A four page feature from "Pulp libri" #29 [Italian bi-monthly review of books], January-February 2001:
From Multiple Names to Wu Ming
by Antonio Caronia
As many readers know, Wu Ming is the collective
name adopted by four Bologna-based promoters of the Luther Blissett Project
(precisely the four authors of Q) after the seppuku, the
samurai-styled ritual suicide by which they quit the "Luther Blissett"
multiple name in December '99. The fifth member is Riccardo Pedrini, former
punk rock musician and martial arts teacher, as well as author of the blood-chilling
novel Libera Baku Ora [Free Baku Now!] (Derive Approdi, January
2000). The latter book was rare evidence that Italians have no genetic
taint and can write intelligent science-fiction even ignoring the legacy
of Calvino and Primo Levi.
Wu Ming (chinese for
"No name") is an artisan factory of literature and culture. In less than
one year of activities, they have created a website (http://www.wumingfoundation.com)
and an electronic newsletter (/Giap/), published a novel (Asce di guerra
[Axes of War]) and made a short novel freely available on their website
(Pantegane e sangue [Rats and Blood]). In the next twelve months
they'll probably publish their third novel, 54. Given that Wu Ming,
as individuals, do a plenty of other things - from the participation in
the anti-globalization movements to the practice of Thai boxing - this
confirms a common saying about post-Fordism: people are working much more
than they did under Fordism. Of course they work in a quite different way:
in the past decades - the Sixties, the Seventies etc. - Wu Ming would've
run the risk of becoming (I do not mean to offend anyone) editors or advisors
for some big publishing house. Nowadays, they don't need to renounce their
autonomy, nor are they forced to fence themselves in an "underground" milieu
which is too pleased with marginality.
Is this a "surrender"
to the cultural industry, as some short-sighted and envious people shout
from the rooftops? If it is so, then it's a very strange surrender. Asce
di guerra, their first novel with the new alias, doesn't give up the
intransigent anti-capitalism and the comptent for the official Left that
characterized Luther Blissett in the Nineties. Wu Ming have excavated stories
from the Resistance and the early post-war years, uncovering the rage against
the stalinist/catholic compromise which allowed the fascist personnel to
return to their positions. In the process, Wu Ming have demolished the
traditional "nice-ist" imagery of the Resistance handed down by the reformist
Left. They've done it by teaming up with Vitaliano Ravagli, the boy from
Imola who was too young to fight with the Partisans, got sick of the post-war
restoration and went to "kill fascists" in Indochina, joining the Lao guerrilla
fighters. Ravagli is both the co-author and a character in the book.
[Ravagli and Wu Ming] didn't want to propagandize
a creed, nor did they aim at teasing the "armchair radicals": they
just gave a voice to the "figures from the background", those who were
excluded from "History" and had to fight their way out of silence, bet
their life in the social war, all the while remaining faithful to themselves.
In order to debunk
some distortions (including Luther Blissett's supposed "Situationism")
and get a better understanding of this book and Wu Ming's work in general,
we asked them a few questions.
Q ended by acknowledging that "No plan can anticipate everything. Time will not cease dispensing victories and defeats to those who keep on fighting." The new novel starts by saying: "Stories are axes of war that we must unbury." Do you mean that the past and the future have no immanent rationality? Are they nothing other than sceneries, open to any individual or collective will and intervention?
Some charged Q
with being fuelled by conspiracy paranoia. Quite the contrary, it is a
dissertation on the reactionary nature of conspiracy theories confirming
themselves ad nauseam. The character called Q believes that "there
is nothing new under the sun" out of the Church, that is why he's named
after Qohelet [Ecclesiastes], a book of the Old Testament, of which
this is the traditional interpretation, now questioned by many scholars.
Little by little Q's faith vacillates, the novel is the chronicle of its
disenchantment, the desertion of the best agent on the last mile. If you
like novels "in cipher", Q's key is not in the epilogue, it is in
the last letter to Carafa, the one which Q fails to send. The final sentence
of the novel ("Let the action continue without any plan") is only a sigh
of relief, and we plagiarised it from (i.e. it was a tribute to)
Don De Lillo's White Noise.
As to Asce di guerra,
we object to the notion of the past as a mausoleum we ought to garrison,
or a memorial tablet we ought to polish and embellish with plastic flowers.
