Strategy 4 : Improper names

Would you mind defining what you call improper name vs proper name? 
 
Marco Deseriis I define the improper name as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors. This definition is meant to express a tension between the collective and the individual, the organized and the spontaneous, coordinated and idiosyncratic uses of an alias.
 
How did the proper name, as you recall in your book, evolve as a political technology?  
 
MD. This is a complex answer, which would require a thorough examination of how practices of naming have evolved throughout history and in different cultures. In modern times, the proper name becomes a political technology when the name is registered at the birth’s record office. By becoming legal, the proper name enters a whole network of apparatuses (demographic records, criminal records, fiscal records, voting records, immunization and health records) through which the state can both identify an individual and effect calculations and operations whose domain is, as Michel Foucault argued, the population. From the state’s standpoint, fixing a reference--i.e., ensuring that a legal name identifies one and only individual--is an essential precondition of modern politics. It is through the legal codification of proper names that a government gets to know its people and can target either specific individuals through the security apparatus or segments of the population through the leverage of political economy. This double operation—which is both selective and extensive, individuating and massifying—is predicated upon the assumption that there should be one name and only one name for every subject, and never the same name for two different subjects.

What is the origin of this [improper name] strategy?
 
MD. There is not only one origin as practices of sharing a name have existed across cultures for a long time. As a conscious political strategy to build symbolic power while escaping identification from the authorities, the first reference I found is Poor Conrad, the mythic leader of the Swabian peasant rebellion against Duke Ulrich of Württemberg in 1514. In their revolt against taxes and tithes several peasants leagues adopted this pseudonym, which was the name used by the nobility to deride poor farmers. Interestingly, the English Luddites also derived the name of their leader (Ned Ludd) from a purportedly inept textile worker, Ned Ludlam, who had been ordered by his master to “square his needles,” that is, to adjust the mechanisms of his framework-knitting machine. Allegedly, Ludlam took a hammer and “squared the needles” by destroying the machine. If the story of the origin of Luddism may be apocryphal, it is interesting that many collective pseudonyms are ironic twists on names that are associated with ineptitude or social inferiority. Such is also the case of Luther Blissett, a case study from the 1990s. Luther Blissett was mostly known to the Italian public as a soccer player who had played an unfortunate season with AC Milan in the Italian Serie A in the 1980s. Thus when a group of Italian activists decided to use the name as a shared pseudonym a decade later, Blissett was connotatively associated with failure.  

When and why (in what context) did this use of improper name surface? Is the function of improper name identical in the pre-modern times and in modern society?
 
MD. Whereas collective pseudonyms have existed for a long time, I argue that collective pseudonyms become “improper” when those who have originally introduced the alias for a specific purpose begin to lose control of the name as this is disseminated in the public domain. For example, the name Ned Ludd quickly spread across different regions of England (the Midlands, Yorkshire, the Northeast) because the news of the first Luddite riots was widely reported in the press. At the same time, different sectors of the English working classes appropriated the symbolic power of the alias and adapted it to their local context to advance different demands. In this sense, media play an important role in determining the evolution of a collective pseudonym from a name that has originally a circumscribed function to an increasingly decentralized strategy. Because in pre-modern times media are still relatively scarce it is unlikely—yet not impossible—that the pseudonyms that were introduced in rural societies could circulate wildly outside of their originating contexts. In this sense, as a conscious political strategy, the improper name is largely dependent on the emergence of modern media.

 You make a distinction between collective pseudonyms and multiple-use names? Would you mind explaining it? 
 
MD. I will explain it in this way: whereas all multiple-use names are improper names only some collective pseudonyms are improper—those which eventually evolve into multiple-use names. A multiple-use name is an alias that is released in the public domain for everyone to use. The inventors of the first multiple-use names (Monty Cantsin, Luther Blissett) knew since the beginning that they were going to lose control of their aliases but decided to take the risk, as it were. On the contrary, inventors of collective pseudonyms such as Jane (a codename used by U.S. women to run an underground abortion service in Chicago in the late 1960s-early 1970s) and Nicolas Bourbaki (a pseudonym shared by a collective of French mathematicians from the 1930s to the 1990s) did not introduce these pseudonyms for public use. Access to those pseudonyms was restricted to members of specific communities. My argument is that a collective pseudonym evolves into a multiple-use name when “unauthorized” and unforeseen uses of the name begin to undermine its original function. In this respect, collective pseudonyms and multiple-use names can be seen as two attributes of the improper name, which define it in terms of varying degrees of control from the centralized (collective) to the decentralized (multiple-use).


