Late February 1999

EURISPES: The Invisible Insurrection

Eurispes is a well-known institute for social studies, researches and surveys. Every year they publish a bulky book titled "Rapporto Italia" [Italy Report, or Italy Files], a shitload of data, surveys, essays on the phenomena and trends Eurispes considers the most important in Italian culture and society. The Rapporto is invariably used as a reference book (and a primary source for further research work) by journalists, sociologists, economists and various kinds of scholars.

Well, the funny thing is that the last Rapporto contains a long section (almost 70k bytes) titled "The Invisible Insurrection", completely dedicated to Luther Blissett! It is one of the most complex critical essays on LBP ever published, which "consecrates" our avatar as one of the most relevant phenomena of Italian culture. Some journalists were stunned by LB's presence in the Rapporto. On January 29 they were attending the official presentation of the book at the University of Rome, skimming through the pages, found the chapter and... Geez!
An excerpt from "L'insurrezione invisibile":

'This way of crossing and superceding the usual dichotomies of contemporary society (singularity/multitude, individual/community, true/false) [was] the invariance of all subsequent experiments signed by "Luther Blissett", and any research work that does not take this aspect into consideration is doomed to fail. Luther Blissett has always tended to pass over (or "short-circuit", it depends on the point of view) all cultural and disciplinary separations, and solve in an experimental way the social contradictions generated by separation. Since 1995 [the Luther Blissett's name] has been adopted by thousands of people all over the world, and established itself as collective, anonymous, transnational project which makes use of all the existing media, even the most underestimated or even ignored ones (urban legends, mail art, bulletin boards, graffiti, fanzines). [Luther Blissett] managed to go through the most different territories of communication, without any embarassment. It's precisely this cultural nomadism the base of Blissett's shifting identity, which proved to be adverse to academic investigations. For instance, think of the phrases that the newspapers used to describe this anthropomorphized project:
"cognitive dissident", "psycho-informatic pirate", "cyber-pirate", "leader of the net-gener@tion", "media terrorist", "cultural terrorist", "cerebral terrorist", "guerrilla semiologist", "media chaos cultist", "art conjuror", "transgender militant", "Fantomas of pranks", "fake scoop manifacturer", "global performance", "philosofical sect", "polimorphous musician" and so on. All these definitions were invariably disavowed by Blissett, yet their variety bears witness for the impossibility of describing this experience once and for all. Moreover, as they stated themselves in several writings and interviews, the multi-use-name bearers are never the same, do not know each other and their respective activities are completely different.'