Manifesto as Theory and Theory as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic

Author(s): Teresa L. Ebert

Source: JAC , 2003, Vol. 23, No. 3 (2003), pp. 553-562
Published by: JAC

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20866585

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 Manifesto as Theory and Theory
as Material Force: Toward a Red Polemic
Teresa L. Ebert

The manifesto is writing in struggle. It is writing on the edge where

textuality is dragged into the streets and language is carried to the
barricades. It is writing confronting established practices in order to open
up new spaces for oppositional praxis. In the manifesto, more than any
other genre, the sign becomes, to use Voloshinov's words, "an arena of
the class struggle" (23). This is another way of saying that the manifesto
is the genre of change-writing, of transformative textuality and the
textuality of transformation.
As such, the manifesto and its polemics are the privileged discourses
of all social and cultural contestations?from surrealism to communism.
Although I will focus mostly on the left (especially Marxist manifestos
and polemics), I would like to begin with some general observations on
the features of the manifesto that make it an effective and necessary form
for engaging social and cultural practices-in-dominance.
The manifesto and polemic are, as might be expected, marginalized
in mainstream discourses and treated in the academy and knowledge
industry, in general, as modes of non-knowledge. This is because they are
critique-al acts that cut through the reified layers of ruling ideas masquer
ading as "common knowledge." The manifesto demonstrates that the
"common" is, in fact, not at all common and that the ideas and practices
advocated by the common are knowledges and practices that serve a
particular class. Marx and Engels, for instance, write in the opening
movement of the Manifesto of the Communist Party,

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this

distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (90)

jac 23.3(2003)

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 554 jac
In these sentences, they unpack the bourgeois myth of classlessness and
implicate all social practices in class struggle. The effect is to put class
and class struggle in the forefront of social struggle. This, of course, is
"mere polemic" as far as the ruling classes are concerned.
Or take the manifesto of the "Situationist International # 6" (August
1961):

If it seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution, this is obviously

because the organized revolutionary movement has long since disap
peared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive
transformation of society are concentrated. But everything else is even
more ridiculous, since it implies accepting the existing order in one way
or another. (63)

The manifesto is aimed at de-writing "revolution" as a thing of the past

and rewriting it as a viable strategy for the present. The point is to lay bare
the assumptions that ridicule revolution as impractical and show that
what is called practical is merely what works within the dominant system.
In a more militant mode, "A Manifesto of Italian Futurism" states,

We want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, of archaeolo

gists, of guides and of antiquarians. . . . The oldest among us are not yet
thirty; this means that we have at least ten years to carry out our task.
When we are forty, let those younger and more valiant than us kindly
throw us into the waste basket like useless manuscripts! (qtd. in Howe
170-71)

Although these are different registers of manifesto and polemics, they are
all militant change-writings: they are all aimed at transformation of the
existing social organizations.
The manifesto, in other words, is the space in which concrete social
contestations are articulated as abstract ideas. It puts in question the
existing economic and social arrangements and intervenes in the alien
ated forms of knowledges and practices that have, by the agency of power,
become familiar and commonsensical and thus have assumed the shape
of natural modes of knowing and acting in the world.
The polemical is the discursive and critique-al register of the mani
festo. It is aimed at implicating the natural in its social, economic, and
historical conditions of production.
All effective knowledges are in a sense both manifestos and polemi
cal. Freud's theories of sexuality are manifestos in the construction of a

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 Teresa L. Ebert 555

new kind of subjectivity more suitable for the rising industrial capitalism.
So is Foucault's notion of discourse and the history of sexuality founded
on it. However, it is not only radical changes in culture that propel
manifestos. Einstein's 1905 paper on "Special Relativity" contesting
Newtonian absolute time and space is a groundbreaking manifesto in
science, as is Heisenberg's 1927 paper on Quantum-theoretic kinematics
and mechanics in which he formulated his "Uncertainty Principle." His
scientific text is a manifesto indeed, for in it Heisenberg declares "We
cannot know, as a matter of principle, the present in all its details,"
thereby calling into question the very possibility of such fundamental
concepts as causality and identity (qtd. in Jammer 330).
Some of these texts are nowpart of the Western canon. This is another
way of saying that manifestos are produced by historical conditions and
are not simply the result of individual "will" or the ideas of a rebel group.
By the same token, there are manifestos that have not been absorbed into
the canon, and their contesting critiques remain as active today as when
they were written. Marx's manifestos on capitalism, in which he contests
the conditions of class relations and social inequality, are an example of
this mode of continuously resisting manifestos. The mainstream resis
tance to these manifestos is no more a matter of authorial insight than is
the canonic absorption of more favored manifestos?rather, the cultural
incorporation or resistance to specific manifestos is an effect of the
historical conditions with which they engage.
Those struggle-texts and change-writings by Freud, Foucault, Einstein,
Heisenberg, and Nietzsche are all manifestos and polemics written
against the cultural contradictions of capitalism. Those struggle-writings
by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg all engage not merely
the cultural contradictions of capital but also its very founding class
contradictions', the exploitative relations of capital and labor.

