The Manifesto Handbook - Julian Hanna

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Copyright

2019

Preamble

I was born in Vancouver the same year as Greenpeace, just a few blocks away

In the 1980s Vancouver was the city of the future

In City of Glass (2000) Douglas Coupland called our hometown one of the world’s youngest—which felt true when you walked around it.

But there was also another world. My grandparents lived on the outskirts of town, across the highway from Western Speedway

The people who went to the Speedway were pretty rough. There was no existentialism or wine and cheese here

these were my people. This was what I came from. Immigrant farmers on both sides who found themselves trapped in the frozen north of the Canadian prairies and headed west until they found somewhere livable

And yet I had the luxury of changing identities when I wanted to. I could dress in black and listen to cassettes of bands with avant-garde names

although I did eventually leave for good, I couldn’t shake my love of the reckless and random New World: its untethered fluidity, its fresh starts and radical self-invention. Even more than the freedom I miss the booming and banging: destruction and rebirth, the theater of authenticity, nihilism as entertainment, consumerism as spectacle

One particular event at the Speedway seems to sum it up best in hindsight: the sideshow in which adults and children pay money to smash up a brand new car with sledgehammers before it is sent out to race

I loved it and all the extreme and desperate movements it spawned. Was the life I left behind and the place I tried to bury the very utopia those artists of the tired and crowded Old World dreamt of?

When I started reading manifestos, I found that they contained everything I’d ever wanted. They represented the perfect marriage of the real world and fantasy

I needed a few extra credits to graduate, and the following course was listed in the Italian Department: “132-385: The Italian Futurist Movement

Ioana helped me to see the manifesto as a living thing and not just a thing of the past.

Our only assignment was to invent an avant-garde movement with a video or performance piece and a manifesto.

All this time I wrote manifestos of my own. I wooed my future wife in our whirlwind courtship with a manifesto of love.

Manifestos are dark and powerful magic. They are personal as well as political. I love manifestos because they are brave but also vulnerable, fleeting, transient, constantly shifting, reinventing

To me manifestos represent the unity of thinking, doing and being.

Introduction

In March 1918, with the First World War still raging, the Dadaist Tristan Tzara laid down some rules for manifesto writing. He began: “To proclaim a manifesto you must want: ABC.”

How can manifestos help us shape our future? How can they serve, in the words of French sociologist Bruno Latour, “Not as a war cry... but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future”?

became, in Marjorie Perloff’s words, “the mode of agonism, the voice of those who are contra.”

In the digital world, manifestos have been there since the beginning: with the hackers, the cyberfeminists, the technoutopians. They have got high art credentials—the manifesto is arguably the defining genre of modernism—but they’ve also always been “tainted” with politics and pop culture, the tricks of advertising and the desire for a mass audience

A new wave of manifesto writing took off, post-9/11, as artists and activists began to wake up from the dreamlike apathy of the Clinton era

After the successive ruptures of the 2008 financial crisis and the 2016 US presidential election, the manifesto is currently having its third major “moment.”

All manifestos are in some sense distorted and extreme. They are wish-lists of the overly ambitious, the public dreams of private Napoleons. This is especially true of the avant-garde manifesto. As the P. T. Barnum of the art world, the self-proclaimed “caffeine of Europe” (following Nietzsche’s “I am dynamite”), Marinetti’s manifestos influenced avant-gardes from Russia to Portugal and around the world. This is not to suggest that people actually liked Marinetti—

Marinetti threw the switch that electrified the pre-war avant-garde. Whether or not you subscribed to his beliefs—not that he cared if you did!—his mania for transformation was contagious

The paradox at the heart of the manifesto, to my mind, is that while I read manifestos to get new ideas and different perspectives on the world, to discover possible futures and different ways of acting and organizing and being, each manifesto in itself is just one way, one perspective—and worse yet, not always but often, it is a limited perspective

Do manifestos bring about change? Yes—by presenting alternative visions, and in some cases outlining concrete actions. By making it clear that the status quo is no good, it’s insufferable, intolerable, ridiculous.

Accelerationism? Marshall McLuhan described the “acceleration of evolution” in 1969, in his Vorticist-inspired post-media manifesto Counterblast

However, if provocation is the principal mode of the manifesto, and utopian dreams are its content, failure might be its most inevitable outcome

There is a sadness about many manifestos, a whiff of desperation, a sense of belatedness and hopelessness.

And then what if they succeed! For there is also the long history of manifesto dreams that turn into nightmares

The singer Michael Jackson once wrote a manifesto, which the TV program 60 Minutes discovered and aired in 2013. In 1979 Jackson laid out plans for his rebranding and subsequent world domination. He declared: “MJ will be my new name.” In its highest form, the manifesto acts as a magic spell incanted by the visionary artist

Today we are all fluent in manifesto-ese. Our writing is not only rapid and concise but also confident and often arrogant.

What can the manifesto do for YOU? It’s a fair question.

this book is not quite a writing guide, nor is it a DIY manual

My hope is that after reading this book you will be so thoroughly steeped, so soaked to the skin, so infused with manifestoism that you will have no choice but to speak its language, at least for a little while.

If I delve too deeply into the content of these manifestos, if I try to compare mythologies, I’ll quickly get lost. Instead I must stick to the form itself, the medium more than the message—but I can already anticipate that this will be a struggle throughout the book.

How to Write: A Manifesto

Listen! There has never been a more perfect time to write a manifesto, or to be a manifesto writer. NOW IS THE TIME. But...do it the hard way. The hard way is good. Why use a laptop when you can write longhand?

Why use cold ink when you can use your own hot blood?

Discover language in rude and unexpected places. Dig your sweetest words out of the dumpster behind the bakery.

Don’t hesitate to mess with the English. WE WANT COURAGE, AUDACITY, AND REVOLT. (Without the Fascism.)

