Will Daddario

Shift Abstract:

manifesto

From Latin, manifestare: to make public, to reveal, disclose, clarify

Etymologically, the manifesto has immediate associations with performing and the public. Manifestos are traditionally understood to involve putting ideas on show, making thoughts conspicuous, or with publicising a particular philosophy or worldview. In turn, as Martin Puchner has noted, both manifesto and theatre refer to the act of making visible: manifesto is derived from the Latin verb manifestare, which means to bring into the open, to make manifest and theatre from the Greek theatron, a place of seeing (Puchner 2002: 449).

Puchner has also discussed the performative nature of the manifesto, as that which construes words as having the power to change the world, rather than merely represent it. In particular, he suggests, the manifesto wants to manifest a futurist performativity in which the present act of revolt, the manifesto performed is understood to mark the beginning of a new future.

The PSi Performance and Philosophy working group invites participation and contributions to A Manifesto Workshop to be held at PSi 16 in Toronto.

This workshop will explore the dimensions of the manifesto’s performativity:

* an act of self-situating and self-explicating;

* writing towards an invisible public or a people-to-come;

* as a critical practice;

* thinking the manifesto as a genre vs. the manifesto as a highly contextualized act

The workshop will operate in two parts:

(1) Seminar with sub-groups who will read around prior to arrival at the conference and

(2) Presentations/Performances in manifesto form.

In particular, the co-ordinators are interested in facilitating a relay of manifestos prior to the conference, such that we might perform a public manifesto conversation between multiple parties. In this instance, a manifesto could be a letter, object, image, or any combination of these that can be passed along to another for a response.