2.1 Polemic before Pamphleteering

Polemic, political agitation, and ad hominem attacks have left important written traces in all scribal and manuscript cultures reaching as far back as ancient Sumer and the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.Footnote ³ These texts often contested the legitimacy of rulers, called the impartiality of judges into question, and sometimes engaged in heretic speculations about the nature or existence of divinities. Yet why are literary historians usually reluctant to describe these texts as pamphlets in the usual, colloquial, hence ahistorical sense of the term? Consider the following two examples from ancient Egypt and fifth-century-BCE China.

In the Egyptian tale The Eloquent Peasant (Sekhti-nefer-medu, 1850 BCE), the poor peasant Khun-Anup petitions the high steward Rensi to receive justice in a case involving donkeys stolen by Nemtynakht, a subordinate of Rensi. In the nine impassioned petitions that make up the bulk of the tale, Khun-Anup develops a theory of ordinary or vulgar justiceFootnote ⁴ that indirectly accuses his rulers Rensi, the Pharaoh Nebkaure, and the magistrates of the Middle Kingdom: ‘The arbitrator is a robber, the remover of need orders its creation, the town is a floodwater, the punisher of evil commits crimes!’Footnote ⁵ Yet instead of being sentenced to death for his accusations, Khun-Anup is rewarded for his rhetorical feats: the literary qualities of Khun-Anup’s petitions are praised so highly by the Pharaoh that neither his legal transgressions nor his rhetorical offenses incur punishment.

In the Book of Mozi (墨子), written during the Warring States period (476–221 BCE), Master MoFootnote ⁶ violently attacks Confucianism which, by the end of the third century, had begun evolving into an official state philosophy. Chapter 39 in particular contains a series of personal attacks against Confucius, extensive use of incestuous wordplay, animalistic insults, and a sharp critique of Confucianism as a philosophical and political proposition: ‘Confucianism’, Master Mo summarizes, ‘is damaging to the people of the world’.Footnote ⁷ Neither the complete text of the Book of Mozi, nor the philosophical tradition it engendered (Mohism) survived China’s ‘philosophical dark age’Footnote ⁸ inaugurated by the hegemony of Confucianism. Yet the Book of Mozi did have a later use as a political text: it was held in high esteem by Mao Zedong, who called Master Mo the ‘Chinese Heraclitus’Footnote ⁹ and thought the text well-attuned to the ideological mainstays of the Cultural Revolution. In the Mozi, Mao found an ally in his rhetorical war against the staunch conservatism and pietism of Confucianism.Footnote ¹⁰

What these two texts have in common is that they failed to circulate widely enough to escape political capture. While The Eloquent Peasant was preserved on no fewer than four distinct papyriFootnote ¹¹ and can therefore be thought to have circulated widely among the literate population of the Middle Kingdom, its fate depended on the good will and personal interests of professional scribes, copyists, collectors, literate patrons, and owners. Conversely, the Mozi was effectively suppressed for two millennia before it was rediscovered as an instrument of revolutionary statecraft. Like most polemical texts written during Antiquity, these texts survived not as polemic, but as religious doctrine, literature, state propaganda, or philosophy, all understood as social practices largely controlled and administered by particularly affluent and powerful social groups. Lacking adequate means of reproduction and circulation and failing to reach a popular social basis beyond the gates of governance and amateur philology, polemical texts generally failed to unleash a political power in any way comparable to their political ambitions.

Contrast The Eloquent Peasant and the Book of Mozi with a crucial counterexample that marks the gradual emergence of a specific system of circulation for polemical texts. In The Clouds (Νεφέλαι, Nephelai, 423 BCE), Aristophanes levels several grave accusations against Socrates. The philosopher is said to corrupt the Athenian youth and to deny the very existence of the gods. More importantly, Socrates is accused of teaching discursive techniques by which citizens might evade their financial, ethical, and political duties, thereby impacting the whole economic fate of the city. By pointing out the social uses of Socrates’ purportedly nefarious teachings in a commerce-oriented city whose population exceeded 250,000 inhabitants,Footnote ¹² The Clouds makes philosophy the urgent concern of the entire political and economic community: the play concerns not only the philosopher in particular, but also the city in general.

Did The Clouds really contribute to the mounting resentment felt by prominent Athenians towards Socrates, as is often alleged? In fact, if Aristophanes’ other comedies usually failed to shape public opinion, The Clouds was a significant exception. It was arguably written for readers, rather than for a theatrical audience, and it had an identifiable literary transmission,Footnote ¹³ thereby indicating a crucial shift from an oral to an increasingly literary, text-oriented culture in Athens. The Clouds, in other words, had a social existence as a kind of pre-modern polemical text, revealing the close relationship between the circulation of literary statements, the growing involvement of the ‘city’ as an object of common political concern, and the progressive emergence of a culture of efficient literary slander against individuals. Once texts were copied and brought to circulate among the population, they were found to wield a uniquely treacherous kind of political power, as Plato repeatedly deplores.Footnote ¹⁴ Political and philosophical campaigns against opponents and competitors could be mounted with little more than a sheet of papyrus, an audience inclined to public polemic, and a set of common political or economic stakes. At the same time Athens discovered the affordances of writing for the administration of commerce and the law, it discovered its affordances and risks as a tool for the pursuit of power. Literature was henceforth perceived to hold a distinct political force: it misled judgment, disseminated slander against individuals, and could be brought to bear on legal proceedings. In fact, the jurors of 399 BCE were too young have attended the original performance of The Clouds. Yet the play seems to have been on the jurors’ minds, attesting to changing perception of polemical literature in Antiquity.Footnote ¹⁵

2.2 A Pamphletary Infrastructure

By reproducing polemical texts, scribes and copyists made them accessible to a growing number of readers in an increasingly wide range of social contexts. Statements made in a theatrical setting could now be decontextualized and used as statements of fact in a criminal trial: writing, in other words, made social context contingent. This central affordance of writing must be understood as an infrastructural transformation in the history of polemic. Once put to papyrus, accusations and satire gained the advantage of being iterable and socially mobile: they could be reproduced, albeit in relatively small quantities, and circulated within several local and institutional contexts at the same time.Footnote ¹⁶

Importantly, this affordance was at first a ‘hidden affordance’, that is, one that was discovered by secondary social actors, rather than by the original addressees.Footnote ¹⁷ The unfolding of a specific political power attached to written polemic was an unexpected offshoot of Greek scribal culture that, in turn, triggered a set of energetic responses seeking to contain the most disruptive effects of polemical texts. In other words, the discovery of the political affordances of writing inaugurated one of the few relative constants in the history of polemical writing. Beginning with scribal cultures and leading up to current digital publics and counterpublics, this historical constant can best be described as an asymmetry between established institutional powers and the infrastructural means of reproduction and circulation of pamphletary writing, from manuscript copies to mimeographs, samizdats, radical imprints, and weblogs.

Very simply put, this asymmetry was detrimental to polemical authors and publics up until the generalization of the printing press and the European Reformation in the early sixteenth century: outright polemic was usually perceived as either overly risky or insufficiently effective. Before the major infrastructural transformations brought about by the printing industry, the disproportion between the affordance of manuscript copies on the one hand, and the slow emergence of stateFootnote ¹⁸ and protocapitalistFootnote ¹⁹ structures, the globalization of trade networks,Footnote ²⁰ the codification of legal frameworks,Footnote ²¹ the appearance of bureaucratic institutions,Footnote ²² the differentiation of social classes and milieusFootnote ²³ on the other hand, usually made written contestation both risky and futile.

There were of course several notable exceptions. The manuscript material that accompanied Proto-Protestant movements in Europe (the Wycliffite heresies in England from the 1370s onwards, for instanceFootnote ²⁴), the medieval polemics against Islam (Riccoldo da Monte di Croce’s Contra Legem Sarracenorum, 1300Footnote ²⁵), and the nascent genre of the antisemitic blood libel (Thomas of Monmouth’s Vita et Passione Sancti Willelmi Martyris Norwicensis, second half of the twelfth centuryFootnote ²⁶) undoubtedly played a crucial role in shaping cultures of invective, critique, and calumny in their respective eras and contexts. Yet it is the printing press that allowed a more general culture of articulating conflict and dissent to emerge in early modern Europe, reversing the asymmetry between instituted powers and polemical counterpublics.Footnote ²⁷

In fact, the production of pamphlets and broadsheets was a mainstay of the printing trade from the beginning, only surpassed in numbers by the indulgences printed on behalf of an enormous range of religious institutions (confraternities, churches, parishes, monasteries, etc.; see Figure 1). The sheer magnitude of this industry is worth considering. In 1480 alone, Augsburg printer Johan Bämler printed 12,000 letters of indulgence. In the same city and that same year, Jodocus Pflanzmann printed 20,000 certificates of confession.Footnote ²⁸ The numbers would keep increasing well into the pre-Reformation period: in 1499–1500, Johann Luscher’s workshop churned out 142,950 indulgences, with other printers setting up additional workshops to cope with the demand.Footnote ²⁹

Figure 1 Printed Cyprus Indulgence, 31 lines. Mainz: Johann Gutenberg, 1454. 1 vellum leaf; 21 x 26 cm.

Incunabula at Princeton, courtesy of Princeton University Library.

These formats responded to an urgent economic necessity. Gutenberg’s work on the Latin Vulgate Bible, for instance, begun soon after 1450 and making first copies available in 1454/1455, depended on enormous and continuous investments in paper that would contribute to his effective bankruptcy by the mid-1450s. The production of indulgences, along with calendars, sensationalized Christian hagiographies, ballads, and broadsheets (advertisements and announcements printed on one side only), ensured both rapid cash-flow for German printers and a degree of leniency from the ecclesiastical authorities.Footnote ³⁰ In turn, the near-industrial production of indulgences made the ‘trafficking in salvation’Footnote ³¹ attractive to the Catholic Church which hoped to finance herculean projects such as the rebuilding of St. Beter’s Basilica in Rome and a new crusade against the Turks.Footnote ³² The absolution of penitent sinners, the production of indulgences via movable type, and the subsidizing of large-scale projects via the mass reproduction of ecclesiastical texts went hand in hand, establishing a three-fold moral, political, and monetary economy around the early printing revolution.

This ‘economy of salvation’Footnote ³³ must be supplemented with what can perhaps best be described as an ‘economy of dissent’ which arose in its immediate wake. Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, which he may have posted on the door of All Saints’ Church in WittenbergFootnote ³⁴ in 1517, was the first volley in a long pamphlet war which ultimately brought about the Reformation (see Figure 2). Luther, then a junior professor of moral theology in Wittenberg, directly attacked the commerce of indulgences:

Writing for ‘a love for the truth and a desire to elucidate it’,Footnote ³⁶ Luther would engender a long tradition of metaphysical-political claims that would profoundly influence the rhetoric of pamphleteering well into the twentieth century (the word ‘truth’ itself, for instance, appears eighteen times in Émile Zola’s 1898 pamphlet J’Accuse … !Footnote ³⁷). The generality acquired by pamphlets during the Reformation therefore made it possible and necessary for polemical claims to become staples of public discourse, rather than being confined to theological disputes. Let me briefly break down the advent of pamphleteering as society-at-large discourse into three main points.

Figure 2 1517 Nuremberg placard edition of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses.

