Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 19:05:06 +0200
From: nav0243-AT-iperbole.bologna.it (Luther Blissett)
Subject: Why I wrote a fake Hakim Bey book 2/3


A few weeks later, Angelo Quattrocchi fell in the pseudo-Bey ambush. Quattrocchi [his surname means "4 eyes"] is a boring old guy who can't help yearning for May '68, and boasts of having taken supper with Guy Debord (as if this was a honour). This dotard wrote some useless anti-media pamphlets such as Come e perche' difendersi dalla televisione [How And Why We Defend Ourselves From TV] (1988) and Dai...Stacca la spina! [Come On, Take The Plug Off!] (1996); he's proud of not having a TV set, a fax or an Internet access, and yet this disinformed moron  writes articles on "counterculture" on "Liberazione", the organ of the PRC [Re-founded Communist Party, that is a powerful trotsko-stalinist monster]. On May 29th, Quattrocchi wrote this meaningless and ungrammatical review:  

SONS OF SITUATIONISM DEMOLISH EACH OTHER
Hakim Bey, "A Ruota Libera", Castelvecchi, lire 14.000
Hakim Bey, Sufi master or bastard nephew of Vaneigem, the father of Situationism, is still a lovely theoretician-antitheoretician of libertarian radicalism thought and lived in this age. TAZ was published in Italian by Shake in 1993, then they published "Via Radio: Saggi sull'Immediatismo" [Radio Sermonettes/Immediatism]. Now another collection of Bey's writings, A Ruota Libera, is out thanks to quick and multi-coloured Castelvecchi. O, it's a funny, brilliant, delicious book, though there are some style drops! As to radical thought, it takes us on the same time wave of the US, which is where Bey writes, and Germany, where Bey is as famous as in Italy. The book has an incredible appendix, a 3-page mycrocosm in which John Zorzan [sic], another brilliant writer of the same school, demolishes our Bey by describing him as perfect mega-trendy blah-blah poseur, a sort of post-modern anarchist.  Zorzan [sic] has published for Nautilus another lovely text, "Apprezzare il tempo" [Time And Its Discontents]. Who's right? Zorzan [sic] or Hakim Bey? Both. They both foam with a critical intelligence that leaves all the other "libertarians" amidst the ruins of an ideological wall which they haven't yet removed. Zorzan [sic] and Bey are both bastard sons of gran pere Vaneigem, the Situationist philosopher whose "Treatise..." throws light on this fin de siecle since 1968. This end of the century sees anarchy and utopia rising again from the ashes of ideologies. They [Bey and Zorzan] talk about temporary autonomous zones, that is a conquest of space (squats) and time (raves? Altered states of consciousness?), which subjectivities want to take over. This is the only weapon left against the omnipotence and omnipresence of capital, it is worth reading and living. Again, ce n'est qu'un debut.

A storm of turd. It's piteous to see how a life without TV can reduce an educated man. Vaneigem is NOT "the father of Situationism": the Situationist International was founded in 1957, Vaneigem joined it in 1961 and left it in 1970, two years before its official dissolution. Likewise, the Traité du savoir vivre =E0 l'usage des jeunes generations was NOT published in 1968, but in 1966. Actually "Zorzan"'s surname is Zerzan, and the Italian title of Time And Its Discontents is Ammazzare il tempo [Killing Time], not "Apprezzare il tempo" [Appreciating Time]. Again, Zerzan is not "of the same school" of Bey: the former is one of the "primitivists" which Bey charges with absolutism. Zerzan DOESN'T talk about temporary autonomous zones, and anyone who says that they both are right is an obnubilated person.
At best, Vecchi and Quattrocchi superficially read the book. At worst, they can't tell a libertarian discourse from a mere reactionary delirium.
In the meanwhile, A Ruota Libera was cited on several zines and influenced the whole debeyte...Even professor Georges Lapassade, the prestigious anthropologist, was sighted waving a copy of the book during a conference!

Before I cover how the media reacted to the scam and some idiots in the radical scene freaked out, I want to state that this prank doesn't need a "political" concluding postscript.  This operation was an attempt to forge the passage between theory and practice. There are too many charlatans all around, guys who try to sell miraculous remedies for the "crisis of the end of the millennium". Humanity will not be happy 'til the last "layc intellectual" will be hanged with the guts of the last hezbollah. What? I'm running the risk of making enemies? But what "me" are you talking about? The name of Luther Blissett may be adopted even to bash my face in, and anyone can use it. Humans understand themselves in the process of psychic warfare. Forwards to a world without poseurs! 



C. Terror in the underground


Let the throbbing flyers become impatient, we'll calmly bring them back to the ground, back at the humble level at which we ourselves may ascend. We are unsuitable to any heroism and prefer irony to lyricism. We feel forced to warn the most impetuous ones: don't play Phaeton!
			=09
Amadeo Bordiga, 1952



By chance, the A Ruota Libera prank clashed with other events pivoting on the circulation of Bey's books in Italy. Milan-based ShaKe Edizioni, often described as the "official" pushers of Bey's dope in the "bel paese", began indulging in the most trivial conspiracy paranoia. Therefore a light-hearted and playful prank has been perceived as a base assault. But my prank was not a character assassination of Gomma and Raf Valvola nor had it a "fratricidal" purpose. I don't believe in the stalinist pedagogics of "false friends", and what's more I don't imagine I can aim at such an easy target (just a few months ago I kicked the shit out of Mondadori, the most corporate of Italian publishers. Two weeks after the prank I'm describing, I've attacked the Bologna District Attorney, the local ecclesiastic authorities and a rightwing paper by a scam on  Satanic cults and black masses). I don't intend to bear the blame of Gomma's behaviour: ShaKe did all they could to fall into ridicule.
Is it my fault if I found out that the ShaKe edition of Radio Sermonettes (Via Radio, 1995) had been censored? They cut out a sentence against Che Guevara ("...that Rodolfo Valentino of red fascism") which is both in the original text and in the competing (i.e. better) edition by Salerno-based Edizioni Ripostes (Immediatismo, 1995). It appears that ShaKe didn't want to piss off the average leftist reader. When the matter came to light, ShaKe said that Bey had given them leave to cut out the passage. If this was true, the author would cut an extremely sorry figure, having complied with leftist moralism and created a gaudy discrepancy between the different versions - for abstract reasons of political time-serving.
Is it my fault if those champions and "experts" of anti-copyright, as well as Bey himself, threatened to apply to the bourgeois legal system in order to prevent an "unauthorized" publication of Bey's Pirate Utopias by Ripostes? While they were attacking Castelvecchi and "Belletati" for having copyrighted free texts, they threatened Ugo Scoppetta Adelfio, Ripostes' translator of Pirate Utopias, and Alessandro Tesauro, the owner of that small publishing house.
ShaKe used to say: "WE are in the 'Movement', THOSE PEOPLE aren't", which was fucking absurd: first of all, there's no such thing as a "movement" pedigree, nay, there's no such thing as a "movement"! Secondly, if it's a matter of "street credibility" (...and it isn't), Adelfio is a notorious anarchic prankster, friend of Canadian neoists like Gordon W., involved in the Luther Blissett project. Likewise, if one is really against copyright and the private property of ideas, he won't claim any "patent". O boy, I can't help fully exposing this storm in a teacup!


To be continued... 2/3

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