From Porcelain to Chips: A Genealogy of Global Technology and Capitalism

Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

August 29th 2025

Many years ago, on my first visit to the Dutch National Museum in Amsterdam, I came across a sight that was both dazzling and slightly absurd. Surrounded by the splendour of the Dutch Golden Age, the self-congratulatory portraits, the oversized world maps, the still lifes that looked like they were promoting a Calvinist version of MasterChef, there they were: ceramics proudly displayed that had been made in imitation of Ming Dynasty porcelain. It seemed odd that they would insert replicas of Chinese ceramics into an exhibition meant to showcase their own Golden Age.

The shape of the replicas looked fairly convincing, but even at a glance, the clumsy traces of copying the authentic originals were unmistakable. The cobalt blue designs looked like they had been applied in a rush, possibly by someone with a vague memory of what dragons might look like. The Chinese characters resembled the result of a blindfolded attempt at calligraphy. It was as if someone had tried to paint serenity while riding a bicycle through a thunderstorm. Whatever it was, it had none of the quiet grace or compositional elegance I associated with Chinese porcelain. Compared to a nearby Rembrandt, this thing looked like a drunken cousin at a family reunion: trying hard, dressed up for the occasion, but clearly out of its depth.

Only later did I learn the truth. This was Delftware, a homegrown Dutch imitation of Chinese porcelain, produced in the town of Delft during the seventeenth century. At the time, Ming Dynasty porcelain was all the rage in Europe, the ultimate sign of wealth and sophistication. But when wars and trade disruptions cut off access to the real thing, the Dutch did what any resourceful people would do; they started making their own. It was less homage and more high-stakes cosplay. These were not merely decorative objects. They were part of a national strategy to domesticate luxury, to turn imitation into economy, and to prove that with enough determination, even cultural desire could be locally sourced.

That vase was not a forgery in the criminal sense. It was a bold experiment in international aesthetics, an early exercise in global branding, a ceramic remix. And there it sat, not hiding its flaws but wearing them with confidence, like a tourist who speaks three words of Mandarin and insists on ordering in Chinese anyway.

This impulse to imitate, adapt, and reimagine foreign luxury was not unique to the Netherlands. On the other side of the continent, during the fifteenth century, a remarkably similar story was unfolding on the Korean Peninsula. According to official court records from the Joseon Dynasty, in the ninth year of his reign, King Sejo issued a royal decree that rippled across the country: artisans were to produce celadon ware matching the quality and refinement of the Ming Dynasty’s porcelain. This was not a polite suggestion. It was a state-sponsored call to aesthetic arms, a declaration that Korea too would master the visual grammar of high ceramic culture.

After years of experimentation, the challenge was met. In 1464, a potter finally succeeded in producing a specimen that passed royal scrutiny. It was presented to the court, presumably with the kind of ceremonial gravitas reserved for diplomatic tributes or rare treasures. The king was pleased. So pleased, in fact, that the production of celadon was institutionalised through a network of state-managed kilns, overseen by local officials but tightly coordinated under central government control. The result was not only a flourishing of technical skill but the creation of a national style, an aesthetic standard that bridged courtly ambition and regional craftsmanship.

What made this Joseon celadon particularly striking was not just the quality of its glaze or the elegance of its form, but the shimmering presence of cobalt blue pigment. Unlike local minerals or clays, cobalt was not native to the Korean Peninsula. It was an international substance, transported across great distances: from the mountains of Persia, through the Silk Road, into the kilns of China, and finally into the workshops of Korean potters. It was, in short, globalisation in powdered form. And just like the Dutch Delftware a century later, the Korean celadon of this era was a product of both imitation and ingenuity, of technical aspiration and material circulation.

The beauty of this celadon lay not only in its finish but in its story: a confluence of royal command, artisanal persistence, and transcontinental trade. If the Dutch had their blue-and-white fantasies, so too did the Joseon court, crafted in green glaze, painted with borrowed blue, and fired in kilns that sat at the intersection of geopolitics and aesthetics.

From a contemporary standpoint, fourteenth-century celadon ware can be understood not merely as decorative art but as the cutting-edge technology of its time, something akin to artificial intelligence today. It represented a high-stakes convergence of science, aesthetics, and state ambition. The ability to control kiln temperatures with exactitude, to apply cobalt pigment with refined technique, and to produce consistent, high-quality ceramics was not simply a matter of artistry; it was a marker of civilisational advancement.

In the same way that the development of advanced algorithms and large language models today signals national competitiveness in the technological arena, the production of celadon functioned as a material index of a state’s scientific infrastructure and artisanal sophistication. The intense technological rivalry that surrounded celadon ware in East Asia illustrates that global value chains did not begin with modern capitalism. Long before steamships and financial derivatives, there existed complicated systems of transcontinental exchange: cobalt pigment mined in Persia travelled via the Silk Road to Chinese kilns, where it was transformed into blue-and-white porcelain, which in turn inspired Korean artisans under royal command to pursue their own technical breakthroughs.