Courtesy of Stabi Berlin. <http://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB00003DCA00000000>

First, Luther’s sweeping indictment of the specific religious practice of indulgences had decidedly general effects, setting off a pamphlet war between innumerable individual and institutional parties, most famously Johann Tetzel, then Grand Commissioner for Indulgences, whose 106 Theses (orig.: Vorlegung, 1518) were printed barely six months after Luther’s own.Footnote ³⁸ Between 1500 and 1530, more than 10,000 individual pamphlets were printed in Germany alone,Footnote ³⁹ establishing key formal features by way of strict economic opportunity: pamphlets were brief (usually two sheets at most), they were printed in large editions of hundreds or thousands, they were affordable or distributed for free, and they circulated widely among the population. Between 1518 and 1526, an estimated 6,000,000 pamphlets were printed.Footnote ⁴⁰

Second, the generality of their claims made texts such as Luther’s Ninety-five Theses the concern not only of ecclesiastical authorities, but of the entire fabric of literate society: criticism of the commerce of indulgences was not only a point of religious doctrine, but it also implicated the material, political, and moral economies of the Church, the printing industry, and the body politic of the region (see Figure 3). Taking note of pamphletary production – and often responding to pamphlets by either publishing other pamphlets or imposing coercive measures – became a political imperative for the authorities and the literate population alike.Footnote ⁴¹ The co-dependency of the development of print infrastructures in Europe, the emergence of an increasingly educated concern for politics among the laity, and the consolidation of organs of censorship must therefore be emphasized. In fact, the sheer mass of polemical publications issued by printing operations of all sizes would render null and void most localized coercive measures in Germany, ranging from regional censorship to prohibition, as early as the early seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴²

Figure 3 Bertold of Regensburg, vernacular sermon in German. Sermones Germanici, manuscript, 1444.

Courtesy of the Austrian National Library. <http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AC13951319>

Third, and in line with this last point, the pamphlet helped establish an early, properly public sphere, the development of which will be the focus of the next section. In the Theses, Luther discovered a popular voice and dispensed with elaborate terminology,Footnote ⁴³ thereby emphasizing the ‘conversational’Footnote ⁴⁴ nature of the pamphlet as a new type of media. The hundreds of copies of the Latin Theses, their translation into German by Kaspar Nützel a few months later, their extraordinary circulation in a matter of months (first to the Catholic centres of Augsburg and Ingolstadt, then across Germany, then across Switzerland,Footnote ⁴⁵ finally across much of EuropeFootnote ⁴⁶), as well as the incipient standardization of German in countless derivative publications (Johannes Pollicarius’ bestselling biographical pamphlet about LutherFootnote ⁴⁷) made ‘the poor’ and ‘the needy’ (Thesis 43) not only the object of Luther’s theological dispute, but also its virtual addressees.

By the late sixteenth century, the pamphlet was firmly established across Europe as a type of media, as a politico-religious activity, and as a source of incessant worry for the authorities. While the myth of Luther galvanizing an entire continent by way of vernacular polemic perhaps looms overly large in the history of literacy research, literacy rates did increase spectacularly during the period (from about 5 per cent of the population in Germany and Britain in 1450 to about 16 per cent in 1550, although such estimates pose as many problems as they attempt to solve).Footnote ⁴⁸ The decline of classical rhetoric, the development of the book trade, and the spread of vernacular scriptureFootnote ⁴⁹ further set the scene for two ensuing centuries of radical pamphleteering.

3.1 The Pamphlet as Event

What, then, is a ‘pamphlet’? All at once a format, a genre, a rhetorical style, and a type of media, the pamphlet has consistently eluded attempts at a transhistorical definition. Historians of the pamphlet, encyclopaedias, and pamphleteers themselves have either pointed out material generalities (a ‘short handwritten work or document of several pages fastened together; a handwritten poem, tract, or treatise’,Footnote ⁵⁰ a ‘short piece of polemical writing’Footnote ⁵¹ of ‘ephemeral duration’Footnote ⁵²), or universalized highly localized practices (for Nicholas Thoburn, pamphlets are primarily ‘communist objects’Footnote ⁵³), or emphasized the confrontational nature of pamphletary texts (pamphlets as ‘agitational objects’Footnote ⁵⁴ or simply as ‘violent and aggressive texts’Footnote ⁵⁵).

Without overcomplicating matters, these definitions routinely neglect the extraordinary diversity of pamphletary writing. Many canonical pamphlets fail to match its core taxonomic features: Zola’s J’Accuse … ! was published in a newspaper as an open letter, Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future (also known as The Unabomber Manifesto) is significantly longer than the Element you are currently reading, and countless nominal ‘pamphlets’ circulate poorly, if at all. Conversely, commercial imprints have recently launched series that exclusively publish inexpensive, short, polemical, pseudo-pamphletary texts that nonetheless fail to elicit public interest, let alone trigger a ‘pamphlet war’.Footnote ⁵⁶

The salient feature of all texts usually considered to be pamphlets is that they set a very specific social response in motion. Whenever short-form polemic successfully operates as a pamphlet, rather than as a philosophical polemic (the Book of Mozi), literature (The Eloquent Peasant), or religious ephemera (short-form Christian hagiographies), they call a reading public into being and trigger historically specific containment measures from public authorities. Pamphlets are always an event that takes place in the public sphere as much as in its margins. In this section, I will briefly theorize the practical contours of pamphleteering as a social event by way of a discussion of revolutionary polemic in eighteenth-century France and the United States.

3.2 Surveilling Readerships

The commonly assumed and almost certainly inaccurateFootnote ⁵⁷ etymology of the term ‘pamphlet’ should provide a hint at what the pamphlet does not do: in name, the pan-philos should be loved by all, interrupt belligerent discourse, and reassert common political interests.Footnote ⁵⁸ Etymologically, the pamphlet should reassure readers that, if nothing else, they at least have a love of polemical discourse in common. Indeed, the slow generalization and formalization of a satirical, ironic, indirect, and indiscreet tone in polemical writing from Thomas Dekker to Jonathan Swift bolstered the respectability of pamphletary writing: from the late seventeenth century onwards, short-form polemic was increasingly read in the salons, coffee houses, and reading circles of polite society. Some historical pamphlets also gained in longevity, prestige, and accessibility. Perhaps most canonically, Jack Cade’s The Complaint of the Poor Commons of Kent (1450) was adapted into popular diatribes in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 (1591).

Despite these factors, the oppositional logic of the pamphlet has almost always fractured extant reading publics, polarizing segments of the reading population into distinct, often radicalized subgroups. In fact, everywhere across Europe and the British Isles, popular dissent was brewing, pitting social groups against one another. The loosening of censorship during the British Civil Wars saw the publication of 20,000 pamphlets and polemical books,Footnote ⁵⁹ while printing and circulation circuits for polemical literature were consolidated throughout Germany and France. Perhaps even more clearly than during the Reformation, pamphleteering in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – a relative lacuna in many European prose literatures – brought about a social dynamic of mutual radicalization among readerships. In turn, oppositional reading publics would be forced to argue for their positions on either rational or rhetorical grounds.Footnote ⁶⁰

This sits somewhat uneasily alongside the paradigm of a ‘public sphere’, whose emergence Jürgen Habermas locates during the early Enlightenment. Habermas’s account (first published in 1962) emphasizes the joint development of the European bourgeoisie as a social class, the emergence of a learned culture in salons and coffee houses, and the saturation of public discourse and public opinion by a proliferation of daily publications ushering in an era of deliberative rationality among European populations. While in pre-bourgeois times the ‘public sphere’ had been generally ‘co-extensive with public authority’,Footnote ⁶¹ that is, the State, it was now co-extensive with a specific subject position which remained implicit in Habermas’s account: the readers who presided over ‘public opinion’ were male, bourgeois, often Christian, and always literate. Here, the social structure of the public sphere functioned as an objective gatekeeper: the potential access to texts, and therefore to political agency, was congruent with the degree of affiliation to the male, Christian, affluent, and literate bourgeoisie. In Habermas’s account, the very ideals of the bourgeois public sphere – its pretension to universality, above all – were contradicted by its material, political, and moral organization.Footnote ⁶²

Yet on the margins of bourgeois readership, popular literacies not only flourished, but also began raising concrete problems of governance for State power and routinely overtaxed the tolerance of bourgeois publics for libellous writings. Some pre-revolutionary pamphlets were in fact so pornographic and so widely circulated that they horrified the very Enlightenment figures who had supported free speech and public rationality in the first place.Footnote ⁶³ The resulting exclusionaryFootnote ⁶⁴ effects of the Habermasian public sphere were supplemented by a spectacular increase in surveillance measures. The 122 to 189 censors appointed in Paris during the final four decades of French absolutismFootnote ⁶⁵ repressed calumny and injurious speech, sometimes deploying a heavy apparatus to identify and prosecute authors, printers, and readers alike. Robert Darnton has deftly outlined the exemplary case of an anti-monarchical poem that circulated under Louis XV:

In this way, the affordances of the pamphlet as an infrastructure of dissent contributed to standardizing the kind of information the police sought to obtain concerning authors: who had penned which libellous text? How did the text circulate? By whom, when, and where was it read? What were its political implications? In turn, pamphleteering and its surveillance helped consolidate a legal understanding of literary authorship (see Section 4), while granting booksellers and publishers comparative leniency and, more often than not, immunizing them from legal prosecution.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hence, both socio-historical aspects are true at the same time: the Habermasian ‘public sphere’ emerged in a context of not only secure deliberative institutions for the bourgeoisie, but also draconian policing measures against popular readerships. As I will point out in Sections 5 and 6, the policing, censorship, and control of licentious texts evolved hand in hand with sweeping infrastructural and political changes, ranging from desegregation in the United States to the generalization of internet access from the early 1990s onwards.

An extreme – and particularly famous – example of the practical interpenetration of legal containment and political provocation is nested as a fictional pamphlet in one of the Marquis de Sade’s most brutal texts. De Sade had been sentenced to prison in 1790 for associating with counterrevolutionaries and on the charge, of all things, of ‘moderatism’. Upon his release in 1793, he published Philosophy in the Boudoir (1795), which contains the mock pamphlet Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, if You Would Become Republicans. Read aloud during the sexual education of fifteen-year-old Eugénie, the fictional pamphlet formulates atheistic propositions (God is ‘an idea without object’Footnote ⁶⁸), argues that revolutionaries must transform the burgeoning Republic into a post-religious and fundamentally amoral one, and promotes ‘prostitution, incest, rape, and sodomy’ as essential Republican activities. The Republic cannot preserve itself by moral means, the pamphlet concludes, ‘for the republic will preserve itself only by war, and nothing is less moral than war. I ask how one will be able to demonstrate that in a state rendered immoral by its obligations, it is essential that the individual be moral? I will go further: it is a very good thing he is not’.Footnote ⁶⁹

De Sade stages the entire infrastructural imaginary of revolutionary pamphleteering. The pamphlet is ‘bought outside the Palace of Equality … straight from the press’,Footnote ⁷⁰ thereby locating polemical literature on the margins of the literary market and its mediating institutions (publishers, booksellers, censors). Its precepts are put into use, both sexually and politically, by its fictional readers, thereby pointing out that print polemic eschews the strictly interpretative or deliberative textual practices of the bourgeois public sphere. The comments of Sade’s protagonists are further amalgamated with the primary text into precisely the kind of ‘cacophony of sedition’ described by Darnton, emphasizing the fact that pamphleteering is not a monological speech act, but a collective social practice. Finally, the pamphlet leads to the radical political transformation of Eugénie and the vindication of the most outré of libertine positions. This, then, is what every novelist and romancier could know about pamphleteering in the Revolutionary era: pamphleteering, once subjected to state surveillance, makes literature observable if not as a sexual fact, then at least as a social one.Footnote ⁷¹

3.3 Ordinary Readers

What do we mean when we say that pamphlets address ‘the people’? What kind of political body comes into being by virtue of being addressed by polemical texts in particular, rather than by literature or political speech in general? Few questions pertaining to the pamphlet have generated as many misunderstandings as this one. On the one hand, a ‘culture of controversy’Footnote ⁷² did emerge among the broader reading public in the course of the sixteenth century, enabling a growing percentage of the population to engage in political and polemical disputes. On the other, however, the very fragmentation of readerships into distinct publics through polemical writing seems to belie the generality and inclusiveness implied by the pamphlet as a ‘popular’ practice.

