Luther Blissett (pseudonym)
Luther Blissett is a multiple-use name and an open pop star informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas since 1994. The pseudonym first appeared in Bologna, Italy, in mid-1994, when a number of cultural activists began using it for staging a series of urban and media pranks to experiment with new forms of authorship and identity. From Bologna, the multiple-use name spread to other European cities, such as Rome and London, as well as countries like Germany, Spain, and Slovenia. Sporadic appearances of Luther Blissett were also noted in Brazil, Canada, Finland, and the United States.
For reasons that remain unknown, the pseudonym was borrowed from a real-life Luther Blissett, a notable association football player in the 1980s. In December 1999, the Italian activists who had launched the Luther Blissett Project in 1994 decided to discontinue usage of the name by committing metaphorical ritual suicide, or seppuku. After authoring the best-selling historic novel Q as "Luther Blissett", five of them went on to found the writers' collective Wu Ming.
Background
Multiple-use names
Marco Deseriis coined the concept of "improper names", which includes two subcategories: "collective pseudonyms" whose use is controlled and centralized, and "multiple-use names", which are subject to "decentralized and idiosyncratic" uses. For Deseriis, Luther Blissett is not a collective pseudonym like Wu Ming but a name of multiple use. "Multiple name" is instead the expression used by the English writer, artist, and essayist Stewart Home for a series of names of multiple use, such as Monty Cantsin and Karen Eliot, who were forerunners of Luther Blissett between the 1970s and 1990s in the context of mail art and artistic avant-gardes like Neoism.Real Luther Blissett
The multiple identity is named after the footballer Luther Blissett, who played for the England national football team and is best known for his time at Watford and Milan in the 1980s, among other clubs. It is particularly popular among Italian subcultural activists and artists. The reasons the group chose the name was unclear to mainstream journalists; the BBC suggested that Blissett, one of the first black footballers to play in Italy, may have been chosen to make a statement against right-wing extremists in the country. It was also suggested that when being scouted by Milan, the Watford player they were impressed with was in fact John Barnes and they mistakenly bid for Blissett being one of the two black strikers at the club, and thus the group may have taken the name as a reference to a red herring. According to one former member, the decision was based purely on the perceived comic value of the name.Since the beginning of the project, the real Blissett has been aware of the group taking his name. Early reports differed widely in saying whether he liked the attention he received because of them. On 30 June 2004, he appeared on the British television sports show Fantasy Football League – Euro 2004, broadcast on ITV, and joked about his own alleged involvement in the Luther Blissett Project. After host Frank Skinner read a line from the novel Q prologue, Blissett produced a copy of Luther Blissett's Italian book Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica 2.0 and quoted extensively from it in the original Italian: "Anyone can be Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name Luther Blissett". At the end of the show, hosts and guests all said in unison: "I am Luther Blissett!"
Luther Blissett's mythmaking and politics
While the folk heroes of the early-modern period and the 19th century served a variety of social and political purposes, the Luther Blissett Project was able to utilize the media and communication strategies unavailable to their predecessors. According to Deseriis, the main purpose of the Luther Blissett Project was to create "a folk hero of the information society" whereby knowledge workers and immaterial workers could organize and recognize themselves.Luther Blissett became a positive mythic figure that was supposed to embody the very process of community and cross-media storytelling rather than being understood only as a Media prankster and culture jammer. Roberto Bui, one of the co-founders of the Luther Blissett Project and Wu Ming, explained the function of Luther Blissett and other radical folk heroes as mythmaking or mythopoesis. Bui said that mythopoesis was "the social process of constructing myths, by which we do not mean 'false stories,' we mean stories that are told and shared, re-told and manipulated, by a vast and multifarious community, stories that may give shape to some kind of ritual, some sense of continuity between what we do and what other people did in the past. A tradition. In Latin the verb 'tradere' simply meant 'to hand down something,' it did not entail any narrow-mindedness, conservatism or forced respect for the past. Revolutions and radical movements have always found and told their own myths."