From the book A neoist Research Project
 
As an example of multiple-use names, you tell the infamous Monty Cantsin story, an especially unruly improper name. What is the legacy of this "open pop star" experiment?
 
MD. The Monty Cantsin experiment has left multiple legacies. The name was introduced by a group of mail artists and musicians in Portland, Oregon in the late 1970s. It was then adopted by several individuals in North America and Europe throughout the 1980s and, more sporadically, in the 1990s. Monty Cantsin was an open pop star and an open reputation. At the most basic level, it was supposed to function as a shared resume and portfolio, which could be used by any artist and musician to reclaim space and visibility. At a more conceptual level, Monty Cantsin was supposed to undermine the art system’s reliance on originality and novelty—the whole political economy of the signature as guarantee of originality—as well as the modern avant-garde’s own obsession with originality and novelty. In fact, Monty Cantsin was the spokesperson of a pseudo-avant-garde named Neoism, whose very name ironically celebrates the new for its own sake. This more overtly political side of the project did not go very far, as many conflicts emerged within the Neoist network, which were difficult for participants to negotiate. However, the experience of Neoism allowed those who had participated in Monty Cantsin to hand down their experience to the next generation of artists and activists, the founders of the Luther Blissett Project, with a minimal set of guidelines. The first recommendation was to cloud the origins of the multiple-use name in mystery so that nobody could reclaim individual authorship over the idea. And the second was to prevent individuals from identifying personally with the name, that is, to use it as a personal alias (e.g. I am Marco Deseriis aka Luther Blissett).
 
Monty Cantsin was an imaginary name unlike Luther Blisset who already existed. Is there a difference between creating a new entity and appropriating an existing one? 
 
MD. There is and there isn’t. Appropriating an existing name can have the advantage of using a name that already exists in the public imagination, and thus is more recognizable to a general audience. However, it is far more important to have an initial strategy and a tactical capacity to “seize opportunities on the wing” as Michel De Certeau would say. Because improper names can be appropriated by anyone, it is important to know how to respond to unforeseen, and potentially undesirable, uses of the name.
 
You write that Luther Blissett was a figure of the "incalculable productivity of immaterial workers". As such Blissett reclaimed "a generalized citizen income for ordinary social activities such as wearing branded clothes, coining slang terms, responding to surveys or becoming the involuntary subject of data-mining". This was in 2000, and seems more relevant than ever in our big data society. But is it still possible, in the Facebook and dominance of social networks era, to share a collective pseudonym?
 
MD. Yes it is, even though it seems that everything is immediately appropriated by capital and put to work, there are many many practices that escape capture. Anonymous is an excellent case in point.
 
How could this "strategy" of improper name adapt to the massive surveillance operated on the networks, and at a time where it is your online "behaviour" that defines you (and the way you are profiled) more than your "name", be it proper or not? 
 
MD. Names are still essential for targeted advertising. Consider Facebook and Google's “real name” policies. Many social network sites now define themselves as “identity services” and claim to know us better than we know ourselves. So I would say that the proper name is still an essential anchoring point, without which the extraction of value becomes very complicated. After the mass marketing of the first half of the twentieth century and the niche marketing of the last three decades of the twentieth century we have now entered the age of individualized marketing. And it is difficult to imagine the individual if it cannot be interpellated and called in question by name.


 
In the 1970-90s, those aliases were a very playful thing. But it looks like nowadays, improper names have become "darker", defensive, against governments and big internet corporations who demand transparency for everyone, except for them? What is your feeling? 
 
MD. If you are referring to Anonymous, I agree and disagree with you. As Gabriella Coleman’s book on Anonymous shows, there is a lot of playfulness within Anonymous. Its public face might be threatening but many of its tactics and modes of socialization are playful—albeit, as you say, always infused with a dose of dark humor. Anonymous demands transparency from governments and corporations but the users of the moniker are also aware of the fact that they themselves can be exposed. No doubt, this is a contradiction, but an asymmetrical one. Anonymous does not aspire to collect taxpayers' money or to serially produce goods and services. Even though some of Anonymous' actions are questionable, its effects on society are rather limited. Further anonymous speech enables social interactions that are not really possible when individuals know each other, as we naturally tend to evaluate speech on the basis of the identity of the speaker. Mind you, many interactions within Anonymous are via channels--such as the Internet Relay Chat--where individual users are pseudonymous. A pseudonymous reputation economy is not the same thing as a completely anonymous one. My wager is that if you really want to understand Anonymous as a collective process of subjectivation, you need to analyze the platforms that enable its formation and reproduction.

