Before A Manifesto
[Metahaven]
We, the undersigned.
This sounds like a manifesto.
We take the manifesto to be a Utopian form.
Fredric Jameson distinguishes between Utopia as a genre (as, for example, a written text, or a building, or a Utopian programme of revolutionary change) and a Utopian impulse in daily life.
The etymology of the word ‘manifest’ dates back to 1374, meaning ‘clearly revealed’, coming from manifestus – ‘caught in the act, plainly apprehensible, clear, evident’ – and manifestare – ‘to show plainly’. It refers to manifesto, 1644 Italian, as a ‘public declaration explaining past actions and announcing the motive for forthcoming ones’ – ‘originally “proof”, from the Latin manifestus.’
Manifestos are publicly stated decisions. They are written by those who have made up their minds and shall now do as they have openly declared. To write a manifesto is to put all of one’s cards on the table. To write a manifesto is to draw up and sign a covenant with a self-declared truth.
This is easier said than done. If a manifesto is a decisive political act, its writers are out for some kind of power, even if such power is quite minimal and temporary. As a manifesto is a statement of principle, it demands a complete loyalty on the part of the undersigned. If the writers diverge from the manifesto’s proposed path to the future, they are either disloyal to their own text or they reveal that pragmatic action has simply prevailed over principled decision. This weakens the impact and credibility of a manifesto. If a manifesto is an attempt to gain power by means of writing and publishing, it risks failing because of its potential conflictuality with the hidden agenda which comes naturally to the successful exercise of power.
Niccolò Machiavelli stated that ‘everyone realizes how praiseworthy it is for a prince to honour his word and to be straightforward rather than crafty in his dealings; nonetheless, contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles.’
A printed object may carry the manifesto’s text in an efficient way, so that people can either read it or hear about it, or both. Manifestos are bound to the technology that provides their most effective mode of dissemination. Régis Debray calls the historical period when socialism, printed matter and the manifesto prevailed the ‘graphosphere’. For all of its hubris and ambition, a manifesto is a shared text which exists in the public domain as a printed original. In hopes of achieving action, a manifesto usually relies on the frequent usage of commanding phrases like ‘we must’, ‘we shall’ and ‘we will’.
But what happens to the manifesto in the age of television and the internet, the ‘videosphere’, in Debray’s words? Does the manifesto have any future when the paradigm of print has come to a close, which does not mean the end of print but the end of the primacy of print? As Marshall McLuhan says with regard to the passage from manuscript to print culture: ‘print multiplied scholars, but it also diminished their social and political importance’. In the same way, the internet multiplies publishing, resulting in the diminishing of the status of what is published.
A manifesto is a text with political consequences; it seizes power, but cannot be about power alone. One reason is that a manifesto’s writers have usually not yet acquired much power; another reason is that as a carrier of peaceful political violence, a manifesto depends as much on poetry and song as it depends on argument. Formal issues are integral to the aesthetic event that is a manifesto. Because the manifesto’s aim is to interrupt, not to affirm, its mode of speech must differ from common speech, to the extent that it allows for new words, new terms and analogies, to render the established ones obsolete.
There are two principal typologies for manifestos.
The fortified structure of arguments, and the assembly of poetic decoys.
In 2000, the Canadian designer Bruce Mau wrote a manifesto about design, printed it in a book, and published it on the internet. It is called An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth. It is a numbered list of sentences and process wisdom, not unlike the well-known type of statement which says that ‘the first rule is that there are no rules’.
The Incomplete Manifesto for Growth’s 43 points include: ‘(1) Allow events to change you. (2) Forget about good. (5) Go deep. (9) Begin anywhere. (10) Everyone is a leader. (12) Keep moving. (13) Slow down. (14) Don’t be cool. (15) Ask stupid questions. (19) Work the metaphor. (18) Stay up too late. (25) Don’t clean your desk. (27) Read only left-hand pages. (28) Make new words. Expand the lexicon. (35) Imitate. (40) Avoid fields. Jump fences. (41) Laugh. And (43) Power to the people’.
This is a manifesto of the poetic type, allowing for internal contradictions and ironic deception. It places no emphasis on design as a professional activity but instead pursues mistakes, nights without sleep, uncool work, messy desktops, and laughter. (The dictum about the left-hand pages comes from Marshall McLuhan). In doing so, it simultaneously taps into Utopian form and Utopian impulse; Mau’s manifesto becomes a programme centered around the transgression of programme.
