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Theatre Journal 54 (2002) 449–465 © 2002 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Manifesto = Theatre

Martin Puchner

In his “Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto I” (1972), Richard Foreman evokes theequation between theatre and manifesto without however committing to their iden-tity. Both terms, manifesto and theatre, refer to the act of making visible: “manifesto”is derived from the Latin verb manifestare, which means “to bring into the open, tomake manifest” and “theatre” from the Greek theatron, “a place of seeing.” But thiskinship, this alliance in visibility, does not justify something as absolute and categori-cal as a mathematical equation. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Foreman deploys theformula manifesto = theatre hesitantly or rather, he takes its three components(manifesto, = , theatre) and reassembles them in a more open-ended fashion [Fig. 1]:1

MANIFESTO =THEATER =

When reconfigured this way, manifesto and theatre are not said to be same, and theycannot, as a simple equation would have it, be transformed effortlessly into each other.Instead, they are placed in a parallel relation, each equipped with its own equationsign.

Our eyes move to the right side of Foreman’s page, looking for what manifesto andtheatre might be equated to; we find three more equations: “life = move towards”;“Art = suspension”; “Our craft = how suspend in place, make ‘em rise.” The prolifera-tion of equations is not the only difficulty we encounter in reading Foreman’smanifesto, for it is written in two modes: printed matter (letters and mathematicalsigns) and hand-markings. There are arrows, underlinings, drawings of people andhouses, and a graphic chart. These drawings set the background or scene for theprinted words; they also comment on the words, reinforcing and questioning theirmeaning. An unsteadily drawn line, for example, separates the “Manifesto = /Theater =” formula from the three equations on the right. And while the manifestobegins with a reflection on the manifesto and its relation to the theatre, it concludes,like a play, with the words “The End.” As this putative manifesto progresses, theboundaries between manifesto and theatre become increasingly porous, so that someof the sketchily drawn scenes that appear amidst the text are labeled “manifesto,”

1 Richard Foreman, “Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto I,” in Plays and Manifestos, ed. Kate Davy (NewYork: New York University Press, 1976), 67.

Martin Puchner is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature, and is co-chair of thetheatre Ph.D. program at Columbia University. He is author of Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

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Figure 1. Richard Foreman, “Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto I,” 1972.

while the more straight-forward manifesto parts are called “theater.” It is as if thisunusual manifesto sought to make visible and manifest through its own structure thefact that theatre and manifesto are firmly entangled in each other, if not mathemati-cally the same.

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In order to understand what is at stake in this entanglement between manifesto andtheatre it is necessary to consider both components separately. I will therefore firstexamine the history of the manifesto, with an emphasis on the manifesto’s particularform of performativity, before engaging in an analysis of its interaction with thetheatre.

I. The Performativity of the Manifesto

The manifesto is one of the least understood and at the same time most importantinventions of what is now called the historical avant-garde. Its morphology includessuch features as numbered theses; denunciations of the past; an aggressive attitudetoward the audience; a collective authorship; exaggerated, shrill declarations; varied,often bold, letters; and a mass distribution in newspapers, on bill-boards, and as flyers.These features characterize the avant-garde manifesto from Marinetti to the seventiesand beyond, spanning what one might call the era of the manifesto. The manifestobecomes the primary instrument through which the different avant-garde movementspresent themselves and compete with one another. No movement, it seems, can dowithout a manifesto; the result is a veritable manifesto-war that leads to ever moreextreme proclamations and attention-mongering rhetoric.

Most important, however, is the temporality of the manifesto, its construction of ahistory of rupture. As a political genre, the manifesto had been geared toward arevolution, a cut in the historical process, an act that attempts to change suddenly thecourse of history. The avant-garde manifesto adapts this desire for a revolutionaryevent and imports it into the sphere of art. Futurism breaks with Symbolism; Vorticismbreaks with Futurism; Dadaism breaks with everything that came before; Surrealismbreaks with Dadaism; Situationism breaks with Surrealism; Fluxus breaks with Dada;Conceptual Art breaks with Fluxus.2 Each time, the break with the past is the prepara-tion for a new departure. Futurism, in this sense, is not just the name of the avant-garde movement that happens to have invented the avant-garde manifesto, but it is aname for the rupture between past and future that every manifesto wants to effect.

It is in this history of rupture that we must locate the particular performativity of themanifesto. The manifesto does not merely describe a history of rupture, but producessuch a history, seeking to create this rupture actively through its own intervention.Even while the manifesto is nothing but so many letters on a page or so many wordsshouted at an audience, it is a genre deeply unsatisfied with itself, a genre thatdesperately wants to move beyond language and change the world. The self-critiquethat ensues from this desire not only accounts for the manifesto’s characteristicimpatience, its choppy brevity, its eagerness to stop talking and start acting, but alsofor the attempt to infuse its own language with the attributes of action. Even thoughthe manifesto is a subversive genre, poised against the status quo, the longing foraction leads to a particular concern about the efficacy of its speech acts. Speech acttheory has always been interested in efficacy, what J. L. Austin called the conditions for

2 The classical studies of the avant-garde follow this pattern. For example see Peter Bürger’s Theorieder Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974) and Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism,trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: Macmillan, 1965). More recently, Richard Sheppard continues thistype of historiography of the avant-garde in his Modernism—Dada—Postmodernism (Evanston: North-western University Press, 2000).

