THE MANIFESTO IS DEAD! THE MANIFESTO IS DEAD!
“Writing a manifesto means self-actualization to the highest degree. It necessitates a deft attention to the world that is akin to prayer.”
THE NEW CRITIC
Cathy Li is a 22-year-old living in Brooklyn. She recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s in English Literature and writes the Substack catharsis.
The age of the manifesto is over. Luigi Mangione’s 242-word untitled, handwritten document the internet dubbed ‘the mini-festo’ is not the Unabomber’s 35,000-word Industrial Society and Its Future nor Valerie Solanas’s wonderfully evocative 40-page S.C.U.M (Society for Cutting Up Men). And yet the spirit of the manifesto haunts contemporary writing.
Self-published personal essays on Substack can read just as urgent and propositional. People used to read the Bible and now they read personal essays. I am not exempt from this. As the feminist activist Carol Hanisch once said, “The Personal is Political.” There is a magical, seductive quality to the first person — the easy accessibility into the author-narrator’s life, how the nature of the “I” offers a claustrophobic proximity to all the sordid details of a personal experience aided through shimmering images, poetic prose, threaded storylines. In the past, the dominant mode for narration was the omniscient third person, providing multiple perspectives across time and space. But the most influential prose from the past decade, in both fiction and nonfiction, is written in the first person. Contemporary prize-winning novels like My Brilliant Friend, The Goldfinch, Conversations with Friends, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, as well as voicey, diaristic novels like Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle series and Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, are just a few of the literati titles that come to mind.
The coinciding meteoric rise and sales success of autobiographical, lesson-laden memoirs like Michelle Obama’s seminal Becoming, Tara Westover’s Educated, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love in the literary market is more than a mere indicator of shifting tastes toward the “I.”1 In many of these first-person pieces, there is often a clean interpretation of the narrated events and an implied lesson at the end of the story, whether that be about the plight of modern dating in The Cut’s Sex Diaries or about more sobering topics like the complexities of solidarity and identity politics within marginalized communities in Cathy Park Hong’s essay, “An Education,” from her 2020 collection Minor Feelings. There is a shared link between the personal essay and the memoir in style and sometimes in form: both genres prioritize knowledge but only through the perspective of the knower, equating an individual’s introspection as interpretation of an ultimate, universal truth.2
After college, I was fatigued with writing about my personal life, especially since I had written a monstrously long, 15,000-word blend of personal essay and film analysis for my thesis. The project aimed to parse loneliness as it impacts intimacy, estrangement, isolation, and desire by focusing on three Greta Gerwig films while also exploring the narrator’s coming-of-age story (mine) to investigate the solitary nature of growing-up and city-dwelling. For months I obsessed over this project, from the literature review to the granular syntax structure of my sentences. My favorite part was carving an objective argument about the media I consumed, interrogating portrayals of contemporary issues to write widely about what that says about our cultural imagination.
I was always more fond of literary analysis and interpretation than writing fiction. Compared to my peers, it seemed quite obvious by the many quiet half-nods in workshops that I lacked the gene many already had for writing fiction and poetry: the ability to grasp at something amorphous in the imagination and render it material through prose. Literary criticism was infinitely more desirous because it required me to treat the text with mathematical precision, to pry it open for meaning and interpretation. I was better served utilizing my judgment and discernment to enjoy the feelings of artistic experience rather than channeling it into creative exercise. Every time I knifed up the text, I was looking at the radical contexts I lived in and how they shaped me, rather than the other way around.
While the project aimed to pair film criticism with personal reflections so as to break up the media’s pathological analysis of “loneliness,” the mental and emotional exhaustion I felt from mining my life for content alerted me that this sort of writing was not something I could sustain in the long term, that my energy could be better utilized elsewhere. Writing about loneliness in particular made me feel, well, lonely. In the throes of it I shuttered myself in a small-town Airbnb outside of Burlington and wrote on yellow legal pads about female friendship, interpersonal fallouts, and young adulthood. My friends often joked that I was “practicing for my thesis” by avoiding any social obligation and declining to go outside that semester.
It was also the constant appearance of the “I” in my writing that was off-putting. “I” was a constant reminder that no matter how I tried to imagine myself out of discomforting emotional situations, I was only ever writing in isolation and to myself. I began to long for something beyond the confessional, defensive style reserved for the personal essay — something equally provocative but much more energized, dazzling, and largely untapped. It meant a great deal to me to have a hermeneutics to describe what it felt like to be young.
