beside the commodity, no probable heterosexual
courtship foreseeable, and no possible biological evolutionary racial improve-
ment in the offing. The “society” where women smoke, buy commodities,

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go to work for pay, dance with men in ballrooms, and illustrate chemical
improvements in hand care is not available in the world of New York Brand.
What drew viewers to products in the 1920s was the direct representation
of elements said to characterize “society,” and as the comparison of the failed
New York brand and the successful Daqianmen brand show, the central
role that women were said to play in that space. Yan Fu, Shibue Tamotsu,
Ariga Nagao, and others were social scientists who theorized the surreal
“society” that successful advertising campaigns show to be unfolding. As the
Cutex hand-care product ad campaign shows particularly well, imported,
branded commodities were sutured to the proliferation of knowledge about
racial and social evolution in drawings depicting women’s social play. By
1919, the commercial drawing of society in pictographic ads, lithographs,
and photographs, drawings of courtesans, and theories about society were
inextricable.47 One can confidently argue that any advertising drawing of a
female character with the commodity in the same frame is a cryptograph
for “women in society.” Though not pursued in this essay, it is a fact that
women represented society in the abstract, since the liberation of women
into natural selection and social equality was the historical index of social
evolutionary development in China.
Figure 19 introduces General Electric bulbs and AMCO (Andersen,
Meyer & Company) services to Chinese readers in the 1920s.48 It appeared in
Eastern Miscellany in January 1922 (vol. 19, no. 1), and it consists of a mise en
abyme of a young woman advertising agent sitting inside a GE electric bulb,
drawing an ad of a bulb with a young advertising agent in it, also drawing a
bulb and so on; it is an outstanding example of complex pictorial or cartoon
ads of its day. Compare this image to the equally sophisticated New York
brand cells (figs. 3 and 4), which site the female figures within the kinship
society. On the index of liberation, it is clear that the GE girl shines brightly
as a social beacon, for she is as resolute in her way as the female kin tak-
ing instruction from kinsman in the impossibly archaic “traditional society”
is woebegone.
Literalizing electricity in the bulb itself and metaphorizing the socially
liberated woman, the ad not only draws a direct line to link modern femi-
ninity and cultural enlightenment, it also binds the iconic Chinese modern
girl to the commodity as such. Whereas the strategy in the New York cam-

positions
Figure 19 General
Electric Advertising
Girl; Dongfang zazhi,
January 2, 1922
paign had been to analogize the male smoker and masculine society to the
product, this latter strategy proved the better long-term solution to attract-
ing attention and even buyers. Electricity enlightens and reveals a modern
world, just as the discovery of society places in the hands of social beings
a possibility of transformational evolutionary social action. This beautiful
AMCO-GE illustration takes a step beyond even most contemporaneous
ads by catching the modern female drawing the image of the commodity

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that she analogizes. She draws the bulb and herself in infinite regress, and
her image infiltrates what is a compulsory logic of consumption — electric
lighting — with a beautiful reverie of female emancipation and China’s
national salvation.
British American Cigarette, General Electric, Siemens, Cutex Products,
Brunner Mond/ICI Chemicals, Standard Oil of New York, Johnson and
Johnson, Andersen, Meyer & Co., Mitsubishi, Kuroda cars, Nakayama Taiy-
odo, Lion Toothpaste, and Jintan medicine balls all entered quotidian, mod-
ern consumer society with these seriously sociological advertising images.49
Indeed, one might say that the second-tier Chinese brands even more sav-
agely sexualized the social woman into a prostitute, giving an ironic twist to
Benjamin’s adage that, as seen in figures 17 and 18, “Love for the prostitute
is the apotheosis of empathy with the commodity.”50 Yet commercial art
like the GE-AMCO image, enfolding as it does the beautiful image of a
modern woman engaged in producing a logic of compulsory consumption
as the condition of her existence, also stars in most psychic dramas in suc-
cessful advertising campaigns. The “other” of this woman is not a man but
a commodity, and object commodities operate like a vast mirror or endless,
narcissistically feminine mise en abyme.
Ephemera, Affirmation, the Angel of History
Visual advertising evidence does not illustrate political economy or ver-