Make the page run red with raw animal heat. CAUTION WILL GET US NOWHERE

Descriptions

Traditionally manifestos were hardly ever issued by individuals

One reason more manifestos are written by individuals these days, from a labor perspective, might be the rise to dominance of freelancing and startup culture. Just drop by a WeWork or a Starbucks and smell the manifestos brewing—combined with the smell of desperation in an atmosphere of increasing atomization and uncertainty.

But why was the manifesto a group genre to begin with? Because it was a genre of solidarity, and there is strength in numbers

The truth behind the numbers implied by the collective “we,” however, is a different matter. Just as on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog, so if you start a movement nobody knows that you’re actually just one lonely person sitting in a cafe.

Near the end of his life, the Vorticist leader Wyndham Lewis admitted that although they were actually few, “It was essential that people should believe that there was a kind of army beneath the banner of the Vortex.”

whether your manifesto is composed individually or with a group, signatories will lend it weight

in many cases manifestos, carefully anthologized, and the ideas they express will outlast the movement itself, overshadowing its other achievements

King Mob Echo, is one example. A manifesto slogan reads: “There is no longer any distinction between theory and action—politics is how we live.”

In the section of The Gay Science (1887) titled “Faced with a scholarly book,” Nietzsche

which also shows Nietzsche’s influence on the energetic Marinetti: “our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing...Our first question about the value of a book, a person, or a piece of music is: ‘Can they walk?’ Even more, ‘Can they dance?’”

11. Art and politics

The art-and-politics debate usually centers on questions like: Is all art political? Does bad politics make good art? Is “political art” too focused on the pressures and concerns of the moment, to the detriment of timeless values? Putting that broader debate to one side, let’s focus on the manifesto in particular—which is rooted in the political form, infused with the history of revolution and the struggle against all forms of oppression, and is thus always inescapably political

There have always been pockets of resistance to the manifesto’s political side

Two aesthetes in late-nineteenth century London—the American artist James McNeill Whistler and the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde—wrote proto-modernist manifestos in which they tried hard to shun politics entirely, being all for l’art pour l’art.

Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” lecture of 1885,

told fashionable Londoners—Wilde himself was in the audience—to simply “leave art alone.” It was of no concern to the public, he said, except in their role as passive consumers.

Art was for artists, and should remain mysterious and elite, untouched by the masses, “the intoxicated mob of mediocrity.”

Wilde, whose manifestos include The Poets and the People: By One of the Latter (1887), had a more mixed and generally upbeat message. His Paterian aestheticism was tempered by the socialism of William Morris—in fact he was a target of Whistler, his onetime friend and neighbor in Chelsea, for his democratizing tendencies. In his most famous manifesto, the “Preface” to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde argues for artistic autonomy: “All art is quite useless.” Yet Wilde’s politics, progressive rather than reactionary, seep in through the cracks. By declaring, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” Wilde frees art from the function of realistic representation

Rather than politicizing art, the manifesto aestheticizes politics

The German critic Walter Benjamin took Italian Futurism strongly to task for this potentially fascistic move (and in fairness, Marinetti’s Futurists did flirt briefly with Mussolini’s Fascists). The critique comes in the epilogue to his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” where Benjamin argues that “Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life,” and that Futurism’s glorification of war, imperialism and military technology supports this Fascism

How short is too short?

What about “tiny manifestos” of the sort included in David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004)?

Where do slogans fit in

Nietzsche, the philosopher whose influence on the manifesto’s outspoken and aphoristic style was more profound than any other except Marx, wrote: “it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book”—an admirable goal

Better, obviously, is something like this

the Laws of Sculptors (1969), by the English artists Gilbert and George, written during the same decade of social upheaval but with a tone that rejected the surrounding chaos. In their manifesto, four concise laws are laid out, including: “Never worry assess discuss or criticize but remain quiet, respectful and calm.”

Manifestos quickly lose their communicative effectiveness as their page count increases.

On the other hand, part of the manifesto’s iconoclastic nature is its tendency toward excess.

Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967) is a rare exception to the rule of longer-makes-duller, and is far and away the most readable example of the fanatical longform manifesto

I hope it is becoming clear by now that in manifestos there is no room for moderation. Think in slogans. Attack your rivals. Kill your idols. Go electric. This is the revolution.

Our language is beginning to shift toward the poetic, the aphoristic and the epigrammatic, thanks to constant nudging from technology. We are all producing shards of poetry and writing sharp little manifestos every time we message or post or tweet, instead of (what now seem like) the baggy expository monsters of the pre-digital age

Valentine de Saint-Point’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913) goes even further, calling for a universal new sexuality based on raw desire, on “the attraction at once delicate and brutal between two bodies, of whatever sex.” She declares: “WE MUST MAKE LUST INTO A WORK OF ART.” What else is the manifesto but lust as art?

Provocations

The opening lines of famous manifestos suggest that provocation is the goal from the start

The Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto (1920) begins with the command: “You are all accused; stand up.”

Our program is cultural revolution through a total assault on the culture

BE FREE, goddammit, and fuck all them old dudes.

“Anger is an energy,” as that latter-day Dadaist Johnny Rotten said. (If you haven’t read Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus’s “secret history” of the roots of punk in the European avant-garde, I recommend it.)

Even more than punk, however, it is hip-hop that captures the true spirit of the avant-garde manifesto: proud, arrogant, boastful, profane, combative, brawling, technologically cutting edge, rhetorically aggressive, frequently masculinist and unbothered by accusations of plagiarism.

The anger and frustration that came through in manifestos of the first-wave avant-garde was not merely an attention-seeking pose. It was a reaction to the carnage of the First World War, a howl of outrage against the “civilization” that failed so badly in 1914