Marco Deseriis

Review of
Marco Deseriis's Improper Names - Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - April 2-12, 2016
"Embrace your Inner Impropriety" by reading the full review: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/434743-imp-roper?chapter=1

THIS IS A MUST READ. Not a mussed read. It's very neat & tidy - wch doesn't mean that it oversimplifies. It's thorough, meticulous, well-researched, well-argued. This bk is about a subject near & dear to me, something that I've been deeply involved w/, I definitely read it w/ a higher degree of critical-mindedness than most people wd.. &, in the end, I'm impressed!

After the title page & before the table of contents there are 2 quotes. The 1st of these is this:

"To give a name is always, like any birth (certificate), to sublimate a singularity and to inform against it, to hand it over to the police. All the police force in the world can be routed by a surname, but even before they know it, a secret computer, at the moment of baptism, will have kept them up to date. —JACQUES DERRIDA" - p vii

Derrida was a French philosopher born in Algeria, in Northern Africa. I have a vague memory from more than 40 yrs ago of reading that some Africans ("Africans" being probably an excessively sweeping generalization) have the names that people know them by & secret names that shd be known only to them in order to avoid having malicious magic applied against them. Consider the following:

"9. Secret names.—A second inevitable consequence of a similar intrinsic power of the name is the development of the idea of withdrawing the name from the eventually dangerous use that might be made of it, by keeping secret the real names of persons."

[..]

"This explains the custom of having for the individual an ordinary name, for daily use, and a real name, which he alone knows (or which even has sometimes been given to him at birth by his parents unknown to him). Sometimes this name is given during the first years of life; sometimes it is revealed secretly to the individual, on a fixed occasion, by his parents, the fetish-man, or the priest, or by a priestly college (e.g., on the occasion of entrance upon the duties of diviner, sorcerer, priest, chief, king, etc.). The most frequent case is that of the secret name whispered by the mother in her child's ear on the day of his birth". [..] "He who possesses this secret name will never reveal it to anybody, and in all circumstances his ordinary name will be used".

- Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics: Mundas-Phyrgians - edited by James Hastings, John Alexander Selbie, Louis Herbert Gray - p 133

To 'Westerners' (another sweeping generalization) this may seem to be a superstition but I tend to relate the idea to Derrida's police state warning above: the more easily a person is identifiable, the more easily they are controlled.

[Coincidentally, while I'm writing this review I'm reading Esther Friesner's fantasy novel Majyk by Accident in wch this is written: "["]'Tis said that he who standeth in possession of a Welfie's true name may call himself the creature's master."" (p 106)]

The introduction, "GENEALOGY AND THEORY OF THE IMPROPER NAME", starts off w/ a wonderful story:

"In May-June 1995, a local community radio station in Rome aired a curious live broadcast experiment. Every Saturday night for five consecutive weeks, all participants in the program vowed to go by the same name and be the same person. By introducing themselves as Luther Blissett, anchors, correspondents and listeners embraced the confusion that ensured: "Hold on, we have a Luther calling in from the Colosseum. Hi Luther, how am I doing tonight?" asked the anchorwoman. "Pretty good, and myself?" replied a male listener. "Not bad, not bad," replied the anchor. "Listen, a group of Luthers are converging on the Colosseum right now to organize a three-sided football match. Do you wanna help them out?"" - p 1

That single paragraph is rich w/ sympathetic vibes for me. I'm reminded of Radio Alice wch, according to Collective A / Traverso's "Radio Alice—Free Radio" article in semiotext(e) intervention series 1 - ITALY: AUTONOMIA - POST-POLITICAL POLITICS (1980):

"When the accusation of obscenity was flung at us, we were a little disconcerted. We had thought about many possible accusations: pirate station, underminers, communists, subversives, but we did not anticipate this one. But that's natural and proper. Language, when it is freed from the sublimations which reduce it to the code and makes desire and the body speak, is obscene (literally: obscene)." - p 130

"Another direct phone call:

""We are workers on strike, we want you to play some music and we want to talk to you about the 35 hour week, it's time they talked about that in contracts."" - p 132