My braided essay ended up being fine, though a little rushed; it garnered no departmental recognition. I doubt that in the end a few glimmering paragraphs meant anything to the panel readers.
Despite my best efforts at convincing myself that my senior creative writing thesis would become my magnum opus, I failed to make a grand, gestural statement with my undergraduate degree in English. The week after I walked the graduation stage in May, I pondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to write a novella or a dense collection of obscure poetry instead of spending the past four years anxious about my social obligations on weekends or positioning myself well for summer internships.
It’s bad right now to be a college graduate. The job market is unforgiving and bleak. After June, I moved back home, and while adjusting to post-college life, I have found myself shackled to my algorithms, consuming whatever the cyberspace deems worthy to put on my plate (which is very often AI slop and listicles from celebrity gossip magazines). My friends, unemployed and employed alike, have expressed similar sentiments, struggling for the right language to describe living out in the oligarch-governed real world of big-data divination and tired politics, equating post-grad life to sleepwalking.
Disillusionment is not new. Cinematic explorations of this existential plight are plentiful, from Mike Nichols’s 1967 The Graduate to Noah Baumbach’s 1995 Kicking and Screaming. There are even more essays like this one about the listless ennui of entering society as a young individual teeming with potential and the golden resource of time. Post-grad blues didn’t just appear out of nowhere, nor did the anxieties about where our global economy is headed and the dangerous polarization in our politics.
When summer rolled around, I tried to temporarily sedate my anxieties by preoccupying myself socially. I wanted to avoid lounging around long enough to be asked questions about what my plans for the future looked like after my magazine internship. In early June, my friend announced they were writing a manifesto about Neo-Luddism, a modern, leaderless movement that opposes modern technologies.3 Its origins are based in the 19th-century Luddite movement that spawned in response to the Industrial Revolution, in which English textile workers revolted by destroying the automated machinery they believed was destroying their lives. In my friend’s telling, however, Neo-Luddism seemed less about destroying smartphones and data centers and more about abstaining from the internet and returning to print media. My friend was always talking about going analog and moving to a “dumb phone”: a Nokia-esque device with all the basic buttons for call communication and texting without the distraction of social media content. I’d never heard of Neo-Luddism up until then, and I felt a gravitational pull toward the argument for a less distracted and more embodied existence. My interest in manifesto-writing was similarly piqued; here was a new form of introspective analysis that did not hinge on gutting yourself for views.
If you look up the term “Neo-Luddism” with the word “Reddit” attached to the end, one of the first things that comes up is Ted Kaczynski, more commonly known as the Unabomber. If you click around a little more, you end up with links to Kaczynski’s 1995 manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future. And if you look up Industrial Society, somehow you end up reading about Luigi Mangione and his mini-festo.4
Aside from its brevity, Mangione’s alleged manifesto, which has been largely removed from every Reddit thread to align with guidelines regarding violent content, is most striking for the confessional voice attributed to the committed murder.5 The manifesto is loose in style, abstract, and barely fleshed out in the points that it appears to make. Mangione’s lackadaisical approach to content and rhetoric are especially evident in these lines: “Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and I frankly do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.” He further defers to those who have already expounded on corruption and greed in the American healthcare system in his references to journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal and documentarian Michael Moore and invokes the first person to legitimize his sentiments and, in turn, his actions.
Unlike Kaczynski’s or Solanas’s manifestos, whose authors went to great lengths to disseminate their work, Mangione’s manifesto was found on his person, along with a slew of other items, including a handgun and a silencer, when he was arrested in Altoona, Pennsylvania for the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson. In contrast, the other authors distributed their ideologies with intent; Solanas sold S.C.U.M by passing it out as a pamphlet on the street herself, charging $1.00 for men and $.50 for women, and Kaczynski, whose writing style and specific phrasing was so identifiable that it cost him his secrecy and several consecutive life terms in prison, threatened further mail bombings if The New York Times or The Washington Post refused to publish Industrial Society.
Mangione’s manifesto reads more like a suicide note in its ineffectual flourishes and melodramatic prose:
“I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming… It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”
Compare that to the opening lines of Industrial Society and Its Future:
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.”
Depending on which Latin dictionary you consult online, the word “manifesto” is either derived from the word manifestus or the neuter manifestum, both meaning clear, plain, obvious, or unmistakable. Oxford English Dictionary primarily defines “manifesto” as:
“A public declaration or proclamation, written or spoken; esp. a printed declaration, explanation, or justification of policy issued by a head of state, government, or political party or candidate, or any other individual or body of individuals of public relevance, as a school or movement in the Arts.”