Your book starts with Ned Ludd and ends with Anonymous, we could consider both of them "machine breakers"/"luddites" of their era. Do you see a secret genealogy between these two movements? 
 
MD. I see at least three similarities between the Luddites and Anonymous. To begin with, both movements do not have representatives or official spokespersons, but build their symbolic power through iterated uses of a shared pseudonym. This lack of representation makes it difficult to integrate them within an institutional framework--be it labor relations or electoral politics. Secondly, both movements emerge at particular historical junctures, characterized by a deep crisis in traditional ways of organizing labor. The Luddites appear in the interregnum between the irreversible crisis of the guild system and the foundation of the modern trade unions. Anonymous also emerges at a time in which traditional modes of organizing and representing the collective interests of labor are in deep crisis. Thirdly, both the Luddites and Anonymous target machines of a specific kind: industrial labor-saving machines in the case of the Luddites, and closed systems and proprietary information technologies in the case of Anonymous. If we use McKenzie Wark’s definition of the hacker class as the class that struggles to keep information in common, and we add the autonomist Marxist insight that the common is the basis of capitalist accumulation, we can see how Anonymous’ campaigns for freedom of information do not only concern the sphere of political rights but also the economy.
 
Yet it is important to keep in mind a major difference between the Luddites and Anonymous. The Luddites—at least the Luddites of Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire—wanted to exert control over the technologies that were being introduced in their workshops, as the guilds had done for a long time. This means that the Luddite subjectivity is not constituted by the new industrial machines, but in opposition to them. By contrast, Anonymous is constituted through the Internet and relies entirely on the network for its organization and reproduction. Because the Internet is now inseparable from the social bios, I believe that Anonymous has far greater chances to be a long-lasting movement than the Luddites. In fact, it has already outlived Luddism, which quickly declined after its initial outburst in 1811-12.
 
Anonymous has no name, "anon" by default, and is also a swarm entity, much more diverse, unstable and unknowable than the previous ones you describe in your book. Since Ludd, do you notice an "improvement", or a complexification of those improper name strategies? 
 
MD. No, there is no improvement as each shared pseudonym emerges in specific historic circumstances and to fulfill specific needs, which are not necessarily replicable in different historic contexts. Anonymous, however, is more abstract than its predecessors in that it emerged from a distinctive techno-culture, the imageboard 4chan of 2005-06, and then migrated to a variety of socio-technical networks and sociopolitical contexts, which have very little if anything to do with its originating milieu. I believe that the reason of this resilience lies in the closer proximity of the improper name to pure anonymity. Even though Anonymous is still a recognizable entity, whose appearances in the public domain are not accidental but the result of intentional and concerted actions, the name works as a threshold of sorts. Anonymous marks in fact the passage from anonymity as an impersonal and potentially anomic condition to anonymity as a communicative condition of belonging that is considered more egalitarian because detached from individual reputation. One of Anonymous’ texts, a manifesto of sorts, reads:
 

“Identity. One of our most precious possessions. You believe we all have one, but you are sadly mistaken. Identity belongs only to those who are important. Those who have earned it by struggle and blood. Those who matter.
 
You my friend, do not. Identity is a fragile and weak thing. It can be stolen or replaced. Even forgotten. Identity is a pointless thing for people like us. So why not let go of it and become Anonymous?"

 
Thus Internet users are invited to “let go” of their individual identities not to become no one, but to become Anonymous. It is through detachment and disindividualization that a new condition of belonging can be explored. With its many offshoots, internal conflicts, and agonistic challenges Anonymous functions as a regulator between anonymity as pure flight from the field of representation and Anonymity as a field in which actions have a symbolic value and words have pragmatic effects, but without necessarily being pinned onto a human subject that is ultimately responsible for them. In this respect, Anonymous is a form of conscience that exceeds the properly human and opens up the entire problematic of the improper name to the more-than-human or the chain of human collectives with technical ensembles with a high degree of indetermination.


Marco Deseriis, author of Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous