Emily LaBarge
This text was performed as part of the event MANIFESTO!, held on March 19, 2025, at KGB Bar in Manhattan.
Emily LaBarge (second from left) readies her manifesto at the March 19 event.
It can feel hard these days to imagine a future that is much different, or even very long at all. Every time I read about stockpiling nukes, rare earth minerals, hell raining down, and so on—I think about what it would have been like to live in a time during which it was not yet possible for humanity to destroy itself, and its unwitting habitats, with such extravagance.
We’re here to talk about criticism, but of course, where futurity is concerned, nothing is unrelated. The present—and the past—condition the imaginary of the future, because we have inherited, good and bad, their terms and principles, especially the invisible ones. Even in opposition, we build from what we know. Which doesn’t mean the human mind isn’t infinite.
I’m not a cynic or a nihilist (maybe an anarchist), but when considering a manifesto for the reformation of criticism, all I could think of—other than “beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” already taken—was the phrase “bad infinity” (also an excellent band name). Used and abused, from Hegel to Lukács and so on, I am drawn to Adorno writing about “bad infinity” in “The Essay as Form,” his sublime, manifesto-like text about form as argument; form as non-form; form as freedom from tyranny and expectation and linearity; form as the unstable, the protean, the unknowable, the anti-fascist. “Bad infinity” is when ideas pass through the object of attention, which might be an artwork, in search of legitimization.
No doubt many of us here can think of countless practical things we’d like to see in critical contexts—more curiosity, less credulity, no bullshit, closer paying of attention, which Frank O’Hara described as “life, or its only evidence.” Ethical frameworks, fewer corporate conglomerates, stable employment. No dismissal, censorship, intimidation for actually enacting an actual politics. Writers who believe in collective action and solidarity, a belief in risk versus the status quo. But of criticism itself? The best criticism is delegitimate, heretical, anarchic, not just because of what it says, but because of how it says it. I’d be flagrantly missing my own point to pronounce edicts about anyone else’s how. If the future of criticism lies anywhere, it’s in what we can’t yet imagine, in what exceeds the terms available.
“Next time someone tells you desire / Is a trick of grammar, / Tell him / If what I have is what I said I wanted / It’s not what I want / But I don’t know its name.” So cautions the sardonic narrator of Helen DeWitt’s short story “Here is Somewhere,” an alternative telling of the Wizard of Oz. In her story, instead of receiving their missing organs and characteristics, the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Lion only pretend to have changed, so as not to disappoint “the frightened old wizard” who has told them lack is possession, absence is presence. Here is somewhere is neither nor—it is between those terms, a nonspecific specific, a future indeterminate.
Here is somewhere; is not over the rainbow; is a paean for the anti-manifesto manifesto. I realize that’s like, when whatever friendly spirit arrives, wishing for more wishes. But now is the time to be shameless about openly wanting more, just as much as not knowing what.
Emily LaBarge is a Canadian writer based in London. Her work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, frieze, and the Paris Review, among other publications. Dog Days will be published in the UK by Peninsula Press in 2025. Excerpts appeared in the winter 2023 issue of Granta and the autumn 2023 issue of Mousse.