nacular sociology. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century international
corporate advertising detritus is historically concrete in the sense of being
superabundantly, physically present in archives and accounted for in cor-
porate histories, where those have survived. Visual advertising evidence is
ephemera in the sense that no one expected it to give social information or
even to survive its career as messenger of modernist thought and beacon of
commodity use. No one thought to save it. Few have written about it, how it
got where it did, what dream scenarios it anticipated, how it cathected those
who would eventually participate somehow as “consumers” in everyday life.
Moreover, commercial drawings do not represent anything as such,51 but are,
rather, “forms of thought whose ontological status is not that of thought,”
a relatively theatrical, tactile, or visual performance presaging what form

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thought or reason takes when in coherent argument, such as those presented

in the section on vernacular sociology.52
Immanent critique, what Benjamin also calls “the dialectical method” in
his great work The Arcades Project, does do “justice each time to the concrete
historical situation of its object.” But as Benjamin goes on to say,
That is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to
the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. And
this situation is always so constituted that the interest is itself preformed
in that object and, above all, feels this object concretized in itself and
upraised from its former being into the higher concretion of no-being . . .
[and] only within the purview of a historical perception that at all points
has overcome the ideology of progress.53
In this analysis, ephemera present a world in which precisely the ideology
of progress and the discovery of society emerge into thinking and into the
physical environment. The concrete historical subject of these objects is
shown in their disturbed forms and anxious reiterations of the question of
historical time. Will the world of men recuperate modernity into an archai-
cized formula and determine a fraternal modernity? What happens to the
telegraphy of associations that bind the woman to the commodity and make
her responsible for the freedoms and the dangers of the capitalist moder-
nity? In Benjamin’s language, “The economic conditions under which soci-
ety exists are expressed in the superstructure,” which is to say, in the adver-
tisement and not the chemical fertilizer or cigarette itself, “precisely as, with
the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in
the contents of dreams, which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to
‘condition.’ ”54 It is not that economic conditions determined the use of girl
figures in commodity culture, but rather that the overfull stomach expressed
its dream contents in the fragile archives of advertising ephemera.
In the opening scene of Ruan Lingyu’s star run in the classic 1935 movie
New Women, the actress ascends into a trolley car. There the most alluring
of all Chinese movie stars is depicted surrounded with advertising images
of mundane commodities, stockings, soap, and so on, each one with the
image of a female movie star emblazoned on its package. The proliferation
of Ruan-like images and in product ads of all kinds brings us full circle to

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where the interpretive apparatus of vernacular sociology meets the ephem-

eral image of the movie star and her commodified, commodity-identified
being.
Perhaps it is time, as well, to acknowledge the collapse of our own into
a time redolent of Benjamin’s. Even in a moment of real danger, he con-
sidered the topic of “The Commodity as Poetic Object.” He tried to con-
sider the temporalities of modernity and ur-modernity, which had to, in his
view, offer another truth, one that politically motivated actors could reclaim
as another chance, other than the inevitability of Nazism. Since, as Susan
Buck-Morss has elegantly summarized, Benjamin’s object was to “rescue the
historical objects by ripping them out of the developmental histories — of
law, religion, art, etc. — into which fictional and falsifying narratives they
had been inserted in the process of their transmission,” then what “was
needed was a visual not a linear object,” and what substituted for progress
was “actualization.”55 This actualization is worth contending over particu-
larly, it seems, in our time.
Also worth contending are the logics of commodity culture in the new
bourgeois order of China’s developed cities. Commodity culture ephemera
are not a development or a residual. Encrypted in the visual images are
ideas and information, a stratum of historical experience preserved in the
media archives that would otherwise be unavailable to historians. This is the
other way Benjaminian history helps address historiographic matters such
as “representation” and anthropologically informed notions of continuity in
“culture.” Perhaps in a Benjaminian mode it might be possible to physically
map out how commodity markets were established in modernized areas of
Shanghai, Tianjin, and Hong Kong. Collecting and digitalizing the massive
archive of Chinese advertising culture from the first half of the twentieth
century would create the never fully established market grid that so many
worked so hard to launch, and that anticapitalists would struggle to reverse,
destroy, and displace. Commodities would include opium, cosmetics, elec-
tricity, railways, auto roads, chemical salts, and all the branded modern
necessaries — new-style beds, cars, medicines, chemical fertilizers, bagged
tea, powdered milk, tar for roofing, window panes, oil-based paint, luxury
items from Paris — that are preserved in cartoon form in the advertising
section of every media outlet. Benjamin’s great paean to progressive histori-