We are not interested in the "immanent rationality" of an era, we want
to know how a community in struggle can make use of certain stories, we
want to explore the link between the reasons of the past and the present,
between yesterday's junk food and today's indigestion. When one looks at
the "immanent rationality" of the past, s/he takes the risk of justifying
any position and choice in the name of the "spirit of the times". That
way, we'd end up blurring any distinction between the Partisans and the
[fascist] Black Shirts.
Unlike Luther Blissett, Wu Ming is not a multiple name which anybody can adopt. Moreover, your first names and surnames are not secret. You have already explained that, and you're probably bored with repeating things, but... could you explain one more time why you've changed tactics since 1995?
Since the beginning,
our adhesion to the Luther Blissett Project was based on a Soviet-styled
Five Year Plan. Five years were enough to achieve what we had in mind without
getting bored and repetitive. Things went better than in the USSR: there
a factory would produce only left shoes, we produced Q. It was a
great hold-up, we reached the vault of popular culture and left the self-referential
shallows of "alternative culture". At the end of the Plan, it was normal
to give up the multiple name, become an enterprise and let the LB martial
art evolve into further different styles. Anyway, Wu Ming keeps many features
from the previous project: the anti-copyright stance, opacity towards the
media, the work more important than its author etc.
The classic studies
on the cultural industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, Edgar Morin.) are all
out of date, as is Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive
work. What is the relationship between the descriptions of mental labor
as directly *social* and your call to artists (or "brainworkers", as you
call them, or even "cognitarians", which is Bifo's definition) to exploit
the form of "autonomous political enterprises"?
As we wrote in our "Declaration
of Intents", "the Intellectual" as a figure separated from the whole
of production has long passed away. Information is the most important productive
force. The "cultural industry" has a symbiotic relationship with the entire
galaxy of commodities and services. The saying "All is multimedia" is already
pleonastic. Telling stories is just one of the many aspects of mental labor,
of a greater social co-operation integrating software programming, industrial
design, journalism, music, intelligence activities, social services, gender
politics etc. Mental labor is completely within the networks of enterprise
and production, indeed, it is their main driving force. We must build up
our companies, go beyond free-lancing, in order to acquire more strength,
get control on the production process and the results of our creative labor.
However, we must set up political enterprises, because we are past
"engagement" as a choice which "those who create" might as well
make. "Creative workers" are left with no choice, they simply *cannot avoid
intervention*. To write is part of production, to narrate is politics.
At last, we make a bet on the self-valorization of mental labour, i.e.
on our own entrepreneurial ability. One ought to avoid begging public funds
or establishing subordinate partnerships with bureaucrats of any level.
We aim at relationships on a parity basis, that's why the political enterprise
must also be autonomous.
Since the days of Luther Blissett people admire (or despise) you because you're able to occupy the media landscape. According to the detractors, you have re-invigorated the spectacle you claim to be fighting. At the end of Asce di guerra you cited a disconsolate comment by [Immanuel] Wallerstein, that "every form of antisystemic movement" was "entirely produced by historical capitalism". How can we sort it out?
Wallerstein is not a
pessimist, he thinks that historical capitalism is an immanent system,
doomed to end as all the previous historical societies. In the very piece
we cited he explains: "Any weakness of the system in a direction has strengthened
it in another direction, but not necessarily on the same level! That is
the question". As to "the spectacle", we think it is a meaningless pseudo-concept,
it was simply the solution Guy Debord found for any crossword puzzle clue
he put in his most famous text, e.g. "Laudatory monologue of the existing
order" - solution: "spectacle". "capital to such a degree of accumulation
that it becomes an image" - solution: "spectacle". Come on, do you really
deem it is an useful category? As far as we know, to fetishize it has only
caused inaction, frustratrion and grudge. We never "fought the spectacle",
we are not scribblers showing off the maximum of formal radicality and
who gives a fuck if nobody understands. We have no paranoic feelings about
"recuperation", we want to take part to actual social conflicts, communicate
with as many people as possible and aim at concrete achievements. As to
our ability to occupy the media landscape, we always did it by promoting
virtual characters that were the product of real social relations.
You stated: "Any opening line by Dashiell Hammett is better than James Joyce's complete works". I think that Joyce deserves more than that, after all he told "stories" as well, even if in an experimental way. Besides my personal opinion, you demand and produce "epic" fiction based on a dense plot and a radical content. Aren't you running the risk of updating so-called "socialist realism"? Do you think you can avoid that?