As I recall, Radio Alice wd keep in touch w/ demonstrations by having people call in to report on police movements wch Radio Alice wd then announce over the air. The idea being to help protesters avoid arrests. This was the battle in the larger colosseum. This was before cell-phones, this was proto-Twitter. W/ this in mind, it's odd that Deseriis wd credit Blissett as follows for doing something similar 2 decades later w/o mentioning Radio Alice as a precursor:

"Luther Blissett updated this occultist version of the dérive" [as manifested by the London Psychogeographical Association] "by adding a new layer: the real-time sharing of information among psychogeographers through the combined use of broadcast radio and the telephone system. Instead of mapping the psychological effects of the spatial organization of the city, the psychogeographers of Radio Blissett explored the temporary social relations that could be activated by remapping the urban layout with the radio and the telephone in that nonplace of the present we call "real-time communication."" - p 139

As for the collective acting-out of the group identity?:

Listen to track 08. “Monty Cantsin Psychoanalytic Encounter Group w/ Charles Boyd (MD)” (1985) in the “Neoism: Smile: The Eggs in the Gauntlet-Ulteriorism...........” digitized tape on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/NeoismSmi... .

There are many ways of fucking w/ language to produce vitally liberated offspring. At the Public Works festival in Toronto in early October of 1981 four people from BalTimOre, Ricki Kilreagan, Sin-Dee Heidel, Eugenie Vincent, & myself (tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE), introduced ourselves w/ different names everytime anyone asked what our names were. The Great Confusion! This was Neoism. Or was it?

In Berlin, on Friday, July 25th, 1997, Florian Cramer, Berit Schuck, etta cetera, & myself (Party Teen on Couch #2), conducted a language experiment in wch we each spoke in English using words to mean what they aren't usually meant to mean & w/o explaining our personal systems for doing so. (See the "Language Experiment" entry here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOut... ) The result? I felt like I was on the verge of levitating. This was Neoism. Or was it?

"Radio 2003:

"In San Francisco to present 2 screenings, one of these was to have a performance of my "Guitarist Anonymous Withdrawal Aids" as part of it. It'd been arranged for me to promote that show on an arts program on KALX. Instead of doing a straight-forward promotion, which didn't interest me, I asked the 2 hosts to play along with my pretending to run a Guitarists Anonymous Therapy Session (or some such). During this, the idea was, I would continually refer to them not by their actual names & I'd act like I was humoring them if they referred to my upcoming screening. To make matters more confusing, I was in a separate studio from where they were - so we couldn't see each other. As I recall, this is only a brief excerpt from the actual event - probably chosen because it had the least distortion. The result was probably one of the most bizarre event promotions the station had ever experienced - although I thought it was appropriately in the spirit of the performance to take place.

"- December 5, 2012E.V. notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE" - https://archive.org/details/Radio2003

This was the Great Confusion on the radio. But it wasn't Neoism.

As for "three-sided football"? The Neoist Facebook Group was recently informed (February 20, 2016) by Tae Ateh that there was to be the "First Quantum Flux Footballum Equinox Fest (FQFFEF) - London, in March" (
http://divus.cc/london/en/content-pag... ). 3-sided football has evolved.

All that in response to one paragraph. This bk means alot to me.

"Luther Blissett was a "multiple-use name." That is, anyone could become Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name. Launched in Bologna in 1994, the open reputation quickly spread to other Italian cities, and thanks to the internet, it did not take long to go international. By the late 1990s, the multiple-use name had been borrowed by hundreds of individuals around the world to author media pranks, sell apocryphal manuscripts to publishers, fabricate artists and artworks, denounce media witch hunts, author best-selling novels, and conduct psychogeographic experiments, or simply as an Internet handle. Even though the wild circulation of the pseudonym made it difficult to define its exact role and function, in the intention of its creators, Blissett was meant to be a folk hero of the information age that could narrate a vast community of cultural producers into existence. In particular, the founders of the Luther Blissett Project saw the condividual as a modern Robin Hood who could seize the symbolic and material wealth accumulated by the culture industries and redistribute it to its increasingly underpaid and precarious producers." - p 2

"To further explore the ambivalent nature of this obfuscation, I shall briefly unearth the etymological meaning of the term condividual. A derivative of the Italian condivisione (sharing as "dividing together"), the condividual does not necessarily presuppose a community but only a concatenation of parts." - p 4

