CRAMER: After translating your declaration [into German], I can't refrain from sending you a couple of critical comments. They mostly refer to what I perceive as ruptures between the Luther Blissett project and the wu-ming project. Not that I would be against ruptures, but since you claim that the "new project thrives on the same features which made great the Luther Blissett Project", it seems to me that we may have different opinions about what made the Luther Blissett project great in several respects. First of all, you write that it was "radical forms and contents", but don't you think that it is questionable to differentiate "form" from "content"? (As if "form" would be something external that could arbitrarily be shelved upon "content"). What struck me about, for example, the Luther Blissett project is that it defies descriptions of its "form" vs. its "content". (If the "form" was "Luther Blissett" and his "content" the people acting in his name/wearing the "form", then the "form" L.B. was in turn made up by the "content" which defined it, at vice versa, and so on.)
WMY: What if we replace "and" with a slash and explain the meaning in a footnote? Or does it sound too "dialectical"? Anyway, Wu Ming is *not* the Luther Blissett Project. We maintain some of the old assumptions, but ours is not a multi-use name developing plan. We are a group, a collective, a company, not an *ethereal* network. To write good fiction requires more concentration and hard work than to create/improve the reputation of a virtual character whose name anybody could adopt. However, I'm not that interested in talking about Luther Blissett, unless I'm forced to do it. See "Flesh and Blood, One Person After Another", /Giap/digest#0.
CRAMER: [You wrote:] "The adoption of a chinese trade name is also due to our belief that the future of human communities depends on what is going to happen in the East. Nowadays, no social ecology, no practical critique of the unbalanced relationship between demographical growth and capitalist forays can prescind from throwing cultural bridges to the Far East, to mainland China in particular. That's where our destiny is at stake, as far as the global catastrophe and the pursuit of alternatives are concerned. That's where mankind's imaginary is moving to." Sounds somewhat pathetic to me. In that it reverses stereotypes, it also echoes them: Shouldn't one rather question such notions as "the East"? What/who is the "we" in "our destiny"? Isn't that the old humanist-engaged rhetoric?
WMY: I agree we should question such notions as "the East" (at the end of the day, it depends from where you're staying at :-)). And yet, to *question* and to *refuse* are two different options. One of the main features of the LBP was mythopoesis, the troublesome making of new myths as well as the *practical* exploration of older ones. The same with Wu Ming. "Myths", archetypes, conventional images (including such a notion as "the East") are neither *negative* nor *positive* per se. Myths are the stuff human cultures are based upon (I know I'm taking an intellectual short cut). The way you throw myths in, like pebbles in a rhetorical pond, can be very interesting and influential. Exempli gratia, Laibach would stage a Spengler-echoing notion of "the West" and gave a weird twist to a vague (the more vague, the more extreme) recall of *statolatric* archeo-socialist and "Blut und Boden" imageries. Don't you ever use such words as "Europe", "Germany", the "Middle Age" and so on? I bet you do it, and yet they're just conventional shit. "Conventions" are not wrong, it depends on the effect they produce on mindsets. As to shit, it happens. In some interviews I said that I feel quite uneasy with dualisms & the East and West are more or less the same thing. As to "we", we mean all the beings breathing the atmosphere of planet Earth.
CRAMER: You wrote: "Wu-ming's approach to cultural production implies the constant derision of any idealistic/romantic prejudice about "the genius", individual..." As a comparative (and German) philologist, I have to protest here. Romanticism was to a major extent opposed to the notion of the genius; and the idealist philosophy of Fichte and Schlegel precisely attempt to prove that the relation between the individual and the world, between subject and object, is imaginary, the product of mental reflection. In many ways, romanticism demanded what you demand: (1) the emphasis on the novel - the word "romanticism" is derived from "roman", French/German word for "novel" -, (2) the emphasis on the collective and the popular, hence the systematic collection of farytales, sagas and folk songs which the romanticists regarded not the lowest, but the highest form of literature. The authors of the early romantic period in Jena and Berlin (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Tieck, Schelling...) published many of their writings anonymously or under pseudonyms, most of them being fragmentary reflections or parodistic literature. On the downside, the emphasis on the collective and the popular developed into the nationalist romanticism of, among others,Wagner several decades later.