Historically, the manifesto as a written declaration has had a direct relationship to the printing press. Martin Luther’s set of theses for example, thrived due to the invention of Gutenberg’s press, spearheading the Protestant Reformation. Similarly, the move from the traditional wood-framed screw press to modern rotary presses in the late 1840s allowed for faster, cheaper production of pamphlets; since then, the word manifesto has been popularly linked with political opposition and revolution (most notably, The Communist Manifesto).
The manifesto, despite being incendiary for its centripetal individualism, engages abstract audiences, a collective “we,” and is anti-descriptive. Distinctive for its stylistic urgency and the certainty and conviction with which it delivers its arguments, the manifesto aspires to become an inflection point, to spark a radical movement in history. As is the case with The Communist Manifesto, the ensuing movement dates back to the document that inspired it.
Art manifestos are a separate entity altogether, though they are also conceived during turbulent sociopolitical times when the people are apathetic (e.g. with the rise of modernism in response to World War I).6 Often, art manifestos read as a set of theses rather than a set of proclamations, more as how-to guides for making art and rationalizing the changing nature of aesthetics with empiricist frameworks than explicit calls to action. Furthermore, art manifestos are lyric, while the political manifesto is not. Despite this distinction, political manifestos and art manifestos exist on the same continuum; art manifestos like Filippo Tommasso Marinetti’s The Futurist Manifesto and Andre Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism end up inspiring sociopolitical movements that often bear the same name. The example of The Futurist Manifesto, in particular, points to how art can influence politics by proclaiming broader cultural change, as the rise of futurism in Italy coincided with the nation’s overthrow by fascism. In this way, manifestos, political or not, are often conflated with propaganda, as they can easily serve many motives.
The manifesto’s ultimate goal is to incite reaction; when compared to the defensive confessional style of memoir and personal essay, it is always writing on the offensive. It knows its audience and, more importantly, the ideas and people it is up against. A manifesto’s intentions must be clearly outlined, and they have to be accessible, written in a way that could be digestible to the average reader. In Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and Its Future, for example, his language is measured, but the document as a whole maintains itself as a searing attack on leftist politics and the ideological institutions governing the masses.
Kaczynski’s is one of the more effective manifestos. The enthusiastic Mangione, whose vast digital footprint includes a shitposting Twitter account during his time at Penn, praises Kaczynski’s manifesto, rating it 4 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.7
With all the talk on the internet about the power of reciting mantras and affirmations (like Esther Hicks’s viral soundbite on TikTok, “Everything is working out for me at any given moment in time,” and “Lucky Girl Syndrome,” a viral tactic to attract your desires by speaking them into existence), it is curious why our generation does not yet have its manifesto. The reason why could be due to a variety of factors: our generation’s obsession with nihilism evidenced by the empathic embrace of meaning-subjective content, shitposting, lolcowing online, and doomscrolling on social media; the slowly bleeding-out state of the publishing industry; declining rates of media literacy and so forth.8 There have been attempts to emulate the Kaczynskian event of the manifesto (not the 20-year mail bomb campaign but the widespread cultural discourse that circulates after a manifesto’s publication), like the Dark Mountain Project’s self-published pamphlet Uncivilisation on the ecological crisis, Harper’s Magazine’s 2020 open letter “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” against cancel culture, and to a much lesser extent, the “Manifesto” corporate value statements printed all over Lululemon’s posthumous cherry red shopping bags.9 And while Substack is a less bureaucratic route for publishing than, say, a magazine or any other legacy print periodical, I really doubt that the next great American masterpiece manifesto will be disseminated on the platform. Manifestos in the digital form have, in the past, fumbled distribution efforts compared to their print predecessors. On the internet, text becomes iterative; it morphs into image in brightly colored Canva-templated infographics and loses its original meaning through reposts, AI summaries, and botched interpretations. If the next manifesto is digitally published, its message would be constantly stripped of its context in quote tweets and resposts, butchered, reassembled into some uncanny, bastardized version of itself, and then fed to us as “influential content.” I think of videos from Neo-Luddites who exasperatedly admit that the next great revolution against modern technology is going to have to take place on online forums like Reddit and gain significant, algorithmized attention on Instagram and TikTok feeds before the Neo-Luddites can ever come close to achieving their goals. In the digital age where distraction is imminent and attention is rampantly filtered, I can’t help but wonder if there is enough momentum for this movement to move beyond its theory and into praxis.