Another important element was relationship of the Italian Luther Blissett Project to the autonomist and Marxist theory of labour known as operaismo. Drawing from the work of Italian workerists, such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato, and others, the activists of the Luther Blissett Project envisioned Blissett as the expression of the capacity of immaterial workers to produce forms of wealth that cannot be properly measured and attributed to an individual producer. The incalculability of these new forms of labour is articulated in the "Declaration of Rights of Luther Blissett", redacted by the Roman Luther Blissett Project in 1995. In this manifesto, the Luther Blissett Project argued that because in late capitalism any social activity can potentially generate value, the culture and media industries should guarantee a basic income to every citizen detached from individual productivity.
History
Early appearances
Luther Blissett first appeared in Bologna in the late summer of 1994. According to graphic artist and publisher Piermario Ciani, who was among the first to popularize the pseudonym in Italy, the plan to launch Luther Blissett was "concocted between Bologna and Rovigo, with the complicity of an old retired mail artist". The postal artist was Alberto Rizzi, credited by Wu Ming with the idea for the prank on Chi l'ha visto and honoured with frequent appearances in the collective's novels. In Q, he is Adalberto Rizzi, best known as "Frate Pioppo". The "first explosion" took place in Friuli. This refers to the prank against the television programme Chi l'ha visto, which was staged in December 1994 but had been prepared in the previous two months.In October 1994, in order to make Luther Blissett a pop icon, two graphic artists in Bologna worked on photo portraits from the 1930s and created a fictitious face. From the very beginning, a distinction was made between Luther Blissett, a pseudonym anyone could use, and the Luther Blissett Project, "an organized network within the open community", active primarily in Italy, committed to defining and implementing strategies for using the name. Connected to the Luther Blissett Project were the MIR collectives, dedicated to radical ufology and the protagonist of sensational exploits, and AAA.
Peak of fame
Luther Blissett reached the height of fame when it was used to sign the novel Q, published in 1999, so much so that the Eurispes Institute's "Rapporto Italia" included in Chapter V dedicated to the theme "Lie/Truth", a long report on the diffusion of the pseudonym, titled "The Invisible Insurrection: The Luther Blissett Case". Through various initiatives—sabotage, performances, demonstrations, publications, videos, and radio broadcasts, the pseudonym quickly spread to various Italian and European cities, such as Rome and London, and then to Germany, Spain, and Slovenia. Sporadic appearances of Luther Blissett were also noted in the Americas, such as in Canada, the United States, and Brazil.A Luther Blissett collective was the author of the 2007 book book Il processo illecito. Tutte le verità nascoste dell'estate del calcio: intercettazioni abusive, sabbie, fumi, abusi di potere e procure creative, a critical analysis of the 2006 Italian football scandal, which involved among others Blissett's former football club Milan but was especially focused by both the investigators and the media on Juventus. Alongside the website Ju29ro.com, a group of lawyers, accountants, and communication experts who collected and verified court rulings, despite the significant disadvantage in terms of visibility, this Luther Blissett collective was able to successfully create a counter-information that ultimately debunked most of the allegations by the prosecution and the media at the dawn of the scandal and that had created a trial by media, overturning the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, free from sensationalism.
Suicide, Wu Ming re-birth, and ''Q''
On 31 December 1999, LBP activists committed a metaphorical suicide. In the announcement, seppuku was defined as "the last, extreme, radical disappearance of a popular hero". The seppuku was commemorated on the CD Luther Blissett: The Open Pop Star, which featured artists such as Japanese artist Merzbow, Klasse Kriminale, and Le Forbici di Manitù, the "artistic vandal" Piero Cannata, and the French philosopher Jacques Camatte. Also in 2000, the four authors of Q, together with a fifth writer, formed the Wu Ming collective. The novel Q was written by four Bologna-based members of the Luther Blissett Project, as a final contribution to the project, and published in Italy in 1999. It was subsequently translated into English, Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Danish, Polish, Greek, Czech, Russian, Turkish, Basque, Serbian, and Korean. In August 2003, the book was nominated by The Guardian for its First Book Prize.In 1999, Q reached the final of the Strega Prize. The authors boycotted the ceremony, describing as "a farce, one of the many useless institutions of this country". They added: "Naturally we are not interested in winning, also because first place is always assigned in advance, but if by chance we were to enter the top five, we advised Einaudi to buy us fourth place." They also said that the Strega Prize was "more rigged than Sanremo and this year it has already been outsourced to Maraini." There were still five weeks to go until the final, which on 9 July saw Luther Blissett coming fourth and crown Dacia Maraini the winner with her collection of short stories Buio. In January 2000, after their seppuku, the authors of Q formed a new group called Wu Ming, under which name many novels were published in several languages and countries.