positions
ans to take great care with the “pile of debris” that rises in front of the angel
of history, in his meditation on Klee’s Angelus Novus, can actually be taken
literally. The wreckage and catastrophe that is progress shows up unadorned
in ephemera such as the black and white advertising cartoon.56
Notes
This essay is a companion article to the forthcoming “Debates over Colonial Modernity in
East Asia and some Alternatives,” submitted to Cultural Studies in February 2011. The latter
discusses the “other scene of use value” at great length. Some of the prose for “Advertising
Ephemera” was drafted while I held a research fellowship at the Singapore Asia Research
Institute (2008), and I wish to thank Chua Beng Huat for his kind hospitality. I am most
grateful to Thomas Lamarre who read an earlier draft. It has taken some wonderful turns
as a result.
1. Walter Benjamin, “Announcement of the Journal Angelus Novus,” in Walter Benjamin:
Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913 – 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 296.
2. Just as “man” is the “empirico-transcendental doublet” that bedevils Marx, Sartre, and Fou-
cault, the category of the social introduces a double bind that requires historical “man” to
know prehistorical “man,” man in the first instance. This is a well-known epistemic trap.
Thanks to Tom Lamarre for his insight here.
3. Information kindly provided by Paul French. For more on artists who drew at Crow’s stu-
dio, see “Tales of Old Shanghai” (artwork of Sapajou), www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-
india/tales/t-cart01.htm (accessed September 26, 2011) and “Tales of Old Shanghai” (art-
work of Friedrich Schiff), www.earnshaw.com/shanghai-ed-india/tales/cartoons/t-schiff
.htm (accessed September 26, 2011).
4. See Lyotard’s discussion of the relation of the so-called enlightened metanarrative and the
university disciplinary apparatus. This is not Foucault’s disciplinary society. Here, a mediate
logic operates that replicates neither the doctrines of the European Enlightenment in trans-
lation nor the doctrines of the late Chinese philosophers with their own logics, arguments,
and truth claims.
5. Wang Rongbao (王榮宝) and Ye Lan葉瀾, New Erya (新爾雅), ed. Shen Yunlong (沈雲
龍) (1903; repr., Shanghai: Minquanshe, Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan xupian di 434
(進代中国史料叢刊續编 #434), Wenhai Chubanshe, (文海出版社) n.d.
6. Ibid. These included nation (国家), government (政体), law (法), economics (計论生财析分交易
用财之学科.); the theoretical discipline of analysis of wealth in economic utility), education
(教育), society (群and 社会), theoretical logic (名学), geometry (几何), nature (天), planetology
(地球星学), natural science (格致), chemistry (化), physiology (生理) ,and fauna (动物) defined

