Claiming class: the manifesto between categorical disruption and stabilisation

ABSTRACT

This article locates the recent resurgence of the manifesto as form on a spectrum between sociopolitical and epistemic disruption and stabilisation. Focusing on contemporary manifestos published in the politically polarised landscape of the United States, it highlights the role that the genre plays in declaring and authorising antagonistic perspectives from specific discursive subject positions. The article situates this pragmatic function within the context of a renewed theory of form interested in functional aspects of genre. It considers the manifesto with respect especially to questions concerning the formation of subjects and demographic groups against the backdrop of divergent conceptualisations of the subject. Of the many recently published sociopolitical manifestos, Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021) is discussed at length. While this manifesto calls into question what it frames as a dominant mode of subject formation, it in effect stabilises and affirms the very practice of categorisation itself. By insisting on personal experience, among other strategies of authorisation, the manifesto-self turns the manifesto into an identity-based instrument of social documentation. As is argued, this example thus updates the manifesto as a post-postmodern form, a genre of compensation with which to counteract postmodern deconstructions of categorisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Manifesto
• genre
• discourse, North American literature
• activist writing
• subject formation

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The author confirms that the data supporting the findings of this article refer to publications listed under References.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 While the focus here lies on sociopolitical manifestos, there are two other clusters that substantiate the recent manifesto boom. The second cluster of manifestos – artistic manifestos – is represented in prototypical ways by video artist Julian Rosefeldt’s 13-channel film installation Manifesto (2015) (see ‘Julian Rosefeldt’ 2019; Gebbers et al. 2016). Historically, there have existed ‘ideological connections between the political and aesthetic programs that share a revolutionary discourse’ (Lyon 1999, 79). Cruz’s and Russell’s manifestos exemplify the interfaces between sociopolitical and artistic manifestos. Both discuss art, music, and film as decisive reference points.

The third cluster, which is constituted by what I call self-care manifestos, spans various branches of the commercial book market and extends to its advice, self-help and lifestyle literature divisions. Books from this cluster are targeted at a commercialised private sphere and use the label of manifesto not least as a sales pitch, which undermines the form’s critical potential.

2 Books in the series counter conservative positions which are also published in manifesto form, if to a significantly more limited degree and not necessarily labelled as such (see, e.g., Farah 2010; Cooke 2015; Free 2017; Conway et al. 2019; Sayet 2020).

3 Changing mediascapes of 24/7 media cycles, digital culture and social media provide conditions for the recent acceptability and success of the manifesto. While public debates today are characterised by an unprecedented level of digitisation and social media communication – e.g., Russell’s manifesto was first published online in 2012 (Russell 2012); Laboria Cuboniks’s manifesto first appeared on the Internet in 2015; the Red Nation’s Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (Red Nation 2021) is based in part on the 2015 online version of the ‘Red Nation Pamphlet Manifesto’ (Red Nation 2015) – print publications have not disappeared. On the contrary, in specific genres such as the manifesto, books have become extremely important medial forms of public counter-positioning. Thus, the recent manifesto boom – in which many manifestos (all those listed above) are published in the counter-medium of the book – can be seen as a response to a ‘culture of post-reality’ (Ouellette 2019, 17).

4 Foucault’s notion of ‘critique’ – ‘the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability’ (Foucault [1978] 2002, 194) – relates to the Foucauldian nexus of ‘power, truth and the subject’ (194). As he notes: ‘Critique would essentially ensure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth’ (194). Using a manifesto to articulate a critical attitude, then, points to a reassessment and overhaul of received forms and practices of ‘subjugation’ (198). I understand subjugation, the formation of subjects, here to refer to a dynamic that has a double meaning: (a) of subjects being subjected to established categories of social and discursive differentiation and stratification and (b) of subjects becoming recognizable this way (to others and to themselves) as subjects.

5 See also the introductory essay to Mary Ann Caw’s anthology of manifestos, which is titled ‘The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness’ (2001a, xix).

