Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
Review by Jake Kennedy, a recent graduate of the Ph.D. programme in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University
Responding to the recent declarations of the diminished (or even utterly exhausted) umph of the so-called historical avant-gardes, Martin Puchner’s Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes is a brash counter-claim. More than just taking issue with the narrow historical categories of Peter Bürger’s and Perry Anderson’s respective scholarship (both of whom limit the avant-gardes’ function to the early twentieth century), Puchner’s book also constitutes a stirring defense of the political force of art. Thus what begins as a fascinating tracing of the genesis, international dissemination, and influence of the Communist Manifesto ultimately unfolds as a splendid new theory of experimental art.
At least part of the cogency of this new theory is attributable to Puchner’s unfashionable conviction that art matters. Throughout this work Puchner evidences a breathtaking respect for the function of poetry. This is not some kind of reactionary neo-formalism, but instead a progressive esteem for the creative word: how form and poetics may enable and do. The manifesto just doesn’t declare, as far as Puchner is concerned, but is itself the action that initiates the radical breaking away. In proving this claim—and in specifically proving the Communist Manifesto’s importance for diverse avant-gardes—Puchner reveals the ongoing vigor of revolutionary art in modernity.
In the opening pages of Poetry of the Revolution, Puchner theorises that all revolutions must, to a certain extent, hallucinate and then express the ideal future conditions of their own coming-into-being. In this sense the revolutionary is a thinker and an activist but also a literary visionary. Attributing soothsaying to revolutionaries is, for Puchner, hardly to invest them with mystic powers but rather to bolt them definitively to material culture and lived language. He writes, ‘the modern revolution must somehow invite the future, come up with phrases, forms, and genres that “derive” their “poetry” from this future’ (1). The Communist Manifesto is the exemplary ‘assist,’ therefore, from which revolutionary modernity is awakened into self-knowledge. Here Puchner builds on Marjorie Perloff’s path-finding work in The Futurist Moment in which she first hints that the modern aesthetic manifesto owes its existence to the famous 1848 document. But where the Manifesto ultimately plays a marginal role in Perloff’s history of the genre, Puchner establishes Marx and Engels’ text as exemplary and central. Indeed, he is fascinated with the Manifesto not only as a genre-creating document (one that successfully harmonized theatrical and performative speech) but also as an early work of global literature that altered the course of history.
To establish these claims, Puchner provides a detailed history of the birth of the manifesto proper. He explains that the manifesto in its first occurrences had more to do with sovereign pronouncements than with any subversive calls to action. Thus the form of the modern manifesto is implicitly a reclaimed genre and part of its performative, dramatic, and political effects are achieved by its audacious commandeering of the “authoritative” voice. Puchner cites the Protestant Reformation and the Puritan Revolution respectively as the arguable testing-grounds for the sounds and dynamics of the modern revolutionary manifesto. Specifically, he dates the first instance of the radical usage of the term ‘manifesto’ to a 1648 work by the Levellers (a wing of the Puritan Revolution) entitled ‘A New Engagement, or, Manifesto.’ He writes, ‘The revolutionary manifesto will break the conjunction of authority, speech, and action on which [the] old manifesto rests and instead create a genre that must usurp an authority it does not yet possess, a genre that is much more insecure and therefore more aggressive in its attempts to turn words into actions and demands into reality’ (12). Though Puchner is at pains to point out that as indubitably radical as the Levellers’ and other early manifestoes were, they were still not future-oriented literary documents—that is, their ‘poetry’ was still firmly embedded in the inherited languages of official laws and common customs.
To underline this insight, Puchner makes reference to Kenneth Burke’s scholarship on the complicated tropics of manifestoes in relation to sanctioned declarations and government constitutions. Where Burke is finally uncertain why certain constitutional texts (the Declaration of Independence, for example) do not declare themselves outright as manifestoes, Puchner suggests that the difference lies in the quality of creative declaration. He argues that, ‘These rights, no matter how radical, are not presented as being created, enacted, constituted, or made, and consequently their declaration is not something that is in need of poesis’ (19). The revolutionary manifesto, in other words, cannot rest on axioms or self-evidence and instead is compelled to adopt a ‘constitutive,’ in-the-making form.