WMY: You got a point. As to "romanticism", we may have used a false friend, you know that "romantico" also means "sentimentalistic in a thoroughly naive way". That's a rather *popular* perception of the term, which romantic authors might as well appreciate. However, I think that your description may concern Germany, but Italy and France were different beasts. What's Ugo Foscolo to do with the re-emergence of folk culture? What's Chateaubriand to do with the refusal of "individual genius"? And then, isn't it correct to state that, being Romanticism the first modern (proto-)avantgarde, the old fellows promoted some cliches we're fed up with , such as the artist being a "tormented" and "intemperate" guy possessed by "inspiration", whose augmented "sensitiveness" is incompatible with organized life etc.? Don't you think this view is closely connected to that of "individual genius"? At last, I stick to "idealistic". The notion of an "individual genius" (as we "Italians" say, I know to talk with you about this is like "smashing an open door down") is undoubtedly idealistic. By "idealism" I mean the Transcendent deemed as more important than the Immanent, the Spirit considered prior to the dynamics of social relationships etc.
CRAMER: "If one can't help looking for affinities, wu-ming is on the same battlefield as the programmers and entrepreneurs working on open source software, "free software" and the likes." Sorry, but I often get the impression that many people, especially from "net culture" and from the left, praise Free Software and the GNU copyleft, but use Macintosh and Windows. I don't see this just as a problem of consistent rhetoric or politics, but also as a philosophical problem, since an operating system like GNU/Linux or FreeBSD works fundamentally different in that it reflects the distributed nature of its development in the decentralized structure of its configuration and man-machine-interfacing. It's intellectually much more challenging, but challenge worth to take (i.e. gaining literacy in what Macintosh and Windows hide from the 'user'). The Linux/BSD/Unix way of thinking is epistemologically different from the Macintosh/Windows way of thinking, and one cannot consistently/honestly subscribe to the 'external' philosophy of Free Software copyleft without also subscribing to the 'internal' philosophy of the operating system whose structure is a historical result of the development dynamics of copylefted code. I really want to see people actually using Free Software before they make great claims about it. (And at least here in Berlin, this is a real problem.) As the authors of bestseller literature who work with big book publishers internationally, you could play an important role for the acceptance of Free Software and open document formats. It must go without saying that you, too, are affected by the proprietary Microsoft Word format being the factual standard in book and journal publishing. It's a standard which, like a pyramid scheme, (1) forces people into using proprietary software permanently upgrading it in order to remain "compatible", (2) gets reinforced as "standard" again and again because of (1). Using Free Software and the (technically clearly superior) LaTeX document formatting system myself, I regularly go through great pains re-creating my documents virtually from scratch (i.e.: from ASCII exports) on a colleague's computer in Microsoft Word because publishers don't accept anything else. If we and others could start a project "writers against proprietary document formats" to break the vicious circle of (1) and (2), I would be happy to participate.
WMY: We'll see what we can do to foster a 100% open source situation.
CRAMER: "Culture is long past the existence of "the Intellectual" as a figure separated from the whole of production". Has it ever been? Marx would already have denied this firmly. "Nowadays information is the most important productive force." I don't buy this yet, all the more since the dotcom and Internet hype is over. The information economy may be a big pusher in contemporary capitalism, but it totally relies on 'old economy' fundaments (power stations, transportation systems, buildings, computer hardware etc.etc.).
WMY: You're mistaking one thing for another.
Information became the main productive force long before the hype about
*new economy* started. The origins of the process can be traced back to
the shift from absolute surplus-value [i.e. time (the time it took a single
labour worker to produce goods) as the only parameter for the value of
goods] to relative surplus-value (the introduction of ever more sophisticated
technologies, which made it more and more difficult to calculate surplus-value).
