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

The question of how art relates to politics has been staged a thousand times. A healthy question it is, as it shows no sign of abatement. Its life resides in a delicate balance between posing the question anew and posing it again. Within the framework of modernity, with its emphasis on making the self and the world, form reigns supreme. The language of form implies the art of making legible, tangible, and material that which is implicit all around us. As a genre, this work of negotiating aesthetic and worldly poesis is borne by the manifesto. That, at least, is Martin Puchner's elegant formulation, one that he pursues with remarkable erudition and toward very productive ends. Puchner takes his title and lead from Marx's genre-making text, the Communist Manifesto (1848), which teaches us that it is manifestos' "form, not their particular complaints and demands, that articulates most succinctly the desires and hopes, maneuvers and strategies of modernity: to create points of no return; to make history; to fashion the future" (2).

Puchner is interested in the ways in which the Communist Manifesto proliferates over time and space, accumulating a transnational audience along the way that it imagines can actually change the world by means of its own distinctive "form of literary agency" (32). This political-aesthetic agency is in turn animated by a productive entanglement of key terms of performance studies—performativity and theatricality. Puchner's book is at once an intricately wrought mapping of the manifesto's trajectories and an invitation to think the collaboration between art and politics generally in the register of performance studies. His temperament is never shy of generous as he tracks the manner in which the manifesto braids a politics of means and ends, words and deeds, theory and practice, tradition and innovation. These resources of creative possibility he locates in Marx's own poetic address, a speech act that poses as its own authority, in a manner that violates the linguistic philosopher J.L. Austin's claim that the theatrical mode disallows the performative. (Austin's example argues that saying "I do" onstage does not a marriage make [1962]). Instead, Puchner insists that the Manifesto constitutes its political efficacy (socialism) and historical agency (the proletariat) by means of a polyvalent bond. "The Manifesto speaks for the proletariat; it creates—makes in the sense of a performative poesis—the proletariat; and it theatrically enacts its future" (31). In this display of self-generating prophetics, performative means are entwined with theatrical ends.

The body of the book takes stock of the manifesto's manifold expressions. After showing us how the Communist Manifesto works, Puchner documents how the tract was put to work as an instance of globalization avant la lettre. Through the first part of the 20th century, the artistic and political avantgardes huddled closely together and nestled in the manifesto. Puchner illustrates this with respect to the Italian and Soviet Futurists, whose art will come to mark a form that, while ever variant, is aggressive rather than introverted and collective rather than individual (6). The movement of the manifesto is crucial to Puchner's account, for while it proclaims a future anterior, its political inflection is never singular, as British rear-guardists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis make evident. Transnational movement is part and parcel of the Dadaist and Surrealist incarnations of "manifesto art." Yet, in this movement, Puchner wisely refuses a simple diffusionist model of the advanced or developed forms traveling to the world's hinterlands. In contrast, he considers the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro's global impact to observe the multidirectional feedback loop between Europe and the Americas (175). Rather than a simple displacement from center to periphery, Puchner considers that the most radical modernities appeared where the force of modernization violently confronted older forms of life. The (then) unexpected revolutions of Italy, Russia, and Latin America...