Manifestoes: provocations of the modern

Abstract

Janet Lyon. Manifestoes: Provocations of Modern. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Janet Lyon's study of most polemical discursive form in modern public sphere, manifesto, seeks to understand relationship between that ardent and sometimes scurrilous artifact, and political modernity itself. Her discussion, rendered with a view to manifesto's historical conjunctures, begins with mid-seventeenth-century Digger movement, wends through Jacobinism and female suffrage, and ultimately lights upon Donna Haraway's postmodern, self displacing address to cyborg consciousness. Her purpose to convince anyone interested in definition of modern political subject that history of manifesto also history of that subject's evocation. With a confident voice and a host of examples, Lyon illustrates topsy-Curvy logic by which these tracts not only amplify intentions of activists and revolutionaries but define and enact new identities. The manifestic format, in other words, doesn't merely serve an entity called the People, but also elicits it. As she writes, manifesto is both a trace and a tool of change. It evokes agents of change by positing a new speaking position while repudiating very fact of its newness. There an implicit rhetorical violence embedded in moment when manifesto registers its bombastic we, what Lyon calls manifesto's seizing control of first causes; it then galvanizes these enacted identities into action. As she illustrates, manifesto positions itself within evolving framework of new republics, new democratic ideals, women's enfranchisementsucceeding as a way of scripting new voices into political sphere. Some of these voices sparked and then seemed to fade. Lyon not only resurrects them but reinserts them into a history of modern contestation, results of which we live with today. For example, her book fills in vital gaps in our understanding of avant garde by highlighting female artist-polemicists, namely Mina Loy and Valentine de Saint-Point, who were eclipsed by legacy of their male compatriots. Her reconsideration of their manifestoes bridges a gap between their polemics and second-wave feminist thinking, continental and stateside; were this gap to persist, we would be left with an incomplete understanding of nonessentializing feminist aesthetic latter group sought to perfect. One cannot fault Lyon for failing at what should be an impossible task. …

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