6 For influential English-speaking publications, including studies of specific social and artistic movements and respective manifestos and manifestors and cultural-historical and genre-theoretical aspects, as well as anthologies of manifestos, see, among others, Perloff 1984; Lyon 1999; Caws 2001b; Somigli 2003; Puchner 2006; Danchev 2011; Fahs 2020b; Hanna 2019).

7 With reference to this time frame, theorists have delimited a research field of the genre in its own right when speaking of ‘manifesto studies’ (van den Berg 2007, 304). The origins of this field have been traced to ‘continental European avant-garde research’ (van den Berg 2007, 303; see, among others, the volumes in the Avant Garde Critical Studies series edited by Barreiro López and Bruelens 1987; Asholt and Fähnders 1997, 2005; Malsch 1997; Ehrlicher 2001). In addition, significant contributions to manifesto studies have also been made in the area of ‘American modernism research’ (van den Berg 2007, 304). This includes North American scholarship on political as well as artistic avant-garde manifestos (see, e.g., Perloff 1984; Caws 2001a; Somigli 2003; Puchner 2006).)

For a brief discussion of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s involvement with fascism, see Stoeckl 2013; Berghaus 1996 provides a comprehensive study of the relationship between futurism and fascism.

8 With reference to the US, activist manifestos, not all of which were necessarily thus labelled, included Huey Newton and Bobby Seale’s ‘Black Panther Party Platform’ (1966); Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967); Shulamith Firestone and Ellen Willis’s feminist ‘Redstockings Manifesto’ (1969); Carl Wittman and Tom Hayden’s ‘A Gay Manifesto’ (1970); and the American Indian Movement’s ‘Trail of Broken Treaties 20-Point Position Paper’ (1972). At this historical juncture, artists’ manifestos also came back en vogue (see Dogramaci and Schneider 2017; Danchev 2011).

9 Other keywords introduced in the debate about post-postmodernism via manifestos are ‘metamodernism’ (Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010; Turner 2011) and ‘altermodernism’ (Bourriaud 2015).

10 Like Cruz, Legacy Russell discusses art (notably by Black and queer artists) as decisive reference points in her Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), thus overcoming clear-cut distinctions between sociopolitical and artistic manifestos.

11 For further noteworthy explorations of their (French, heteronormative) working-class origins, see Eribon (2013) and Louis (2017).

12 In distinction to Cruz, Charles M. Blow, in his The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto (2021), brings into focus a different kind of death and its ramifications, addressing the killings of unarmed Black people at the hands of white policemen and, more broadly, the social, physical and psychological violence of structural racism in the US.

13 In contrast to Cruz, who foregrounds a class antagonism, Frank Wilderson, in his analysis of structural racism, sees ‘the essential antagonism […] not between the workers and the bosses, not between settler and the Native, not between the queer and the straight, but between the living and the dead’ (Wilderson 2020, 229). By the latter, Wilderson refers to an antagonism marked by civil society and Blackness.

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Carsten Junker

Carsten Junker is University Professor of American Studies with a Focus on Diversity Studies at TU Dresden, Germany. His research interests include North American literatures and cultures including Canada and the Caribbean from the seventeenth century to the present, theories of authorship, genre theory and structural violence. A special emphasis in his work lies on how social differentiations and cultural patterns, including discursive struggles, are formalised. Recent Publications include: 2020. ‘Vicarious Writing, Or: Going to Write It for You’. Amerikastudien/American Studies: A Quarterly 65 (3): 325–345. doi.org/10.33675/AMST/2020/3/7; 2020. ‘Invocations of Indigeneity in the Colonial Red/White/Black Triad’. ZAA: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture 68 (2): 145–158. doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2020-0016; 2016. Patterns of Positioning: On the Poetics of Early Abolition. American Studies – A Monograph Series, vol. 271. Heidelberg: Winter. He is co-editor, with Julia Roth (U Bielefeld) and Darieck Scott (UC Berkeley), of the book series American Frictions. Berlin: De Gruyter.