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The
following review was written by Australian writer and hacktivist McKenzie
Wark, and posted on the Nettime list
in July 2003.
McKenzie Wark is the author of three books, Virtual Geography, The
Virtual Republic and Celebrities, Culture and Cyberspace. He was
a co-editor of the Nettime anthology Readme! and with Brad Miller co-produced
the multimedia work Planet of Noise. He lives and works in New York.
Some of his texts are available here
and there.
An interesting interview is here.
Click here
to listen to his speech "Escape from the Dual Empire".
WM1 wrote to Wark: "I think you laid too much emphasis on our alleged
Situationist influences, even if it is true that the SI's practical proposals
were much better and more promising than Debord's theory."
Wark replied: "Quite so. I could have made a connection instead to Negri,
who is well known here now, but that might have bored you even more!"
WM1 commented: "Hey, you're right now that I think of it! :-)".
Luther Blissett, Q, William Heinemann, 2003
reviewed
by McKenzie Wark
<mw35@nyu.edu>
Q
is a terrific read, an epic from "the bowels of history."(517) The
story follows two main characters. One wants to overthrow the social order.
The other is a spy in the service of the forces who want to maintain it.
Q is the spy, in the pay of Father Carafa, an ultra conservative figure, rapidly
rising up the hierarchy of the Catholic church. The other main character is
a radical protestant, who sets himself against both the corrupt power of the
Catholic church, and also against Luther's Protestant reformation. For the
more radical protestants, Luther is a political tool in the hands of a rising
mercantile class, not a friend of the peasants and artisans. His is just a
new kind of authority, which is "putting a priest in our souls"
(353)
These two characters cross paths many times, from one end of Europe to the
other, until coming together for a final confrontation, in Venice, where their
identities will finally be revealed to each other.
If that were all there were to it, this would be a fascinating, but ultimately
over-long genre novel the historical thriller. But Q is not so
much a novel as an anti-novel. The confrontation between the two characters
ends up something of an anti-climax. It provides a narrative impulse to get
the reader through to the end, but the real narrative strategy it conceals
is quite different.
In Q, conflicts are never resolved, merely deflected, transformed,
shifted to another level. Yet that does not mean that in renouncing the bourgeois
novel's sense of narrative closure and harmony, Q falls for the other
dominant form, pulp serial fiction, which creates the necessity for each new
installment out of the inevitable incompleteness of the episode. In Q,
our hero learns from his struggles, grows wiser, avoids old mistakes. This
is a didactic novel, but with a different purpose. It is about learning how
to struggle against the ruses of power and get by.
One of Q's lessons is not to get too bogged down in identity. Our hero
changes his name many times. He adapts, he sheds failed strategies. He finds
new friends, new structures of belief and methods for reading the signs.
This is not unlike the authors of the book themselves. The Luther Blissett
who wrote this book is Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi
and Luca Di Meo. They emerged out of a milieu in which Luther Blissett was
a popular pseudonym for all kinds of radical actions, avant-garde provocations
and spectacular pranks. But they too have moved on, and now call themselves
Wu Ming.
In Q, the Blissett crew finds a form and a narrative to hold together
a popular account of all that a generation has learned in various struggles.
The book can be read as an allegory for the history of the late 20th century.
The folly of Mao and the prudence of George Soros can all be read between
the lines in the actions of the book's many walk- on characters.
Or, one can read Q as a more local allegory, for a series of struggles
waged by the Italian left from the 80s to the 90s. It may not matter whether
these allegorical readings are actually intended. One of the effects of the
book is to encourage allegorical reading and some skepticism about it.
The many radical protestant leaders who populate the first third of the book
are forever using the Bible as an allegorical machine for reading the signs
of the times with very mixed results. Just as 60s Marxists read every
hiccup of capitalism as heralding the 'crisis', Q's true believers
see everywhere the coming apocalypse.
English language readers will find some of the background material familiar
if they have read Norman Cohn's book about radical sects, The Pursuit Of
The Millennium, or Raoul Vanegeim's The Movement of the Free Spirit,
or even Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces. The latter was famous for insisting
on a subterranean link between the Sex Pistol's John Lydon and the radical
Anabaptist John of Leyden. Leyden is a featured character in Q, but
a much less romantic one.
This Leyden is emblematic of the reactive, persecutory forces that can seize
hold of a radical movement from within, just at its moment of triumph. There
is a remarkable study here of the forces and pressures that can lead a militant
movement into self-delusion, worthy of Guattari.
Those familiar with radical European avant-gardes will find much to chuckle
over in Q. In this version of the 16th century, radical forces use
theology and religion in much the same way as the avant-gardes use theory
and art. There is a useful dialogue with the Situationists in these pages.
Blissett seems to have a fondness for the practical strategies of the SI.
The derive, or the drift: the wandering through cities, cutting across the
order of the working day is artfully applied here to give wonderful portraits
of medieval Venice, Antwerp and Münster.
The whole book can be read as one long exercise of the other SI strategy.
