Scrivener's Monthly: T'ai Smith Talking About Frock Coats and Capital

Description:

For this iteration of Scrivener’s Monthly, T’ai Smith presented Threadbare: Frock Coats and Fadenscheinigkeit in Capital, Vol. 1, Book 1, Part 1, a lecture tracing the presence of the frock coat as a figure of thought in various texts throughout the nineteenth century. In a re-translation of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Part 1 (1867), Smith explored the frock coat not as an image or a metaphor, but as a diagram, tracing its form and evolution throughout modernity.

Smith’s forty-five-minute presentation concluded with a question and answer period. 

Scrivener’s Monthly was a series of public presentations that explored the space between material practices and spoken words. Set alongside exhibitions at Western Front, this experiment in “not publishing” involved readings, performances, and other articulations.

Video documentation of this event is available upon request.