Not Being Able to Work That Way as an Endangered Ability— Jack Smith, Das Kapital: Volumes I, II, and III

In what follows, I discuss Jack Smith theoretically, and I do this as if he had a consistent theoretical and aesthetic program. Of course, this method contradicts the numerous personal and anecdotal memories about Smith in circulation, especially since his rediscovery twenty-plus years after his AIDS-related death. But I am convinced that it is precisely because of a certain programmatic—others say, neurotic—consistency at the heart of his queer anarchism that interest in him these days is so great.

Intro

Jack Smith’s world is rich. It is abundant, overwhelming. What does richness mean? Not only an excess of objects and use values but also plenty of options for using the objects efficiently and plenty of ways and means of using them. The actors and performers in Smith’s films constantly present and perform an abundance of possibilities for using objects. Richness in this sense also means that each usable object, which is full of possibilities, has been taken out of a stream of excess and luxury. There is always an accessoire, a hat, a feather, or other details of a mask—if you want to call it a mask—that seems to be completely arbitrary as if it were saying, for instance, “I am a great, obscure, strange funny hat, but I could also be another equally absurd, beautiful hat.” But, simultaneously it says, “Beware! This is not arbitrary at all. It has to be exactly this hat.” Thirdly, it says, “Where this came from, there are more hats exactly like it.”

I have often wondered what is at the core of this rare and contradictory impression of mine—namely, that Smith’s world is at the same time a maximum of disorder and chaos, as well as perfectly organized. Whenever we are presented with the accounts and anecdotes about his endless performances with their continuous interruptions, about his inability to arrive at conclusions and to decide about the transition between rehearsal and public presentation, Smith’s perfectionism is cited as one of the reasons. The presentation of a nearly unlimited number of possible choices and the search for precision and perfection seem incompatible and, indeed, were the source of Smith’s desperation. Nonetheless, it is important for my narrative that there are two seemingly antagonistic claims to be dealt with: richness and precision.

My point is that there is an economic relation between the two. The artistic treatment of this relation is central to Smith’s critique of capitalism. That his work harbors such a critique and that Smith felt—not in a theoretically or morally mediated way, but directly and immediately—horrified by capitalism is a fact we know from some of his own writings or from anecdotes about him. For instance, in Sylvère Lotringer’s 1978 interview for Semiotext(e), Smith argued that this was a bad name for a magazine. Lotringer should have called it “Hatred of Capitalism” instead.¹ (Twentythree years later, Lotringer published Hatred of Capitalism [2001], a book version of Semiotext(e), in honor of Smith.²) In his performances, there is a reappearing cast of characters who embody the evils of capitalism, like Uncle Fishhook, and especially the evils of what he calls “landlordism,” his own word for those evils of capitalism he most specifically abhorred because they turned everything around him into a “rented world.”

We can also try to localize Jack Smith’s anticapitalism in deeper layers— that is, in the structural framework of his lifelong project. And that is what I am trying to do here. The first level would address a complex of categories that includes concepts of richness, treasure, availability, use value and, above all, the critique of the commodity. The second level would refer to the relations among temporal pressure, lack of time, and real time in the aesthetics of his time-based practices (film and performances). This more generally includes the question of the extent to which Smith interprets his works as finished or finishable...