Contrasting with Habermas’s emphasis on social settings and institutions (salons, libraries, coffee houses, etc.), theorists attuned to the primarily democratic, rather than bourgeois, origins of the public sphere have emphasized readerly abilities as a condition of participation in political debates. Here, abilities that are distributed unequally among individuals and social groups enable readerships to come into being and exercise their political agency. For Albert O. Hirschmann (literacy as the kind of ‘persuadable temper’Footnote ⁷³ conducive to agency), for a large segment of the African American literary tradition (literacy as freedom and agencyFootnote ⁷⁴), and for recent waves in the sociology of literature,Footnote ⁷⁵ the public sphere exists by virtue of individuals and groups exercising their reading competencies.Footnote ⁷⁶ In turn, the way individuals and groups exert their political agency remains dependent on the way they gained these competencies in the first place. The political power of popular readerships bears the mark of formative reading experiences, specific literary styles, and modalities of circulation: ‘published claim provoked printed counterclaim, vindication, denial, or agreement … The more controversial print there was, the more need there was to enter into print to engage with it’.Footnote ⁷⁷

Of Thomas Paine’s numerous pamphletary writings published during the American Revolutionary War, Common Sense (1776) perhaps best illustrates this process. The text, which calls for a shift to armed conflict and secession from Great Britain, begins by outlining a collective, transnational subject (a universal ‘mankind’). Soon, however, Paine operates his own kind of textual secession, invoking a much more limited political body, a Republican We that must henceforth be distinguished from its continental counterpartFootnote ⁷⁸ and to which Paine claims to have unmediated access precisely because it is a performative object: Paine’s reading counterpublic is a ‘kind of social totality’ that merely ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’ (Michael Warner).Footnote ⁷⁹ In fact, by the 1770s, literacy rates in the American colonies were exceptionally high, with a large percentage of white males having at least some degree of literacy, although exact numbers are disputed.Footnote ⁸⁰ As a result, Paine’s Common Sense circulated particularly well (Paine’s own gross exaggerations notwithstanding, perhaps as many as 100,000 copies sold within the first yearFootnote ⁸¹).

Revolutionary pamphleteering therefore engaged in the twin pursuits of nation-building and cultivating an American knowledge industryFootnote ⁸² that would be attuned to the needs of a discontented readership: a readership that was widely scattered across the territories, that sometimes straddled milieus and social classes, and that was soon to enact a bloody partition of the body politic and declare its independence from Britain. In other words, these readerships differed fundamentally from the near-mythical common readers variously invoked by Samuel Johnson, Virginia Woolf, and the back covers of Penguin paperbacks in so far as they involved a logic of social decomposition and polarization, rather than of disinterested aesthetic pursuits and learned inquiry. Paine’s Common Sense had an impact on society precisely because it divided its readership into partisans and opponents: the pamphlet failed to find aesthetic and political commonality (i.e., a Johnsonian ‘mirror in every mind’) on account of its negation of political and aesthetic commonality from the outset.

Pamphletary readerships, at once historically contingent upon and rhetorically performed by polemical texts, are thus best thought of as ordinary readers. They are ordinary as much in the etymological sense of having authority to deal with political orders or norms directly rather than by deputation, as in the sense of always relating their readerly dispositions to their ordinary, daily, and concrete political circumstances. Ordinary readers use polemical literature socially: they read to effect normative changes, they discuss pamphlets to correct perceptions of their contingent political situation, and they circulate polemical literature to demand rights.Footnote ⁸³ Paine himself expects no less of his readers, emphasizing the fundamental difference between common literary production and his own pamphletary works. While the former was necessarily ‘ineffectual’, Paine’s revolutionary pamphlet adroitly manipulated the fears and aspirations of his literary constituency, demanding it divest itself of all its political attachments and literary habits.Footnote ⁸⁴ Equating Common Sense with a sweeping ‘act of oblivion’, Paine originated the crucial rhetorical conceit of nineteenth- and twentieth-century polemical writing: pamphleteering was to secede from the bourgeois public sphere and demand that its uses be practical rather than symbolic. For Paine, as much as for his literary successors, ‘the period of debate’ must henceforth be considered ‘closed’.Footnote ⁸⁵

4.1 Ordinary Readers and Intellectuals

A new figure emerges at the dawn of the twentieth century: the ‘intellectual’, a term first used in the context of Émile Zola’s J’Accuse … ! (1898), and the Dreyfusard movement.Footnote ⁸⁶ The Affaire Dreyfus revolved around the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish ancestry. Convicted of treason and sentenced to life in 1895, Dreyfus maintained his innocence throughout the court proceedings. Zola’s J’Accuse … !, arguably the most famous of all nineteenth-century pamphlets, was but one element in a vast movement that sought to exonerate Dreyfus.

‘Intellectuals’ – or ‘les intellectuels’ – was initially used as a derogatory term against the French writers, politicians, artists, and journalists who sided with Dreyfus. The term implied a contestation of the political detachment often engendered by the hard-won artistic autonomy gained during the mid nineteenth century. Where ‘auteurs’, ‘écrivains’, and ‘essayistes’ remained dependent on the limited legitimacy they had gained as authors, writers, or essayists, the intellectuals of the Fin de Siècle imposed a different social compact, now refusing to pay the price of literary autonomy with political quietism. Zola, then a best-selling novelist, reinvested his fame and legitimacy in an unprecedented act of political radicalism. By doing so, he not only redefined the social role of literature, he also retroactively asserted the moral and political integrity of his previous novelistic oeuvre. Zola’s J’Accuse … ! made ‘acts of prophetic denunciation’Footnote ⁸⁷ at once possible, profitable, and necessary for authorial self-positioning.Footnote ⁸⁸ After close to a century of relative Romantic insularity, the turn of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a pamphletary market that was increasingly indistinguishable from the rest of the literary industry. Pamphleteering, in short, gained legitimacy both as a literary exercise and as an activity for novelists.

Yet turn-of-the-century pamphleteering was also a continuation of the strategies that had marked polemical literature since the French and American revolutions. The distinction between practical and symbolic uses of literature, perhaps most clearly contrasted in Paine’s Common Sense, became an object of incessant criticism, sometimes precipitating criminalization, prosecution and, in Zola’s case, banishment. Zola’s seminal innovation in J’Accuse … ! was arguably his particularly insightful critique of the limits of ‘literature’ as a social institution. Its historical attachment to the clear demarcation of practical from symbolic uses of language, its habitual political lethargy, its tendency to side with affluent social classes and to abuse religious minorities were the object of all of Zola’s numerous Dreyfusard writings. Yet Zola brought his detractors to a boil by flaunting the legal implications of his last pamphlet: ‘In making these accusations I am aware that I am making myself liable to articles 30 and 31 of the July 29, 1881 law on the press making libel a punishable offense. I expose myself to that risk voluntarily … I am waiting’.Footnote ⁸⁹

By naming names, by calling for legal consequences, by defaming members of the public, Zola forced the bourgeois public sphere of the Third Republic to react in ways it usually considered to be incompatible with higher aesthetic, political, and moral pursuits. In order to respond to the accusations levelled in J’Accuse … !, the French literary field had to acknowledge that its own verbal rituals had direct material effects on the existence and livelihood of its opponents. Hence, J’Accuse … ! pointed out that ‘literature’ and its institutions were but nominally independent from the bourgeoisie. By doing so, Zola put pamphleteering and ‘literature’ on an equal footing. Writing ‘literature’ in general, rather than just pamphlets in particular, had to be understood as a fully political action. In the months that followed, Zola was convicted of criminal libel, barely six months before Major Hubert Joseph Henry confessed to having forged documents brought forward in the trial against Dreyfus.Footnote ⁹⁰

4.2 A Polemical Education

Pamphleteering was now invested with a crucial function: it tested and expanded the social power of literature and its sanctioned institutions. From the Affaire to the beginning of WWII, the term ‘public intellectual’ gained in popularity and soon became a staple of journalistic discourse. It was also a near-pleonasm: to be an ‘intellectual’ meant exercising one’s rationality publicly. The public reinvestment of one’s notoriety in favour of a political cause was soon perceived to be the crucial gesture reading publics could demand from their intellectuels.Footnote ⁹¹

In turn, the slow democratization of free, mandatory, and secular education (the ‘Jules Ferry Laws’ of 1881 and 1882) not only helped secularize the Republic, it also soon produced a mass readership that was well versed in the rudiments of literary history, geography, political economy, law, and the natural sciences.Footnote ⁹² The infrastructure of the publishing industry adapted to a growing popular readership, launching successive series of paperbound books (Tauchnitz in 1841, Reclam in 1867), affordable hardback formats (Everyman’s Library in 1906, Nelson in 1910, Calmann-Lévy in 1938) and, later yet, mass-market paperback editions (Albatross Books in 1932, Penguin in 1935, Simon & Schuster in 1939, Éditions du Seuil in 1951).Footnote ⁹³

Yet by the same token, the distinction between mass-market publishing and the infrastructure of print polemic became increasingly fuzzy. On the one hand, the distinction remained intact: the radical pamphlets of the early twentieth century did not circulate among reading publics the same way canonical or pedagogical literature did. Open letters, manifestos, and radical pamphlets were published in the daily press, in small, private, and sometimes pirate editions, or via party or gallery imprints – but rarely by the same publishers who supplied mandatory education with pedagogical treatises and literary raw material. On the other hand, however, some publishers viewed the serial formats of the nineteenth century as an opportunity to blur the fine line separating serialized fiction from short-form polemic.Footnote ⁹⁴ Publishers like Jules Rouff laboured the point: if Hugo’s Les Misérables could be reprinted in weekly instalments at 10 centimes for a general readership, so could a much more radical Socialist History 1789–1900, edited by Rouff’s friend Jean Jaurès and serialized for half the price (see Figure 4).Footnote ⁹⁵ In turn, Jaurès himself experimented with the transformation of the publishing industry: his ferocious press articles written in support of Capitaine Dreyfus and calling for a retrial were soon collected in book form and circulated as radical polemical literature, rather than as journalistic ephemera. Authors and publishers now perceived polemical texts to be both more profitable and more respectable than they had been throughout the nineteenth century. A general loosening of established markets and literary taxonomies soon took hold of the industry. Why, after all, should short-form polemical literature be understood to be a greater threat than the socialist or anarchist tropes that were now staples in literary fiction? By the mid twentieth century, across the Seine, publisher Jean-Jacques Pauvert would simultaneously publish Hugo’s complete novels and, for the first time, the unexpurgated Works of the Marquis de Sade, including the mock pamphlet Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, if You Would Become Republicans.

Figure 4 Jules Chéret, poster for Jules Rouff’s serialized edition of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, 1886.

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

If the distinction between pamphleteering and literature could now be productively and profitably undermined by authors and publishers alike, this general shift was flanked by a series of even more consequential social-historical tensions. In France, mandatory education had brought about a distinct social type in the form of the Hussards noirs (‘Black Hussars’, so named for their frightful black coats and black caps). These schoolteachers, who usually had provincial origins and scarce economic resources, were often perceived as the Republican elite precisely because Republicanism constituted the core of their pedagogical goals. Their radical attachment to Republican virtues and their staunch anti-clerical ethos not only instilled defiance towards the Church in their overwhelmingly Catholic pupils, but also contributed to normalizing ad personam attacks and rhetorical excesses as legitimate modes of argumentation in civil society. The supreme values of the Republic (in Zola’s own pamphlet: ‘humanity’, ‘truth’, and ‘justice’), the widely shared belief in what Catholic-nationalist polemicist Charles Péguy derided as the ‘positivist metaphysics’Footnote ⁹⁶ of progress, the rapid urbanization of the population, steady increases in life expectancy, the allocation of leisure time, a liberal legislation on free speech and censorship, and spectacular increases in literacy rates all contributed to the social acceptance of open conflict in writing. Hence, by 1913, Péguy could publish the sober promise to ‘shoot Jaurès’Footnote ⁹⁷ without fearing censorship (Jaurès was, in fact, shot by a nationalist one year later). That same year, other pamphleteers resorted to publicizing the sadomasochistic sexual mores of Prime Minister Louis Barthou (these accusations were by all accounts factualFootnote ⁹⁸). Here too, it was the invocation of Republican radicalism that served to legitimize the thematic continuity of revolutionary and turn-of-the-century pamphleteering, with both of them showcasing a strong interest in the genital peculiarities of monarchs and ministers alike. In 1798 as much as in 1913, few rhetorical tropes held as much weight as declaring one’s ruler to be not only politically powerless, but also sexually impotent.

