Magic and Modernity in China

Magic violates the rules of nature and society. Its inherent foreignness and eccentricity mean that magic resists historical periodization and cultural specification, inasmuch as it appears to be as old as history and as ubiquitous as civilization. In this paper, however, magic makes its appearance as a specific secular, modernist cultural practice rather than a transhistorical superstitious system. Scholarship has not neglected magic's special affinity with modernity. Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin both associated modernity with phantasmagoria.¹ Ephemerality, ceaselessly replacing a shifting status quo, is modernity's characteristic mode. Modernity rests on the negative magic of fetishized thought that forms the hidden bedrock of capitalist drives and rationalized processes.² Are not rationalization, systematization, regulation all responsible, in Terry Castle's phrase, for the "estranging of the real"?³ Many Chinese, equally dazed and frustrated by the contradictory new reality in play, encountered "uncanniness" with their bodies. It became integral to China's modernity as such.

What interests me most about modern magic culture is how it came to be so integral to the people's material participation in the new order. Magic, I will show, may have drawn the popular classes because of how it performed their anxious foreboding. But magic also opened pathways to new pleasures as well. Magic culture was never simply a coping mechanism for subjects seeking to somehow protect themselves from a menacing modernity. Interaction with magic was one material means of participating in modernity itself. The popular magical performances and magical activities that I will analyze here help to describe the estranging reality of everyday modern living and the growing transnational commodity desire that overtook people in Shanghai's fast-paced consumer culture. Magical modernity was enticing at the same time that it was violent and estranging. Magic—a way of juxtaposing past and future, China and the world—gave newly minted consumers a taste of what was to come and a chimerical window onto their supposed future.

The standard Chinese translation of modern is modeng; magic was rendered as moshu. Although each of the mo characters is different in writing and etymology, their pronunciations are the same, and both newly translated terms gained wide circulation in China around the turn of the twentieth century.⁴ This article aspires to demonstrate the cultural logic linking these two seemingly independent mo words. Modern Western magic's arrival coincided with the advent of modernity in China, and the two parallel events heralded the arrival of a new era of sensation in which magic was modern and the modern was magical. In what follows, I will touch first on current debates holding that magic was a screen for essentializing "the West" or the self in the face of contaminating, engulfing, alienating modernist cultural flows. While these studies are fascinating and accurate in their own right, they are limited because they see in magic only a conceptual tool for rationalizing people's experience. The bulk of this article is instead devoted to describing and analyzing Shanghai's early-twentieth-century magic culture and underlining the ways in which magic was a bodily experience that captured the dynamic cultural changes then under way in the semicolony. This article provides a special case study of the transnational pseudoscience of the modern magic show in order to stress the materiality and excitement of turn-of-the-century magical modernity.

Magic and Modernity

According to art history scholars, Western modernist artists enchanted the magical-primitive as their "other" in order to legitimate modernism as such, in much the same way that primitivism fetishized and disavowed the difference and thus the threat of the "other."⁵ Literary critics have also pointed out that because it was his "misuse" of Chinese culture that made Ezra Pound such an important modernist.⁶ Western modernism is likely the product of misappropriating and misunderstanding newly encountered "primitive" traditions. Other scholars have proposed that confronting the primitive was more than rhetorical, since the estranging experience...