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the “happy” speech act.3 Building on Judith Butler, Jon McKenzie’s 2001 Perform or Elseextends this focus on efficacy to the expanded field of performance studies: rather thanfocussing on the subversive function of performance, McKenzie insists on thenormative meaning of performance, the fact that organizational and technologicalperformances demand effectiveness, efficiency, and efficacy.4 The manifesto invitessuch an interest in efficacy and efficiency because it is a genre geared towardssuccessfully accomplishing the act that is to create a zero point in history, a revolution-ary overturn. All previous history becomes a preparation for this point zero, whichitself is pregnant with futurity; the present act of revolt is the beginning of a newfuture. The performativity of the manifesto might therefore be called a futuristperformativity.

This futurist performativity makes it particularly difficult to write the history of themanifesto. Too great is the danger of being drawn into the manifesto’s own temporalfabrications and thus of repeating the manifesto’s own historiography of rupture. Inorder to avoid this problem, I will go backward, against the grain of the manifesto,starting with the present. In an interview with Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) conductedby Jon McKenzie and Rebecca Schneider for a 2000 issue of TDR, CAE, a collectiveexploring new modes of civil and artistic disobedience in a global and electronic age,is asked about its use of the manifesto today. Schneider asks provocatively: “So, themanifesto style: Does the manifesto function as a kind of outmoded backward glance,then? A kind of quotation? Or Affect?”5 CAE answers with a defense of the manifesto:“Well, manifestos have never really gone away,” and adds, “ we also like it because it’sa fast style, perhaps the fastest,”6 while declaring that “the book is far too slow.”7

While CAE makes a case for the continuity of the manifesto, a large number ofcritics and theorists operate under the assumption that the manifesto is indeed“outmoded,” that writing a manifesto today is inevitably a retro gesture, an exercise inpostmodern pastiche. The manifesto as such becomes the genre that epitomizes theutopian progressivism of the early twentieth century and thus everything thepostmodern present is not. Perry Anderson articulates this view with particularsuccinctness:

Since the seventies, the very idea of an avant-garde, or of individual genius, has fallenunder suspicion. Combative, collective movements of innovation have become steadilyfewer, and the badge of a novel, self-conscious ‘ism’ ever rarer. For the universe of thepostmodern is not one of delimitation, but intermixture—celebrating the cross-over, thehybrid, the pot-pourri. In this climate, the manifesto becomes outdated, a relic of anassertive purism at variance with the spirit of the age.8

What Anderson does here is to construct a break within the manifesto’s futuristperformativity of rupture. This sounds perhaps more paradoxical than it is, for therupture between a manifesto-driven modernism and a post-manifesto postmodernismis the product of a history of capitalism: capitalism has changed and with it the

3 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 14.4 Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (London: Routledge, 2001).5 “Critical Art Ensemble: Tactical Media Practitioners: An Interview by Jon McKenzie and Rebecca

Schneider,” TDR: The Drama Review 44.4 (2000): 136–50, 139.6 Ibid., 140.7 Ibid., 141.

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manifesto. It is nevertheless a factor worth pointing out that the Marxian history ofcapitalism on which Anderson’s writing is premised itself derives, however indirectly,from the manifesto of manifestos, the Communist Manifesto. In this sense, at least,Anderson does not entirely step outside the manifesto-generated history of rupture—but only applies it to the history of the manifesto itself.

Rather than highlighting the paradox of creating a rupture in the history of rupture,which is only one more version of the paradoxical formulation of the term post-modernism, we should perhaps dwell a moment longer on other current practices ofthe manifesto. For even though Anderson’s conviction that the manifesto is passé hasnot kept people away from the genre, many writers of manifestos grapple with a sensethat the high times of the manifesto are over. In 1995, a collective of Danish filmmakerslaunched the so-called Dogma-manifesto, which has had some limited impact onfilmmaking in recent years,9 and Alain Badiou published a Manifesto for Philosophy.Instead of being directed at the future, these manifestos look backwards, calling for areturn to the purer practices of the past: a type of film without fancy technology in thecase of Dogma, and a philosophy yearning for “the (re)turn of philosophy itself.”10

Two years ago, finally, Rem Koolhaas received the prestigious Pritzker prize not somuch for his buildings as for his text “Delirious New York,” whose subtitle reads “ARetroactive Manifesto for Manhattan.”11 And so we might be tempted to conclude thatmany manifestos written today are, in one way or another, retroactive, thus reversingtheir original, futurist direction. These manifestos speak out for a return, and theirwriters are struck by a sense of historical belatedness that makes these manifestosintensely self-aware, critical of the form they are using, and thus incapable ofproceeding without scruples or doubts in the classical manifesto manner. The mani-festo, a form that shuns reflection and privileges action, is thus turned back on itself;a genre of action becomes a genre of reflection.

