Abstrakt
Declarations, manifestos, programs and proposals have sometimes been explicitly imagined inutopian fiction (for example in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Martians, which includes "The Constitution of Mars") but they have largely appeared in utopias formulated implicitly, in descriptions and narratives of imaginary communities. As is well known to students of utopian literature, to depict a more perfect world is to court failure, to encounter "the atrophy in our time of what Marcuse has called the utopian imagination, the imagination of otherness and radical difference" (Jameson 1982: 153, original emphasis).
Yet, we need utopias, just as we need declarations, manifestos, political programs and proposals. In my presentation, I will discuss a selection of writings by the Russian futurist Velimir Khlebnikov, with the intention to show that rather than being simply nonsensical and absurd, his works such as the "Proposals" reveal the nonsense and absurdity of our dehumanized, war-driven world, and may thus be read alongside other manifestos and declarations.