My journey to the Gatwick already offered something: a gift that should not be ignored. There was a young woman sitting in front of me on the seats prioritised for disabled and older people. She was sitting by the window and she had a case wedged into the seat next to her thus taking up both the two seats. She was also wearing headphones and listening to music from her phone, drifting in her cloud from A to B. This is a common enough sight today: an unconscious rejection of public space and public etiquette. She was doing fine in her bubble and was trying her best to remain comfortably inside of it.
I am conscious that this psychic privatisation of public space is rather commonplace, to the point that even mentioning it runs the risk of appearing distinctly retro. I believe it is worth observing all the same as it is not a universal given, it is a tendency specific to a certain time and space: the one that I happen to occupy. In this state of withdrawing into a private experience whilst in public space, other people are liable to become no more than obstacles, dead meat standing in your path.
A further thing observed en route: seated beside me on the plane was a woman going over lists: an excel chart, a series of word documents and some hand-written notes. From this I gathered she was from some sort of advertising or promotions agency and was attending the Biennale in this professional capacity. The sort of writing she was poring over has, I guess, largely replaced the manifesto, a form I hope to see more of in Venice. Today the carefully worded press release or mission statement is where the action largely is. When political manifestos are produced they all too often read as insipid documents with all the literary weight of a toaster’s operation manual. The manifesto has been largely consigned to the fringes as the political class have become more concerned with the management of appearance thus employing small armies of PR staff in the tit for tat PR offensives waged between the various parties. Blair, for example, maintained till the bitter end that the Iraq war’s unpopularity was due to a failure of communication and was not due to it being a mistaken policy.
Is the manifesto an outmoded form then? Yes perhaps it is, but that does not mean that it is of no use. Rather, it just means that it comes with baggage, with the expectation of being a strident rejection of something or another and of promising more than it can deliver. It is expected to have a rhetorical flair that is public and somewhat theatrical in contrast to the press release that is private and rational in appearance.
