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Modernism/Modernity 7.3 (2000) 509-511



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Book Review

Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern


Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Janet Lyon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 230. $47.50 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

If modernity is a permanent revolution--the ongoing political and aesthetic struggle to represent "our" time--then for the past three-hundred-plus years, the manifesto has been its script. The manifesto stages history as guerilla theater where, ideally, actors and spectators merge and the fourth wall is ruptured by the promise of universal subjectivity. Tracing modernity's broken covenants, Janet Lyon's Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern realizes Peter Bürger's vision of what the historical avant-garde could do and, through a patient dilation of his temporal scope, shows what contemporary political and artistic movements still can do. In Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984), Bürger argued that the historical avant-garde successfully engineered a (one-time-only) merger of the aesthetic and the political via its attack on the bourgeois institution of autonomous art only to founder on the oxymoron of its own institutionalization. He thus perpetuated the crisis modality that he studied. In making her case for the manifesto "not as a paper tiger but as an intervention into the organization of cultural practices," Lyon reveals art as constitutively entwined with the praxis of life (80).

Though not an expressed goal, Lyon's contextualization of Bürger is one of her book's most important contributions. Manifestoes provides the historical munitions finally to depose Theory of the Avant-Garde, which has long served as the paradigm for assessing not only self-identified avant-gardes but also all intersections of art and institution. Through Lyon, we are able to read Bürger's Theory as itself more a manifesto than a scholarly work; it reproduces the manifesto's tendency, in Lyon's terms, to "fashion a foreshortened, impassioned, and highly selective history which chronicles the oppression leading to the present moment of crisis" (14). She situates the manifesto's "slip between iconoclasm and iconography" at the core of modernity's endlessly iterable performance (27). Bürger's text, along with the historical avant-garde it hagiographically isolates, becomes legible within the "long-standing narrative of exclusion and oppression" that is the story of modernity's rise and the record of its failures (30). [End Page 509]

Read through manifestoes major and minor, the avant-garde's Janus-faced predicament--the performative versus the constative, innovation versus institutionalization--emerges as the foundational double-bind of the modern experiment. In Lyon's account, the struggles that produce the modern public sphere have always been both radical and conservative, trafficking in the fantasy of universal subjectivity and participatory democracy even as they willfully undermine it. Monitoring the brilliant births and violent deaths of revolutionary artistic and political movements--from the range of revolts that constituted the French Revolution; through the incongruously intertwined "antimodern" modernisms of the Vorticists, Futurists, and Suffragettes; to Jenny Holzer and Donna Haraway's self-conscious iterations of the manifesto form--Lyon maps the faultlines of modernity. The avant-garde is the modern, in her concise logic; the Declaration of Independence not only shares certain rhetorical moves with the likes of BLAST, the two documents bookend a history of common cultural work.

Just as manifestoes render modernity's contradictions readable, so, even more acutely, do women. Lyon makes this analogy explicit, "like manifestoes issued during and in the wake of the Revolution, the word of women in the street drove a wedge into the republican political system" (72). In the genealogy of modern revolutionary discourse, women's voices function as a kind of prehistoric trace: always outside the sanctioned public sphere, they highlight the limits of "universality" even as they make it possible. During the French Revolution, Lyon shows, women exercised their only two choices: articulate their "sectional" interests and be dismissed as "chaotic, counterrevolutionary . . . divisive," or subordinate their needs to the formation of a revolutionary "we" and "behave as republicans unmarked by gender if they were to be taken seriously as...

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