When I 1st heard of Luther Blissett in 1994, no doubt from my correspondent Florian Cramer, I had already participated in the collective identities of David A. Bannister, Monty Cantsin, & Karen Eliot. As such, I rc'vd word of yet-another such name w/ some trepidation b/c it seemed to me that there cd be 'too many' collective pseudonyms & that they cd proliferate so much that they'd become individualized names instead of, to use the term that Deseriis uses, condividualized. The 'problem', as I perceived it, is similar to what Umberto Eco addressed re Volapük in his bk The Search for the Perfect Language:

"Volapük was perhaps the first auxiliary language to become a matter of international concern. It was invented in 1879 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a German Catholic priest who envisioned it as an instrument to foster unity and brotherhood among peoples. As soon as it was made public, the language spread, expanding throughout south Germany and France, where it was promoted by Auguste Kerckhoffs. From here it extended rapidly throughout the whole world. By 1889 there were 283 Volapükist clubs, in Europe, America and Australia, which organized courses, gave diplomas and published journals. Such was the momentum that Schleyer soon began to lose control over his own project, so that, ironically, at the very moment in which he was being celebrated as the father of Volapük, he saw his language subjected to 'heretical' modifications which further simplified, restructured and rearranged it. Such seems to be the fate of artificial languages: the 'word' remains pure only if it does not spread; if it spreads, it becomes the property of the community of its proselytes, and (since the best is the enemy of the good) the result is 'Babelization'. So it happened to Volapük: after a few short years of mushroom growth, the movement collapsed, continuing in an almost underground existence. From its seeds, however, a plethora of new projects were born, like the Idiom Neutral, the Langu Universelle of Menet (1886), De Max's Bopal (1887), the Spelin of Bauer (1886), Fieweger's Dil (1887), Dormoy's Balta (1893), and the Valtparl of von Arnim (1896)." - pp 319-320, The Search for the Perfect Language (Ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea translated from Italian to English by James Fentress)

In other words, wd "Babelization" result from the addition of yet-another-collective-identity-name?! If so, & if that's the 'natural' product of such lingual ambitions, why not embrace yr inner Babelization rather than reject it?! Such was my proposal of "Daffy Diplomacy" to the "A Neoist Research Project: experiments & outcomes" at WORM, Rotterdam, Netherlands on December 3, 2010. There're 2 movies from this participation online on my onesownthoughts YouTube channel: a LISTED one that one cd find w/ a search in wch the movie's backward ( https://youtu.be/Nl6VVzCzaMY ), & an UNLISTED one in wch it's forward ( https://youtu.be/ywB0rs0D4L0 ). The notes to the LISTED backward version say this:

"[definite article missing in Ojibway, not usually translated in Chinese, not expressed unless emphasis is required when "itu" 'that' is used in Malay] perchobaan tchi chwàngdzàu an gwójì inwewin ada an pada-berlaku dwoshù temenong gigi khayalan nibwakawin. - December 6, 2010 notes from Monty Cantsin

"Tags: international communication, khayalan, neoism, misunderstanding, WORM"

The notes to the UNLISTED forward version say this:

"I was invited to participate in a neoist "experiments & outcomes" event at WORM in the Netherlands by providing A Neoist Research Project & by doing something via international phone call on the nite of the event: Friday, December 3, 2010. I provided about 7 hrs of vaudeos to be presented & filled out a Neoist Research Project form that was sent me proposing "Daffy Diplomacy" - a project emphasizing MISCOMMUNICATION as an international language. On the nite of the event, I rc'vd a phone call from WORM to the projection booth where I was working. I put the phone on speaker mode so that I cd move around the rm a little & so that ambient sound cd be heard. I had 2 sound f/x CDs playing that I cd control the volumes of. One was being shuffled & the other played the tracks straight thru. This produced an unpredictable mix. Since I was following a presentation by someone in the dark claiming to be the editor of the Neoist Research Project bk, I, too, had my voice presented in the dark & I began w/ MY claim to be the editor of the bk. What followed mainly consisted of me reading from my proposal & slightly manipulating the f/x. At the end of my reading, one CD was playing a race car sound while the other played the sound of a helicopter taking off. I faded out the car & pushed the 'copter to max volume & then hung up the phone. I later learned that a performance that involved playing a pyrophone (a fire pipe organ to be precise) w/ hash in its pipes had been not too long before my part & that everyone was very stoned."

