Article "Claiming Class: The Manifesto between Categorical Disruption and Stabilization" in Culture, Theory and Critique

In this article Carsten Junker locates the recent resurgence of the manifesto as form on a spectrum between sociopolitical and epistemic disruption and stabilisation. Focusing on contemporary manifestos published in the politically polarised landscape of the United States, it highlights the role that the genre plays in declaring and authorising antagonistic perspectives from specific discursive subject positions. The article situates this pragmatic function within the context of a renewed theory of form interested in functional aspects of genre. It considers the manifesto with respect especially to questions concerning the formation of subjects and demographic groups against the backdrop of divergent conceptualisations of the subject. Of the many recently published sociopolitical manifestos, Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class: A Manifesto for the Working Class (2021) is discussed at length. While this manifesto calls into question what it frames as a dominant mode of subject formation, it in effect stabilises and affirms the very practice of categorisation itself. By insisting on personal experience, among other strategies of authorisation, the manifesto-self turns the manifesto into an identity-based instrument of social documentation. As is argued, this example thus updates the manifesto as a post-postmodern form, a genre of compensation with which to counteract postmodern deconstructions of categorisation.