Anderson’s analysis seems nowhere as poignant as when the manifesto becomesentangled with the cunning of the markets. Last summer I opened the stagebill for ashow at the Lincoln Center Festival and read on its first page, “Isabella Rosellini’sManifesto,” and an instruction saying, “Write your own manifesto.” This commandwas framed by two images of young women with red lipstick and lots of make-up,and some fine print: “Available at Bloomingdale’s, 1-800-555-SHOP” [see Fig. 2].“Isabella Rossellini’s Manifesto,” it turned out, was an add for makeup and lipstick.What has happened to the manifesto here? “Isabella Rosellini’s Manifesto” departs

8 Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1998), 93.9 Return, for Dogma, means a diminished mediation, especially of synchronized sound. All sound

must be recorded during the shooting of the film, giving Dogma films their documentary character.This and other ways of banishing techniques of manipulation and mediation, such as artificial lighting,lead to the attempt to recuperate the liveness of the theatre. Indeed, what is striking about most Dogmafilms is that they are centered on the actor, and usually make use of the entire repertoire of melodrama,supported by the melodramatic plots, one of the dimensions of film-making that is not treated in themanifesto.

10 Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. and ed. Norman Madarasz (Albany: State Universityof New York Press, 1999). See especially the essays “The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself” and “Definitionof Philosophy.”

11 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: The MonacelliPress, 1994).

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Figure 2. Advertisement for cosmetic products by Isabella Rossellini, Bloomingdale’s,in Stagebill, Lincoln Center Festival, 2000.

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from the classical avant-garde manifesto in several ways. First as Anderson points outcorrectly, the standard manifesto, from Karl Marx through Rosa Luxemburg to GuyDebord, is a collective enterprise, often written collaboratively and always on behalf ofa group. “Isabella Rosellini’s Manifesto,” by contrast, turns the writing of manifestosinto an individual, and thus private, exercise; everyone has his or her own manifesto.Second, this text distances itself from the genre of the manifesto in that it does notpresent itself as a manifesto, but only as the invitation to write one. It is a text that shiesaway from writing on behalf of anyone, from exerting any kind of authority. Thesemblance of a democratization of the manifesto, however, acquires a different qualitywhen we realize that this non-manifesto is nothing but an advertisement for a productdistributed by Bloomingdale’s. Democracy, here, becomes simply a marketing strategy,opening up the sphere of manifestos to consumer choices—it does not matter whatkind of manifesto you write as long as you write it with Bloomingdale’s products.Anderson’s worst fears about late capitalism seem to be born out. Just as avant-gardeaesthetics has been appropriated by institutions such as the Lincoln Center, so themanifesto’s revolutionary gesture has been appropriated by advertisement.

There is one additional context, however, that offers a different perspective on thistext. As an ad for makeup and lipstick, “Isabella Rosellini’s Manifesto” does notaddress everyone, but primarily women. In doing so, it takes a stance toward thegender history of the manifesto. At least in the hands of Marinetti, a chief inventor ofthe avant-garde manifesto, the manifesto had been a genre celebrating the masculine:aggressive posing; virility; force. Pound and Lewis, for example, use their Blastmanifesto to threaten the Suffragettes, whose cause they otherwise endorse. To saythat the avant-garde manifesto is often masculinist is not to say that there are nomanifestos by women—Rosa Luxemburg’s Sparakus Manifest, Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifesto della donna futurista, and Valerie Solanis’s SCUM Manifesto testify tothe opposite. But it means, as Janet Lyon has shown, that feminist manifestos have totake into account this masculinist heritage, even and especially when they attempt todisplace or co-opt it.12 When seen within this genealogy, “Isabella Rosellini’s Mani-festo” can appear as one more step in the appropriation of the manifesto by thefeminine or even feminist. And it is noteworthy that this critical revision of the historyof the manifesto is not made entirely inoperative by the function of this text asadvertisement. Is the world of advertisement perhaps not the absolute perversion ofthe manifesto, but only its latest transformation?

What we begin to fathom here is that the real problem with the understanding of thecontemporary manifesto as retroactive, late-capitalist pastiche is that it presumes, byimplication, a genuine, authentic manifesto that precedes this pastiche. It is thispredominant understanding, promoted by critics such as Perry Anderson and writersof manifestos such as DOGMA or Rem Koolhaas, which needs to be examinedcritically. Can we really find, before Dogma, before Koolhaas, and before Foreman’sown self-aware mixture of manifesto and theatre, a pure and classical manifesto? Agood period to look for such a manifesto is the sixties, a climate full of therevolutionary and utopian energy in which the manifesto can thrive. A representativemanifesto of the so-called neo-avant-garde is the 1963 “Fluxus Manifesto I.” Even here,