In the *Grundrisse*, Marx speculated about this process till he foresaw
the end of Fordism and assumed that soon the parameter for valuation would
be the actual amount of *information* embodied in the goods.
That is, value is aleatory, valuation
is an arbitrary act of semiotic war. When this started to get "real", Internet
was still called ARPAnet. In the meanwhile, (1) money became *immaterial*
itself (in the early Seventies, Nixon gave up the Gold Exchange Standard),
(2) financial sorceries and conjuring tricks (i.e. the most irrational
aspect of capitalism) were gradually identified with capital *tout court*.
As a result, the *hermeneutics* of production
is given more importance than the production itself (the "old economy",
as you call it). It's crazy and hypnotizing, and it's making the planet
collapse, but it's there. *New economy* was only an epiphenomenon of the
recent unfoldings.
CRAMER: "Everything is multimedia". Really? You sound like "Wired" ten years ago. I don't see yet what "multimedia" really is, except that electronic media (radio, tv...) are tending, slowly, to become particular digital storage/transmission formats which eventually may become part of the Internet. (It could also happen that digital networks fragment again into largely unconnected networks, as is already the case with cell phone/SMS services vs. the Internet or digital TV vs. the Internet.)
WMY: In fact, we wrote that "multimedia" is a pleonasm. Please read again. Anyway, I don't see any fragmentation or lack of connection. They're just integrated parts of the same digital media complex. People surf the web and send e-mail by their Wap or UMTS cell phones, or send SMS messages via the web. People surf the web using their state-of-the-art telly, and one can watch streaming TV broadcasts on line by Real Player and the likes.
CRAMER: "What kind of privileged status can an " author" claim, now that telling tales is just one of the many aspects of mental labour, of a greater social co-operation integrating software programming, industrial design, journalism, intelligence activities, social services, gender politics etc.?" What you state here doesn't sound as new to me as you make it seem to be; practically the same was said about literature (and the author as a "writing worker") after the Russian "october revolution." In what respect is your programme different from the earlier, non-apparatchik socialist realism of, say, Majakowski? "Mental labor is completely within the production networks, indeed, it is their main driving force." See above.
WMY: We meant that everything and everyone takes part to global *valuation*. This wouldn't happen at the times of Majakovsky, when the concrete, material basis of production still was more important to profit that the "immaterial" processes I've tried to outline. This is about the end of such notions as the separated intellectual (i.e. separated from labour - in plain words, the fact there were no shovels or monkey wrenches involved made intellectuals somewhat *external* to industrial production, confined to the dubious sphere of *super-structure*, certainly a notion which has ceased to exist), Gramsci's "intellettuale organico" (i.e. the intellectual who sided with the Proletariat), engagement*/*interventionism* as a choice. There's no choice, everyone is at the centre of the dancefloor. As to the risk of "social realism" we're supposed to run, I suggest you to read our interview on Pulp Magazine, three /Giap/digest issues ago.
CRAMER: "To write is part of production, to narrate is politics." Sounds like a universal truism to me. But does it imply a hierarchy, i.e. that the political superimposed to the literary? Or isn't the reverse also true: that politics is narration, fiction, literature?
WMY: You bet your life it is a truism. However, most "authors" are completely unaware of it (think of some net-artists). I think that politics is narration, but I think it runs the other way around as well. Completely reversible.
CRAMER: "First of all, stories that have a beginning, an end and a plot in between. Experimentation is acceptable only and exclusively if it improves narration." I am seriously disappointed. You might as well have written "First of all, music that has a song structure, major/minor tonality, an even rhythm and no noise". Or: "First of all, movies that have actors, dialogues and a story with a beginning, an end and a well-crafted plot". Or: "Art in oil paint and on canvas which properly depicts its objects". How can you be so conservative and speak against conversativism at the same time? Do you think it is possible to be aesthetically conservative without being politically conservative? If that should be the case, how can you then state that "to write is part of production, to narrate is politics"? - I agree with the latter and therefore disagree with your aesthetic programme.
