Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (review)

The manifesto has long been considered a genre embarrassing to modernist studies: it often sounds downright mad as it prophesies the coming of an impossible and now unfashionable utopia. And it always seems to fall short of its aims: the revolution doesn't fully come off, the new art movement is superseded by another, or the avant-garde peters out entirely. But Martin Puchner's Poetry of the Revolution resurrects the genre and the avant-garde in groundbreaking ways. Declaring that "writing the history of a futurist genre such as the manifesto" to be "a paradoxical if not outright perverse enterprise" (259), Puchner embraces this perversity as he swerves from a teleological to a cyclical model of genre based not upon death or utopia, but on difference and repetition. He invokes a postmodern understanding of historicity to argue that each manifesto, whether explicitly or not, draws upon and revises the manifestos that have preceded it. Puchner's methodology sees the manifesto stretched between theatricality—understood as a rehearsed repetition of a pre-existing script—and performativity—understood as an instrumentalist use of language, doing things with words, beginning the revolution now! Throughout his cultural history of the manifesto, Puchner insists on keeping both poles in dialogical play, "suspended between past and future" and between the repetition of the past and what he calls the "replacement" for the future (262).

Puchner's most striking and central claim is that Marx and Engels invented the genre with The Communist Manifesto. Certainly manifestos existed prior to 1848, and Puchner discusses those of the English Revolution and the Reformation. But he says that The Communist Manifesto, and Marx more broadly, invented a poetics of revolution: the manifesto form itself. This form "would help revolutionary modernity to know itself, to arrive at itself, to make and to manifest itself" (1). All prior manifestos become retroactively recognizable as the "prehistory" of the manifesto. This claim may be contestable: despite the cyclical nature of generic history that Puchner lays out, he paradoxically advocates a radical break between the "backward-looking" manifestos of the French Revolution and the poetics of the future he claims for Marx. Nevertheless, by making Marx and Engels' manifesto the lynchpin of his argument, Puchner is able to weave together the strands of international socialism, world literature, and avant-garde aesthetics in a powerfully persuasive argument that makes the case that the manifesto was the crucial innovation of the avant-garde and one that we should continue to take seriously as a means of intervening in modernities worldwide.

Puchner's highly readable and erudite prose covers a large swathe of the manifesto's cultural history from Martin Luther to the contemporary pages of The Drama Review. He first argues for the retrospective historicity of The Communist Manifesto through the subsequent prefaces written by Marx and Engels and the anxiety of its influence on the part of later socialist and communist manifesto writers and on the avant-garde itself. This historicity allows him to foreground the tensions between party discipline (instrumentalist language) and aesthetic play (theatrical language) present in avant-garde manifestos. Secondly, Puchner graphs the worldwide dissemination and translation of The Communist Manifesto to argue that it inaugurates a new instance of world literature, one whose ongoing project is that of displacing bourgeois literature and remaking literature through its international, traveling, and translated form. Puchner founds this model of world literature, envisioned by Marx and developed by the international avant-garde, on the concept of modernity's uneven development. This model takes into account the avant-gardes of the so-called periphery as Puchner's study moves from western Europe and the European peripheries of Italy and the Soviet Union to Latin America and, briefly, to the Caribbean. In each instance, the manifesto translates modernity into multiple modernisms of displacement and travel.

While the First World War intensified the nationalist proclivities of Futurism, vorticism, and German expressionism, it animated the internationalist sentiments...