Yet this culture of personalized controversy simultaneously stood in stark contradiction to the avowed project of democratizing the expectations, habits, and moral proclivities of the bourgeoisie. This project was explicit in the foundational texts of the school reform movement of the 1870s onwards, which routinely bemoaned ‘the absence of intercourse’ between social milieus and ‘a mutual uneasiness between the people and the bourgeoisie’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thus, the moderation of agonal conflict, the modulation of insults and calumny, and the tabooing of open discussions of sexual promiscuity were structural necessities: they ensured that commerce – both verbal and mercantile – could flourish across classes despite often opposing interests, social positions, and ambitions. In other words, pamphleteering always ran the risk of undermining the very political and behavioural ‘civisme’ (understood both as polite civility and as civic sense) which had, albeit paradoxically, legitimized pamphleteering as a Republican form in the first place.

The highly ambiguous position of the pamphlet as both a Republican and a potentially socially destructive format was stabilized by its readership itself, as well as by its ingrained readerly dispositions. The emergence of what historians have described as a ‘radical bourgeoisie’ was decisive. Deeply Republican and attached to universal rights (in either their 1798 formulation as Droits de l’homme or their 1791 precedent as Paine’s Rights of Man – the difference carries little weight here), the radical bourgeoisie was also engaged in a process of democratic nation-building begun in 1792 and interrupted during the Second French Empire (1852–1870).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The threat posed by polemic was resolved by simultaneously banishing excessive polemic from school materials and enabling pupils to participate in open polemic as citoyens, that is, as a specific type of bourgeois citizen that was encouraged to read, share, and discursively moderate radical polemical statements. While diatribe and the most radical pamphletary styles would henceforth be banished from schools, mandatory education would simultaneously enable citizens to polemicize as Republican citizens, thereby placing great pedagogical and political importance on literacy and abstract discursive principles. This perhaps best explains two immediate consequences of Zola’s J’Accuse … !.

The first is social: intellectuals now had the support of the radical bourgeoisie and increasingly acted as mediators between reading publics, pamphleteers, state institutions, and the bourgeoisie itself. In fact, the countless answers and rejoinders prompted by the publication of J’Accuse … ! drew much of their weight from the institutional affiliation of their authors, who soon came to be known as the ‘maîtres de la Sorbonne’ – academics of all stripes who could mobilize important symbolic resources for political causes. Hence, J’Accuse … ! not only instigated the formation of a coalition of new social actors, it also suggested that scientific truth and political truth were cut from the same cloth.Footnote ¹⁰¹ If ‘truth marches on’, as Zola claimed in J’Accuse … !, it did so only because it was flanked by both scientific competences and the universal moral imperatives of justice, freedom, and political truth.Footnote ¹⁰²

The second consequence of the banishment of excessive polemic from schools and the simultaneous habituation of pupils to open polemical debate was a turn towards abstraction in turn-of-the-century pamphleteering. The extremely harsh penalties Zola incurred for J’Accuse … ! served as a stern warning to polemical publics and led pamphleteers to fight on more general, less individualized, less specified terrain. Polemicizing for ‘truth’, ‘justice’, or ‘equality’, rather than attacking specific social actors or libelling individuals allowed pamphleteers to criticize the personnel and institutions of the Republic in the name of its own values. In so doing, Republican pamphleteering could now pose as a prototypical Republican activity that spared the sensibilities and respectability of notable figures. Readers could therefore be addressed directly in a bid to effect normative change with the full legitimacy conferred by Republican self-criticism.

4.3 Pamphleteering as Norm: The Artistic Avant-Gardes

In fact, while the scope and intensity of polemical accusations kept expanding until the outbreak of WWII, they generally remained within the confines of an outdated historical model: polemical literature often imitated oral communication in secluded social settings (in essence: the salon or the Café) and generally upheld its imperatives of relative decency and tact.Footnote ¹⁰³ The obligation of sparing one’s discursive opponent the humiliation of insult and verbal defeat in the presence of equalsFootnote ¹⁰⁴ became entrenched as a style, a political necessity, and a commercial logic in all European and American pamphletary markets.

The oral imaginary of pamphleteering nevertheless began to erode with the European Avant-Gardes of the late 1910s and 1920s. All defining artistic movements of the era not only turned to pamphleteering as a natural vector of publicity and expression, they also did so in a way that publicly signified a decisive break with the modes of communication that had marked pamphleteering from the Revolutions of the eighteenth century to the social transformations of the late nineteenth century.

On the one hand, they broke with the implicit orality of protest by experimenting with typography. The canonical pamphlets of the era all made use of the formal innovations of European and American Modernisms to unsettle pamphletary statements and disorganize dissent on the printed page. The innumerable manifestos, open letters, tracts, and leaflets of the various Dadaist groups scattered across Europe notably drew on the Calligrammes of poet Guillaume Apollinaire, published in 1918, as well as on the new visual languages of advertisement,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ often using collages and visual puns to voice polemical claims (see Figure 5). Instead of ensuring the legibility of political demands by the greatest numbers of readers – a priority for the overwhelming majority of pamphleteers since the Reformation – Dada loudly emphasized its own ‘ability to hypnotize’, rather than its willingness to sway public opinion on rational grounds. Dada’s calls for ‘the introduction of progressive unemployment’, the ‘compulsory adherence of all clergymen and teachers to the Dadaist articles of faith’, and the ‘requisition of churches for the performance of bruitism’Footnote ¹⁰⁶ were never motivated rationally. Ostentatiously rejecting both their discursive constraints and their function as vectors of ‘public opinion’, the staunchly antitheoreticalFootnote ¹⁰⁷ pamphlets of the Avant-Gardes blurred what remained of the inherited distinctions between artistic practice, political dissent, and commercial interests. In fact, the poetics of dissent sometimes closely imitated the poetics of commerce; by the end of the twentieth century, however, this relationship would be reversed, with dissent now providing aesthetic and ideological blueprints for a commercial culture geared towards ‘disruption’ and commodified protest.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Figure 5 Guillaume Apollinaire, ‘Ears Plugged’, Calligrammes: Poèmes de la guerre et de la paix, 1913–1916.

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France.

On the other hand, the polemical writings of the Avant-Gardes outpaced the rhythm of well-tempered oral communication in their sheer quantity and frequency. The constant stream of Surrealist pamphlets issued between 1924 and 1945 – sometimes as short as three lines, sometimes as long as 100 pages – highlighted the fact that pamphleteering could now lay claim to a large share of the group’s resources. While eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pamphleteers and reading publics typically coalesced around single causes (a retrial, a taxation measure, the support of an identifiable constituency), the Surrealists multiplied occasions for polemical statements and obscene provocations that fundamentally violated the decorum of the public sphere: their pamphlets celebrated recent sadistic murders, called for the beatification of incestuous sisters, protested against the state funeral of Anatole France, objected to the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931, derided the First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture (1935) on account of its conformism and ineffectiveness, and relentlessly attacked individual creativity and its social rites (prizes, academies, the very notion of literature).Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The logic of scandal, ‘the public event par excellence’,Footnote ¹¹⁰ buttressed the radical insurgency and the economic interests of the Surrealist group to such a degree that one may rightly speak of an ‘autonomization’ of the pamphletary field. To put it another way, the sheer intensity of the polemical activity of the Surrealists (and this is true of all continental avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s) sometimes undermined the urgency of its political causes and occasionally contradicted the agency of polemical literature; the publication of a steady stream of invectives and denunciations could produce unwanted effects, obscuring pressing issues and famously alienating sympathizers and fellow ‘travellers of the world revolution’Footnote ¹¹¹ (notably the Dadaists and the French Communist Party, as well as several of the founding members of the Surrealist group itselfFootnote ¹¹²).

In effect, Pierre Bourdieu notes, ‘the more one moves through history, that is, through the process of autonomization of the field, the more the manifestos … tend to be reduced to pure manifestations of difference (though one should not draw the conclusion that they are inspired by the cynical search for distinction)’.Footnote ¹¹³ The Surrealists used the infrastructure of textual dissent developed by their predecessors to both pursue political goals and assume specified and desirable positions in the literary field of the Third French Republic. By the time the Surrealist movement was born in 1924, the legitimate social uses of the pamphlet had therefore diversified.

4.4 Pamphlets or Manifestos: Taxonomies of Dissent

At this stage, it is necessary to spell out (and dispel) an ambiguity that has marred most of the scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century polemical literature. The term ‘manifesto’ is often used interchangeably with that of ‘pamphlet’. While it is true that many of the most notorious polemical texts of the era self-identified or were marketed as nominal ‘manifestos’, and while manifestos fully participate in the long tradition of pamphletary writing, this conflation has created a series of methodological problems and historical ambiguities for historians of literature and book historians alike.

While texts published as early as the sixteenth century had occasionally described themselves as manifestos (alongside other, more common generic denominators such as the petition, call, or appeal), the historical nexus of this ambiguity is perhaps most easily and fruitfully placed alongside the publication of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party. This most famous and influential of all manifestos is, for several reasons, perhaps also the least typical exponent of the genre. Since its publication in 1848, innumerable other texts have adopted the term in their very title: the 1979 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto and its foreword by Margaret Thatcher, the Futurist Manifesto (1909), the Secular Humanist Manifesto (1980), the techno-utopian Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), and Valerie Solana’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), to name but a few of the more familiar ones among a global archive of several thousands. In effect, the genre of the manifesto has crowded out other self-descriptions of polemical literature, while homogenizing an ever more diverse set of claims and styles. What, in fact, does the SCUM Manifesto have in common with the Startup ManifestoFootnote ¹¹⁴ or the Superfood Manifesto (‘Don’t eat a lot of candy’Footnote ¹¹⁵), other than their generic self-description?

A fundamental – and methodologically interesting – asymmetry between both genres is often overlooked. While nominal manifestos constitute an ever-growing and lucrative archive, instances of polemical texts describing themselves as ‘a pamphlet’ are exceedingly rare. As a descriptor, the term ‘pamphlet’ is usually attributed by readers, censors, surveillance personnel, prosecutors, and literary historians, rather than by authors and publishers. Conversely, the term ‘manifesto’ is used by authors and publishers to define and market a publication but is seldom used by readers and literary historians to describe texts that would not have the term ‘manifesto’ in their title. This is best explained not by the respective formal or ideological features of the manifesto and pamphlet, which are often indistinguishable, but by their starkly different social uses.