WMY: The fact: we are the least conservative thing that happened in Italian literature since the end of WW2. Do you really think that the suckers who never went a step beyond Marinetti's "Zang! Tumb! Tumb!" or drool about David Foster Wallace's crap about tennis, tv and tornadoes are the real revolutionaries? That's piss-poor masturbation. *That*'s conservativism. What is an experiment? Experiments can't be repeated endlessly, one makes experiments in order to analyze the results, find out something, and then go *farther*. That's what we do: we make experiments with narrations that have a head, a tail and some guts in between. We inoculate viruses and see what happens to the guts. If there are no guts, no way we can inoculate anything anywhere. Let other people make experiments with something else. We'll go our way. And what is conservativism? Is everything we know about culture to be superceded/discarded? Or is there something we'd like to preserve? "Conservative" is the way many common friends describe your looks: short hair, round glasses, suit coat, pants with a crease, loafers and a briefcase. I strongly disagree: that's not conservatism. That's style. And, yes, I like movies with actors, dialogues and a well-crafted plot.
CRAMER: I _would_ understand your point if your aim was subversion of those forms, i.e. using traditional forms against themselves, in the same way the Luther Blissett project used exhibitions, press conferences, books, press reports, etc.
WMY: Yeah, that's precisely *one* of the purposes. We try to *stretch* and *force* the rules of *genre fiction*, apparently *breaking* no rule, then end up publishing a book which *looks* like genre fiction at first (and maybe second) glance, then you read it and realize it is something else, and you really don't know how to describe it. I know this may sound as old hat, but it's not supposed to sound strikingly original, the perception depends on the result, and I like to wear old hats on my cropped hair. *Q* is like that. *Asce di guerra* is even more problematic. We usually put it this way: "invisible experimentation". The more invisible, the more radical, and vice versa. The most extreme attitude concerns the twists and turns of the plot. For example, I believe that no other "commercial" (I hope you understand what I mean right away :-)) novel has so many characters as *Q* (hundreds of 'em!), all switching from one name to another all the time, and readers never get to know the protagonist's and the antagonist's real names. Moreover, there's a shitload of levels of comprehension, it may be interpreted as a history of the Luther Blissett Project, a moral tale on 1970's terrorism, a satire of rave culture and all that at once. I also hope that the German translation will allow readers to grasp the games we played with the language. And yet, it looks like a classic cloak-and-dagger novel, no shit, straight-to-the-point entertainment. Appear rough, be subtle. If the "Declaration" is not clear enough about it, that's because one's supposed to have read the books.
CRAMER: "If experimentation is nothing other than an excuse for mediocre or bad narrators, then - as far as we're concerned - they can shove it up their ass." My former highschool teachers would whole-heartedly subscribe to that statement.
WMY: Hey, pal, we're not at the high school any more, we no longer need to stress the generational gap. The fact that your teachers used to say something doesn't automatically imply that it was bullshit.
CRAMER: "To sum up, wu-ming intend to praise social cooperation." A pleonasm: "cooperation" is always "social".
WMY: Not a pleonasm: an intensive. "Social" means "involving the whole society", like "social factory" means "diffused factory".
CRAMER: "...both in the form and the substance of immaterial production". Again, what is the different between "form" and "substance"? Why is "form" not "substantial", and why is "substance" not "formal"?
WMY: That's what we inserted "both" for.
CRAMER: "...collectivity is simultaneously the content and the expression of our narratives." Same as above goes for "content" and "expression". I thought that if there was a common denominator of those working in Neoism/multiple name games/media pranks/psychogeography etc. than the aim to get rid of such thought-patterns as implied by "content" and "expression".
WMY: That's what we inserted "simultaneously"
for. As far as I can recall, Deleuze & Guattari thought that there was
no "form"/"substance" antinomy, while such notions as "content" and "expression"
are two actual unstable polarities and can be used to describe processes and
contradictions (D&G wouldn't use this term though). For example, "social
realism" claimed to have "progressive" contents, but the "expression" proved
it was shite.