The political consequence is that the commonly accepted separations between professional and personal engagement are overruled. Design is taken out of its limited mandate of professional operations, and is brought into the realm of imagination, possibility and contradiction. The manifesto promises that the most interesting ideas will arise out of the lunatic reserve of the white night. This is the signal feature of artistic manifestos; a most famous example, the Futurist Manifesto written in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti, mentions it right away.
‘We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them we were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing. Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.’
The Incomplete Manifesto’s hidden agenda is not without corporate appropriation; the recommendation to perform night labour (preferrably for Bruce Mau’s studio) carries its hidden agenda in an unstated (thus Machiavellian) alliance with the post-Fordist practice of flexible labour and maximized economic productivity.
‘We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators who have been raised in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents. Many design teachers and mentors promote this belief; the market rewards it; a tide of books and publications reinforces it.’
The First Things First 2000 Manifesto (hereafter FTF) was signed by 33 graphic designers and was issued in 1999. It was printed in design magazines and put on the internet. Re-reading FTF more than 8 years after its release, it appears like a covenant of respectable professionals offended by the degrading standards of their trade. In comparison, The Communist Manifesto, first printed in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had more brutally stated: ‘Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.’ FTF made clear that it had no such modality of sacrifice to offer, rather the opposite: nearly all of its authority was based the professional achievement of the signees, who included Gert Dumbar, Ken Garland, Tibor Kalman, Rick Poynor and Erik Spiekermann.
What do the undersigned offer instead? ‘We propose a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting and democratic forms of communication – a mindshift away from product marketing and toward the exploration and production of a new kind of meaning.’
While there is no doubt about FTF’s sincere intentions, none of the signees publicly refrained from well-paid or commercial work after its release, none set out to make some sort of professional or personal sacrifice that would purport realization of the aims stated, and none changed the trade of advertising from without or within. Simply put: nothing changed. FTF’s text, of the fortress type, proved easy to conquer and dismantle for critics. Some of them hit home by targeting the misrepresentation of commercial practice, pointing out that none of the 33 undersigned, with the exception of Milton Glaser, had any real experience in advertising and therefore were professionally unqualified to attack it. Michael Bierut, a New York-based designer and partner at Pentagram, writes that they ‘have resisted manipulating the proles who trudge the aisles of your local 7-Eleven for the simple reason that they haven’t been invited to.’ Michael Rock, partner at the New York-based graphic design firm 2×4, takes a more subtle approach. Eventually he cites the theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, targeting FTF’s simplifications as ‘lite-radicalism’: ‘The identification of the enemy is no small task given exploitation tends no longer to have a specific place and that we are immersed in a system of power so deep and complex that we can no longer determine specific difference or measure. We suffer exploitation, alienation, and command as enemies, but we do not know where to locate the production of oppression.’
Indeed FTF’s enemy is simplified, but so is eventually every enemy. The point is that it is hesitantly and politely simplified. So that its signees are not outraged, but ‘increasingly uncomfortable with this view of design.’ Not labourers but ‘art directors’. Not selling one’s soul to the devil but ‘devoting one’s efforts primarily to advertising’. And so on.
Some conditions at the time of writing of FTF were not put to the right use. With regard to the manifesto’s general ties with printed matter and the graphosphere, the authors of the FTF ommitted to realize that in order to historically make sense it must relate to the internet, despite the fact that in 1999 online advertising had hardly developed.
With regard to ideology, 1999 was as post-manifesto as one can get. As British designer and writer Robin Kinross wrote about two years after FTF, ‘the days of manifestos are over. In politics, no one much believes in any sharp polarity of left and right. The difficulties of action are immense. Keeping the boat afloat and away from the rocks seems all we can do.’ Kinross accounts for the ideological tabula rasa of the post-manifesto world and design’s general departure from ‘socially engaged practice’, typical for the world after the fall of Communism and the so-called crisis of the Left. The empty place left by the collapse of the Left-Right opposition has been taken by a new concept, the ‘Third Way’, crafted most prominently by the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens and implemented by New Labour in the United Kingdom. Critics argue that the Third Way conceals hegemony by advocating the nonexistent possibility of a rational consensus.
