Writing that demands change now
Zoe Leonard, I want a president, 1992, wheat-pasted paper. Installation view, High Line, New York, 2016. Timothy Schenck; Courtesy the High Line
MANIFESTO IS THE FORM THAT EATS AND REPEATS ITSELF. Always layered and paradoxical, it comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries—something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. While appearing to invent itself ex nihilo, the manifesto grabs whatever magpie trinkets it can find, including those that drew the eye in earlier manifestos. This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.
Somewhere a manifesto is always being scrawled, but the ones that survive have usually proliferated at times of ferment and rebellion, like the pamphlets of the Diggers in seventeenth-century England, or the burst of exhortations that surrounded the French Revolution, including, most memorably, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The manifesto is a creature of the Enlightenment: its logic depends on ideals of sovereign reason, social progress, a universal subject on whom equal rights should (must) be bestowed. Still unsurpassed as a model (for style, force, economy, ambition) is Marx and Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, crammed with killer lines, which Marshall Berman called “the first great modernist work of art.” In its wake came the Futurists—“We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice”—and the great flood of manifestos by artists, activists, and other renegades in the decades after 1910, followed by another peak in the 1960s and ’70s.
After that point, fewer broke through the general noise, though those that have lasted cast a weird light back on what came before: Donna J. Haraway’s postmodern 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, in refusing fantasies of wholeness, purity, full communication—“The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams . . . of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one”—presents the manifesto as a form that can speak from the corner of its mouth, that always says more and less than it appears to say, that teases and exaggerates, that usefully undermines itself. Haraway makes an explicit case for “serious play” and for irreconcilable contradictions, introducing her “effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. . . . More faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification.” By directly announcing its own tricksiness (an extra contradiction in itself), “A Cyborg Manifesto” seems both to critique its predecessors and to hint that even the most overweening of them were never quite designed to be read straight.
And it’s true that a manifesto’s swagger, its impression of speed and fury, might lead its readers astray, allowing them to imagine a far simpler communication than is offered. Often the most basic premises of the text remain murky. There is a tension, in Marx and many of those who followed, between change that must be willed or seized, and that which is already in process and historically inevitable. Then there is the question of who is being addressed—an enemy establishment, an untapped army of comrades? And whose views or intentions are actually being represented? In his notes to my undergrad Penguin Classics edition of TheCommunist Manifesto, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor tactfully notes that “the Communist League was itself the creation, more or less imaginary, of Marx and Engels” (the specter, in other words, had in fact not gotten round to haunting much just yet). Likewise, Valerie Solanas’s rollicking Swiftian SCUM Manifesto (1967) invents a lethal cadre of “secure, freewheeling, independent, groovy female females” in her own image. Though sometimes accused of gender essentialism (“the male is an incomplete female,” Solanas writes, “a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage”), SCUM Manifesto envisions a world beyond binaries, in which boring, passive panderers of whatever sex are gone—and with them their pesky distractions, such as war, disease, marriage, religion, government, bullshit jobs, the money system, “Great Art,” politeness, etc.—leaving only “kookie, funky” revelers, which might be to say, only an array of mutually admiring Solanases. Biological femaleness explicitly doesn’t guarantee you membership in this groovier set, and so the reader feels encouraged to self-identify. If Solanas didn’t commit so seriously to what she’s saying, and deliver it with such palpable relish, SCUM Manifesto wouldn’t be as funny as it is. The destabilizing tone feels like a test of textual orientation: anyone willing to enjoy the joke is in; a reader who’s offended, confused, or scared might have good reason to be. (Or, if you look around and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.)
Manifestos, explicitly or otherwise, always attempt to teach you how to read them. Virginia Woolf’s 1938 Three Guineas was an urgent feminist pacifist manifesto that in its circuitous imagery and form—its profusion of footnotes to sources then considered too frivolous or unauthorized for history, its delicate linguistic connections and repetitions—upset the expected boundaries of private and public life, traced the relationships between patriarchy, capital, colonialism, and war, and dragged the reader along, half-tricked into absorbing arguments and picking sides. Manifestos espouse violent metaphors and large abstractions that dare you not to take them literally: “All that is solid melts into air”; “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion,” The Woman Identified Woman (1970); “We’re not waiting for the rapture we are the apocalypse” Dyke Manifesto (1992); “If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.” Many contain an apt slippage between art and politics. June Jordan, in a 1973 essay called “Young People: Victims of Realism in Books and in Life,” links limitations of genre to the standard politician’s cop-out that transformative policy is “not realistic”: in a section titled “My Manifesto,” she pledges to “attempt, in all of my written work, to devise reasonable alternatives to this reality. . . . We are the ones who owe our children something else, right now.” If a manifesto has one job, it is, perhaps, to expand what may be imagined.
For obvious reasons, many manifestos have been more vivid and specific in condemning what is than in detailing the future they intend. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor puts it: “We have no idea what it would be like to live in a society free of exploitation and how that would change people.” In recent years, though, post-social-media, when the fantasy of a coherent public sphere to speak into has weakened and fragmented, there’s also been a renewed obligation to make clear precisely what isn’t being said. You may fear languishing unread but you are nonetheless always at risk of being overheard. Laboria Cuboniks’s “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” (2015) proactively defends itself against so many pitfalls and misreadings (“This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars”; “Open, however, does not mean undirected”) that it risks losing some of the carefree brazenness of predecessors who invited attack or misinterpretation left and right. In other cases, writers take advantage of the palimpsest of possible readings that await them. The “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s Magazine in 2020, which argued against a climate of “ideological conformity,” was pitched to be either over- or under-read. To some readers it was a straightforward, even anodyne reassertion of the importance of free speech. To others, it was a strike back against those who’d expressed alarm at the reactionary ideas espoused by some of its signatories (who were accustomed to publishing their views without facing such loud, vehement public disagreement). In an intriguing reversal of the manifesto’s foundational irony, rather than outsiders usurping the tone of authority, many of those signatories were establishment figures sounding the plea of a persecuted minority.
More : https://www.bookforum.com/print/2802/writing-that-demands-change-now-24497
