Manifester og offentligheder: En afsøgning af moderniteten

Resumé

Manifestoes and Public Spheres: Probing Modernity:

In this article Janet Lyon shows that the manifesto form is both a liberatory genre that narrates in no uncertain terms the incongruous experience of modernity of those whose needs have been ignored or excluded in a putatively democratic public culture, as well as a genre of rigid binaries creating audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity, parceling out political identities across a polarized discursive field. Through readings of the tracts of the Diggers and Levellers of 1650 and the 1992 Dyke Manifesto, Lyon argues that when the conditions emerged for a possibility of an ideology of a universal subject with universal rights and sensibilities – that is, when political and economic developments in post-Enlightenment Europe generated the modern concepts of equality and rational autonomy – the manifesto arose as a public genre for contesting or recalibrating the assumptions underlying this newly ‘universal’ subject. In this influential instantiation, the manifesto is the form that exposes the broken promises of modernity: If modern democratic forms claim to honor the sovereignty of universal political subjecthood, the manifesto is a testimony to the partiality of that claim. The discussion isolates and explores some of the consistent formal features of the manifesto – its selective and impassioned chronicle of the oppression that has led to the present moment of rupture; its forceful enumeration of grievances; its epigrammatic style  – and then shows how the repetition of these structures and locutions across myriad political epochs attests to the form’s capacity to serve as a multiaccentural ideological sign, one that can be evoked in any number of struggles, on any number of sides.