Marginalizing the Manifesto, Rejecting the Polemical

In the circles of ruling knowledges, the manifesto and the polemic have
always been represented as forms of "crude" thinking or more often as
non-thinking: as dogmatic pronouncements that are, to make the matter
worse, written in an even "cruder" language. In the dominant cliches, the
manifesto is formulaic, badly written, and an embodiment of hostility.
For example, Foucault, whose early works were exemplary polemics,
now, as a new Master of hegemonic knowledges, decries polemics,
declaring that the polemicst "wages war" against "an adversary, an
enemy" and aims at "abolishing him" ("Polemics" 382).

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 556 jac
Mainstream critics have always tried to marginalize the manifesto
and polemical writings by appealing to the "subtle," the "understated,"
and the "ironic" as marks of thoughtfulness, reflectiveness, and complex
ity. Manifestos, of course, always transgress norms and either implicitly
or explicitly show that subtlety is not so much the quality of thoughtful
writing as it is the ideology of the normative. Brecht, perhaps more than
others, has made this point clear through his practice of plumpes Denken,
what Walter Benjamin annotates as, "coarse thinking" (199-200). The
manifesto is the space of Brechtian "coarse thinking"?a demystification
of the subtle and the ironic and a demonstration of how these seeming
marks of thoughtfulness are, in fact, obscuring strategies and diversions
that direct attention away from why a point is made to how it is articulated.
Subtlety focuses on the "procedures" of writing and occludes the writing' s
historical purpose and social interventions. In contrast, coarse thinking
foregrounds the manifesto's interventionist writing.
The common dismissals of the manifesto and the polemic have
erased?from the scene of social contestation?all those ideas that can
provide a debate over priorities and have substituted the noncontrover
sial, the non-offending for conceptual daring and intellectual risk-taking.
In a recent overview of cultural and literary criticism in the United States
today, Richard Woodward writes that one can no longer find a robust
exchange of ideas. Quoting novelist and critic Dale Peck, he says it has
all become a "game" filled with

friends blurbing friends through their agents and editors, reviews couched
in tepid praise out of fear over payback. 'It's a terrible time to have an
opinion, and a terrible business to have an opinion in . . ."

The polemic is now, like critique, summarily dismissed as "negative," as

"trashing" and as anti-social. Woodward, continues,

Amazon.com could teach everyone a thing or two about eliminating the

critic. Who wants interference from opinionated voices when you can
launch a title with puffery from in-house cheerleaders or the author's
friends and relatives? (Amazon once asked me to review a book. I agreed
but told them I disliked it. They promptly withdrew the offer, admitting
they were looking for 'something positive.')

The discursive threat that the mainstream feels from coarse thinking is,
in part, caused by the fact that the "crude" in the manifesto works as a
strategy for confronting the hegemonic. Coarse thinking is an integral

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 Teresa L. Ebert 557

part of all intellectual interventions. Subtle thinking, which is naturalized

as deep thinking, is always a mode of conservative intellectual consoli
dation and part of the mainstream's attempts to manufacture consensus.
The genealogy of "coarse thinking," in its materialist sense, can be
traced in modern and contemporary thinking back to Marx and Engels
(who not only opposed the Young Hegelians for fetishizing the subtle
but also rejected the very practice as a mode of scholasticism) up
through Brecht (who taught audiences "coarse thinking" as a resis
tance against bourgeois sentimentality represented as subtlety) and
now continuing in some contemporary leftist writing, although it is
increasingly under attack.
Most mainstream attacks on the manifesto and the polemic, as I have
already indicated, are conducted under the alibi of "subtlety" and "style"
against "crude" thinking. But, in actuality, these are not so much ques
tions of "style" as they are instances in the larger social struggles over
social priorities among contending classes.
The most concerted attacks on the manifesto now are from the
neoliberal market forces that are attempting to exclude ideas from the
lives of citizens and in their place introduce fantasies of consumption and
sentimentality. In his recent book, The Business of Books: How Interna
tional Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We
Read, Andre Schiffrin describes how Alberto Vitale, an international
banker who was brought in to replace one of the chief editors at Random
House, wrote a memo in which he ordered, "Pantheon would no longer
publish political works." Pantheon, which used to publish books like
VoncaulVsHistory of Sexuality, oneof the supreme polemics of postmodern
writings, nowadays publishes books like How to Win at Golf... Without
Actually Playing Well.
The attack on the manifesto and polemic, however, is not limited to
blacklisting the genre of manifesto and its writers in the traditional
academy or by big global publishing cartels. The new academy of the
"post" is equally active in trying to marginalize the manifesto and the
polemic even though?as I will demonstrate in my discussion of Fou
cault?the "post" academy itself came into power through its own
manifestos and polemics against Sartrian Existentialism, Levi-Strauss'
structuralism, and humanism, in general.
JnPolemicization: The Contingency of the Commonplace, Benjamin
Arditi and Jeremy Valentine, deconstruct the polemic for its decided
interventions. In its place, they put a mode of contingency and
undecidability that evades closure. For them an effective polemic is not