Let me briefly summarize some canonical scholarly positions on the manifesto to elucidate this genre and format. Scholars have tried to specify its ideological particularities, almost always taking Marx and Engels’ seminal text as their formal starting point, if not their historical one. For Kenneth Burke, manifestos can be traced back to the logic of modern Constitutions, themselves ‘Great Manifestos’ of a kind, as well as to the process of declaring, instituting, and enacting rights and norms taken to be inalienable (the ‘self-evident’ truths of the US Declaration of Independence, for instance). Manifestos are inherently pragmatic in the sense that they outline not only a series of inalienable norms (‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’, ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’, etc.), but also the historical and political measures necessary to obtain and defend them: ‘in the Manifesto’s closing challenge, we see what ‘views and aims’ may do, not simply as reflecting conditions, but as guides for the changing of conditions’.Footnote ¹¹⁶

For Hayden White, manifestos are the genre most conducive to an ironic emplotment of historical narrative. Because manifestos simultaneously describe objective social conditions in the present and desirable aims in the future, they allow their author to ‘claim the title of a ‘realist’ while sustaining his dream of a Utopian reconciliation of man with man beyond the social state’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As such, the manifesto is the main literary vector by which utopias may acquire plausibility for readerships.

Conversely, Marjorie Perloff argues that the manifestos of the early twentieth century announced the end of the political field as a strictly distinct and clearly outlined realm in the distribution of power in modern societies. The manifesto’s inherent hybridity allowed otherwise marginal social actors to transform ‘what had traditionally been a vehicle for political statement into a literary, one might say, a quasi-poetic construct’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Doing so, they introduced ‘propaganda’ as the default mode of political participation for the artists and writers of the European Avant-Gardes.

Finally, Martin Puchner emphasizes the performative aspect of political and artistic manifestos. Here, manifestos are speech acts that are ‘singularly invested in doing things with words, in changing the world’. Puchner suggests that the roots of this performative power lie in a dual historical lineage. On the one hand, the ‘Manifeste’ (German, plural) of sovereign communication were ‘authored by those in authority, by the state, the military, or the church’. They were grounded in an authority that was both undisputed and, more importantly, that did not depend on being communicated in the first place: Manifeste manifested an existing power. On the other hand, however, the religious figure of revelation or manifestation (the burning bush, the son, or Scripture) provided manifestos with the kind of ambiguity necessary for utopian political work. In manifestos and religious manifestations alike, nascent aims, new desires, and desirable norms were ‘revealed’ to the audience. Yet they had ‘uncertain results and effects’, unlike speech acts performed by and with authority: the realization of political and religious ‘manifestation’ remained dependent on interpretation and was therefore necessarily ‘laborious and prone to failure’. Puchner concludes that whenever a manifesto ‘turns against the state and its authority, it appeals precisely to this alternate authority of religious revelation’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

All these definitions also apply to the majority of pamphletary literature, as well as to many more marginal examples of polemical communication. Yet what these definitions of the manifesto also have in common is that they minimize the importance of the social existence of polemical literature (see Figure 6). In fact, they all dispense with considering the role of reading publics, printing infrastructures, and circulation networks in not only the elaboration and circulation, but more importantly the reception and effectuation of polemical claims. The power of reading publics to identify and circulate polemical texts deemed worthy of attention or conducive to political change is treated, at best, like an epiphenomenon of specific literary styles.

Figure 6 ‘Night Gathering of Tramps, Printers, and ‘Pan Jerkers’ on the Battery, New York City’. Allan Pinkerton, Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives. New York, G. W. Carleton & Co, 1878. Library of Congress.

It is remarkable, by contrast, that scholars of the pamphlet proper almost always emphasize the place of publics in the making of the genre, sometimes going as far as to propose sweeping definitions from the perspective of a fictive historical reader: ‘For such a reader the interconnections between the material, the commercial, the literary and the political in forming the pamphlet, in making it work as a means of speaking out, informing, and cultivating public opinion, would probably have been obvious’.Footnote ¹²⁰ For George Orwell, the pamphlet is best defined by its self-evidence and from the perspective of its presumptive reader:

Orwell emphasizes two of its distinct features: a pamphlet is inexpensive and written for ‘a large public’.Footnote ¹²² The bulk of recent scholarship on pamphlets has emphasized this point and highlighted ‘unrestricted discursive opportunity’Footnote ¹²³ presented by pamphlets whenever they successfully trigger large-scale discussions of their claims. Hence, scholarship has tacitly conferred to reading publics the signal legitimacy of identifying, and thus ‘making’ pamphlets, regardless of their formal makeup, text length, and generic self-description. To put it another way, the apparent truism according to which ‘the historical significance of the pamphlets lies in the fact that they were read and thereby exercised social influence’Footnote ¹²⁴ must be granted full attention.

It is indeed significant that one of the early foundational definitions of Book History as an academic discipline was formulated by a scholar of Revolutionary pamphleteering. Robert Darnton’s frequently cited essay delves into the ‘life cycle’ of books as the appropriate ontology for (and methodological innovation of) Book History. This cycle

Robert Darnton’s emphasis on the ‘life cycle’ of books and on the way they ‘spread through society’ would, in fact, seem to apply to a minority of books only, while also excluding pre-print manuscripts. Yet Darnton’s model does apply to most pamphlets. To rephrase, I want to suggest that the pamphlet is perhaps best understood as the epistemic unconscious of the early years of Book History: the social life of books, or what was then known as ‘the sociology of texts’,Footnote ¹²⁶ was routinely extrapolated from both the highly specific modalities of pamphletary circulation and the way publics identified or ‘made’ pamphletary claims worthy of circulation, reproduction, discussion, and enactment. The sustained criticism of Darnton’s approach admittedly belongs to the annals of the discipline itself.Footnote ¹²⁷ Yet the universalization of the pamphlet as the paradigmatic ‘book’ in early Book History, as well as the generalization of a highly particular case of the ‘socialization of texts’Footnote ¹²⁸ remain symptomatic of the ambiguity attached to polemical literature in general, and to the pamphlet in particular.

As a simplification of what remains a contentious taxonomical debate, I would emphasize three relatively uncomplicated distinctions that help specify the pamphlet and distinguish it from cognate genres such as the manifesto, although they often overlap.

First, the historical pamphlets at the disposal of historians are usually those that circulated successfully. The attribution of the generic term ‘pamphlet’ is often retrospective and dependent on a reading public’s demonstrated recognition of the import of a given polemical text. Manifestos, on the other hand, frequently fail to elicit significant public interest. As such, Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party is perhaps best thought of as a generic exception: while it was a nominal manifesto, it was also a ‘pamphlet’ on account both of its mass circulation and the import attributed to it by successive reading publics around the globe (see Figure 7).Footnote ¹²⁹ By contrast, the Superfood Manifesto should not be considered a pamphlet, despite its brevity and rhetorical gesturing towards radical literature. In short: pamphlets are polemical texts that circulate well and do so because of the popular interest and support they elicit.

Figure 7 Anonymous, ‘Karl Marx as Prometheus’, L’art dans la révolution bourgeoise, 1843.

CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris

Second, texts retrospectively considered to be or to have been pamphlets almost always responded to great social stresses.Footnote ¹³⁰ They were often embedded in extant social tensions or debates and, in turn, triggered a set of typical responses from the public, ranging from orderly public discussions to popular riots. Pamphleteering is a collective activity that societies turn to in highly contentious historical circumstances for lack of strategic or medial alternatives. Pamphlets are a medium of last (or only) resort. Conversely, manifestos usually are not and often dispense with engaging explicitly and violently with an identified sociopolitical context or normative horizon.

Third, most pamphlets are ‘rubbish’, a fact which must have been ‘true at all times’,Footnote ¹³¹ as Orwell observed. They often, if not always, dispense with elaborate rhetorical and aesthetic strategies and instead emphasize clarity and directness in addressing extant normative orders. They are akin to life itself, if only in the Hobbesian sense of the term: poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Pamphlets are media of diminishing opportunities and growing demands: they must thereby bear the brunt of unfulfilled aspirations without recourse to organized, aestheticized, and recognized forms of political agency. In contrast to the pamphlet, manifestos are often but a component of larger-scale political, artistic, or commercial enterprises. Manifestos, therefore, usually add little more than a textual surplus to aspirations buttressed by other political, artistic, or commercial means. As such, they must often meet the standards and match the interests of systemic gatekeepers.Footnote ¹³² In short, manifestos are almost always literary reconfigurations of other political vectors, and almost always necessarily so; pamphlets seldom are.

In the following section, however, I want to argue that these distinctions, while they clarify important aspects of the literatures and social modalities of dissent, also invite us to adopt a different attitude towards polemical literature altogether. Robert Darnton’s much criticized exposition of the ‘life cycle’ of books, for all its imprecisions as a paradigm in Book History, does in fact provide the opportunity to conceive of pamphleteering as a collective activity that radically shifts the focus from immanent textual considerations to social practices.

5.1 Booms, Waves, Clusters

Social historians and historians of polemical literature have often noted that polemical literature comes and goes in ‘booms’, ‘clusters’, ‘waves’, and other assorted metaphors. The political implications and methodological approaches differ in each case, even though all draw attention to the fact that the production of pamphletary literature varies much more significantly across decades than it does for other literary genres, styles, and formats. The various pamphletary ‘booms’Footnote ¹³³ of the eighteenth, mid nineteenth, early twentieth, and mid twentieth centuries, for instance, usually denote mere quantitative bursts of ‘intense polemical activity’Footnote ¹³⁴ in times of political strife. Conversely, pamphletary ‘clusters’ are scholarly abstractions: they extract raw polemical matter from contingent historical situations to produce the kinds of thematic groupings that make up literary anthologies and handbooks.Footnote ¹³⁵

Pamphletary ‘waves’ are both more familiar and more interesting – historically, conceptually, and metaphorically. They are also coupled to other chronological subdivisions, most prominent among which are the successive ‘waves’ of the feminist movement, despite several noted critiques of this metaphor.Footnote ¹³⁶ Yet the fact that the US-American feminist movement’s own ‘mythological’Footnote ¹³⁷ origins are often traced back to the Seneca Falls Convention and its pamphletary Declaration of Sentiments (1848) remains significant for both literary and political history.Footnote ¹³⁸ The ‘waves’ of the Women’s Movement, whatever the appropriateness of the metaphor for the reconstruction of feminist history through print culturesFootnote ¹³⁹, have all been accompanied by cyclical waves of pamphletary texts: ‘waves’ therefore denote the coupling of polemical writing and social history. What is the modality of this coupling, and how can we theorize the way publics and texts coalesce into historical ‘movements’ or ‘pressure groups’Footnote ¹⁴⁰?

First, waves are cyclical in the precise Darntonian sense that is usually brushed over in Book History. Pamphletary waves not only address a text to a public, but also a public to a text and its author. What Darnton loosely describes as the ‘general sense of the literary enterprise’Footnote ¹⁴¹ is perhaps most clearly perceptible when publics exert their political agency through the very act of identifying, selecting, sharing, commenting, and often rewriting pamphletary texts among a host of possible texts, thus funnelling political and literary agency from authors and publishers to reading publics – and back.

Second, waves are cyclical in a loosely historical sense. The feminist movement is a particularly telling example of the way pamphletary texts relate intertextually to pamphlets published during earlier waves of the movement. The classic polemical texts of the successive feminist waves all refer, with varying degrees of explicitness, to previous phases, texts, and positions, thereby maintaining a collective archive of dissent, affects,Footnote ¹⁴² and polemical strategies to be, in effect, recycled by future social actors.