Limited selection of Blissett's stunts, pranks, and media hoaxes
In January 1995, Harry Kipper, a British conceptual artist, disappears at the Italo-Slovenian border while touring Europe on a mountain bike, allegedly with the purpose of tracing the word ART on the map of the continent and disappearing while tracing the final letter. The victim of the prank was a famous missing-persons prime-time show on the Italian state television. They sent out a TV crew to look for a person that never existed. They went as far as London, where novelist Stewart Home and Richard Essex of the London Psychogeographical Association posed as close friends of Kipper's. The hoax went on until Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for it. It was the TV programme Chi l'ha visto? that took an interest in the case, sending a crew to the scene of the alleged disappearance and to London, the artist's supposed hometown, and only at the last moment before going on air the editorial staff realized that Kipper did not exist.This was followed by the September 1994–May 1995 experiment. Starting in September 1994, a Bolognese community radio began broadcasting Radio Blissett, a late-night show featuring a variable number of Luther Blissetts who "patrolled" the city on foot and called the studio from local phone booths. Inspired by the Letterist International and Situationist International's urban drift or dérive—a seemingly aimless wandering through the city whereby psychogeographers go in search of heightened emotional experiences—Radio Blissett allowed players to interact at a distance in real time. Listeners could also call in from home and direct the patrols to various locations to join or create unexpected social events, including guerrilla-theater interventions, street parties, three-sided football matches, and "psychic attacks" against public buildings and institutions. In the spring of 1995, the experiment was duplicated in Rome, where the wider extension of the city required the simultaneous use of car patrols and cell phones. The Saturday night show, which aired on the frequencies of Radio Città Futura, featured psychic attacks against the Italian copyright office, the office of employment, and other semi-improvised direct actions which culminated in one of the most well-known episodes of the Blissett's saga.
On 17 June 1995, a few dozen participating in the Roman Radio Blissett boarded a night tram at different consecutive stops. A rave party took place on the vehicle until the police decided to stop it. Requested to disembark and identify themselves, the ravers refused to identify themselves other than with the multiple-use name. A riot ensued in which the police fired three shots in the air. A journalist from Radio Citta' Futura covered the event with his cell phone broadcasting the riot and the shots on the radio programme. The radio programme caused a media sensation. Also in June 1995, the paintings of Loota, a female chimpanzee, were to be exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Arts. In the context of the hoax, Loota was described as a former victim of sadistic experiments in a pharmaceutical lab. The ape was then saved by the Animal Liberation Front, and later became a talented artist. Some newspapers announced the event; however, Loota did not exist. A November 1995 article in the Workshop for Non-Linear Architecture journal Viscosity stating that the K Foundation had announced a 23-year moratorium on "all further activity" following their burning of a million pounds in cash on the Isle of Jura was credited to Luther Blissett. Also in 1995, the newspaper Il Resto del Carlino published a story about model Naomi Campbell's visit to Bologna for cosmetic surgery. The revelation that the story was false caused a stir in the editorial staff of the Bologna-based newspaper.