What Marx and Engels achieve in the Communist Manifesto is a vision of history that is inseparable from revolutionary struggle—and most importantly they figure their own document as constitutive of that radical uprising. Despite all of this, the Manifesto is marked by an anxiety about its own historical status vis-à-vis the radical future it both predicts and creates, and it reveals its most acute nervousness around the problem of reconciling literary utterance and political agency. As much as the Manifesto is a demand for a particular material consciousness, it is also an attempt to undo the division separating speech and action, word and revolution. But, and this is testament to his belief in the dialectics of history, Puchner does not suggest that the Manifesto utterly or un-problematically resolves these binaries. On the contrary, in his tour-de-force second chapter, entitled ‘Marxian Speech Acts,’ Puchner explains that the Manifesto in fact exploits these very contradictions: ‘There is . . . a split between theory and practice after all, and this means a remnant of the Machiavellian utopia; there is, I would say, a remainder of theatricality in the Manifesto that allows it to speak in the theatrical mode of “as if,” as if the unified proletariat already existed’ (30). Puchner’s specific formal analysis here is germane to wider disciplinary questions about the social force and legacy of avant-garde poetics. Just as the Manifesto dramatizes a revolutionary present, speaking to a world not yet born but as if there to hear it all the same, its echoes inform the declarative sounds and grammars of all future avant-garde projects.
Puchner ultimately suggests that the historical avant-gardes (Futurism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism etc.) would have lacked the urgent vocabulary and formal platform of revolution if the manifesto genre had not existed. As well, there is an interdependence at work as the avant-garde essentially brings the revolutionary form of the manifesto to the public and the manifesto brings the revolutionary avant-garde, so to speak, to itself. The avant-garde manifesto and the political manifesto are hence both related with respect to their mutual dependence on collective voices and their calls for a break with the past. Still, the productive ambivalence that Puchner notes in the Manifesto’s poetic ‘as if’ (and the harnessing of its phrasal power in subsequent manifestos) is also perhaps what allows the tenets of Italian Futurism or British Vorticism, for instance, to degrade into the dictates of fascism. Puchner highlights this disturbing tendency and understands the manifesto as indicative of the ongoing struggle between the domains of politics and art. He states that, in this modernist moment, ‘the manifesto, now situated both in politics and in art, became a genre through which art and politics could communicate, a kind of membrane that allowed for exchange between them even as it also kept them apart’ (79). Conceiving of the manifesto genre as a membrane is inspired, especially as it calls attention to the exciting liminalities of the form. For all of its proclivities for self-regarding bombast and shrill certainties, there is something deeply melancholic about the manifesto—it truly yearns for dialogue and to create the conditions in which such exchanges may flourish.
While Puchner makes important references to the feminist scholarship of Avital Ronell, Mary Ann Caws, and Janet Lyon—noting, in particular, their analyses of the manifesto as a masculinist genre—he is not overly concerned with the gender or racial politics of the manifesto form. And although I understand fully that Puchner’s work does not aim to be a comprehensive critique of all avant-garde manifestoes so much as a meditation on the centrality of the Communist Manifesto and the enduring influence of its revolutionary poetics, I still wonder how a more penetrating feminist or post-colonial vision, say, might disturb some of his findings. For example, how much of the manifesto’s progressive poetic force is tainted by its militaristic, self-mythologizing, heroic rhetoric? Not only Marinetti’s notorious 1909 ‘The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism,’ but also Andre Breton’s 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism,’ rather gleefully establish its foundational scenes as explicitly men-only. More specifically, how might Puchner read competing (feminist, post-colonial) manifestoes of and within the historical avant-garde moment? Mina Loy’s 1921 manifesto, ‘Psycho-Democracy,’ to cite one example, is entirely unlike the “declarative” theatrics of Marinetti, or Wyndham Lewis, or Breton, or Tzara. Loy’s text is less concerned with constructing a mytho-poetic drama of origin than with the expression of a genuinely revolutionary program. Compared with Tristan Tzara’s 1919 ‘Dada Manifesto,’ which is characterized by an ingenious if ultimately enigmatic critique of bourgeois culture, Loy’s phrasal and typographical strategies all seem marshaled in the service of a humble, innervating, razor-edge politics. In her discussion of power as a kind of secret society of the minority, and her commitment to addressing these imbalances through the practical transformation of social institutions (like the education system), Loy’s manifesto strikes me as spectacularly mature. Such a magical but sober document, I think, would make a fascinating counter-point to the canonical, masculinist manifestoes that Puchner places on centre stage. Moreover, Loy’s psycho-democratic call—replete with Blakean mysticisms—seems to harmonize the political and artistic differences of the genre that elsewhere Puchner worries may finally prove irreconcilable.
And I wonder, too, about the euro-whiteness of the manifesto form itself? Puchner’s otherwise incisive chapter on Surrealism only considers Aimé Césaire’s aesthetic and political contributions in passing. Puchner explains that Césaire’s “relation to surrealism is strategic rather than identificatory” (188) as it plays out in post-colonial terrain; but he also banishes to a footnote his most tantalizing comment about Césaire’s work: ‘This dislocation [of the normative function of the manifesto to speak of origins] of surrealism also had its consequences for the manifestos. Césaire’s Discours sur le Colonialisme is one of the prominent documents that re-writes the history of the Enlightenment and of the revolution, the two central traditions for the Manifesto’ (286). I, for one, would love to read more about the political effects and force of Césaire’s ‘dislocating of surrealism.’ Are the poetics of his ‘dislocation’ premised more on an identity of suffering and, if so, how does this effect Puchner’s ‘as if’ paradigm? In the same vein, I would also love to read more about the Black Panthers’ (also discussed in passing by Puchner) rewriting of the discourse of race in the United States. I wonder if the urgency of these documents—prompted by aesthetic desire, for sure, but evidently also by immediate social necessity—points at an altogether higher (less impish, less pompous) form of ‘poesis’? Is there a moment when injustice is so extreme that the revolutionary manifesto it inspires thus transcends “making” and becomes its own radical law—a collective, righteous voice?
However, these are not, in the end, critiques of Puchner’s specific politics but rather editorial quibbles about space allocations. It is perhaps because of Puchner’s wide-ranging, captivating scholarship that one learns to expect extensive analysis at all turns and thus in those (admittedly rare) passages in which the paragraph or chapter breaks too soon, the slightness is unfairly exaggerated. Certainly Puchner’s text will be a vital resource not only for scholars of the avant-garde and modernism, but also for anyone interested in contemporary art/postmodernism and its relationship to globalization. His closing chapters—which discuss the Situationists in depth, and the Critical Art Ensemble and Dogme films more generally, for example—constitute rich contributions to Marxian cultural theory. And even though Puchner states that today we must admit that the poetry of the revolution has been co-opted to some extent by the poetry of multinational capitalism (the poetics of the mass media advertisement), he also refuses to see this reality as cause for total hopelessness. Puchner still believes in the possibilities of the poetry of the future and in this he sets himself up as contra the negativity and cynicism latent in the otherwise progressive works of Giorgio Agamben and Jean-Luc Nancy. I see Puchner’s resplendent attention to poetics, his breadth of scholarship, and his courageous optimism here in Poetry of the Revolution, as evidence of a resurgence of post-post-modern theory. Like the recent avant-garde and political work of Krzysztof Ziarek, Suzi Gablik, and Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, for example, Puchner too is dedicated to the struggle for social justice and freedom—to locate those future, invocative texts that may find a new way to become both means and end.
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