From Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern by Janet Lyon.

. . . the manifesto form has much to teach us about the problems of modernity: while it may be best known as the no-nonsense genre of plain speech, the genre that shoots from the hip, it is in fact a complex, ideologically inflected genre that has helped to create modern public spheres. Its influence on the history of the modern West, though decisive, has been largely overlooked, perhaps precisely because its apparent rhetorical straightforwardness obscures the degree to which the form is embedded in the contradictions of political representation. On the one hand, the manifesto as we know it from the French Revolution forward is the liberatory genre the narrates in no uncertain terms the incongruous experiences of modernity of those whose needs have been ignored or excluded in a putatively democratic political culture. On the other hand, the manifesto is the genre not of universal liberation but of rigid hierarchical binaries . . . the manifesto participates ina reduced understanding of heterogenous social fields, creating audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity, parceling out political identities across a polarized discursive field, claiming for “us” the moral high ground of revolutionary idealism, and constructing “them” as ideological tyrants, bankrupt usurpers, or corrupt fools. (3)

. . . the manifesto as a genre is constitutive of the public sphere to the degree that it persistently registers the contradictions within modern political life. For while modernity offers ideological assurances of autonomy and individualism within collectivity, it also and at the same time draws on the degferral of those promises. The manifesto records just this breach between modernity’s promissory notes and their payment. In order to understand how the manifesto has kept the records of modernity for the past three centuries, therefore, we must first reopen the historical record of democratic universalism in the west. (8)