Can a design manifesto still be written from the ideological void? Now that the principal tools of design – the computer and its software – have been homogenized among practitioners and democratized among people, professional distinction is an unlikely perspective for a future design manifesto to gain support. User-generated content accounts not for an amateurish supplement to a stable, professional core, but for a fundamental transformation of the workforce and the value it creates. The professional core of designers will not regain the central role it once could claim based on its mastery of tools and services unavailable to users. It seems instead more probable that among those professional designers, a gap will increase between those who design as celebrity, and those who design as labourer. Such a gap has already appeared in the architectural profession. Subsequently, for a design manifesto, a new alliance between designers and users may be a potentially more succesful way forward. At the key of such a potential alliance is the concept of immaterial labour.
Hardt and Negri define immaterial labour as producing ‘an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.’ For the sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato, the immaterial labour of advertising, fashion and software development, comprises ‘intellectual skills, as regards the cultural-informational content; manual skills for the ability to combine creativity, imagination, and technical and manual labour; and entrepreneurial skills in the management of social relations (…).’
A new common ground for designers and users is provided by the changing links between production and consumption, of which immaterial labour is the ‘interface’. The products of immaterial labour not only materialize ‘needs, the imaginary, consumer tastes, and so forth’, but also generate and produce new needs, imaginaries, and tastes, so that the act of consumption is not the destruction of the commodity but the establishment of a relationship which links production and consumption (read: designer and user) together. Lazzarato holds the social, aesthetic and communicative aspects of immaterial labour (which for him extend into the act of consumption) capable of producing direct social and political ties which escape traditional capitalist appropriation.
An example of the actualization of such ties is provided in The GNU Manifesto, written by Richard Stallman in 1985: ‘I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. ‘
This manifesto (GNU being the acronym for ‘GNU’s not Unix’) stands at the beginning of free software, open source and file sharing movements. While different from Marinetti and Mau’s white nights, it crosses similar boundaries. It declares the relationship between software developer and user a social one.
Manifestos may require multiple decades of incubation time, as Régis Debray accounts for with regard to the Communist Manifesto. On the internet, a manifesto is no longer contained within a printed artefact that protects its integrity. One may choose to read a manifesto only partially, and one may encounter it while searching for something entirely different. This should not harm the manifesto; ideally it should work equally well from each of its sentences, so that in some ways, its fortified structure of arguments becomes a distributed network.
Written by Metahaven in Amsterdam and Brussels and published in May 2008 as part of the pamphlet ‘White Night Before A Manifesto’.
http://www.metahaven.net
References
Michael Bierut, ‘Ten Footnotes to a Manifesto’. in M. Bierut, Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007)
Max Bruinsma et al., First Things First 2000 – a design manifesto, at www.xs4all.nl/~maxb/ftf2000.htm (accessed 27 April 2008)
Régis Debray, ‘Socialism: A Life-Cycle’. in New Left Review 46 (July-August 2007)
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000)
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future. The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005)
Robin Kinross, ‘More Light! For A Typography that knows what it’s Doing’. in S. Bailey (ed.), In Alphabetical Order. File under: GRAPHIC DESIGN, SCHOOLS or WERKPLAATS TYPOGRAFIE’ (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2002)
Peter Lang & William Menking, Superstudio: Life Without Objects (Milan: Skira editore, 2003)
Scott Lash & John Urry, Economies of Signs & Space (London: SAGE Publications, 1994)
Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labor’. in M. Hardt & P. Virno (ed.), Radical Thought in Italy. A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996)
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (London: Penguin, 2004)
Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, at www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html (accessed 27 April 2008)
Bruce Mau, ‘An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth’. in B. Mau, K. Maclear, B. Testa (ed.), Life Style (New York: Phaidon, 2000)
Marshall McLuhan, ‘Joyce, Mallarmé, and the Press’. in E. McLuhan &
F. Zingrone (ed.), Essential McLuhan (London: Routledge, 1997)
Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005)
Michael Rock, Save Yourself, at www.2×4.org (accessed 27 April 2008)
Richard Stallman, The GNU Manifesto, at www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html (accessed 27 April 2008)
mmm interesting.
There is an interesting book which picks up on the manifesto ‘genre’ - which gives a way of thinking about it that might be useful for contemporary design: Mary Ann Caws ‘Manifesto: a centry of isms’ (University of Nebraska Press 2001). I like it because it helps us look beyond individual manifestos like FTF (mentioned above) and the unresolvable issues of ‘how to be socially responsible’. It, like Metahaven, takes a meta-view of this mode of practice.
/Katy 06/06/2008