“It is in the dramatic atmosphere induced by Cameron’s opera that I want to write a draft of my manifesto. I well know that, just as much as the time of avantgardes or that of the Great Frontier, the time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, it is the time of time that has passed: this strange idea of a vast army moving forward, preceded by the most daring innovators and thinkers, followed by a mass of slower and heavier crowds, while the rearguard of the most archaic, the most primitive, the most reactionary people, trails behind—just like the Navis, trying hopelessly to slow down the inevitable charge forward. During this recently defunct time of time, manifestos were like so many war cries to speed up the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries. This huge war-like narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow of time had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. The war waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how many defeats. What this series of manifestos pointed to was the inevitable march of progress. So much so that they could be used like so many sign posts to decide who was more “progressive” and who was more “reactionary.”

Today, the avant-gardes have all but disappeared, the front line is as impossible to draw as the precise boundaries of terrorist networks, and the well arrayed labels “archaic,” “reactionary,” “progressive” seem to hover haphazardly like a cloud of mosquitoes. If there is one thing that has vanished, it is the idea of a flow of time moving inevitably and irreversibly forward and which could be predicted by clear sighted thinkers. The spirit of the age, if there is such a Zeitgeist, is rather that everything that had been taken for granted in the modernist grand narrative of Progress, is fully reversible and that it is impossible to confide in the clear- ightedness of any one—especially academics. If we needed a proof of that (un)fortunate state of affairs, a look at the recent 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen would be enough: at the same time when some, like James Lovelock, argue that it is human civilization itself that is threatened by the “revenge of Gaia” (a good case if any, as we will see later, of a fully reversible flow of time!), the greatest assembly of representatives of the human race manage to sit on their hands for days doing nothing and making no decisions whatsoever. Whom are we supposed to believe: those who say it is a life-threatening event? those who, by doing nothing much, state that it could be handled by business as usual? or those who say that the march of progress should go on, no matter what?

And yet a manifesto might not be so useless at this point, by making explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to go even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future. The nuance I want to outline is rather that between progress and progressive. It is as if we had to move from an idea of inevitable progress to one of progressive, tentative and precautionary progression. It is still a movement. It is still going forward. But, as I will explain in the third section, the tenor is entirely different. And since it seems impossible to draft a manifesto without a word ending with an –ism (communism, futurism, surrealism, situationism, etc.), I have chosen, to give this manifesto a worthy banner, the word compositionism. Yes, I would like to be able to write “The Compositionist Manifesto” by reverting to an outmoded genre in the grand style of old, beginning by something like: “A specter haunts not only Europe but the world: that of compositionism. All the Powers of the Modernist World have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter!”.”