Manifesto

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We think that the existing models for academic and critical publishing privilege and perpetuate existing hegemonies, and that critical form needs sustained intervention and experiment.

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The Earth was flat, said cartographers and kings, and it looked Euclidean, no matter the coordinates. But as imperialism sent ships out to follow lines of capital until they ended, people eventually ended up where they’d begun—giving the lie to the flat plane theory of progress.

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Even modern maps are just two-dimensional manifolds, imprisoned by the hegemony of unilateral motion.

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What would happen if the avante garde occupied the critical essay, if the essay was broken apart and room was made, recesses opened up?  Critique could happen into pockets of space, move through alternate rooms, make room for moments where time is suspended; given space to meander, it could find unpredictable paths or routes, create new forms of critical thought.

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These experiments enact and instrumentalize our work as a way to disrupt traditional academic discourse—not by rejecting the critical, but by subverting it.

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At large scales, the Earth folds up on itself; it only looked flat because the perspective was limited to the singular human eye. On a map, each quadrilateral might be compared to the reach of that single gaze. By just standing in any one spot on the grid, it is impossible to know what shape manifold Earth takes: is it flat, or a sphere—or a torus, a bottle, a blossom? It is a manifold of unrevealed proportion, until each piece of the grid is disabused of its flattening impression of objectivity.

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A true innovation or experiment—an intervention—in criticism puts the form of the critique in direct conversation with the work that it addresses.

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Thus, MANIFOLD publishes works of criticism that experiment with form and perspective, that find room and leave space, while still remaining, first, critiques.