Against lists: A Post-Manifesto for a Wild, Ecological Creativity

This chapter deals with the idea that creativity has its own life and agency. Manifestos are, as Steven Marcus (1998) writes, performative. They are a “form of action writing that accomplish something in their very creation and public proclamation”. A feral, uncommodified creativity demands an ethics that renders people response-able and adaptable. Creative ethics also takes into consideration scale, the local and specific—what Sedgwick (2002) describes as the practice of “weak” theory: action that stretches to include only what is needed and near, rather than a story that attempts to tell, explain, or account for all within a field or domain and thus risks becoming tautological. Halberstam, like other queer and critical contemporary scholars, addresses the relationship between and across “nature” and “culture,” between and through human and nonhuman, between and around “queer” and normative. Domestication, sameness and replication are the enemies of creativity.