Times are tough. I am boiling in existential doom and I would like my experiences to mean something. We don’t experience the world directly, like we did in the 19th century, but instead through interpretations of life on our screens. Everyone I know who has a job hates their job, and everyone I know who is unemployed hates their life. I’m in my twenties, the decade of my life in which I’m constantly soul-searching for answers. I would like to be useful. Audre Lorde once said, “You need to reach down and touch the thing that is boiling inside of you and make it somehow useful.” I would really, really like to be useful.
This is my predicament: I really want my life, and I want it to be my own. I know it is impossible for the self to exist in a vacuum, as we are always interpolated by others’ perceptions of us and inundated with messages that shape us unconsciously. We are always subjects.10 Even as I pen this essay, I render myself an object, as many narrators do in their stories about coming of age and becoming. I can’t help but claw at my life, at the worst bits, for some sort of meaning that hardship always culminates into a useful lesson. I have yet to write my own set of proclamations or present theses on how my life ought to look, but I know I want desperately to become, to move myself from a theory of self to the realized thing.
Writing was almost always my coping mechanism in college. I loved to follow my thoughts to a logical conclusion, particularly admiring the fact that a thesis ordered interpretation. It was easier to follow my head than my heart.11 I truly believed that in the end, a narrative would liberate me, cleanse me from the collegiate troubles of dorm life, whisk me away from the dizzying interpersonal spats that set my world on fire, and sedate my anxieties about entering a politically and economically turbulent America after graduation. In plumbing all my experiences for a message, I would exorcise all the insecurity that plagued me about my past and present so that I could bend myself to live less blindly or carelessly in the future. I reasoned that everything could be easily abstracted, that feeling could be reordered into fact. Something as commonplace as heartbreak can be whisked into the world of theory and interpreted to death until the real meaning is visible, dead center.
It is no wonder why personal essays remain so magnetic to me, because the best of them suggest that a life well lived is always imbued with meaning. Every single experience, however minute and meaningless at face value, can be transgressive if squinted at hard enough.
Unlike the personal essay, manifestos are special because they don’t merely interpret events for what they mean, but they envision a whole new world, instead. Writing a manifesto requires reading yourself to the highest extent, thinking beyond the personal and sublimating the self into a collective “we.” It means contextualizing an experience you had into a broader societal reality and orienting it toward a call to action to see the self beyond its self-importance, beyond self-analysis, and reject the need to “do the internal work” a la therapyspeak. Writing a manifesto means self-actualization to the highest degree. It necessitates a deft attention to the world that is akin to prayer.
I want to move beyond the hermeneutics of self-interpretation into action, like a sort of Nietzschean aesthete. I want to be the real thing. I remember in sophomore year, I badly wanted for someone to really read me, to crawl into my skin and see the world through my eyes. I understand now that feeling came from profound loneliness, out of the inability to articulate myself with the limited language I had. As Wittgenstein once aptly put it, “The limits of language mean the limits of my world.” Our vocabulary shapes what we know. Language, after all, is only real if it can be pictured in the real world.
It might be impossible for me to write a manifesto, at least for now. I am too inexperienced and naive to dedicate 5,000-plus words to what the world ought to be, let alone figure out who I want to become. The medium itself is multi-faceted — it is theory on its way to practice, philosophy critically interrogating how to expand itself beyond the philosopher’s sight-line, how to solve a problem of “how to be” by always being in conversation with histories and potential futures.
Manifestos are ultimately about connection and process. Movements are ultimately long processes in the making. In this way, manifestos, with their imaginative qualities, slip in and out of the realm of nonfiction and into fiction’s sphere. Ultimately, manifestos are perspectives.
Some days I lurk on Penn’s English department website and parse through the professors I could have had and the classes I could have taken, wondering if I really squandered my opportunities to make the most out of a prestigious English education. It is easier for me to fantasize being a better writer, an artist worthy of having my words arrive at something material, instead of retroactively seeking martyrdom from a past experience, static in refuge within the genre of creative nonfiction.
The lines are blurry. I am still on my quest to find meaning, despite the pessimistic moment. I turn to the manifesto’s singularity. Instead of the personal essay’s declarative relatability, the manifesto’s urgent tone dares us to keep dreaming.
