Luther Blissett (nom de Plume) - Luther Blissett's Mythmaking and Politics

Luther Blissett's Mythmaking and Politics

While the folk heroes of the early-modern period and the nineteenth century served a variety of social and political purposes, the Luther Blissett Project (LBP) were able to utilize the media and communication strategies unavailable to their predecessors. According to Marco Deseriis, the main purpose of the LBP was to create "a folk hero of the information society" whereby knowledge workers and immaterial workers could organize and recognize themselves. Thus, rather than being understood only as a media prankster and culture jammer, Luther Blissett became a positive mythic figure that was supposed to embody the very process of community and cross-media storytelling. Roberto Bui—one of the co-founders of the LBP and Wu Ming—explains the function of Luther Blissett and other radical folk heroes as mythmaking or mythopoesis:

Mythopoesis is 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 LBP to the Autonomist-Marxist theory of labor known as Italian Workerism. Drawing from the work of Italian Workerists, such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato and others, the activists of the LBP 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 labor is articulated in the "Declaration of Rights of Luther Blissett", redacted by the Roman LBP in 1995. In this manifesto, the LBP claims 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:

The industry of the integrated spectacle and immaterial command owes me money. I will not come to terms with it until I will not have what is owed to me. For all the times I appeared on TV, films, and on the radio as a casual passersby or as an element of the landscape, and my image has not been compensated . . . for all the words or expressions of high communicative impact I have coined in peripheral cafes, squares, street corners, and social centers that became powerful advertising jingles, without seeing a dime; for all the times my name and my personal data have been put at work inside stats, to adjust the demand, refine marketing strategies, increase the productivity of firms to which I could not be more indifferent; for all the advertising I continuously make by wearing branded t-shirts, backpacks, socks, jackets, bathing suits, towels, without my body being remunerated as a commercial billboard; for all of this and much more, the industry of the integrated spectacle owes me money! I understand it may be difficult to calculate how much they owe me as an individual. But this is not necessary at all, because I am Luther Blissett, the multiple and the multiplex. And what the industry of the integrated spectacle owes me, it is owed to the many that I am, and is owed to me because I am many. From this viewpoint, we can agree on a generalized compensation. You will not have peace until I will not have the money! LOTS OF MONEY BECAUSE I AM MANY: CITIZEN INCOME FOR LUTHER BLISSETT!