12 Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

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however, we find that this manifesto does not correspond to the standard features ofthe manifesto I outlined above. In contrast to “classical” manifestos, which are signedby a coherent group, “Fluxus Manifesto I” is not signed at all, not even by Maciunas,the presumed author, himself. In fact, the other members of Fluxus always challengedthe authority of Macinuas’s manifestos just as they continued to challenge hisauthority as the leader of Fluxus. The figure that looms large in these debates about themanifesto and group leadership is André Breton, who had used the second manifestoof Surrealism for the purpose of excommunicating “renegade” members such asBataille and Artaud.13 We can see here the other side of the manifesto, namely itsauthoritative and controlling side. Before the manifesto had become the quintessentialgenre of revolt, it had been an instrument through which kings, emperors, and headsof states made their will known to their subjects. WWI, for example, was declaredthrough a text, issued by the Austrian Emperor, that was called “Manifest.” While themanifesto often seeks to break with the status quo, it also tends to create a new dogma,and it was either irony or self-awareness that made the Danish film collective choosethat name for themselves. This “dogmatism” of the manifesto is one more version ofits emphasis on successful performativity, a performativity grounded not in someform of free play, but in the efficacy of speech acts.

The Fluxus manifesto struggles with a difficulty related to the authoritative,dogmatic character of the manifesto, namely the paradox of circumscribing a flux that,by definition, cannot be confined to a neat formula. Maciunas had the ingenious ideaof making this problem part of the form of his manifesto: half the manifesto consists ofdefinitions, but these definitions are taken from a dictionary. What better way tofollow the demands of the manifesto than to include straightforward definitions, butat the same time to keep some distance from them by signaling that they are merequotations? In between these three quoted definitions Maciunas inserted threesections of text that are much closer to a traditional manifesto, for they revolve aroundthree commands: to purge, to promote, and to fuse. Each command is related to thequoted definition that precedes it, and in this sense the two elements of this manifesto,quoted definition and inserted commands, are integrated with, or at least aware of,each other. Intertwined in this way, the two disparate parts of the manifesto begin torub off on each other: the quoted definitions acquire more authority, while thecommands start to seem more like quotations. The two types of authority, theauthority of the dictionary—the most unchallenged authority in the realm of print—and the authority of the manifesto thus work together, but also against each other.“Fluxus Manifesto I” is thus not a “pure” manifesto, but it relies self-consciously onquotations and external authority [see Fig. 3].

The sense that “Fluxus Manifesto I” is engaged in a complicated negotiation withthe form of the classical manifesto and its investment in efficacious performativity isconfirmed when one turns to the particular scene in which this Fluxus manifesto wasstaged: the opening of an evening of Fluxus performances. A hand emerges frombehind the drawn curtain and throws the manifesto into the audience—itself an

13 At a later date, Breton would try to distance himself from both his dictatorial behavior and the“violence of expression” used in his manifestos to the “revolutionary literature” circulating at the time.André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: TheUniversity of Michigan Press, 1972), 115.

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Figuer 3. George Maciunas, Fluxus Manifesto, 1963.

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almost parodically Futurist mode of distribution. But the evening had begun with thecurator of the show, Jean Pierre Wilhelm, asking, “Should a manifesto be launchedtoday?,” adding the observation that the “heroic period of the manifesto is over.”14

Maciunas’s manifesto is thus set up from the beginning; one might say that it is staged,as a belated manifesto: a text that must work through its relation to the manifesto, agenre it can no longer inhabit without reservations or doubts. Already in 1963, then,there was the sense that the manifesto was history, and once history, the manifesto’sfuturist performativity can no longer exert its full force. What is noteworthy here isthat at the very moment when the futurist performativity of the manifesto ischallenged, a different aspect appears, namely its theatrical performance. The declineof efficacious performativity, it seems, is coupled with an increase of theatricalperformance.

In search for Wilhelm’s “heroic” time of the manifesto, we may move eleven moreyears back to John Cage, who is often considered the father of Fluxus. In 1952, JulianBeck and Judith Malina asked Cage to write a manifesto for a stagebill of The LivingTheatre. Cage accepted their request, but he scrupulously avoided writing a mani-festo. Here is what he wrote instead:

written in responseto a request fora manifesto onmusic, 195215

This text [Fig. 4], which should be labeled “response to a manifesto,” is only thebeginning of a long series of similar evasions of or responses to the manifesto onCage’s part. Cage gave lectures, wrote articles and essays, exposed his aesthetics, hispolitics, his beliefs, but in each case he deviated from the pure form of the authorita-tive manifesto or, to be more precise, he turned it into a performance piece. It does notseem surprising that Cage, who objected to almost any form of authority, would avoidthe prescriptive force of the manifesto or at least take off its edge by re-framing it as apiece about the act of speaking. A feature shared by all of Cage’s performances is thatthey play off the manifesto’s authoritative performativity against its theatrical per-formance. The most famous of these speech performances is his “Lecture on Nothing,”whose title suggests a refusal to take a position, to declare an allegiance, to write amanifesto. Instead, this piece consists of whispered words, subtly and carefullysuperimposed onto one another, that obscure any lingering agenda or position. It is asif Cage had decided to tone down the voice of the manifesto and to eclipse its content,thus undermining its function as a statement of purpose. Cage’s attentive ear and hisdelicate voice turn the manifesto into a lecture on nothing except the act of lecturingitself.

We have no other option, it seems, but to conclude that all of these post-WWIImanifestos consider the classical form of the manifesto to be a thing of the past. In theirattempts to continue the avant-garde legacy, their acts of rebellion, of writing new

14 Archive Sohn, Staatsgalarie, Stuttgart, quoted in Owen Smith, “Developing a Fluxable Forum:Early Performance and Publishing,” in Fluxus Reader, ed. Ken Friedman (Chichester: AcademyEditions, 1998), 3–21, 3.

15 John Cage, Lectures and Writings by John Cage: Silence (Hanover: Welseyan University Press, 1961),xii.

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manifestos and founding new movements, they are keenly aware of being belated andretrospective. For the neo-avant-garde, the manifesto becomes something that isquoted, but something which can no longer be relied on with confidence. The onlyremaining period where we might hope to find a pure manifesto, it seems, is the so-called historical avant-garde. And the adjective “historical” derives its justificationfrom precisely this sense that this period is no longer continuous with ours, and thatwe are doomed to recycle and quote from the forms, such as the form of the manifesto,that came into existence then.

However, once we enter this putatively historic period of the avant-garde, we findthat a pure manifesto barely exists there either. Take, for example, Tristan Tzara, themost prominent writer of Dadaist manifestos. Only nine years after Marinetti’s firstFuturist manifesto, Tzara wrote his famous “Dada Manifest 1918,” which begins: “Inorder to launch a manifesto, you have to demand: A.B.C., and denounce 1,2,3, becomenervous . . . .” A page later he continues: “I write a manifesto and I don’t wantanything, nevertheless I say several things and I am against manifestos on principlejust as I am against principles.”16 This manifesto opens with a veritable morphology ofthe manifesto, and, for this reason, it tends to be quoted in scholarly accounts ofmanifestos.17 What is rarely discussed, however, is the fact that such a self-reflective

Figure 4. John Cage, “written in response to a request for a manifesto,” 1952.

16 Tristan Tzara, “Manifest Dada 1918,” in DADA total: Manifeste, Aktionen, Texte, Bilder, ed. Karl Rihaand Joerg Schaefer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1994), 35.

17 It is only recently, through the work of a few editors and commentators that the manifesto as agenre has begun to attract systematic critical and theoretical attention. Insightful studies have been

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opening is at odds with the manifesto’s desire for efficacy, its need to instrumentalizelanguage ruthlessly in order to change the world. The fact that this manifesto isinfused with a critical awareness of the form of the manifesto demonstrates the extentto which this manifesto too is a belated manifesto, a manifesto that looks back at thegenre whose conventions it seeks to expose. And again this retrospective posture putsinto question its futurist performativity. This manifesto declares that it wants “noth-ing” and that its central cause is “nothing.” Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” is hereanticipated by Tzara’s strategic “nothing,” and the history of displaced manifestosfrom Cage to Foreman finds its roots in Tzara’s strategy of entangling his manifesto inthe impossible position of being against the manifesto in principle and being againstprinciples. Between these two contradictory statements, Tzara’s manifesto oscillatesbetween continuing to be a manifesto and becoming a parody of one. Far from beinga classical, heroic, and historical manifesto, this manifesto presents itself as somethinggrafted onto the manifesto form, which it obeys only for the purpose of subjecting it allthe better to critical analysis and ridicule.

As Tzara’s manifesto demonstrates, a sense of belatedness characterizes not only theneo-avant-garde but also the historical avant-garde from the beginning. RichardForeman’s self-conscious manifesto then does not deviate from a putatively pure orheroic manifesto, but continues the project of reflecting on the genre of the manifestoas it was operative already in 1918 and even in Marinetti’s “First Futurist Manifesto.”18

And here, at this origin of the avant-garde manifesto, we might remember “IsabellaRosellini’s Manifesto” and note that Marinetti’s manifesto was part of what one mustcall an advertisement coup as well, including press releases, paid ads in newspapers,posters on billboards, and flyers. Indeed, futurist and other manifestos frequentlyborrowed techniques from advertisement to perfect the art of calling attention tothemselves. A tendency toward advertisement, we must acknowledge, has been partof the manifesto since its adaptation by the avant-garde in the early twentieth century.Being unfaithful to some “heroic” form of manifesto, it turns out, is the best way ofbeing faithful to the avant-garde manifesto, and writing a manifesto requires one toreflect on the genre’s structure and history, which is fraught with self-awareness, self-critique, and parody.19 The difference between pre-WWII avant-garde and post-WWIIavant-garde is one that is marked only by different modes of displacement, and thismeans that we must therefore move the operations of quotation, parody, distancing,and displacement into the center of our understanding of the avant-garde and of theavant-garde manifesto.

devoted to this genre by Claude Abastado, who edited a special issue, Littérature 39 (1980), on themanifesto and Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1999). Collections of manifestos have been presented by Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, ed.,Manifeste und Proklamationenen der europäischen Avantgarde (1909–1938) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995). Morerecently still, Mary Ann Caws presented the first comprehensive collection of manifestos in English:Caws, ed., Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001).

18 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986).

19 This critique parallels in part the one made by Hal Foster in his Return of the Real, where he arguesthat it was only through the so-called neo-avant-garde that the original, historical avant-garde wasretroactively created. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

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The sense that there is no “heroic” manifesto is confirmed once we realize that theentire history of the avant-garde manifesto, from Marinetti to Foreman and even toDogma and Bloomingdale’s, is a late mutation or displacement of a genre that waspreviously a political speech act. Used by the Diggers and Levellers in the socialupheavals of seventeenth-century England and then in the French revolution and itsexploding culture of pamphleteering, the manifesto as a genre of political agitationbecomes canonized in the nineteenth century through the Communist Manifesto.20 Andthis history of subversion is itself an appropriation of a yet older use of the manifestoas an authoritative declaration of state mentioned above. The Communist Manifesto and“Isabella Rosellini’s Manifesto” do not relate to each other as revolutionary (collective,masculinist) origin and capitalist (individualist, feminist) perversion, but as a series ofiterations and displacements. Grail Marcus’s “secret history of the twentieth century,”presents itself evocatively as a history of traces—lipstick traces; it is a history thatparallels the history of the manifesto from Dada to the Situationists.21 And so we mayfind that in order to be faithful to the manifesto as a displaced genre, it may well benecessary to rewrite the Communist Manifesto in lipstick, or at least, in lipstick traces.

II. Performativity and Theatricality

Once we recognize that self-reflexivity and intermixture are not a postmodernphenomena but that they define the manifesto throughout its history, we are in a betterposition to examine texts such as Foreman’s. Foreman points us to a particularmixture, namely the mixture of manifesto and theatre which is also a mixture ofmanifesto’s futurist performativity and theatricality. And since the relation betweenperformativity and theatrical performance has already surfaced in various displace-ments of the manifesto, as in the case of Fluxus and Cage, it is time to move thisrelation to the center of analysis. Avant-garde manifestos were frequently performed,in particular in the early phase of Futurism and Dadaism.22 Both movements instituteda form of non-matrixed performance taking place in not only traditional theatres,which the Futurists rented for their tours through the provinces, but also non-traditional performance sites such as Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire or the streets. TheCabaret Voltaire was used for performances including expressionist plays, simulta-neous poetry, music, and dance, and paintings were placed on stage and theatricallyunveiled to the audience. The manifesto too was performed, screamed directly at theaudience.23 The exaggerated declarations and tone of many avant-garde manifestosthus originate in the rowdy cabarets of Futurism and Dadaism, which forced itsperformers to turn up their volume in order to be heard. What does this theatricalizationmean for the manifesto? And how does it interact with the manifesto’s futuristperformativity and efficacious speech acts?

20 The function of the pamphlet in the construction of a revolutionary public was first outlined by thepath-breaking work of Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins in the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

21 The subtitle of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1989).

22 Günther Berghaus, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909–1944 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).23 Martin Puchner, “Screeching Voices: Avant-garde Manifestos in the Cabaret,” in European Avant-

garde: New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 113–35.

462 / Martin Puchner

It is remarkable that a contentious relation between theatre and manifesto isoperative even in the most classical and most political of manifestos, the CommunistManifesto. There exists a tradition of reading the Communist Manifesto as some form ofa theatrical script. Kenneth Burke, for example, recognized it as a chief example of atheatrical scheme called dramatism, and Derrida has recently placed it in relation tothe play of plays, Hamlet.24 Marx inherits the privileging of the theatre from Hegel,which is also why Marxism frequently looks at history in dramatic terms, be it tragedyor farce. At the same time, drama fuelled Marx’s view that history must progress viaa crisis, which is also a peripeteia, a turning point that will eventually lead to aresolution. The Communist Manifesto even turns into something of a dramatic dialoguehalfway through, when Marx begins to engage other thinkers and does so by givingvoice, in the form of direct speech, to their arguments before switching back to his ownvoice in responding to these hypothetical objections. The drama of history is thusmirrored in the dialogic structure of the Communist Manifesto, and dialectics once morerejoined with its origin in the dramatic dialogues of Plato. Marx interrupts theengaged tone of the manifesto and lends his voice to the opponents of Communism.Even though this is a technique for undermining their objections, structurally it is aninterruption of Marx’s own discourse. The quasi-dramatic form of these passages thuscan be said to arrest temporarily the forward thrust of the manifesto.