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558 jac
one that marks class struggle as the dynamic of history but instead one that
renders the category of history itself an open-ended discourse. Their main
point is that "Polemicization is aleatory" (vii). It is a mode of
overdetermined textuality whose formation and outcome are unpredict
able. In theorizing the polemic as undecidable, they treat it more as an
internal re-balancing of conflicting issues rather than an intervention in
the existing order.
The manifesto and its polemic, from this deconstructive perspective,
are simply practices for re-activating questions and not for making any
decisions. "Polemicization," they write, "reveals the undecidable status
of decisions" (126). This is a formalist understanding of the manifesto
and polemic. Such a hermeneutic view, in the name of a resistance to
closure, is itself a closure, reducing everything to a circular series of
isolated language acts. As they write, the "contestation of representation
remains within representation itself as that which falsifies it" (xii). As a
language act, the manifesto turns the "certain" into the "uncertain" and is
itself turned into an "uncertainty." The "outside" and "inside," in other
words, become supplementary and not oppositional. This is seen as
putting foundations into dispute. But this is a move that comes close to
textual transcendence and ends up a-politicizing foundations that are not
simply epistemological but class-based.
True polemic, then, for Ariditi and Valentine, is a resistance to the
closure of the commonplace and demonstrates that the commonplace
always already "exceeds" itself and, as such, does not have any decidable
meaning. Marxist polemic?which is critique-al of this hermeneutic
approach and works to demystify the commonplace as a site of class
politics?is itself marginalized as a dogmatic closure. We are back again
to the play of the subtle seen as effective intervention into the closural and
the marginalization of "coarse thinking" as a transgressive, antibourgeois
mode of writing.

Foucault and his (Anti)Polemics

So far, I have suggested that the manifesto is a vigilant form of interven
tion into existing knowledges and that attempts to dismiss the manifesto
and the polemic as modes of non-knowledge are closely tied to power. To
illustrate this, I would like to very briefly examine the trajectory of the
manifesto and the polemic in the writings of Michel Foucault, who begins
by writing manifestos and polemics when he is on the margins attempting
to open new spaces of knowledge and social practices. His own change
writings range from his early "archeology of the human sciences" in the

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 Teresa L. Ebert 559

Order of Things to his genealogical rewritings of "monumental history"

and power-knowledge regimes in the History of Sexuality, vol 1., which
is an exemplary polemic. It is a series of inj unctions against the repressive
hypothesis and for what he calls, his "new 'economy' of power" in
"regimes of truth" ("Truth" 61). But Foucault ends up bitterly opposing
the polemical as unethical after he is, himself, installed as a new Master
of hegemonic knowledges.
In an interview shortly before his death, Foucault denounced polem
ics at great length, claiming that the polemic is "a parasitic figure on
discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth" ("Polemics" 382).
"Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of polemic?" he asks (383).
But the polemic, as I have already shown, is, in fact, a necessary practice
for generatingnewknowledges. Foucaultparodies polemic as mimicking
"wars, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting for
ward as much of one's killer instinct as possible" (383). He warns it is
"really dangerous" to pursue "truth by such paths." As proof of these
dangers, he cites "the debates in the USSR over linguistics or genetics not
long ago," thereby reviving that old bogeyman of bourgeois science?
"Lysenkoism"?as "the real consequences of a polemic attitude" ("Po
lemics" 383). But what Foucault is doing here is substituting dogma for
polemic. Lysenkoism is a textbook case of the institutionalization of
dogma in the dominant regime of power-knowledge relations. It is quite
the opposite of polemic, which is oppositional struggle-writing against
hegemonic ideas.
As the new master of a current regime of truth, Foucault tries to
preserve its hegemony by turning the search for truth into a "morality"
that "concerns the relation to the other." He does so, on the one hand, by
banning all critique-al polemic as a form of Stalinist dogma?and this
from the former change-writer who had once called for "permanent
critique" in his "What is Enlightenment?"?and, on the other hand, by
allowing only carefully constrained dialog. The path of truth is now a
"game" of "questions and answers," what he calls a "reciprocal elucida
tion," that he says, is "at once pleasant and difficult?in which each of the
two persons takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and
by the accepted form of the dialogue" ("Polemics" 381-82). In the anti
polemic, in other words, the right to question is now bestowed by the very
authority being questioned. The inquiry into truth is reduced to a safe
conversation, a dialog, constrained by the acceptable bounds of the
dominant "regime of truth" to which the participants must first agree in
order to be granted the "right" to speak. Such a "right" certainly was

