Manifesto Now!

Description

Manifesto Now! maps the current rebirth of the manifesto as it appears at the crossroads of philosophy, performance and politics. While the manifesto has been central to histories of modernity and modernism, the editors contend that its contemporary resurgence demands a renewed interrogation of its form, its content and its uses. Featuring contributions from trailblazing artists, scholars and activists currently working in the United States, the United Kingdom and Finland, this volume will be indispensable to scholars across the disciplines. Filled with examples of manifestos and critical thinking about manifestos, it contains a wide variety of critical methodologies that students can analyse, deconstruct and emulate.

 

Analogue 0 

Manifesto Now! (Again!) – Laura Cull and Will Daddario

Analogue 1 

Absent Futures: The Ironic Manifesto in an Age of Austerity – Michael Shane Boyle

Duration and Space: The New Manifesto of Occupy Wall Street – Maurya Wickstrom and Stephanie Vella

Analogue 2 

Standing By Their Words: The Manifestos of the Freee Art Collective – Ken Wilder

Twenty-First-Century Political Art: The Freee Manifesto for Art & Twenty-First-Century Socialism – The Freee art collective

Analogue 3 

Manifesting A Star: An Essay in Two Directions – Lin Hixson

The Sense of the Manifest/o – Branislav Jakovljevic

Analogue 4

What Is the University For? A Story from the Dreamtime of a Possible Future – Stuart McLean

Manifesto for Reification – Mary Overlie

Analogue 5 

[One Less] Manifesto for a Theatre of Immanence – Laura Cull

Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [ ] Borders – Electronic Disturbance Theatre and b.a.n.g. lab (Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand)

Analogue 6 

Manifesting the Animal: Human-Animal Interactions in Contemporary Performance – Lourdes Orozco

Provisional Absolutes: The Second Manifesto for Generalized Anthropomorphism – Esa Kirkkopelto

Sujets

• Technology Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Cultural studies
• Activism
• Science