The most theatrical part of the Communist Manifesto, however, is its preamble. Thispreamble begins with the famous invocation of the “specter of Communism,” whichKenneth Burke identified as a parody of the Hegelian spirit. While the first paragraphdescribes the specter as it is being hunted by the reactionary forces of Europe, thesecond paragraph promises the appearance of true Communism; Marx wants toreplace the specter of Communism with Communism itself. Communism will openlydeclare its intentions and thus finally enter European politics in undisguised form.This revelation of Communism, its unmasked entry, is brought about by the Commu-nist Manifesto. The manifesto is the instrument, the genre, that replaces specters withthe real thing, and it is the genre that is responsible for the final, dramatic revelation ofCommunism on the scene of world politics: “It is high time that the Communistsshould openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, and theirtendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the specter of Communism with a manifestoof the party itself.”25 Here we are promised a climax, a confrontation of the two mainagents from the previous two paragraphs: the nursery tale of the specter of Commu-nism and Communism itself.26 While the dramatic sections of the Communist Manifesto

24 Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1954] 1969), 200ff.Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International,trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). Also see Martin Harries, Scare Quotes fromShakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment (Stanford: Stanford University Press,2000).

25 Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848, Stuttart: Reclam Verlag,1969), 19.

26 This climactic showdown is cast in terms of two textual genres, for the battle between the specterand the party becomes a battle between the “nursery tale” and the manifesto. The manifesto, it turnsout, is an anti-fairy tale, and it is through an attack on the fairy tale, which was just at the height of itsnineteenth-century resurgence, that the manifesto constitutes itself. The manifesto casts itself as theprotagonist in a generic struggle and takes the occasion of the preamble to reflect on its own use andfunction.

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constitute the dramatic and theatrical insertion of difference voices into the dominantone of the manifesto, the preamble marks an initial moment of reflection in which themanifesto is poised against its theatrical, spectral counterpart.

What this preamble bears witness to is not only the theatrical, scenic imagination ofthis manifesto but also the fact that like Tzara’s and Foreman’s manifestos, theCommunist Manifesto does not proceed without a moment of hesitation. It does notjump right into the work of revelation and declaration but reflects on its own role andon its own function in the struggle between Communism and its enemies. What wecan see here is that the Communist Manifesto’s theatricality does not simply enforce itsfuturist performativity. Rather, it marks a moment of hesitation, a moment when themanifesto gives up its commitment to absolute efficacy and action, and allows itself todwell on theatrics instead. This theatricality of the manifesto, to be sure, is closelyrelated to the genre’s futurist performativity—exposing specters and convincing othervoices are part of the task the manifesto has to accomplish if we are to call its speechacts successful. However, this theatricality also seems to work as an obstacle to themanifesto’s performativity: the manifesto must combat this theatricality in order toachieve its goal. Theatricality is something of a specter haunting the manifesto, thethreat that its speech acts might turn out to be nothing but stage acts. It is useful hereto remember that Austin considered the theatre to be a place where speech acts looseall their normative force. The explicit exclusion of the theatre from his speech acttheory has often been derided as one more example of a philosophical anti-theatricalprejudice, as described by Jonas Barish and others.27 However, In the case of themanifesto, the attempt to maintain a strict division between theatricality andperformativity is necessary, if only to perceive the struggle between those two modes.Theatricality can be seen as the troubling underside of the manifesto’s performativity.

The rivalry between theatricality and performativity had particular consequencesfor those manifestos that concern themselves with the theatre. Beginning withMarinetti’s manifestos on Futurist theatre, the twentieth-century abounds in theatreprojects that are announced and accompanied by manifestos. This is the caseparticularly with utopian theatre projects that were difficult or impossible to realize,such as the ones devoted to instituting some form of Gesamtkunstwerk. Among thoseone could name the Merz Theatre of Kurt Schwitters, Vasily Kandinsky’s new totaltheatre, as well as the Totaltheatre of Oscar Schlemmer and Erwin Piscator. All of thesetheatres, and many more, were launched by manifestos. They also all try to push thelimits of the possible, and this means that their realization is always precarious, oftenpostponed, and sometimes impossible. The more difficult it is actually to create thetheatres called for by specific manifestos, the more these manifestos become the onlyplace where these utopian theatres can take shape. For this reason, these manifestos nolonger function simply as instruction manuals for new types of theatre, but theybecome instead a platform for utopian or impossible theatres. In its most radicalmanifestation, the manifesto can take over, or entirely takes the place of, the theatre itcalls for.

The struggle between manifesto and the theatre can be seen with particular clarityin the work of one of the most famous writers of manifestos and visionaries of the

27 Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

464 / Martin Puchner

28 Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son Double, in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1956–74). Itappeared for the first time in NRF in 1932.