The manifesto radiates from the self but sublimates into another thing. In this radical transformation, the manifesto speaks for itself in a voice beyond the realms of first person and third person, asking “What is to be done?” In this speech act, the manifesto is almost human-like in its empathy to become something new behind the collective statement of “we.” In order to carry out its ambitions, the manifesto necessitates the collective dreaming for a better, or more articulated, future condition of thoughts and of self. This determined state of the “we” is more inspiring as it is a responsible self lifting up another self.
The self is something I am no longer trying to access through deep examination of contexts and subtexts, but something I want to become. The only way out is not through theory or analysis but through the manifesto as a form of prayer.
I leave with a quote from the famed personal essayist Haley Nahman, who warns about the shortcomings of constant self-analysis and narrative interpretation. She writes, “There’s a certain narcissism to self-deprecation, to the belief that you are exceptionally bad or wrong. The resulting ‘need’ to turn inward enables a familiar spiral. Moving onward and outward, meanwhile, requires a surer foot.”12
It is a soul-less venture to pick at the self for some sort of abstract meaning. Knowledge of the self is not the ultimate project — existing in it is. If a surer foot is what it takes, then we need to know what the stakes are before we step.
POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Ramsey Alsheikh and the founding editors of The New Critic. We met Ramsey our freshman year at Dartmouth taking Arabic classes. We ended up on a study abroad together in Rabat, Morocco in the summer of 2023 and became good friends. Ramsey’s reputation for the polemical and his 6’7” frame precede him. He is the former president of Dartmouth’s Palestinian Solidarity Coalition and the outgoing opinion editor of The Dartmouth.
In our conversation, we discuss the eros of activism, brain-rotted manifestoes, and Ramsey’s relationship to the political imperative through memes, fiction, and law school.
Below is just a taste.*
ELAN Do you want to write a manifesto in the future?
RAMSEY I mean, despite everything I’ve been saying, I still think the manifesto is sexy. I think it’s cool. Why wouldn’t I want to do that? It’s on my bucket list. But I think we need to be realistic, write when you have something to say. And I don’t think if I wrote a manifesto now, just for the hell of it, it would be very interesting. A manifesto, for it to be interesting, has to be a document born out of, you know, a real political need in a certain political moment, right? Kaczynski was forward-looking, forward-facing. Even if, again, for the sake of my future self, I’m not condoning pipe bombing. Not every manifesto is going to be interesting or worth reading. It’s easy to be loud, but it’s much harder to actually do the work…
THE YOUNG AMERICANS
The supervalent memoir is the most dominant genre of contemporary literature in terms of sales volume; memoirs count for as much as 80% of the best-seller list, with sales in this century alone increasing 400% from the 20th century average. Becoming quite literally transformed the literary market by boasting 14 million copies.
The academic Anna Kornbluh says they “are related in her theory of ‘a hegemony of a weakened standpoint epistemology.’” This epistemological framework, Kornbluh argues, was initially developed to advance working-class, feminist, queer, and other minority goals, but in the present culture, it is hostile toward abstraction, and universal knowledge claims, making this popular in many critical theory departments and certain anthropological spheres of academia. I find her style analysis, especially the chapter on writing, to be very illuminating and would recommend it to anyone interested in contemporary literary theory post-Fredric Jameson. Immediacy is kind of like my version of the Bible.
Sometime in July, I received a mostly bare document with links on how to engage in this counter-culture movement — by leaning off device usage and returning to physical media like magazines and CDs for entertainment instead of indulging in streaming subscriptions and overconsuming content online. My friend never wrote that manifesto. From what I know, the document is still blank, except for the cobalt blue hyperlinks littering the page.
There is discourse online about whether or not news outlets circulated the real “manifesto,” and if there is an extended version somewhere out there. The one I reference in this essay can be found here.
A user’s post on complying with Reddit’s site-wide rules regarding Luigi Mangione and related content.
See: Ezra Pound’s A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste. I am not sure if we can categorize this as a manifesto per se but it is among my favorite reads about modernism as an art movement.
Tweets from 2016-2020, https://x.com/PepMangione?lang=en
Other names for this condition are apathy, fatalism, and defeatism.
This is real! Designed by Pentagram, phrases like “Ignore the haters, including yourself,” and “the world is changing at such a rapid rate that waiting to implement changes will leave you 2 steps behind. DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW, DO IT NOW!” were printed on shopper bags in a typeface called “manifesto” (obviously). They used to sell the manifesto printed on their clothing as well.
Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)
 | A guest post by
|
This democracy, and authoritarianism is extreme. The tension between the democratizing effects, and the envy about who controls and owns that are the main sources of conflict. How is that conflict resolved, author? What’s the denouement?