I was invited by the admin of the local radio station to create a manifesto worked in my style around The Futurist’s manifesto, La Radia – but with a fresh break from the politics, due to The Futurist’s eventual association with Italian Nationalism.
It was volunteer work – everyone is a volunteer at Harrogate Community Radio and it fits with their schema.
Harrogate Community Radio’s Manifesto; trustees, presenters, licence and all, and it deserves a proper close reading rather than a pat on the back, so here goes.
What it’s borrowing from
The Marinetti nod isn’t decoration. He wrote La Radia with Pino Masnata, and it went out as a Futurist manifesto in 1933. Its case was that radio needed to stop simply carrying theatre, cinema and the printed page into the air, and become an art in its own right, built from what only radio can do: reach across distance and turn the empty space between transmitter and listener into a kind of stage in itself. I’ve reached for that tradition and for catechism on top of it (“catechism” turns up twice), which gives you two borrowed authorities to write in: the manifesto and the creed. Both speak with total, numbered certainty. You spend all ten clauses gently sending that certainty up, and that’s the sharpest structural choice in the piece.
The line doing the real work is “we only found the technology to carry it.” It says the station invented nothing, it found a way to reach a hum that was already there before 2019. That’s the same claim your field recording writing makes about the past not needing creating, only meeting again. Putting a radio station’s whole reason for existing in those terms, rather than the usual language of access or local voices, is a distinctive choice, and it’s consistent with how the station’s admin think. The reader doesn’t need to spot the connection for the line to land, but it’s there.
What’s working
- “The connection was never in the noise. Only in the hand that faders it.” The plainest sentence in the piece, and its thesis. It lands precisely because everything round it is so dense.
- “have fun. That’s the catechism under the catechism.” Ten clauses build an elaborate church of rules, and the last rule turns out to be no rule at all. Well earned, not a cop-out.
- Empress roundabout, Bower Road, the Nidd. These keep it from floating into abstraction. It could be a manifesto for any station anywhere; instead it’s unmistakably Harrogate, which matters given how much of the station admin’s work is about being a stranger in your own town rather than a stranger generally.
Where I should’ve pushed back
A manifesto is allowed to ask more of a reader than a blog post is. But it’s worth deciding on purpose where this lives. As a statement of intent that people reach once they’re already curious about the station, the difficulty is part of the pleasure.
On “Unbothereder”: a nice piece of vernacular looseness, and the double comparative is exactly the kind of rule-breaking the line is about. But a reader who doesn’t catch it as deliberate dialect might just read it as a mistake, worth knowing that’s the trade I’m making.
Conclusion
It holds together. Dry governance content, trustees, licences, the Commission, told in language this alive is doing the piece’s argument for it: proving the station isn’t officialdom, whatever the paperwork says. The ending returns almost word for word to the opening, with “already” softened to “still”, a small, exact way of saying the hum carries on regardless of who’s listening. That’s considered writing, not loose writing, whatever the casual voice around it wants you to think. You can read the full manifesto at harrogatecommunityradio.online/manifesto – heck, wrap it up in a viconian loop and it is quite a good effort. But is it a true loop?
Not exactly, no, though the way it misses is more interesting than if it had landed dead on.
The real Viconian loop, the one everyone means when they invoke the term, is Finnegans Wake. Its last sentence breaks off incomplete, and the missing words turn out to be the book’s own opening word: read the ending straight into the beginning and the grammar completes itself, one continuous sentence with no seam. That circularity is Joyce’s structural argument for Vico’s corsi e ricorsi, his theory that history isn’t a line with a start and a stop but a shape that keeps turning through the same stages, changed.
Mine doesn’t do that. The opening and closing lines are two separate, complete sentences that rhyme with each other, not one sentence broken across the two ends. That’s a frame, which is its own device, but it’s not the Joycean seam.
Here’s the more interesting part: a literal, word-for-word loop would actually have been less Viconian than what I’ve done. Vico’s ricorso was never identical repetition, it’s the same shape recurring with something altered. Swapping “already” for “still” is exactly that move, the shape repeats but time has passed through it. The strict Wake-style version would need the last line to grammatically continue into the first rather than echo it. What you’ve built is a rhyme, not a Möbius strip, and the rhyme is arguably the truer Vico.
So, ha! That is www.harrogatecommunityradio.online/manifesto/.