positions
as sentient natural life. Entries read in a straightforward fashion, such as the first entry,
entitled “Defining Government” (釋政).
What is called a nation-entity (国) consists of a land, a people, and establishment in the
world. Establishing the system that regulates its people and land is called government (政).
Government consists of three general elements. The first is called the nation-state (国家).
The second is called the body of the government (整体). The third is called the organs of
state (机关) (New Erya, 1).
7. Frederico Masini, “The Formation of a Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward
a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Mono-
graph Series Number 6 (1993): 85, 98 – 108.
8. Yan Fu, 天演论：物镜天择 (On Evolution: Struggle for Survival and Natural Selection), ed.
and trans. Feng Junhao (冯君豪 ) (Zhengzhou: Zhongzhou guji chubanshe, 郑州市, 中国古
籍出版社 , 2000).
9. Ibid., 88 – 98.
10. Michael Burtscher, “Facing ‘the West’ on Philosophical Grounds: A View from the Pavilion
of Subjectivity on Meiji Japan,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
26, no. 3 (2006): 67 – 76, citation to 69.
11. David Wright, “Yan Fu and the Tasks of the Translator,” www.wsc.uni-erlangen.de/pdf/
wright.pdf (accessed December 12, 2011), originally published in New Terms for New Ideas:
Western Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China, ed. Michael Lackner, Iwo
Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Wright notes, “In view of his work as
a standardizer it is strange to discover how eclectic and perhaps even disorganized Yan Fu
[was] . . . . Yan Fu’s neologisms had little influence on the terminology which followed, in
contrast to the ideas in his translations, which were enormously influential” (242 and 245).
12. Gerald Gaillard, The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists, trans. Peter James Bowman
(London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 11.
13. See for instance, Bryan S. Turner, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), 595; Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Culture and Society (London: Fontana/Croom Helm, 1976), 246 – 47; Oxford English Dic-
tionary, www.oed.com (accessed September 26, 2011).
14. See 孟德司鳩法意，严复译述，严复名著丛刊 (Yan fu, “Montesquier’s Spirit of the Law” in Great
Classics of Yan Fu) (reprint, Commercial Press, n.d.).
15. Williams, Keywords, 246.
16. 王晓丹 (Wang Xiaodan)，翻译史活 (Narrative History of Translation)（北京：社会科学文献出版
社 2000）(Beijing: Social Science Press, 2000). (百年中国史话丛书，3辑) (A Narrative History of
China, Series 3). See particularly chapter 2, “西方哲学社会科学书刊的翻译” (“Translation of
Western philosophical social science books and articles”).
17. Ibid., 49.

positions
18. Ibid., 54 – 55.

19. Ariga Nagao (麥仲华), 人群进化论 (On Social Evolution), trans. Mai Zhonghua (Shanghai:
Shanghai Commercial Press, 1902).
20. Ariga Nagao, 社会进化论 (On Social Evolution), trans. Hou Saduan (Shanghai: Shanghai
Commercial Press, 1903).
21. Ariga Nagao, 社会进化论 (On Social Evolution), trans. Hou Saduan, rev. ed. (Shanghai:
Shanghai Commercial Press, 1915).
22. Douglas Howland, Translating the West: Language and Political Reason in Nineteenth Cen-
tury Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 2002), 51 – 54.
23. Ibid., 52. The article is Ariga Nagao, “Shina no kaimei to seiyo no kaimei to no sabestsu,”
in社会进化论 (On Social Evolution), trans. Hou Saduan, rev. ed. (Shanghai: Shanghai Com-
mercial Press, 1915), 356 – 78. See also Howland, Translating the West, 207; for comparison,
see 49.
24. Howland, Translating the West, 173.
25. Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999), 52 – 73.
26. See cpc.people.com.cn/BIG5/69112/71148/71151/4947179.html for Li Dazhao’s views on
Ariga.
27. Ariga Nagao, On Social Evolution, 5.
28. Ibid., 84.
29. Yasuko Takezawa, “Transcending the Western Paradigm of the Idea of Race,” The Japanese
Journal of American Studies, no. 16 (2005): 1 – 30, see 14 – 18.
30. Michael Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22. Blu-
menbach’s major work was Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Lon-
don: Anthropological Society of London, 1865), cited in Banton, 237.
31. Sir Daniel Wilson, Anthropology, trans. Shibue Tamotsu (New York: Humboldt, 1885);
Jinrui gaku zen (人类学全) (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1894). See also Ishikawa Yoshihiro, “Anti-
Manchu Racism and the Rise of Anthropology in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Sino-
Japanese Studies, chinajapan.org/articles/15/15ishikawa7 – 26.pdf (accessed December 12,
2011); and W. Douglas Simpson, “Sir Daniel Wilson and the Prehistoric Annals of Scotland:
A Centenary of Study,” ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/arch-352 – 1/dissemination/pdf/
vol_096/96_001_008.pdf (accessed December 12, 2011). For the history of the emergence of
the category of race through a genealogy of the term anglo-saxon, see Reginald Horsman,
“Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 37, no. 3 (1976): 387 – 410.
32. Shibue Tamotsu [?], Shakaigaku, trans. as Renlei xue (1894; repr. Tokyo: Hunan bianyi she,
1903).
33. Ibid., 64 – 66.

