Date: Sat, 2 May 1998 16:36:41 -0400
From: Luther Blissettt <blissett-AT-unpopular.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: AUT: This list is getting a bit weird


Katha Pollitt wrote:

>A few weeks ago, Autopsy was a place for serious and mutually respectful
>conversation -- at least most of the time.   Now all of a sudden, I read
>that Louis Proyect supports  Maoist gay-baiters and turns into assorted
>authorities people whose politics he dislikes. (Charges he ignores,so
>what am I to think?)  Luther Blissett turns out to be the pseudonym of
>several dozen Italians who seem to be involved in (voluntary!
>all-adult!) Satanic sex rituals, publishing scams, and assorted
>unpleasant pranks involving skulls. Bernhard and Harald, whose
>contributions were always smart and sensible, have faded away.

The Luther Blissett Multiple Name Project has been going for several years
now and has involved a broad range of interventions - eg at the 1995 Venice
Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art. A recent intervention concerned
the publishing a book about the trial of some Satanists in Bologna, and
castigating the prosecution for bringing a false prosecution as part of the
media manipulation used by the Roman Catholic Church. I do not know whether
any of the satamists have used the name Luther Blissett or not. Certainly
when the book appeared it made no suggestion that they had - though it is
possible that they might have done so by now. I would welcome this as I see
Satanism as a simple inversion of christianity, which fails really to
escape its logic, whereas the Luther Blissett Multiple Name Project is far
more interesting.

An essential ingredient of the LBMNP is precisely questioning identity both
personally and politically. I feel this is important with the rise of
identity politics, which stresses precisely this point. I am not sure what
an authentic identity would be - the complete matching of a persons
interior life onto how they function as a social creature. I don't think
that's possible. I think that part of social intereaction is the way our
interior lives interact with how we function as social creatures. Of course
this can become an area of to much tension, when a mental breakdown is the
usual consequence. On the otherhand the tension can become suppressed, the
inner life becomes subsumed by the social role. What is important is to
strengthen the psychic powers so that the interior life can find expression
through mutating the function as a social creature. Perhaps you call this
energising!

>  I am starting to feel like Autopsy is turning into one of those awful
>Internet-crime stories, in which people have false identities and secret
>lives and are using the list to manipulate and play games.
>
>Katha
>

As regards playing games, I consider the seventeenth century notion of the
Ludibrium important. In fact it was neither a game nor something serious,
but relied on the tension between the two. In some ways this runs parallel
to Harry's recent posting of the Peter Linebaugh text trying to balance
green and red, the festive and the angry. The green man is traditionally
jolly.

But then from time to time, we are faced with the seriousness of a court
case and an international appeal for solidarity and defense against state
interference with what happens on the web.

So many people have professed themselves anxious to defend freedom of
speech, so I thought it only considerate to put them in touch with this
other aspect of the LBMNP, and indeed Richard Barbrook's statement of
solidarity. As much as I disagree with his position, I feel that it is
certainly clear in locating the notion of free speech in the bourgeois
notion of the republic. It was also necessary to make the other documents
available so that people could understand the issues involved.

That's the good news. Here's the bad. It is daily life under capitalism
which is getting progressively weirder. Indeed retreat into awful
internet-crime stories can often be a way people cope with this. I think
this is to do with over design and over stimulation as  more and more
labour becomes used up in intangible aspects of the commodity - such as
image. We face the close of the period whenthe economy was driven by the
complex of cars-petrol-roadbuilding into the age of
computers-telecommunication-television. Here, more and more commodities
will have only the slightest physical reality - principally the mechanical
means to store data. The expense is to be found in organising the data into
such things as a computer programme that works, music that is satisfying
etc. etc.

Old methods of political organisation are now useless. Perhaps we are stuck
with the weird. This does not have to be celebrated, but it does need to be
dealt with.

http://www.unpopular.demon.co.uk
http://www.dsnet.it/qwerg/blissett/bliss0.htm
http://www.skatta.demon.co.uk
http://www.geocities.com/~johngray




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