Wherein I enumerate the elusive qualities of brilliant manifestos.
1. They are clarifying and mysterious at the same time.
2. They are inconclusive.
3. They leave thready holes into which the reader’s imagination can spin its own connections. Like good fiction, they leave much unstated. Like seduction, like flirtation, they contain a suggestion without a promise.
4. None of this amounts to obfuscation.
5. They are lyrical.
6. Their propositions are vague and untestable; a manifesto is not a positivist exercise.
7. They are passionate about a set of details not previously subject to passion, at least not in the particular assembly gathered into the manifesto at hand.
8. They make their authors seem both crackpots and seers in equal measure.
9. They require a touch of naiveté, of dreaming, to maintain sincerity against the cynicism inherent in critique.
10. They contain hints of the process by which they were derived; they refuse to conceal the tumultuous history that led one proposition to be linked to another.
11. They are proclamations without prescriptions, offering a way of thought, not a solution to a problem.