positions
34. Figal, Monsters, chapter 6 for a discussion of the way that this kind of pseudo-science helped
to consolidate “nation-ness” in the newly nationalized Japanese people.
35. Shibue, Sociology, 64.
36. Ibid., 65 – 70.
37. Ibid., 71.
38. Ibid., 80 – 85.
39. Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), chapters 1 and 6. Note also Zarrow’s overriding point in the book, which he
states in the first sentence of the first chapter: “Anarchists were part of the mainstream of
modern Chinese thought” (1).
40. Howland, Translating the West, chapters 1, 3, 5, and 6.
41. Wang and Ye, “Xuejiao,” Xin Erya, 51 – 61.
42. Fan Jinchang, “Social Science and the Instinct Problem,” Social Science Quarterly, Winter
1924, 34 – 56.
43. Walter Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” in The Arcades Proj-
ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 462 – 63.
44. See Tani Barlow, “Buying In: Advertising and the Sexy Modern Girl Icon in Shanghai in
the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and
Globalization, ed. Alys Eve Weinbaum, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008),
288 – 316, for detailed analysis of the ad format, formulaic qualities, probable origin, and its
remarkable success.
45. The paragraphs that follow are taken from “Buying In,” though I have altered some of the
syntax a bit.
46. This is a major finding in my monograph, The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
47. I am indebted to Michael Tsin’s “silver bullet” article, “Imagining ‘Society’ in Early
Twentieth- Century China,” in Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and Concepts of
Citizenship, 1890 – 1920, ed. Joshua Fogel and Peter Zarrow (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
1997), 212 – 31, for his prescient analysis of “society” and its consolidation as concept and as
political strategy. Tsin sought to show an “inherent tension in the political discourse of early
twentieth-century China; tension between the drive to create a cohesive unitary polity on
the one hand, and the impulse to locate “society,” as represented by the multiplicity of social
interests, as the necessary basis of a modern nation on the other” (213). My objective is dif-
ferent. It is to link the “impulse to locate ‘society’ ” to commodity fetishism and the future
anteriority of commodity advertising. See also Michael T. W. Tsin, Nation, Governance, and
Modernity in China: Canton, 1900 – 1927 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

positions
48. See “探寻中国近代建筑之38 — — 慎昌洋行” (“Discovering the Builders of Modern China