This was a pre-capitalist global economy, but no less dynamic in its circulations of material, technique, and symbolic capital. The ceramics of the time depended on the movement of rare minerals, specialised knowledge, and imperial mandates.

Moreover, blue-and-white porcelain offers a striking historical example of the universality of technology. Much like digital technology today, its appeal transcended national boundaries and civilisational divides. It circulated across continents not simply as a luxury item, but as a shared technical and aesthetic aspiration, a common language of form and function. And yet, this universality never existed in a neutral vacuum. It was quickly harnessed, territorialised, and politicised by states.

Here lies the enduring logic of what Deleuze and Guattari called the state as a capturing machine: the apparatus that takes a universal flow, whether pigment or code, porcelain or machine learning, and converts it into a national asset, a tool of governance, a geopolitical lever. The beauty of celadon thus lies not only in its technical achievement but in how it reveals the deep entanglement between technological universality and political particularity.

Fast forward to our present, and the echoes are striking. Today’s porcelain is the semiconductor chip: technically demanding, universally desired, and jealously guarded. Just as Delftware and Joseon celadon became national projects, so too do semiconductor fabs in Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States stand as monuments of state ambition. TSMC in Hsinchu, Samsung in Suwon, Intel in Arizona, these fabs are the kilns of our age. They are sites where global universality is captured, territorialised, and converted into national prestige, economic survival, and geopolitical leverage.

The parallels are more than poetic. Both porcelain and chips are civilisational technologies: objects that fuse material science, labour regimes, trade networks, and political symbolism. Both are universal in appeal but always local in capture. Both remind us that technology never floats freely. It circulates, but it is always seized, institutionalised, and made to serve particular ends. Delftware was Dutch ingenuity against scarcity; Joseon celadon was Korean assertion against Chinese cultural dominance. Chips today are American sanctions against China, Chinese subsidies against dependence, and Korean statecraft against vulnerability.

Artificial intelligence is simply the next step in this genealogy. Like porcelain, it aspires to universality, a shared language that transcends culture. Yet, like porcelain, it is immediately territorialised. States capture it, regulate it, subsidise it, weaponise it. The flows of silicon and data repeat the story of cobalt and clay. The technologies change, but the logic endures: universality exists only to be seized, shaped, and repurposed.

Therefore, that porcelain vase was never just a decorative curiosity. It was already a fantasmatic object, a support for the dream of universality. In the courts of Europe, porcelain condensed not only the mastery of craft but also the fantasy of cultural and political universality, a world in which beauty could circulate without borders. Yet with the Dutch replica we see the moment when this universality is transformed. What Marx calls the fetish character of the commodity appears here in embryonic form: the vase presents itself as a bearer of value, concealing the global circuits of labour, trade, and violence that brought it into being.

For Moishe Postone, this is the point at which value emerges as a new universality: not a universality of beauty or craft, but of abstract labour, an impersonal logic of temporal domination that structures social life through production-for-production’s-sake. The Dutch copy is not about the dragon motif, nor even about porcelain as such. It is about acceleration, reproducibility, exchange. What matters is that the object can circulate as value.

Here Lacan’s concept of objet petit a, the elusive object-cause of desire, sharpens the point. The Dutch vase works as a fetish not despite its flaws but because of them. Its very inadequacy produces desire: the awkward dragon, the careless brushstroke, the sense that something is missing. The commodity never satisfies but generates “surplus enjoyment” (plus-de-jouir), the libidinal equivalent of surplus value. The subject is captured not only economically but affectively, locked into a cycle where dissatisfaction becomes the motor of consumption.

This is why the porcelain vase was already a chip in disguise. Both are fantasmatic supports of global capitalism. The vase projected the fantasy of cosmopolitan refinement; the chip projects the fantasy of universal connectivity and technological progress. But in both cases, what is universal is not beauty, nor progress, nor knowledge. It is value itself: abstract labour and surplus enjoyment fused into objects that dominate those who make and consume them.

The chip is the perfected fetish. Like the vase, it conceals relations of extraction and exploitation, mines in Congo, assembly lines in Shenzhen, cloud infrastructures consuming planetary energy, while staging the fantasy of seamless universality: faster networks, smarter devices, infinite possibilities. The fetish displaces labour with the glow of technology, and the objet petit a ensures that the subject is bound by desire to this illusion.

Porcelain and chips are not simply objects in the history of technology. They are the stage props of capitalism’s fantasy, the material screens through which value and enjoyment circulate while obscuring the violence of their production. The story is not progress but capture: from the dragon painted on porcelain to the circuits etched into silicon, the same structure repeats itself, the universality of capital, mediated through fetishised objects that return to dominate us.

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Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.