To take an almost classic example, Valerie Solanas’s relentless attacks on the intersection of ‘Money, Marriage and Prostitution’Footnote ¹⁴³ in the SCUM Manifesto (1967) rephrased and radicalized the Suffragette’s criticism of marriage of the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Solanas’s polemic would in turn make several reappearances in the defining texts of the Queer Movement published during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Notably, the pamphlet Queers Read This, distributed in the ‘tens of thousands’Footnote ¹⁴⁵ by the activist group Queer Nation during the June 1990 Gay Pride Parades in New York City and Chicago, adapted the first- and second-wave feminist critique of marriage for nascent queer counterpublics. It also drew on the SCUM Manifesto’s incendiary tone to propose core strategic measures:

Queer Nation’s rhetoric at once entered mainstream media outlets and feminist historiography, most notably through Rebecca Walker’s short pamphlet ‘Becoming the 3^rd Wave’, published in the high-circulation magazine Ms. in 1992. Here, Walker drew conclusions from Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. As a response to the outcome of the widely publicized confirmation hearings, Walker reiterated the oppositional logic and rhetorical violence of second-wave critiques of matrimony:

A particular sense of historicity emerges from the polemical writings of the feminist movement. These texts not only constitute one of the main historical archives of US-American and transnational feminism, both quantitatively and politically, they also give prominence to its strategic cohesiveness, or strategic ‘permanency’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Feminist pamphleteering is an ‘idiom of resistance’,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ that is, a group of propositions established and recognized through usage as having a political meaning and value. By referring successive ‘waves’ to one another, feminist polemics draw attention not only to progress made,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ but also to the permanence of injustice and, in turn, to a strategic need for pamphleteering: ‘the fight is far from over’ and can only be waged in the margins of public discourse.Footnote ¹⁵¹ This logic has been accompanied by the development of a dedicated print infrastructure: ‘feminists needed not merely a room, but an entire print culture of their own if they hoped to communicate among themselves and spread their ideas to a larger public.’Footnote ¹⁵²

Finally, ‘waves’ are cyclical in that they are subject to complex dynamic phases. Polemical texts and their adjacent movements are born, ascend, and finally collapse, following rising and diving flows of political animus.Footnote ¹⁵³ Between trough and crest, political aspirations are consolidated through accumulation, comparison, and mutual reinforcement (here, the colloquial lexicon of associative dissent is highly varied, ranging from mere mutual ‘support’ and ‘hope’ to ‘consciousness raising’ and ‘mass consciousness-raising’, with respective pamphlets for each entryFootnote ¹⁵⁴). As metaphors for the mutability of political agency, waves have therefore entered the imaginary of profane political theory, from Gustave Courbet’s obsessive depiction of waves during the Paris Commune (1871) and its popular fervour to the fabled ‘democratic waves’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ that have surged in the wake of the Revolutions of 1989. Since the 1850s, however, the feminist movement has insisted on a precious amendment to this tradition: waves necessarily depend on written dissent to become politically effective.

5.2 The GI Underground Press

To become politically effective, pamphlets and pamphletary waves also need to reach a constituency and a public. How do texts address, create, or maintain publics on whose behalf they call out injustices and argue for normative changes? More to the point, how do highly heterogeneous, sometimes segregatedFootnote ¹⁵⁶ and antagonized reading publics agree to coalesce around common pamphletary demands?

In this section, I focus on the GI Underground Press to explore the ‘constituent power’Footnote ¹⁵⁷ of pamphlets in the face of highly diverse readerships and, just as frequently, highly diverse authorships. These polemical newsletters, short newspapers, and single-page pamphlets were mainly written by active-duty GIs, recently discharged troops, and deserters. They circulated widely yet did so without the approval of military authorities. While the News Notes of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors were first issued in 1949, the vast majority of the GI Underground periodicals and single-issue publications were created during the nineteen-year Vietnam War (November 1955–April 1975). With the increased presence of U.S. troops coming ashore in Vietnam from 1965 onwards, the regional demographics of combatant and support troops changed radically, with African Americans, whites, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, Hispanic American men and women now fighting under a common leadership.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The GI Underground Press reflected and politicized this juxtaposition, which was unprecedented in U.S. American military history: the Vietnam War was the first American war in which African American and white troops were not segregated.

Scholarship knows comparatively little of the circa 900 underground periodicals published during the Vietnam War era. Their status as ‘periodicals’, or even as ‘printed material’, was doubtful: most were mimeographed copies of hand-lettered manuscripts and drawings. This ambiguity was also a matter of immediate legal import: Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 1325.6 (Guidelines for Handling Dissident and Protest Activities among Members of the Armed Forces) stipulated that while ‘the mere possession of unauthorized printed material may not be prohibited, printed material that is prohibited from distribution shall be impounded’,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ a sentence most GI Underground publications would include in their masthead.

GI Underground publications shared crucial features with revolutionary pamphleteering. All but a few of their contributors wrote anonymously. Their circulation was difficult to gauge, their material footprint was erratic, ranging from barely readable single-sheet prints, four-page leaflets, and multiple-section periodicals, their publication frequency varied from a single issue to more than 800,Footnote ¹⁶⁰ and their print run varied significantly, ranging from a few hundred to more than 35,000 copies.Footnote ¹⁶¹ These publications often used mimeography and hand-lettering as their sole means of production and reproduction. They were the object of constant surveillance by military authorities and intelligence services, which organized frequent search raids, entrapped authors, and enforced ‘existing obscenity, drug, and unlicensed vending laws’ to circumvent DoD Directive 1325.6 and court-martial contributors, distributors, and readers.Footnote ¹⁶²

Their general stance was consistently anti-war, anti-militaristic, anti-racist, revolutionary, and anti-imperialist. The aggressiveness of their tone and their ad hominem rhetoric were unmatched in previous GI publications, with one contributor notably describing Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird as a ‘a practicing prostitute and pig for the military industrial complex’ who was ‘proud of his war monger haircut’.Footnote ¹⁶³ Many publications also directly contradicted the strategic imperatives of the Vietnam War by not only encouraging desertion, but also by providing the textual means to do so effectively and safely. Famously, the cover of the June 1971 edition of Up Against the Bulkhead provided a bilingual declaration of capitulation to be carried into combat: ‘I am against the war and will not fight the Vietnamese people.’ The front matter read: ‘Clip This to Save Your Life’.Footnote ¹⁶⁴

The GI Underground Press would play a decisive, if wholly underestimated, role in the Civil Rights movement by establishing a global network of printed political dissent. Underground publications emerged in virtually every location in which the U.S. Army was either stationed or engaged in combat: in Vietnam, in the Philippines, in Australia, in army bases throughout the United States, Germany, France, and Japan, in military prisons, in mess halls, in mailrooms, in immediate combat zones (The Boomerang Barb and GI Says) and aboard U.S. Navy ships. A contemporary account (1972) directly implicates military authorities and emphasizes the infrastructural precariousness of production aboard ships:

Beyond their interest as marginal media, the pamphlets of the GI Underground Press are also a neglected archive that allows us to tell another, complementary story about the Civil Rights Movement. Because they circulated widely and across social boundaries, these texts actively included social actors that were usually excluded from progressive politics. The two known issues of Women’s Voices, for instance, insisted on the ambiguity of their self-description as a ‘pamphlet’,Footnote ¹⁶⁶ simultaneously understood as polemical literature and medical print format (the ‘medical pamphlets’ of waiting rooms). Published in Okinawa by a group of servicewomen and civilians, Women’s Voices not only provided detailed instructions on contraceptives and pregnancy, but also denounced professional and military medicine (‘We are dehumanized, chemicalized, analysed and brushed aside’Footnote ¹⁶⁷) and encouraged vaginal self-examination as a safe alternative. Women’s Voices was therefore a medical pamphlet in that it provided condensed practical knowledge, yet it was also a political one in that it turned this knowledge against authorities, wrestled with the injustice imposed upon servicewomen, identified enemies, and encouraged civilians and troops to consider their common interests.

Even more importantly, it advertised (and often imitated in style and content) the seminal 1970/1971 feminist anthology Our Bodies, Ourselves: ‘We have copies of it at the Women’s House and if you can’t afford to pay the whole thing we will accept donations’.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Such reproductions and recirculations of polemical texts were fixture in the GI Underground Press and enabled texts published in the United States to circulate among highly marginalized publics, most notably African American GIs stationed abroad or deployed in combat zones and as such far removed from the urban settings of 1960s radicalism.

Both Black Unity, published at Camp Pendelton (San Diego County), and A’bout Face 1, published in Heidelberg and Mannheim (Germany), reprinted Point 6 of the Black Panther Party’s pamphletary Ten-Point Program (1966): ‘We Want All Black Men To Be Exempt From Military Service’.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The radical Voice of the Lumpen, published in U.S. bases around Frankfurt am Main (Germany), went much further. In the thirteen issues produced between 1971 and 1972, the publication developed a maximalist programme of radical justice and emancipation, pledging to ‘move against the evil and corrupt gentry by any means necessary and sufficient’,Footnote ¹⁷⁰ in this way redeploying the rhetoric of Malcolm X’s famed 1964 speech at the Organization of Afro-American Unity. By its eighth issue, Voice of the Lumpen was reprinting the pamphlets of the Revolutionary People’s Communications Network, founded in 1971 in Algeria by Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver. It highlighted the importance of communication infrastructures and the transnational ambitions of revolutionary anti-militarism, Black anti-fascism, and anti-capitalism:

Political pamphleteering, then, served various functions for dissident troops. It consolidated local movements and provided polemical material for regional, national, or international circulation. It also related the normative claims of militant organizations (such as Point 6 of the Ten-Point Program) to the concrete lived experience of African American troops deployed in war zones and, conversely, related their lived experience of combat to abstract normative demands formulated at home. Theory and practice – to use the recurrent terminology of Voice of the Lumpen – therefore constituted a system of mutual authentication and legitimation.

Most importantly, GI pamphleteering not only provided marginalized social actors with information and political perspectives, it also allowed them to participate as authors in the elaboration of political strategies. The inaugural issue of the transparently named FTA (Fun Travel Adventure, Fort Knox), for instance, declared radical openness to be its prime objective: ‘We’re going to say what most of us say when talking to each other but we’re going to put it in print.’Footnote ¹⁷² Others, like Highway 13, consisted primarily of readers’ letters that denounced both ‘racism’ and the ‘censorship’ of critical statements by GIs about the ‘military-industrial complex’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Voice of the Lumpen, without doubt one of the most uncompromising and polarizing publications of the Civil Rights era, also repeatedly called for readers to send in material:

The construction of an authorial collectivity, of ‘the people’, of a ‘most of us’ (FTA), or of what Mary Ann Caws calls the ‘we-speak’Footnote ¹⁷⁵ inherent to all polemical writing, is therefore dependent on the active participation of the readership and, conversely, the exclusion of the ‘the brass’, the ‘fascists’ and ‘pigs’ that make up ‘Amerikkka’.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Therein lies the ‘constituent power’Footnote ¹⁷⁷ of GI pamphleteering: it provided rational grounds on which the objective heterogeneity of its readership and collective authorship could be downplayed. In fact, the GI Underground press expressly insisted on the universality of its political stances when – and especially when – its content was addressed to specific political factions or subgroups: Voice of the Lumpen emphasized its compatibility with feminist critique, the Resisters Inside the Army’s two-page periodical ACT advocated for solidarity between ‘Black’ GIs and ‘Yellow’ Vietnamese fighters against a government that was ‘racist – inside and outside the States’,Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Bragg Briefs (Fayetteville, NC) built a platform that was inclusive of veterans, deserters, the Women’ Army Corps, GIs ‘using hard drugs’,Footnote ¹⁷⁹ lesbians, ‘gay and straight alike’.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

Beyond the immediate political affordances of ‘universalist’ positions (notably the maximization of readership, as well as the numerical growth and consolidation of politicized social actors), the radical inclusiveness of even the most explicitly partisan GI publications can perhaps best be explained by the military culture’s own nominally ‘universalist’ material underpinnings: universal conscription. In fact, the justification of the ‘practice of coercive mobilization through the notion of universality, the theory that each and every citizen should shoulder an equal share of the nation’s military obligation’Footnote ¹⁸¹ had become particularly contentious during the Vietnam War. Imbalanced conscription based on racial identity and class, along with ‘medical exemptions that favoured the wealthy, student deferments, and the safe haven of the National Guard and Reserves for the upper class’Footnote ¹⁸² had become central issues in the public perception of the Vietnam War. Criticism of these specific inequalities was a staple in the polemical texts of the GI Underground, thereby both galvanizing dissent and encouraging the formation of a more objectively universal, inclusive, and solidary critical constituency. Because they offered a common resistance narrative to a highly heterogeneous readership, and because this common resistance narrative effectively contested the U.S. military’s own highly selective uses of universality, the polemical writing of the GI Underground press should not be considered as mere ‘media curiosities’,Footnote ¹⁸³ but as one of the decisive crucibles of the New Left.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

5.3 A Paper Trail to Washington

The Vietnam War habituated several distinct demographics to radical polemic. Countless discharged troops and deserters returned to the United States with expertise in collective pamphleteering, the manufacturing of dissident publications, and the covert circulation of prohibited texts. Of those innumerable civilians who had either read or written for the GI Underground Press, many returned to careers in academia, management, and administration, both in the United States and in Europe.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Yet these troops and civilians were not only ‘media pioneers’Footnote ¹⁸⁶ in that they deployed an intercontinental network of pamphleteers, lay publishers, and partisan readers. They also pioneered a way of actively participating in democratic processes by way of marginal media infrastructures.

