After the manifiesto. GSAPP Books
Craig Buckley (Editor), 2014. New York. p. 152-157

After the manifiesto

Mark Wigley

THE AIM HERE is to quickly take the pulse of the manifesto in architecture, and to try to grasp its evolving role. A manifesto is a weapon. It is a challenge to the status quo, a call for action, a call for change. You use a manifesto to change things. But this is already far too simple, because a manifesto is not only a call to arms. It is also a form of action in its own right. The most famous example, of course, is the Communist Manifesto of 1848, but we could also use the Anarchist Manifesto of 1850. The gesture of making a manifesto is already a very complicated act, more of a performance than anything else.

There is no such thing as a small manifesto. Manifestos conjure whole worlds. A manifesto never simply appears in our world. It is a polemical document thrown into and against our world. There is always a violence to the throw. One world hits another. The violence does not come from force but calibrated disdain. The hit undoes the existing situation by treating it as unreal and unworthy. The manifesto unravels the existing environment without apparent effort, exuding confidence in its own better world. The manifesto has no doubt. It does not arrive as a utopian dream but as a sudden reality that renders unreal what came before. The manifesto-effect, the sense of encountering a manifesto, is the sudden sense of an undoing, the coming undone of what was taken for granted. There is a double act with every manifesto, the manifesto effect and then the effect of the manifesto, the effect of the effect—neither of which is obvious.

The aesthetics of the document are critical. The statement is always an aesthetic statement, even when the very theme is an attack on aesthetics. Indeed, it could well be that the act of undoing a world is necessarily aesthetic, even a rendering of the existing world as a form of ugliness or inadequacy. The look, texture, rhythm, sound of the document are mobilized and every element of the manifesto has to collaborate in a singular concentrated statement. The internal rigor of a manifesto is with the subservience of all parts to the whole, no part subservient to any other part, and every collaborating point at the same level with same weight. The manifesto galvanizes the aesthetics of horizontal to disorder existing worlds. The anti-hierarchical document has basic forms: points, principles, formulas, credos, programs, notes, demands, theses, positions, reports, retorts. There are many different do it, each of which has a different kind impact and none of which is straightforward.

At first glance it seems like it is not so complicated. The whole point manifesto is that it appears uncomplicated. The word "manifesto" from manifest, “to be clear,” so one could say that the manifesto form is about a kind of polemical clarity. It is clearer than any other document you can find. It is well organized. it is well ordered, it is compact, it makes points, it is super-edited. There is no word or punctuation mark in a manifesto that is not doing work. You could even say that a manifesto is a modern instrument or a machine, that it is industrial. It has a rhythm to it-tick, tick, tick. The points are numbered one, two, three, four, five, six. The relentless beat of this modern machine creates a sense of forward movement carrying the reader to an inevitable and better place.

But this sense of rhythmical progress is a kind of a trick, a ruse that crafts an invitation to blindly nod in assent. The manifesto does not simply appear in a particular moment and have a particular historical effect. Every manifesto positions itself in time, creates a sense of linear momentum, but can only do so by being outside of that time. The change it calls for is not a change within a space or time but a change of space and time. In the end it's not very clear who writes a manifesto, or who reads it or oven where or when a manifesto is read—and after all, what does it mean to read a manifesto? Can a call for a change of worlds simply be received or obeyed? All of the apparent clarity of the performance disguises something very complicated. What I want to suggest is that a manifesto is never simply written, and it's never simply read. For a manifesto to do its work, it does not have an author or even a reader as such. The point of a manifesto is to change the status of the writer and the reader. It wouldn't be a manifesto if, at the end of the day, the writer and reader are still in the same places.

Every manifesto carries a signature, although it cannot really be signed by one person. Even if there is a single name, that person will use the word "we.” And the "we" is not the we of the writer, but the we of the reader. For a manifesto to work, the person who reads the manifesto has to countersign it, in a sense. The readers have to add their signatures by affirming what they read. And the manifesto is thrown into and against a space—so the signing of the manifesto, the throwing of the manifesto, and the reader's counter-signing of the manifesto are never quite what they seem. It is not a linear process. A manifesto does not simply ask for us to make a change in the future. Most manifestos are retroactive. Most describe something that has already happened. Or to say it another way, if a manifesto is a call for action, this action can come before the manifesto, during the manifesto, or after. It doesn't matter. Thus the great trick of the manifesto is that there is a complete disconnect between the call for action and the action itself. In the same way, the action that is called for is never simply a construction or a production. The manifesto is always itself very well constructed, one could even say beautifully constructed, but its main purpose is a kind of undoing, a kind of deconstruction, a dissolution of authority. You cannot simply call for action without depowering an existing system. Of course this means that to make a manifesto you need to construct an enemy, you need a status quo—an "establishment"—that should be changed. Architects dream of construction, which already raises the question of how to write a manifesto for construction that will deploy a kind of destruction or undoing to achieve this. An existing dominant architecture will be visualized and treated as unreal, undone to make way for the arrival of the new. The new will move. It will be a movement. You need an image of something that is not moving in order to make a movement. So one of the first gestures of a manifesto is to stop things from moving, to make an image of a static establishment, then urgently call for movement—and making things look like they are not moving is usually more difficult than the movement itself. The real art of the manifesto is to make it seem that the world is still, waiting for the manifesto.