Détournement, or the detour: the appropriation and correction of existing
texts, plagiarism in the service of a militant education. The genre of the
historical thriller and popular histories of the Reformation are here freely
plundered and repurposed as an almost Brechtian learning-book for "awkward
people" (403)
At one point a character utters the famous line "let the dead bury the
dead." (160) It's an expression Blissett have pinched from Marx, knowing
full well that he in turn stole it from that original revolutionary text --
the Gospel of Matthew. All the great lines in history happen three times:
the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, and the third time as
détournement.
Ironically, for a book set in the 16th century, there is a very contemporary
focus on 'new media', which in the context of the times means the printing
press. The book is both an early artifact of commodity production and exchange,
and something that points beyond it. Throughout Q, the book keep re-appearing
as a market opportunity for a growing merchant class, and an impossible commodity
that may be freely pirated and distributed beyond commodity exchange.
Blissett locates the paradox of the vectoral economy of our own times, where
information is the stake in a struggle over private versus communal property,
in the very origins of the mechanically reproduced word.
Q is divided into three
parts. The first concerns peasant uprisings and radical protestant movements
that sought to abolish private property and both secular and religious authority.
The second looks at the movement of the free spirit, which employed a strategy
of seduction rather than revolution, seeking to create a new world within,
rather than against, the old. The third takes up the rise of a new Papal authority
that radically shut down the space of theological pluralism, and the struggle
to open up what we would now think of as a 'public sphere'.
This could be read as an allegory for political theories of the late 20th
century, moving from 30s Marxism to the 60s new left to 80s radical democracy.
It is also interesting the way the terrain of struggle moves from the locus
of the city to a more nebulous space of information, made up of networks of
oral and textual vectors.
The status of the text changes across the three parts of the book. In the
first, a text is a tool for struggle; in the second, a form of subjective
self- management; in the third, part of a network, a milieu that makes many
different kinds of thing possible. The last third of the book revolves around
a book within the book, a work written by progressive forces within the Catholic
church that restates in popular language the radical theses of the Protestants
called The Benefit of Christ Crucified.
This book within the book strategy will be familiar from postmodern fiction,
as a device for drawing attention to the formal, textual dimension of the
work. Or, perhaps closer to hand, it is a technique repeated over and over
in the popular anti-literature of Stewart Home.
As with Home's anti-novels, Q uses the book-within-the-book to ask
questions about how to read the book-outside-the-book, the book in the world.
It's more the reverse of the postmodern strategy than a continuation of it.
It's not about the formal, textual play within, it's about the way a text
moves through the world.
Blissett may be speaking of Q as much as of The Benefit when
they describe it as a "mediocre book". Unlike Guy Debord, who pondered
out loud about whether to include his statements to the police in his Collected
Works, Blissett judge their work in terms of how
it circulates, rather than on its textual perfection. "Books only change
the world when the world is capable of digesting them." (408)
Q is a useful reality-check
for avant-garde tendencies that, in diving head first into 'new media', forget
their own pre-history in the avant gardes of the past. The real skill displayed
in this book is not 'literary'. The actual writing is serviceable and generic.
The skill is in taking the avant-garde strategies of detournement and making
a popular, readable work out of it. This is a textbook for a 'catholic' avant-garde,
with something for (annoying) everybody.
At the risk of perpetuating a stereotype, one aspect of Q that strikes
me as rather 'Italian' is the fondness for conspiracy and dissimulation as
an explanation for world events. I'm reminded of Sanguinetti's On Terrorism
and the State, in which that latter-day Situationist
accused those involved in armed struggle in Italy in the 70s and 80s of being
the dupes of the secret police. Throughout Q there is always a conspiracy
afoot. But then conspiracy is, after all, the popular route to understanding
social totality, as Fred Jameson once remarked.
In
one remarkable way, Q is not an allegory for past events, but for present
and future ones. The book ends with our hero and his crew escaping from Venice
for the real center of the world Constantinople. Carafa's vision of
how power works has come to pass. The public sphere has closed down, taking
with it a more 'moderate' and diffuse order. Carafa has triumphed by recognizing
what is really required for "the foundation of a millennial power",
namely "a gigantic and complex apparatus that inculcates that message
in people's thoughts and deeds." (611) One that is based on fear. What
could be a more prescient description of our present situation?
Q
is in some ways an optimistic book. Sure, the popular revolts of the first
part are all in vain. The scams of the second part get people killed. The
attempt to open a space for free thought and life within communication of
the third part is foreclosed. A millennial power triumphs, and it's not a
pretty sight. But then, "the illustrious names of the defeated and the
victors remain in the chronicles, available to anyone
who wants to reconstruct the intricate events." (626)
Benjamin had said that "not even the dead are safe", but what he
didn't count on is that power always leaves a trace of those it has vanquished
in its own account of its own triumphs. It's a question of a narrative resurrection,
where the return of the marginalized, the disempowered is still possible.
A return, not as victim, but as a different kind of hero. The kind of hero
who works in situations, does what is possible, and moves on. A Luther Blissett.
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