In effect, the publications of the GI Underground bore witness to a drastic transformation of the way marginalized social actors assessed their own capacity to question legal norms, exert political power, and call into question what sociologist Luc Boltanski calls the ‘reality of reality’.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ Why, in effect, ‘did these soldiers presume that they had rights protected by the First Amendment when their predecessors had resented but essentially accepted the Uniform Code of Military Justice?’Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Signs that collective exercises in radical pamphleteering were instrumental in this shift had first become apparent far removed from the battlefield. Underground and clandestine publications were springing up in the San Francisco Bay Area as in much of the United States. Long before the Queer Nation Manifesto’s insistence on four-letter words (the classic triumvirate of ‘fuck’, ‘cunt’, and ‘dick’, along with a litany of ‘ass’Footnote ¹⁸⁹), the Berkeley Barb (1965–1980), The Great Speckled Bird (1968–1976, 1988–1990), the San Francisco Oracle (1966–1968), and the Chicago Seed (1967–1974) mixed unrestrained rhetoric with anti-war politics, psychedelic advocacy, erotic art, radical agitation, and the polemical writings of discharged troops. By the late 1960s, a transnational network of radical, short-form, polemical publications was established, posing new challenges to state institutions and political opponents alike.

It is no exaggeration to say that polemical literature, both at home and on the battlefield, was one of the key reasons for the modernization and expansion of the state surveillance of political radicals. While previous administrations from the First Red Scare (1919) onwards had controlled dissent on an ad hoc basis, orchestrating harassment campaigns against targeted groups and individuals, the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations successively coordinated efforts to create a unified surveillance infrastructure. By the 1950s, the FBI under Hoover had compiled a ‘Security Index’ listing up to 15,000 individuals (ranging from polemicists and communists to clergymen and public figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr.) to be immediately arrested in case of a national emergency. For the first time, this ‘custodial detention list’Footnote ¹⁹⁰ was stored on IBM cards, ushering in the era of digital mass surveillance. By 1967, the programme was supplemented by a ‘Rabble Rouser Index’ (later renamed ‘Agitator Index’), a computerized database of 200,000 activists and writersFootnote ¹⁹¹ ‘who have demonstrated by their actions and speeches that they have a propensity for fomenting racial disorder’,Footnote ¹⁹² a definition soon to be expanded to include any ‘person who tries to arouse people to violent action by appealing to their emotions, prejudices, etc.; a demagogue’.Footnote ¹⁹³ Through electronic surveillance, campus infiltrations, break-ins, and systematic harassment, state authorities tightened their grip around what they had come to perceive as a major threat to domestic peace, orderly political discourse, capital interests, and racial segregation.Footnote ¹⁹⁴

Now treated as a grave danger necessitating staunch coercive measures, pamphletary publics were in turn given legitimate reasons to take themselves seriously as a political force. In other words, it is the expansion of surveillance itself that made it possible for pamphletary publics to perceive themselves as part of an agential group endowed with real political power.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Importantly, the increased surveillance measures also taught writers and activists to think of themselves as collective agents: they were precisely as general, universal, or undifferentiated as surveillance measures implied and codified legally. It is therefore not surprising that the pamphlets of the Civil War era repeatedly formulated demands in the name of collective subjects, long before the minute segmentation of activist groups was to take hold in the following decades: ‘we’, ‘kids’, ‘this generation’, ‘women’, ‘human beings’, as well as various shared pseudonyms or ‘assemblages of enunciation’Footnote ¹⁹⁶ were the collective subjects who demanded rights by pamphletary means. Thus, we can best think of pamphleteering during the Civil Rights Era as a wide-ranging set of social and moral dispositions that included not only a generous universalizing tendency among writers and readers, but also state infrastructures that made this tendency appear to be inevitable and justified in the eyes of these writers and readers themselves. The ‘subjectification through reading’ and ‘subjectification through writing’,Footnote ¹⁹⁷ an arduous process of self-definition and self-clarification that occurs whenever social actors turn to texts to define and defend their political existence, thereby brings into relief an important universalizing logic of collective action that is often overlooked in histories of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left. This amendment to the (overall justified) insistence on identity politics and anti-universalism in the seminal accountsFootnote ¹⁹⁸ of the late 1960s is what Book History in general, and the study of polemical literature in particular, can contribute to the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Yet while the state and its coercive measures did have a formative effect on the pamphletary cultures of the Civil Rights Era, the reverse is also true, albeit in more isolated terms. A fascinating example of a pamphlet having a crucial effect on policy, nationally and internationally, emerged from a protracted process of collective writing and rewriting. In 1972, the Trail of Broken Treaties cross-country caravan took Indigenous organizations from Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., where they presented a seminal 20-Point Position Paper to President Richard Nixon. Quite literally, ‘textuality [was] dragged into the streets’Footnote ¹⁹⁹ by the cross-country caravan of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Along the way, thousands of Native Americans put their demands to paper, revising the collective draft during workshops that aimed at defining ‘one basic status for all Indians, which could be easily understood by all Indians and which could not be whittled away by the actions of the different states’.Footnote ²⁰⁰

The central objective of the 20-Point Position Paper was to restore and secure treaty-making authority by Indian Tribes. The text demonstrated AIM’s readiness to deal with federal institutions on almost formalistic terms, often showcasing an intimate technical understanding of the institutional underpinnings of Native American history. Discussions of expropriation, displacement, and cultural marginalization were phrased in legal terms, rather than ethical ones. In conjunction with the seventy-one-day siege of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973, during which two activists were killed, the American Indian Movement’s pamphlet durably radicalized the strategies of the Indigenous movement.Footnote ²⁰¹ Yet the highly ambiguous nature of the pamphlet reflected the Civil Rights Movement’s own contradictions regarding the place of universality. On the one hand, AIM proclaimed the generality, inclusivity, and rationality of its core demands:

On the other hand, however, AIM’s insistence on autonomy and treaty-making authority excluded the kind of universalist leanings that had become apparent in the Underground press of the mid-1960s: ‘Unlike the American civil rights movement, with which it has been compared, AIM has seen self-determination and racism differently. Desegregation was not a goal. Individual rights were not placed ahead of the preservation of Native Nation sovereignty.’Footnote ²⁰³

It is arguably this very ambiguity that sealed the fate of the 20-Point Position Paper, as it unwittingly provided a framework for larger-scale institutional projects that faced similar contradictions. First, AIM’s principal demands were voiced once again at the crucial International NGO Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous People in the Americas, held in the United Nations’ offices in Geneva on 20–23 September 1977. It was the first UN conference at which Native peoples could present Indigenous delegates. The Conference’s own manifesto, the Declaration Of Principles for the Defense of the Indigenous Nations and Peoples of the Western Hemisphere, a core text in the political history of Indigenous Nations, rephrased AIM’s fundamental demands, including those concerning the treaty-making sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.Footnote ²⁰⁴ Second, the 20-Point Position Paper served as a basis for the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which defined minimal legal provisions. They included basic cultural, educational, economic, and linguistic rights for Indigenous peoples. The importance of the 20-Point Position Paper has been noted by the UN itself, highlighting its influence on preparatory studies published as early as 1982.Footnote ²⁰⁵ Finally, the 20-Point Position Paper forced the FBI and CIA to implement ‘an intensified effort to identify violence-prone individuals or organizations within the American Indian movement’ and to deploy an ‘informant development program’Footnote ²⁰⁶ to infiltrate communities and their political structures. After a seventy-one-day siege and the finalization of the 20-Point Position Paper, AIM was evicted from the Bureau of Indian Affairs it had been occupying. AIM organizer Dennis Banks summarizes the events:

Despite this failure, the 20-Point Position Paper was immensely successful. While it is generally the case, as Michael Warner argues, that ‘no single text can create a public … since a public is understood to be an ongoing space of encounter for discourse’, and while ‘texts themselves do not create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time’,Footnote ²⁰⁸ most exceptions to this rule are historically significant – from Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses and Zola’s J’Accuse … ! to AIM’s 20-Point Position Paper. As ‘effective knowledge’, as ‘a vigilant form of intervention into existing knowledges’,Footnote ²⁰⁹ AIM’s decisive pamphlet forced the state to take note of the power a single text could deploy among marginalized populations. For a time, the 20-Point Position Paper reverted the relationship between state authorities and pamphletary publics, demonstrating that pamphlets and pamphleteers were endowed with a crucial function not only in the formation of politicized reading (and writing) publics, but also in the elaboration and contestation of politics in its most institutional form.

6.1 1988 and the Return of ‘Virality’

In this section, I want to make the case that Book History and the history of pamphleteering have something to say about the radicalization of public speech online. Social scientists and critics of the contemporary public sphere ought to consider the rise of invective speech, ad hominem attacks, and radical critique in light of their infrastructural and generic origins: pamphleteering. I also want to argue that one of the important tropes in internet culture, ‘virality’, can best be understood – and criticized – with reference to its origins in pamphletary culture.

In 1988, the institutional framework of the future World Wide Web was established,Footnote ²¹⁰ the first commercial Internet Service Providers were capitalized, daunting technical problems of data flow were solved, and the Morris Worm appeared, the first computer virus spread via the internet rather than floppy disks. It was also the first to garner the attention of the non-specialist press.