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 560 jac
denied Galileo's polemics against the hegemony of church science by its
clerical keepers. Questioning, for Foucault, no longer struggles to change
what is, but instead is simply a "pleasant" game of "reciprocal" reassur
ance. Unlike Foucault, however, the polemic never leaves Marx's texts,
which remain a continuous series of manifestos, of writings in struggle.

Return to Marx: The Manifesto as Root Knowledge

In contrast to Foucault' s writings, which focus on cultural issues, treating
them as more or less autonomous, Marx uses the manifesto to engage the
fundamental conditions of social problems?that is, as the effects of the
primary relations between labor and capital, which means, as effects of
the class struggles between the two antagonistic classes. Unlike Foucault,
Marx thus produces root knowledge. The first chapter of the first volume
of Capital is exemplary of the use of the manifesto and the polemic to
produce the critique-al understanding needed for social change. His
argument is that value resides in human labor and that the accumulation
of capital is the effect of the exploitation of human labor?an exploitation
that has produced a commodity culture and reduced human relations to
the fetishized relations among objects. The logic of capitalism, he argues
later, is that "The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on
the domination of capitalist over worker" ( 899). Marx's purpose is not
simply a hermeneutic reading of labor or capital or class. Rather, he uses
the polemic to produce the root knowledges needed for social change.
Having marked the problem, he then argues in one of his other polemical
texts, the Critique of the Gotha Program, that this regime will come to an
end only in a society that inscribes "on its banner: From each according
to his ability, to each according to his needs!" (Tucker 531).

Toward a Red Polemic

To foreground the manifesto and the polemic today is one of the most
urgent tasks of theorists and pedagogues in part because the manifesto
and polemic desediment the settled discourses of culture and, in doing so,
open up a space for the struggle for change. All root knowledges go
beyond (re)describing the world; they interpret it to change it. The
manifesto and the polemic are change-writing and, as such, they begin
with the de-familiarization of the daily?the making strange of the
habitual and the accustomed. The polemic is the suspension of the
customary, and since the customary is always subtle, the manifesto,
through its polemical pressure, introduces "coarse thinking" as an inter
vention into the commonplace and the commonsense.

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 Teresa L. Ebert 561

"Clearly," Marx writes in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of

Right, "the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons
and the material force must be overthrown by material force." But, Marx
continues, "theory also becomes material force once it has gripped the
masses" (Early 251).
"Theory as material force" is the manifesto writing of our time?
what I call, the red polemic. The red polemic turns theory into a force for
social change by producing class consciousness. It does not simply
produce a hermeneutic reading of class, nor does it advocate a "sentimen
tal, Utopian, mutton-headed socialism" (Tucker 142). Rather, red polemic
is the root pedagogy of revolutionary collectivity, which is the condition
of praxis for the "transcendence of private property" (Tucker 84). Red
polemic is the pedagogy for the transformation of" everything existing"
because, as Lenin argues, "Without revolutionary theory there can be no
revolutionary movement" (Tucker 19).1
State University of New York
Albany, New York

Notes
1. A version of this text was published in Working Papers in Cultural
Studies.

Works Cited
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Benjamin, Walter. Reflections. New York: Harcourt, 1978.

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Howe, Irving, ed. Literary Modernism. New York: Fawcett, 1967.

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York: McGraw, 1966.

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-. Early Writings. Trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. New

York: Vintage, 1975

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Ed. Dirk
Struik. New York: International, 1971.

Schiffrin, Andre. The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates

Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read. London: Verso,
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Tucker, R., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. New York: Norton.

Voloshinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav

Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1973.

Woodward, Richard B. "Reading in the Dark." Village Voice Literary Supple

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Nominations Solicited

The Gary A. Olson Award is given for the most

outstanding book on rhetorical and cultural theory
each year. The award was generously endowed by
Professor Olson, Interim Associate Vice President for
Academic Affairs at the University of South Florida
St. Petersburg. JAC readers are invited to nominate
articles for this award by contacting the Editor.

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