In this way the manifesto has to construct an invitation for itself. It has to create a space for its own performance. It could easily be that 90 percent of the manifesto is creating the space for the act. To produce the sense of establishment that gets challenged, the manifesto cannot simply be placed in the space of the establishment that doesn't yet exist until visualized by the manifesto, or simply outside that space, but must be launched in a liminal space that acts as a kind of incubator. The classic site for a manifesto is a newspaper or a magazine or a theater—spaces of negotiation and debate. The audience, by definition, is neither an insider nor an outsider. It belongs neither to the manifesto nor to the establishment, but sits between them in what might be thought of as a kind of democratic space.

This means that a manifesto is not simply launched by a new group against an old establishment. The manifesto actually creates the possibility of a new group by constructing the image of an old group. It creates an interior space, a space that you can occupy, by negating and working new image of what is said to be the old establishment. The call for action is launched by the innovative construction of a description of what supposedly already exists. Radical prescription is inseparable from radical description.

Now, usually there are no visual images in a manifesto of what is being rejected, or what is being called for. It is unusual to have images in a manifesto. Normally it is only words, but these words have been compacted into a kind of image. The manifesto itself is an image—its production is literally the production of a work of art. All the classic formal features—the shape, the typeface, the rhythm, the frame, and so on—are extremely important.

This is not necessarily an avant-garde work of art. The manifesto is one of the key tools of the avant-garde, and the avant-garde in its military sense might require this call to arms. The avant-garde needs the manifesto, but the manifesto doesn't need to be avant-garde and in a sense cannot be. It has a radical relationship to the existing world but not to the world it calls for. It's more like a stamp, or a seal of approval. In fact, a manifesto aspires to be semiofficial, even bureaucratic. It is a set of instructions, a set of rules, and there is no deviation acceptable. iT has all of the roles of a seal or signature. The signature of the manifesto is not outside the document—it is the document. The document authorizes certain things in the world. Every manifesto, no matter how radical, aspires to be the law. This means that if there is an aesthetic of the manifesto, it is the aesthetic of the law itself. Perhaps when we think about the avant-garde manifesto, we shouldn't think so much about destruction but about projecting a kind of law and authority. Even the Anarchist Manifesto's assault on all forms of government is carefully assembled as a linear argument framing key points under carefully organized headings that begin with the section called "Anarchy is Order."

Finally, no manifesto exists alone. It is always part of a sequence. It's not just points one, two, three, it's manifestos one, two, three. In the original sense of a "manifest," this document would be on the side of a ship announcing what's inside or attached to a public building announcing the new laws that have been passed. Literally each of these manifests would be placed on top of the previous manifests. So to read a manifesto, you have to read it on top of another manifesto, which is on top of another one, and so on. Manifestos are layered on top of each Other, and each of these layers has its own precise history. The discourse of the new is always archeological. And yet you cannot write a simple history of the manifesto, since each manifesto is by definition a reworking of time and each mode of writing history has itself been impacted by specific manifestos.

The question becomes more precise when looked at with regards to ideas and representations of so-called modern architecture. Modern architecture is full of manifestos—they are everywhere. This should be no surprise, because the manifesto is the most efficient form of propaganda. It is itself thoroughly modern. It is reduced, streamlined, telegraphic, stripped. It's not by chance that the history of the manifesto coincides with that of modern architecture. It could even be argued that the aesthetics of modern architecture were the aesthetics of the manifesto, that architects tried to craft the manifesto-effect with buildings. At the very least, if you think in a more boring linear way about modern architecture having a proto-modern phase, early modern phase, canonical phase, postwar, late modern, all these different overlapping phases—the manifesto is always there in that history So to ask what happened to the architectural manifesto might simply be to say, "What happened to modernity in architecture?”

The manifesto is all about reduction. It aspires to efficiency. Yet its length is not the key measure. What counts is how Sharp the point is. In a way a manifesto is an argument sharpened to a point, so if you can sharpen a text, you can produce a manifesto. Each manifesto, therefore, has its own history of sharpening, distilling, cutting, cleaning, refining, and crafting the most perfect document. But even in the most reduced statements, there are never only the points. You cannot make a manifesto with "one, two, three, four, five," because first you have to say, "Here is the manifesto." There is always a frame to the points. "One, two, three, four, five" are not points, but numbers. For you to think of them as points means already that you have accepted the theory of the manifesto, and often the full force of a manifesto is established in the framing of the manifesto, not in the points it contains. We could probably play a trick in which we introduce new points into famous manifestos, modify or remove some, and nobody would notice the difference. In fact, this often happens. There could even be the possibility that the strongest manifestos are the ones that can absorb or foster movement within the points.