By 1991, engineers and investors were drafting the technological and capitalistic contours of ‘Web 1.0’ and Jeremy Rifkin was contemplating the cultural impact of the coming ‘Age of Access’.Footnote ²¹¹ In turn, public discussions of polemical speech and pamphleteering were embedded into a new technological lexicon. Justice Clarence Thomas (see Section 5.1) compared his confirmation hearings with a ‘high-tech lynching’,Footnote ²¹² while the concept of ‘virality’ itself escaped the epistemic confines of epidemiology to now serve as a general metaphor for the high-frequency circulation of digital data. By the mid-1990s, ‘virality’ had become internet culture’s own profane theory of cultural transmission, as witnessed by the emergence of an informal canon of short-form, digital, high-circulation (‘viral’) pamphlets on digitalization, virality, and free speech: John Perry Barlow’s A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (1996), the Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), The Pirate Bay’s POwr, Broccoli and Kopimi (2005), Piotr Czerski’s We, the Web Kids (2012), the collectively authored A Feminist Server (2014), and James Damore’s Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber (2017).Footnote ²¹³

These pamphlets discuss internet politics, net neutrality, filesharing, freeware, and recruiting policies in the tech industry from a wide spectrum of ideological perspectives. Importantly, and for the first time in the history of pamphletary literature, none of these texts existed as print media. In fact, most of them do not even depend on a specific format: they are mere semiotic strings (often in plain .TXT or .RTF formats) that elicit dedicated interpretative dispositions for dedicated digital and social uses. Some are distributed as attachments to pirated video and music files on sharing platforms, thus maximizing circulation and, perhaps, the serendipity of protest: ‘virality’ consolidates incidental social structures into pamphletary publics.Footnote ²¹⁴

Yet ‘virality’, as a conceptual device and as a communicational property, is itself deeply embedded into the history of polemical literature. The term ‘virus’, in the sense of an infectious pathogen, has been in use since the early eighteenth century, long before the formal discovery of viruses by Dmitiri Ivanovsky in 1892. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both medical practitioners and polemical authors routinely commented (and punnedFootnote ²¹⁵) on the similarity between the spread of disease and the spread of polemic. The Boston Smallpox Epidemic of 1721, for instance, which infected more than half of a population of 11,000 and which was then known to involve a ‘communicable’ disease, saw the unfolding of a large-scale pamphlet war between proponents of vaccination and proponents of inoculation. Andrew Gross has shown how this pamphlet war subsequently triggered a series of public debates about the properties and ideological makeup of the early American public sphere, its counterpublics, and the weight they respectively attributed to rational debate. Gross concludes that ‘the infection metaphor is not very useful for making sense of the cultural significance of contagion. The transmission patterns of a virus are in no way analogous to the publication infrastructures that transmit meaning’.Footnote ²¹⁶

Yet during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this conflation of viral and pamphletary ‘contagion’ would not only become increasingly entrenched in public discourse, but it would also repeatedly ignite further pamphlet wars. All the main viral events of the time would be accompanied by a trail of short-form polemical texts, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.’s diatribes against the obstetricians of New England (the ‘Synod of Accoucheurs’,Footnote ²¹⁷ as he eloquently puts it) during the height of the puerperal fever epidemic to the countless pamphlets published the Covid-19 pandemic variously incriminating Chinese authoritiesFootnote ²¹⁸ or reactivating antisemitic canards.Footnote ²¹⁹

On this last point, it is crucial to note that ‘virality’ played a decisive role in the transformation of both antisemitic discourse and pamphleteering from the mid-1930s onwards. While it is true that the equation of ‘germs’ and ‘Jews’ had been a staple in nationalist rhetoric since the 1890s, and while ‘contagion’ had been a prominent trope in the history of antisemitism and anti-Judaism in the early twentieth century,Footnote ²²⁰ the 1930s saw the publication of a string of enormously popular pamphlets that further radicalized this grim tradition and related it to the spread not only of pathogens, but also of information. Shortly after the momentous publication of his novels Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on Credit (1936), Louis-Ferdinand Céline, for instance, would publish four antisemitic pamphlets whose brutality remains unmatched in collaborationist literature. Céline, a doctor who had previously been a secretary at the Institute for Hygiene and Epidemiology at the League of Nations, fanatically supported the idea that no distinction between the circulation of discourse, of populations, and of disease should henceforth prevail: science, communism, Jewish men, women, and children, and viral pathogens were to be treated as one and the same type of ‘infection’Footnote ²²¹ of the French body politic. In his explicit calls for the assassination of 320,000 men, women, and children, Céline turned to the pamphlet as the natural vector of antisemitic propaganda.Footnote ²²²

I therefore want to emphasize that the study of polemical literature requires a particularly conscientious attention to the methods and concepts it employs. The popularity of ‘virality’ is an eminent case in point: it can best be compared to what Hans Blumenberg described as an ‘absolute metaphor’, that is, a type of figurative language that has become naturalized to such a degree that it is independent from the contents it originally sought to illustrate.Footnote ²²³ Recent and recurrent calls to ‘immuniz[e] the public against misinformation’Footnote ²²⁴ are certainly necessary. Yet on account of the historical origins and political weight of informational ‘virality’, they make light of two important considerations. First, pamphletary literature does not spread like pathogens. Their material vectors, patterns, and target populations are different: if information did spread across the public sphere in ways resembling to any degree that of pathogens, ‘viral’ discourse would be endemic and exclude all other kinds of informational circulation. Second, pamphletary publics are neither ‘hosts’ nor ‘passive users’ of polemical speech. On the contrary, their agency in selecting, evaluating, and circulating (or not circulating) pamphlets is one of the very few constants in the history of polemical literature since the sixteenth century.Footnote ²²⁵ Should literary historians and book historians willingly dispense with this essential facet of the pamphletary tradition?Footnote ²²⁶

6.2 Epilogue: From Pamphleteers to Hashtag Publics?

The 2010s and 2020s arguably provide a negative, yet elegant, answer to this question. These decades have been marked by the increased footprint of digital media on political history, the advent of several pamphletary ‘booms’ and ‘waves’, as well as a growing sense of unease regarding marginal, polemical, and accusatory speech and writing. Across Europe and the United States, legislation was passed that facilitated the prosecution of licentious speech, the increase in content moderation, the protection of personal rights, the containment of ‘fake news’, and the loosening of ‘echo chambers’, whatever their precise contours and justification may be. Despite this sweeping societal shift, counterpublics have made massive use of digital infrastructures to voice polemical demands in the public and digital spheres, perhaps most visibly within the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, which have employed social media and turned to short-form polemical texts to advance their causes. Online pamphlets, then, are not merely occasions for ‘epidemiological encounters’Footnote ²²⁷ in an ‘epidemiological space’Footnote ²²⁸ among politically passive populations or ‘hosts’:Footnote ²²⁹ online pamphlets provide social coalitions with rationally elaborated arguments and a literary-political infrastructure by means of which to exert their agency.

Yet scholarship often meets these digital texts with indifference, if not outright condescension. Because they now make increased use of computerized infrastructures of mass publication, social movements online have been variously accused of ushering in ‘postfeminism’Footnote ²³⁰ and ‘slacktivism’,Footnote ²³¹ as well as ‘intensify[ing] a lack of connection to real space’.Footnote ²³² Many accounts of digital activism also point to the ‘profound digital dualism’Footnote ²³³ of social media, that is, its growing independence from traditional print media, to explain both the ‘viral logic’Footnote ²³⁴ of networked protest and ‘what happens to activist commitment and community-building when the medium used for organising no longer requires sustained face-to-face contact’.Footnote ²³⁵ Both points ignore the fact that all communication technologies, from the papyrus script to the HTTP protocol, have always allowed people to communicate, exchange information, or converse without being physically co-present.Footnote ²³⁶

Such dualisms also routinely lead scholarship to disregard the long historicity of polemical literature. Admittedly, the self-assured taxonomies of the early twentieth century fail to grasp the particularities of online pamphleteering (witness Orwell in 1948: ‘To ask ‘What is a pamphlet?’ is rather like asking ‘What is a dog?’ We all know a dog when we see one’Footnote ²³⁷). On the other hand, however, online pamphleteering has insisted on making its historical filiation known by including clear intertexual references, using the habitual dictions of protest, and conforming to recognizable formal features (Orwell again: ‘The true pamphlet, however, is a special literary form which has persisted without radical change for hundreds of years, though it has had its good periods and its bad ones’Footnote ²³⁸).

I have argued throughout this Element that we should shift our attention from the physical and formal features of the pamphlet to its social function, that is, to ‘what it does, how it works within machinic, systemic, and cultural domains’.Footnote ²³⁹ I would like to conclude on a brief discussion of what this change of perspective allows us to understand – or better understand – of the contours of contemporary online polemic. I want to highlight two important aspects of online pamphleteering: its addressability and its medial hybridity.

Online pamphlets are ‘addressable’ in that the current medial infrastructure of polemic (the internet) now enables readers (users) to respond to pamphletary statements as implied (and sometimes explicit) addressees, while also affording users a semblance of anonymity. In other words, the proportion of the ‘effective’ or ‘addressable audience’Footnote ²⁴⁰ among a quantified total audience has grown exponentially: the dialogical affordances of social media not only encourage, but more importantly make it possible for users to respond to polemical statements ‘with substantially diminished transaction costs and monumentally increased circulation’.Footnote ²⁴¹ This ‘new structural transformation of the public sphere and deliberative politics’Footnote ²⁴² has had strong legal implications and has attracted significant attention from scholars of constitutional and civil law. They stress, sometimes with explicit reference to the pamphletary tradition,Footnote ²⁴³ that anonymous expression online is a right tacitly guaranteed by both the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Footnote ²⁴⁴ They also emphasize that freedom of speech and anonymity in turn makes freedom of association not only an enforceable right, but also a practical possibility.Footnote ²⁴⁵ By turning to online polemic, counterpublics increasingly perceive their rights to be dependent on infrastructures of communication and association.

The #MeToo movement illustrates this affordance particularly well. From the first posting of the hashtag in October 2017 onwards, the addressability of the campaign was implied in its very title. As the movement took shape on the social media platform Twitter, it called upon users who had been ‘sexually harassed or assaulted’Footnote ²⁴⁶ to voice their experience as explicit addressees. In this way, social media platforms functioned as ‘aggregators of knowledge’Footnote ²⁴⁷ in a twofold sense: they aggregated polemical, political, or legal statements (‘I was sexually harassed’, ‘#MeToo’, ‘xyz sexually assaulted me’), and they aggregated knowledge about what users knew about one another, thereby undermining pluralistic ignorance (i.e., the mistaken belief that others do not share one’s knowledge, beliefs, or experiences). This affordance is arguably the crucial feature that sets online pamphleteering apart from its print predecessors. While the latter often circulated widely, they did so confidentially; in effect, readers had no plausible means of assessing the degree to which they belonged to a counterpublic. Online pamphlets, on the contrary, flourish precisely because their circulation is quantified and accompanied by metrics and metadata (i.e., a quantified and communicated number of ‘retweets’, ‘likes’, or ‘shares’Footnote ²⁴⁸). By circulating online and by disclosing the degree to which they do so, pamphletary statements make it plausible for social actors to assume their experience to be common to other actors, thereby mitigating the risks of associating with a (hitherto plausibly minoritarianFootnote ²⁴⁹) counterpublic.Footnote ²⁵⁰

But are tweets ‘pamphlets’ in any helpful and terminologically consistent sense? The fact that online polemic is increasingly medially hybrid is decisive here: most of the polemical ‘waves’ or ‘pamphletary events’Footnote ²⁵¹ of the past decade have had a particularly wide media footprint, at once encompassing print news media, blogs,Footnote ²⁵² social media, public events, and more classically ‘pamphletary’ texts.Footnote ²⁵³ This hybridization is a recent development. The #MeToo movement itself started out as an ordinary support network on the social media platform Myspace in 2006.Footnote ²⁵⁴ Barely a decade later, the movement could mobilize a wide variety of infrastructural resources and mould them to reflect the movement’s polemical intent. In fact, if 2017 could justly be dubbed the ‘Year of the Open Letter’,Footnote ²⁵⁵ it was also the year when a major reconfiguration of the pamphletary tradition became perceptible to most social actors. Open letters to film producer Harvey Weinstein were ‘performed’ on national television,Footnote ²⁵⁶ pamphlets accusing publishers were reprinted and advertised by competing outlets,Footnote ²⁵⁷ poems were published, anthologized, and shared on image-based social media platforms,Footnote ²⁵⁸ crowdsourced spreadsheets warned of abusive men in the media,Footnote ²⁵⁹ polemical texts were read by public figures at the United Nations Headquarters,Footnote ²⁶⁰ and a set of secondary polemics incriminated institutions of higher education in the most refined of scholastic tones.Footnote ²⁶¹ In short, the shift away from pamphleteering as a literary format to pamphleteering as a broader social activity was no longer merely a theoretical proposition, but a collective practice wholly independent from the original print infrastructure of short-form dissent.

To put it differently, and perhaps more prudently, pamphleteering now appears to be an increasingly legitimate activity for demographics which have access to an ever-growing range of media infrastructures and institutional contexts. There is, of course, an obvious quantitative reason for this: women represent half of the world’s population. As such, the growing digital footprint of polemical styles represents a crucial shift in democratic cultures.