29 Ibid., 120.30 Ibid., 380.

theatre, Antonin Artaud.28 Because of Artaud’s unparalleled influence on postwartheatre, too little attention has been paid to the question of why Artaud was not ableto realize his program for a Theatre of Cruelty. It does not suffice to argue that runninga theatre requires more than a program, but also managerial skills, money, and, ofcourse, an audience. More important than these external factors and circumstances isthe dynamic of the genre that articulated this program: the Theatre of Cruelty existsonly as manifesto, printed on the pages of the literary magazine La Nouvelle RevueFrançaise. The fact that Artaud depended on a literary magazine to provide him witha space for his theatre could be seen as a bitter irony, given Artaud’s tireless attacks onthe written word. However, we need to distinguish between the dramatic text, whichArtaud derided, and the text of the manifesto, which he embraced. Rather thanextracting from Artaud’s manifestos the description of some text-free physical theatre,as it is usually done, we should recognize that his theatre is in fact intimately tied tothe form of his manifestos, its tone, its performativity, its textuality, and its visualappearance.

Artaud’s manifestos constitute a form of action speech that is characteristic of themanifesto. Polemical by nature, Artaud’s texts abound in formulations such as “downwith,” “let’s do away with,” or “enough of,” denouncing first masterworks, thenrepresentation more generally, before turning eventually in futurist manner againstthe “past” tout court. The language of these texts is one of rupture: verbs such as“rupturing” or “breaking” often accumulate in the same sentence, and when therhetoric of rupture seems insufficient, Artaud uses extreme images such as that of theplague to increase the shock-value of his texts. Asked to supplement this manifestowith clarifications, Artaud refused, claiming that they would “deflower its accent”(d’en déflorer l’accent).29 Artaud here seeks to preserve the manifesto, its most character-istic mode of aggressive, accented speech, against the pressure, exerted on him by theeditors of NRF, to turn the manifesto into a more explanatory, theoretical discourse,one that would be in control of its own language. The question of whether themanifesto should be considered to be a genre akin to theory has haunted the avant-garde manifesto throughout, and scholars and teachers have tended to use it as ahandy explanatory device. Even if the use of the manifesto as theory is not entirelywrong, it does disregard the manifesto’s most distinctive literary features, preciselythat which Artaud called its “accent.”

The “accent” of the manifesto can be seen as a marker of the manifesto’s theatricalperformance, but unlike some of the other avant-garde manifestos, Artaud’s werenever meant to be performed. This did not keep them from internalizing their ownoral performance. A newspaper reporting on one of Artaud’s acts, for example,observed that he was “shouting his text as if he were declaiming it in a publicgathering, cutting up his delivery with a monotonic choppiness,” and another onecharacterized Artaud’s speech as a “jerky, staccato language full of disconnectedcries.”30 Artaud’s stage performances here seem to be under the spell of the manifesto’saggressive oratory. The influence of the manifesto on Artaud’s theatre also found its

MANIFESTO = THEATRE / 465

entry into the content of his manifestos. One of the pillars of the Theatre of Cruelty,says Artaud, is a “deformation” of speech that leads to a “particular use of intona-tion.”31 It is the use of the voice that is supposed to break open the “stratification” oflanguage. It is as if Artaud had begun to realize that the Theatre of Cruelty was avision not so much of a physical theatre, but of a mode of speech that was akin to the“accent” of the manifesto.32 It is due to this partial convergence between the manifestoand the theatre envisioned in Artaud’s manifestos that the manifesto was able to takethe place of the Theatre of Cruelty. To put this in a slightly different manner, theTheatre of Cruelty cannot be realized in any other form than in the form of themanifesto.33

Through the coupling of the manifesto’s futurist performativity and the traces of itsoral performance, the manifesto enables Artaud to erase the actual theatre altogether.In this sense, the manifesto is the opposite of the dramatic masterwork, which Artaudhated to much; it is a text that is at odds with its own textuality, trying to reinvent thattextuality as action. Whatever residual theatricality there is has wandered entirely intothe oratory of the manifesto, its internalized performance. The paradox of Artaud’sdependence on the literary genre of the manifesto thus must be understood as onemore version of the struggle between performativity and theatricality at work in themanifesto at least since the Communist Manifesto. This struggle means that there is atendency within manifesto’s performativity to eclipse the theatre altogether. Thiseclipse, however, testifies not only to the rivalry between the performativity andtheatricality but also to the fact that the two must be related closely enough in order forthe one to be able to take the place of the other.

Manifesto = Theatre—what this equation suggests is not that all manifestos aretheatre or that all theatres are manifestos. Rather, it points to the fact that the historiesof the theatre and of the manifesto are intertwined, that the history of the one cannotbe written without the history of the other. Although the equation manifesto = theatredoes not balance, the identity which it claims points to an essential, if contentiouskinship that should occupy a central place in our understanding of both the theatreand the manifesto.

31 Ibid., 112.32 One can hear echoes of this manifesto tone in Artaud’s later radio works, in particular his “To

Have Done with the Judgement of God,” in Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 13. Here, Artaud uses the wholevocal repertoire, from the lowest to the highest sounds, falling with regularity into a screaming thatattacks the listener with direct force. It is a language of sounds, cries whose radical gestures tryeverything to throw off the stratification of language.

33 Based on an analysis of Artaud’s critique of representation, Derrida argues that the Theatre ofCruelty can never be faithfully realized in any theatre. Jacques Derrida, “Le théâtre de la cruauté et laclôture de la représentation,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 364.