Now, obviously, I'm trying to communicate here but I'm also accepting that miscommunication is likely to result & might even be humorous (or fatal). I'd addressed this in an earlier piece called "Lost in Translation" (1997) (read the edited text here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/W1997.L... ). The idea behind accepting the difficulties of communication (both technical & philosophical) & even exaggerating them creatively is partially to enhance one's ability to navigate thru communication obstacle courses. It's probably more practical to just learn as many languages as one is capable of but some of us take a different route that's more natural to us.

"The paradox is that the more this circulation increases, the more the name's indexical function—its ability to circumscribe a discrete referent—is undermined." - "CONCLUSION", Improper Names, p 221

Those concerns aside, I embraced Luther Blissett as the newest member of the collective identity family & was probably using it as my "Internet handle" for my 1st email address in 1996. I was even fortunate enuf to have a recording of my "Whoop-Up @ the Funny Farm" included in the "Luther Blissett Open Pop Star" CD compilation (WOT4) in 2000.

"Although these aliases retain the formal features of a proper name, their multiple and unpredictable iterations in the public sphere put into crisis the referential function of the proper name." - pp 4-5

& what if "the formal features of a proper name" aren't retained? What wd that put "into crisis"? _____?

"The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has defined symbolic power as the magic power to act on the social world through words. Drawing from J. L. Austin's reflections on the conditions of felicity of an utterance, Bourdieu argues that "the real source of the magic of performative utterances lies in the mystery of ministry, i.e. in the delegation of virtue by which an individual—king, priest or spokesperson—is mandated to speak on behalf of the group, this constituted in him and by him."" - p 5

Consider the following from an interview I conducted w/ Florian Cramer:

"FC: [..] if Bill Clinton, today, says, uh, "Drop the atom bomb over Moscow" then the atom bomb would actually be dropped because he has the power & the possibility to do so. & just by saying this & by, maybe, having a few codes, or whatever, this would be made to happen today. So you could say that modern linguistics in defining language as arbitrary is actually missing some aspects. It can not answer the question of how language is actually capable of directly invoking things or making things happen. & this is, for example, a matter which has been discussed by speech act theory - that's exactly the question of speech act theory, how you..

"2: Speech act?

"FC: Speech act theory, yes, by, notably by Austin & um..

"2: Austin's spelled A,u,s,t,i,n?

"FC: Exactly, yeah. He was an Oxford linguist, I think in the 1930s."

- Interview with Florian Cramer, Berlin, approximately July 21st, 1997ev, conducted by Party Teen on Couch #2 - abbreviated: "2" [aka tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE] - http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Intervi...

"As noted, the first distinctive feature of improper names is to provide anonymity and a medium for mutual recognition to their users. By failing to designate an identifiable referent, improper names make it difficult for authorities to track down specific individuals while enabling participation in social and political activities on an informal basis." - p 8

I can think of possible exceptions to this but I won't mention them here, eh?!

"It is no accident that many improper names emerge in rural societies where forms of organized resistance are unconstituted and illegal. For instance, the historian John Maddicott has suggested that the legend of Robin Hood may originate from the attribution of the same alias to notorious English thieves in the early fourteenth century."

[..]

"In other circumstances, peasants and farmers were not named after an eponymous leader but deliberately chose to share a personal name to conspire against the authorities. Such is the case of Poor Konrad, the collective pseudonym adopted by the Swabian peasants of southern Germany during the rebellion against taxes in 1514; Captain Swing, a pseudonym employed by impoverished English farmworkers in the riots that swept the southeast of England and led to the destruction of thousands of mechanized threshing machines in 1830; and Rebecca, the name shared by the tenant farmers of southwest Wales to attack toll gates between 1839 and 1843 as a form of resistance against rents, tithes, and the enclosure of common lands." - p 8

READ THE FULL REVIEW (please): https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/434743-imp-roper?chapter=1… (mehr)