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" (nomi impropri), which includes two subcategories: "collective pseudonyms" (pseudonimi collettivi) whose use is controlled and centralized, and "multiple-use names" (nomi di uso multiplo), 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" (nome multiplo) 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 ("The coin of the kingdom of the mad dangles on my chest to remind me of the eternal oscillation of human fortunes"), Blissett produced a copy of Luther Blissett's Italian book Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica 2.0 (Toto, Peppino and The Psychic War 2.0) and quoted extensively from it in the original Italian: "Anyone can be Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name Luther Blissett" (Chiunque può essere Luther Blissett, semplicemente adottando il nome 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 (Italian for "workerism"). 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 (1951–2006), 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 (Andrea Alberti and Edi Bianco) 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 (Men in Red) collectives, dedicated to radical ufology and the protagonist (especially in the two-year period 1998–1999) of sensational exploits, and AAA (Association of Autonomous Astronauts).
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 (Calciopoli), 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 (match fixing, rigged leagues and drawing lots, Juventus exclusive or preferential relations with the referee designators, gifts, corrupted referees, journalists, and judges, a referee forcibly closed in the locker room, GEA World as a criminal conspiracy aimed at illegal competition with use of threats and violence, and comparisons to the Italian Mafia, the Sicilian Mafia Commission, and Propaganda Due) 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 (WOT4, 2000), 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 (Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi, and Luca Di Meo), as a final contribution to the project, and published in Italy in 1999. It was subsequently translated into English (British and American), Spanish, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese (Brazilian), 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 (Chinese for "nameless"), under which name many novels were published in several languages and countries.
Limited selection of Blissett's stunts, pranks, and media hoaxes