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783200887
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2013 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2013 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2013 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Lin Hixson, 'This wallpaper is killing me', 2012.
Cover designer: Stephanie Sarlos
Copy-editing: Heather Owen
Production manager: Bethan Ball
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-005-4
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-087-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-088-7
Printed and bound by Bell & Bain, UK
For Stephen Daddario
Contents
Acknowledgement
List of Illustrations
Analogue 0
Manifesto Now! (Again!)
Laura Cull and Will Daddario
Analogue 1
Absent Futures: The Ironic Manifesto in an Age of Austerity
Michael Shane Boyle
Duration and Space: The New Manifesto of Occupy Wall Street
Maurya Wickstrom and Stephanie Vella
Analogue 2
Standing By Their Words: The Manifestos of the Freee Art Collective
Ken Wilder
Twenty-First-Century Political Art: The Freee Manifesto for Art &Twenty-First-Century Socialism
The Freee art collective
Analogue 3
Manifesting A Star: An Essay in Two Directions
Lin Hixson
The Sense of the Manifest/o
Branislav Jakovljevic
Analogue 4
What Is the University For? A Story from the Dreamtime of a Possible Future
Stuart McLean
Manifesto for Reification
Mary Overlie
Analogue 5
[One Less] Manifesto for a Theatre of Immanence
Laura Cull
Sustenance: A Play for All Trans [ ] Borders
Electronic Disturbance Theatre and b.a.n.g. lab (Ricardo Dominguez, Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cárdenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand)
Analogue 6
Manifesting the Animal: Human-Animal Interactions in Contemporary Performance
Lourdes Orozco
Provisional Absolutes: The Second Manifesto for Generalized Anthropomorphism
Esa Kirkkopelto
Notes on Contributors
Index
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge those people whose thought and support has guided the creation of this book. Special thanks goes to Bethan Ball at Intellect for shepherding us through this process over the last couple of years. Likewise, we would like to recognize the work of the members of the Performance and Philosophy Working Group that fuelled the initial discussion of manifestos during the 2010 PSi conference in Toronto: Shane Boyle, Franziska Bork Petersen, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson, Beth Hoffman and Esa Kirkkopelto. For documentation of this event, please see http://psi-ppwg.wikidot.com/manifestos . We are also extremely grateful to each of the contributors in this volume for working diligently over the last several months to articulate their beliefs about the manifesto in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Outside of this book, many people have offered motivation in the form of collegiality and friendship. Will would like to thank Michal Kobialka, Margaret Werry, Sonja Kuftinec, Cindy Garcia, and Diyah Larasati at the University of Minnesota whose commitment to their individual fields of study has been influential in helping to make visible and palpable the stakes of critical thinking. Above all, Will would like to acknowledge the love and support of Joanne Zerdy, without which all would be bland and grey. Laura would like to thank John Mullarkey who has been her unerring source of love, inspiration and support through this and, indeed, all her projects.
List of Illustrations
Analogue 1
1.1
Figure 1: UCMeP auctions off UC Berkeley campus landmarks to the highest bidder during the student walk-out on September 24, 2009. Credit: Anders Sundnes Løvlie.
Figure 2: UCMeP rolls out the red carpet for students to cross the picket line in March, 2010. Credit: Benjamin Kieswetter.
1.2
Figure 1: Occupy Kitchen. New York City. Credit: Maurya Wickstrom.
Analogue 2
2.1
Figure 1: Manifesto reading of The Manifesto for a New Public at the bandstand, Clapham Common, London, UK, 2012. Photograph: courtesy of ‘Towards Common Ground’.
Figure 2: Revolution Road: Rename the Streets! (Emmanuel Street renamed as Colonel Despard Walk), performance stills, for ‘Generosity is the New Political’, Wysing Arts, Cambridge, UK, 2009. Photograph: courtesy of the artists. Photographer: Alice Evans.
2.2
Figure 1: Manifesto reading of the Freee Art Collective Manifesto for a Counter-Hegemonic Art , at Freee’s exhibition entitled, ‘How to Make a Difference’, International Project Space, Birmingham, UK, 2007. Photograph: courtesy of the artists.
Figure 2: Freee manifesto reading and billboard work (background image). Reading of Revolution is Sublime, or What are We Going to Do With The Rich? as part of the work Petition to ban all Advertising! (No more renting out the public sphere) , for ‘We are Grammar’. Pratt Manhattan Gallery, New York, 2011. Photograph: courtesy of the artists.
Analogue 3
3.1
Figure 1: This wallpaper is killing me. Image by Lin Hixson, 2012.
Figure 2: The tear is the actor. Image by Lin Hixson, 2012.
Figure 3: You just break all the glasses you see in front of you. Image by Lin Hixson, 2012.
Figure 4: Ice cream never lies. Image by Lin Hixson, 2012.
Figure 5: Slowly, I sorted out my feelings about the fast-moving star. Image by Lin Hixson, 2012.
3.2
Figure 1: Dušan Makavejev: Manifesto , Courtesy of Cannon Group, 1988.
Analogue 4
4.1
Figure 1: Visiting Faculty? Photo credit: Stuart McLean.
4.2
Figure 1: The Bridge (Six Viewpoints Diagram). Image by Mary Overlie.
Figure 2: Reification. Image by Mary Overlie.
Analogue 5
5.1
Figure 1: Microscript after RW, Laura Cull, 2012. Image courtesy of the author.
Figure 2: Perspectivist Symbol, Laura Cull, 2010. Image courtesy of the author.
Figure 3: Attention-training workshop, Laura Cull, May 2011. Image courtesy of the author.
Analogue 6
6.1
Figure 1: Installation view of Embracing Animal by Kathy High. Image courtesy of the artist.
Figure 2: Rat Hero, by Kathy High. Image courtesy of the artist.
6.2
Figure 1: Other Spaces Group on the Ice of Baltic Sea, Helsinki 2012. Image by Pasi Kirkkopelto.
Figure 2: Other Spaces Group on the Ice of Baltic Sea, Helsinki 2012. Image by Pasi Kirkkopelto.
Figure 3: Other Spaces Group on the Ice of Baltic Sea, Helsinki 2012. Image by Pasi Kirkkopelto.
Analogue 0
Manifesto Now! (Again!)
Laura Cull and Will Daddario
0.1
Manifesto Now! What does this mean? The syntax suggests at least two readings. First, it might express an exuberant introduction to the current status of manifestos. Where does the manifesto emerge in the present moment? Does its form still contain the power to enrage and incite like it did, for example, for communists in the mid-nineteenth century or feminists in the twentieth? In terms of the first question, this collection of essays argues that the contemporary manifesto surfaces where performance, philosophy, and politics collide. To be more specific, the argument on the table is that, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, the manifesto functions as a performance score through which philosophical concepts express themselves through embodied participation in a field of political conditions. The manifesto now, i.e., in the present moment, demands more than literary or rhetorical analysis for its irreducible complexity to reveal itself. It requires that we take time to embody the subject positions conjured through its performativity and, through so doing, that we participate in a political discussion as in ‘“a shaking,” from discussus , pp. of discussus “strike asunder, break up,” from dis- “apart”… + discussus “to shake”’ (Etymonline 2012). In terms of the second question, as to the potency of the manifesto today, you will have to decide. That is, and perhaps this has always been the case, the efficacy of the manifesto lies not only within its text or performative effects/affects but extends from the actions of those who take up the manifesto’s provocations.
This leads to the second possible reading of the phrase: ‘Manifesto Now!’ as a direct command. What precisely are we to do? What are the terms of the engagement? With whom are we to communicate as we figure these things out? None of this is clear, at least not rationally speaking. Instead, the command resonates within the affective register and causes us to itch. We feel irritated about something, but we know not what. To remedy the itch, to find the discussion into which we must plug ourselves, or to execute a specific action, we must take stock of the manifestos that populate the fields of performance, philosophy, and politics. This collection of essays provides such a sampling and presents them here as multiple lines of sight onto battles (some conceptual and some more physically belligerent) waged on numerous fronts, from academia to national borderlands, from arts activism to animal rights. Maybe a plan of action awaits you in the pages ahead?
Perhaps there exists one more reading of ‘Manifesto Now!’, one that requires a brief historical contextualization. That is, the urgency of the word ‘now’ has, for quite a long time, testified to the temporal dimension unique to the manifesto. Janet Lyon has summed up the notion of manifesto time succinctly in her essay ‘Feminist Futural – Five Kinds of Time’, where she writes that
Manifestos typically recalibrate dominant accounts of history in order to foreground a marginalized group’s unacknowledged history of struggle and to stage the present moment, the urgent ‘now’, as the inevitable, necessary moment of action – the moment that marks the commencement of the group’s radically new, self-determining future.
(Lyon 2007, p.148)
In other wo