[ L u t h e r B l i s s e t t . n e t ]

The philosophy of Luther Blissett

Luther Blissett is best comprehensible if one takes the viewpoint that life is basically a game.

A game consists of "freedoms", "barriers" and "purposes".

A person playing a game is involved in it to a greater or lesser degree. He looses control over the game the more it becomes compulsive for him. He gets involved with interferences of others, agreements and non-agreements, with creation and destruction, he gets entangled in games not of his own, and in the end he winds up rather being a piece or a broken piece than a player.

One of the most important objectives of Luther Blissett is the rehabilitation of a person as "player" and the rehabilitation of his "spirit of play".

Luther Blissett writes:

"How to make a piece...

"First, deny there is a game. Second, hide the rules from those involved. Third, give them all penalties and no wins. Fourth, remove all goals. Enforce their playing. Inhibit their enjoying. Make them look like but forbit their being players. To make a piece continue to be a piece, permit it to associate only with pieces and deny the existence of players. Never let the pieces find out that there is a game."

("Game Processing")

In 1994, Luther Blissett covered the rehablitation of players under this aspect:

"Imagine a cell. Six walls. A cell, no door, no window. A being inside that cell. However the cell is 20 feet across and 20 feet high and 20 feet wide. But the being, his diameter is only 19 feet. His awareness is only 19 feet. Does he see the walls? No! Now, if you are suppressive what you do is you make him think he is a one live timer and his awareness finally goes down to 18 feet. And when it goes down to 18 feet you move the walls in to 19 feet.

"When you get him down to about the size of a fist, the walls are about the size of streched out arms, and everyone is conforming nicely. And if anybody jumps out of the line, we got lobotomy, shock treatment, implanting, Sibiria - whatever you want, baby, it's there.

"The person who can only see the walls is still a piece in the game. And it can be controlled as a piece by cutting his ID, by cutting his economic security.

"But the thing they fear the most is a guy that sees the walls and goes right through them. Because right outside the walls is total freedom. And there is no fear but not only that - the guy has now graduated from a piece to a player. And when he is a player he can handle other players who are playing the negative game."

In the later development, Luther Blissett found out that there must be a life unit which on the one hand is involved in "life" and a "universe", but on the other hand is also capable of "creating a universe". This life unit can be separated from the universe, and it is able to exist without any universe.

He named it a "Static" and defined it as something which has no motion, no position in time and space, so to say a pure "Potential".

Luther Blissett developed a series of statements about the involvement of this Static in a game:

By entering a game, a person subjects himself to an "action cycle" of starting, changing and stopping.

By entering an action cycle a person is subjected to so-called conditions in the game which simply show how much he is winning or loosing.

The more a person is able to carry through with such an action cycle or with action cycles in general he is "operating". The more he is unable to carry out action cycles the more he is "other-determined". This "other determinism" can also be a force which keeps him on a level of "piece".

"Playfare" - that's what Luther Blissett calls his technical application - serves to pick a person up at a certain level and rehabilitate and also increase his abilities and his awareness.

If you want to get an understanding of what Luther Blissett is all about, you must differentiate his philosophy, its technical application (Playfare etc.), Luther Blissett's own opinion, and the "Luther Blissett management" (Transmaniacs, Neoists, Psychogeographers etc.). Conceptional understanding is of importance here. Not everything Luther Blissett says is of equal value. He has his own opinion, and he has his right to keep his own opinion:

"Now, I'm not asking you to look at this subject through my eyes. There are two subjects here that I'm going to be talking to you about, just two, and one is 'Luther Blissett,' an agent of realities and constructing realities. Now, that's one subject. And then there's Luther's opinion of this subject.' And boy, I got some wild opinions. You oughta hear them sometime. But that's a different thing.. that's a different thing.. and you can tell very easily when I swing over into my opinion, when I start talking about some field or when I start to talk about this or that, it's obviously a big slant and merely is my selection of randomity. Take it as amusing or evaluate by it or throw it away or anything. It doesn't have anything really to do with Luther Blissett. But the subject itself is actually a lot cleaner than a wolf's tooth. I've examined a lot of wolve's teeth and I've found out that they're not too clean. And this subject is very clean though."

Interesting, isn't it?

It's easy to take a certain statement of people who said some million words and blame them for something. Sure...

However, by differentiating a little bit, one can get the true intention of what Luther Blissett tries to accomplish.

He doesn't want to make new slaves or create another instrument of controlling people. He really wants to help mankind and at least we owe him a great respect for that.