Between 1995 and 1996, Luther Blissett organized collective "psychogeographic drifts", a practice of Situationist origin, coordinated by the radio programme Radio Blissett in Rome and Bologna. On the evening of 18 March 1995, during one such drift held on the Roman tram network, about one hundred people occupied a bus to hold a "traveling party". The police stopped the vehicle and detained twenty participants in the event. Four of them were tried for resistance and contempt. In the same year, Luther Blissett took part in the Disordinazioni projects on urban intervention. Throughout the two-year period of 1995 and 1997, especially in Bologna, Luther Blissett organized performances of Situationautic Theatre. In addition to the drifts and performances, theoretical interventions on urban planning and urban life are multiplying, published in the magazine Luther Blissett or read during conferences. On 17 December 1996, a conference on the environment was held at the Cinema Imperiale in Guidonia, with the participation of local administrators, the associative world and numerous citizens. The report by Luther Blissett was read, introduced as "full professor of Psychogeography at the University of Rome", who was absent from the meeting but brought a point of view on the "waste belt". In 1996, some members of the project provided Mondadori, a publishing house interested in commercially exploiting the media phenomenon, with random texts from the Internet. Mondadori published them under the title net.gener@tion, billing them as "the manifesto of new freedoms".
In 1997, many Italian newspapers published the news of the arrest of Gelmini, a controversial founder of several drug rehabilitation centres, for child sexual abuse. The news, spread by Luther Blissett in a phone call to ANSA, was false but destined to become reality ten years later when Gelmini was in fact investigated for the same crimes. Between 1995 and 1997, Viterbo newspapers denounced the practice of black masses and ritualistic violence in the woods surrounding the city. The newspapers peppered the satanists' actions with details, and the news even reached Studio Aperto, giving rise to a collective panic in the city. Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for the elaborate prank in an episode of TV7, the weekly programme of TG1. Connected to the satanic pranks in Viterbo was the publication in 1997 of the pamphlet Lasciate che i bimbi. Pedofilia: un pretesto per la caccia alle streghe, an essay analyzing the media lynching of Bolognese Satanist Marco Dimitri, who was unjustly accused of sexual assault and ritual abuse of a minor. The book was itself the subject of legal action and a trial. In 1997, Blissett also spread the false news of the suicide of Susanna Tamaro, who at that time was at the height of her popularity after the publication of Va' dove ti porta il cuore.
Between 1998 and 2000, Italian art magazines such as Tema Celeste and Flash Art began to report about the activities of Darko Maver, a hitherto unknown radical Serbian performance artist who disseminated hyper-realistic replicas of dismembered bodies in public spaces and hotel rooms across the former Yugoslavia. The magazines and a website called Free Art Campaign reported that the artist was arrested by the Serbian authorities for his performances, which were meant to offer a scathing meditation on the hyperreality and media representation of the Yugoslav Wars; before the exhibition, the artist's death in a NATO bombing was announced. On 30 April 1999, the Free Art Campaign announced that Maver was found dead in a prison cell in Podgorica, Montenegro. In March 2000, after alternative art spaces such as Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana, Forte Prenestino in Rome, and major art venues like the Venice Biennale set up a posthumous gallery, dedicated retrospectives, and paid tribute to the artist, the Luther Blissett Project, along with the newborn net art collective 0100101110101101.org, announced that Maver was himself a work of art. Also between 1998 and 2000, a fake Vatican website created by Luther Blissett remained online. Its graphics were identical to those of the official website but its intent was satirical and misleading, containing a fake programme for the Jubilee 2000 and manipulated texts of papal encyclicals.
A month before the appearance on the bookshelves of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, an email was sent to the Full Disclosure mailing list. In the e-mail, a self-declared group of Catholic hackers purportedly gave away the ending of the book, declaring they violated the computer systems of Bloomsbury Publishing to obtain it. The e-mail quoted Joseph Ratzinger's words against Harry Potter. The news escalated from niche IT security mailing lists to mainstream media outlets, and in about 48 hours it was run by CNN, BBC, Reuters, and over 10,000 blogs who reported the claim. Three days after, Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for the hoax in a public email that described how easily the media could be manipulated and how this could be used for psyops purposes. The revelation was ignored by most media outlets, with the notable exception of Noticiasdot, which published an interview with Luther Blissett. The psyop may be the cause of the 5% drop of Bloomsbury Publishing stock quoted on the London Stock Exchange. On 30 September 2015, within the context of the European migrant crisis, Luther Blissett claimed responsibility for a hoax against Ryanair, consisting of the company's false announcement that it intended to carry undocumented refugees on its flights.