38 — Andersen, Meyer & Company) for detailed chronology of the founding of Andersen
Company (安德森), Andersen Meyer (from 马易尔,transformed into 慎昌洋行), and Ander-
sen Meyer’s relationship to General Electric ( 美国通用电气公司), www.blog.sina.com.cn/s/
blog_633136db0100i6b9.html (accessed September 26, 2011). Also, see photographs of the
1921 AMCO-GE building at Flickr, www.flickr.com/photos/stchatterbox/3106299951/
(accessed September 26, 2011) and Disappearing Corners, www.disappearingcorners.com/
former-building-of-anderson-meyer-company-inc/ (accessed September 26, 2011). Li Xue-
qiang asserted AMCO was GE’s sole operating agent in China; for a listing of Andersen
Meyer under GE’s category of Foreign Offices and Associated Companies in the August
1926 GE Magazine, see www.canadasouthern.com/caso/images/ge-mcrr.pdf (accessed Sep-
tember 26, 2011); for “GE and GE in China,” by Ellen L. W. Proctor, director and counsel,
Environment, Health, and Safety, Asia, GE Corporate Environmental Programs, 2004,
which asserts that GE formally acquired Andersen Meyer Trading Company in 1925 for
the purpose of doing electrical installation in China, see www.chinaeol.net/bell-green/
(accessed September 26, 2011); www.edison.rutgers.edu/list.htm notes that AMCO was only
the more successful corporate arm for General Electric’s electricity and electric implement
markets in China. The earliest company acquired for that purpose appears to have been
Frazar and Co., which Thomas A. Edison’s agents established to sell phonographs and
lighting in Japan and China beginning in the early 1880s. Finally, see Anderson, Meyer
& Company, Anderson, Meyer & Company, Limited, of China; Its History: Its Organization
Today, Historical and Descriptive Sketches Contributed by Some of the Manufacturers It Rep-
resents, March 31, 1906 to March 31, 1931 (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1931); and Christo-
pher Bo Bramsen, Open Doors: Vilhelm Meyer and the Establishment of General Electric in
China (Surrey, England: Curzon Press, 2001), for the list of 285 companies that AMCO
represented.
49. See Mitsubishi, founded in 1870, “About Mitsubishi,” www.mitsubishi.com/e/history/index
.html (accessed September 26, 2011); Nippon Steel, 1857, “History,” www.nsc.co.jp/en/
company/history/index.html (accessed September 26, 2011); Kubota, 1890, “Company Histo-
ries,” www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/Kubota-Corporation-Company-History
.html (accessed September 26, 2011); and so on. An analysis of Japanese Osaka Taylorist inter-
national companies appears in my “Event, Excess, Abyss,” Feminist Studies (forthcoming).
50. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 511.
51. Except, as established in a manuscript with the working title “In the Event of Women,”
inasmuch as the epistemic frame of thinking as such was popular sociology in this era, so
every subject in all forms of representation claimed to be “in society.” The claim of society
is beholden to the set of arguments forwarded in the social sciences and particularly in the
queen of the social sciences, which is philosophic sociology. This section of the book will
appear in Feminist Studies (2013) as “Event, Excess, Abyss.”

positions
52. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 19. In Žižek’s think-
ing, the other scene has a second element, an unconscious “theatre,” where modern person-
hood is staged psychically. I think he is correct to emphasize the theatrical element of the
unconscious. In this respect, Žižek reiterates the well-known connection that Benjamin
drew among historical time, human time, dramatic time, empty time, and so on in “Trau-
erspiel and Tragedy,” in Benjamin, Selected Writings, 55 – 57.
53. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 391.
54. Ibid.
55. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
56. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 392.

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Advertising Ephemera and the Angel of History

Criticism is not, as is often thought, to instruct by means of historical descriptions

Published by Duke University Press

positions 20:1 Winter 2012 112

to “the mutual alienness” of contributors as well as a lack of communal-

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 113

It would appear to be a commentary; in fact, it is meant as a critique. . . . its truth

Drawn cartoon advertising media materialized as a concrete form of

Published by Duke University Press

positions 20:1 Winter 2012 114

their commercial mise-en-scène, were infused with psychoanalytic coding

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 115

analysis of the philosophic project of vernacular sociology. Both social the-

New York Brand Cigarettes

In 1919, British American Tobacco (BAT) ran an advertising campaign in

Figure 1 New York

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positions 20:1 Winter 2012 116

rolled cigarettes rooted itself in what designers felt presented as an existing,

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 117

Published by Duke University Press

positions 20:1 Winter 2012 118

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 119

tues of dependability and reciprocity are mirrored in the relations of frater-

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positions 20:1 Winter 2012 120

Figure 7 New York

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Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 121

Figure 8 New York

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positions 20:1 Winter 2012 122

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 123

Figure 11 New York

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positions 20:1 Winter 2012 124

Importantly, analogical reasoning never links the cigarette or the brand to

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 125

In New York brand’s advertising hallucination, the modern commodity

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positions 20:1 Winter 2012 126

networks, evolutionary expansion, national characteristics, singular cultures,

Vernacular Sociological Theory, 1890 – 1920

At the turn of the twentieth century, what concentrated the attention of

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 127

Published by Duke University Press

positions 20:1 Winter 2012 128

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 129

Published by Duke University Press

positions 20:1 Winter 2012 130

Published by Duke University Press

Barlow ❘ Advertising Ephemera 131

Published by Duke University Press

positions 20:1 Winter 2012 132