路德·布利塞特

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's 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."