Alleged role of Umberto Eco
The German weekly Der Spiegel in its 25 May 1997 issue, discussing the spread of Blissett in Europe, listed writer and semiologist Umberto Eco as one of the project's founders. That same year, a pamphlet titled "Umberto Eco's Multiple Names: The Hegemony of the Left from Gramsci to the Internet" was published online and as a stapled booklet. This anti-Blissett publication, signed "K.M.A." and attributed to far-right circles, was published online. The booklet ascribes the entire Luther Blissett Project to a secret circle of semiologists at the University of Bologna, whose alleged leader was Eco. The publication of Q encouraged new comparisons and connections. On 25 February 1999, Panorama reported: "Dense mystery and splashes of venom surround Q, a colossal historical and imaginative novel by Luther Blisset to be released this spring in the Stile libero Einaudi series... It's impossible to know more: in keeping with the Luther Blisset project, the real authors remain in the shadows and the publisher is keeping quiet. Faithful to their anti-copyright stance, Blisset's followers enjoy bouncing crazy hypotheses around the ponderous tome: behind the multiple identities there might be a group of goliards or a heretical prelate. And some are even going so far as to name Umberto Eco himself."On 6 March 1999, Il Messaggero reported a denial by Eco, stating: "It's pointless to ask who is hiding behind the Luther Blissett of Q. Is it Umberto Eco ? Is it Bifo? A group of young people from the University of Bologna? He's certainly laughing, sipping coffee, like the rebellious protagonist of his novel, at the court of some powerful man." On that same day, La Repubblica published an interview by Loredana Lipperini with the four authors of Q, with a preface: "The story... appealed to more than one illustrious reader who was able to preview it, and it fueled what was predictable: the hunt for the true author, until now identified with heretical prelates and, of course, Umberto Eco. Things are different. The authors are four, and they have been part of the 'Luther Blissett Project' since its inception." In 2021, Wu Ming 1 revealed that "Umberto Eco's The Multiple Name" was itself a Blissett hoax, that K.M.A. simply stood for "Kiss My Ass" and that "the real author of the pamphlet is a member of the Luther Blissett Project, now a media philosopher, a respected lecturer at a German university and a theorist of so-called 'accelerationism'."
Legal issues
In 1997, the Castelvecchi publishing house published the book Lasciate che i bimbi. Pedofilia: un pretesto per la caccia alle streghe under the name of the Luther Blissett collective. The book addressed the legal case of Marco Dimitri and the Children of Satan, which resulted in an acquittal of all charges after years of investigations and trials. The book was positively reviewed in several national newspapers. According to Il Sole 24 Ore on 25 January 1998, the book showed "the errors to which the obsession with pedophilia and the desire for revenge can lead, especially if the mania is fueled by the press's desire for scoops... a call for common sense and caution, and a banishment of the perverse logic of the scapegoat." La Repubblica praised the book as "a healthy antidote to the collective hysteria that... has gripped the entire universe of communication". Nonetheless, the book caused a scandal, being accused of pedophilia, was censored on Rome's civic network, and was banned by the Telefono Arcobalen association led by Fortunato Di Noto, an anti-pedofilia activist priest.In the book, the collective strongly attacked Lucia Musti, the public prosecutor in the Children of Satan trial. Musti filed a civil suit—for the "uncivilized language" and "the harmfulness of the statements and judgments contained" in the book—against the publishing house and the two internet providers who distributed the book online. At the trial, Castelvecchi presented a document showing that the publishing contract was signed on behalf of the Luther Blissett collective by Roberto Bui. Consequently, the latter was also sued. On 14 June 2001, the Civil Court of Bologna sentenced Castelvecchi and the two Internet providers, ordering them to reimburse Musti for the sum of 80 million lire, thirty of which were due to the publishing house. Bui was sentenced, in conjunction with Castelvecchi, to reimburse 50% of the sum.
Works
Mind Invaders- "Guy Debord è morto davvero" Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica 2.0, AAA edition, 1996, Green Apocalypse Anarchist Integralism Handbuch der Kommunikationsguerilla Q The Invisible College
- Numerous software recipes in the Python Cookbook edited by Alex Martelli and published by O'Reilly and Associates