Panel Presentation "Solidifying Solidarities—Formalizing Self-reflexivity and Self-positioning in the Genre of Meta-manifesto"

Professor Carsten Junker and Laura Handl jointly present a paper titled “Solidifying Solidarities-Formalizing Self-Reflexivity and Self-Positioning in the Genre of Meta-manifesto” at the international conference “Recentring Form(s) in and of the Margins: The Politics of Self-Rflexivity. ” The paper is part of the panel “Collaboration, Solidarity and Animal Agency as Affordances of Self-Reflexivity.” Carsten Junker and Laura Handl shed light on a practice in contemporary manifestos which is part of the current upsurge of the form since 2015/2016, of reflecting one's own manifesting and identification as a manifestor. In the paper, this is understood as a meta-aesthetic that can be linked to a break with postmodern textual practices and relates to the potentialities of the manifesto form itself. Junker and Handl propose the term palimpsestism for these texts and argue that they formalize self-reflexivity as solidary relationality. They discuss how the formalization and centring of self-reflexivity in the manifesto, including its affective dimensions, relate to a more recent repositioning and re-centring of the form of the manifesto itself, both in practice and in theory. In their outlook on solidarities, palimpsestic manifestos can be reconciled with and distinguished from modernist and postmodernist precursor manifestos, which in earlier moments facilitated the re-positioning and re-centering of the manifesto form itself, both in practice and in theory.