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“You are a member of ‘al-Qaeda’ if you say you are” - Jason Burke (2007), Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam

The franchise analogy has occasionally been applied to the decentralised nature of al-Qaeda-inspired activities and the above quote from Jason Burke neatly sums up the idea that al-Qaeda as an idea, nay, a brand, can be utilised by almost anyone should they choose to do so. Like a franchise, one assumes that the same product (terrorism) is supplied to the same standard (magnitude, degree of disruption) with the same brand values (anti-American, radical Islam). ‘Al-Qaeda’ as a name has to some degree become a collective pseudonym available to those who wish to depersonalise themselves under the banner of a greater, globalised movement.

For those not perhaps au fait with the Luther Blissett phenomenon, Paolo at In Media Res provides a long and thoughtful description and examination in The Luther Blissett Project: a viral attack on the modern infosphere, which mainly deals with the Italian example, although his points are well-made in the international context also. (I should perhaps note at this point that the original Luther Blissett played football for Watford and England in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Over to Paolo, and some background:

The reasons why the name of an English football player has been used to share the identity of a great variety of people are unknown. However, it is true that since the summer of 1994 many shows of performing art and media guerrilla operations were carried out under this unique name. The leitmotif, which was endlessly repeated, was “Everyone can be Luther Blissett”, highlighting a sort of ideological statement aimed at the loss of individual identity. In other words, the multiple-name is an open reputation that anyone can informally adopt and share with other people, and whose performances must not necessarily have a common purpose.

The performative nature of terrorism has long been recognised. Indeed, Brian Jenkins coined the phrase “terrorism is theatre” in 1975, although its demonstrative characteristics are recorded at least as far back as the ‘propaganda of the deed’ of European anarchists in the 19th century. Do AQ-brand actions have a common purpose? Operationally and tactically, yes, I would argue - perhaps not strategically. I am as skeptical as Olivier Roy as to the existence of a consistent AQ ideology and grand strategy.

Thereafter follows a list of ‘media pranks’ propagated by anonymous persons calling themselves Luther Blissett, whose intention was:

the construction of a myth of fighting, a folk hero whose identity can be shared and used for demonstrative actions. Luther Blissett wants to hit the system of mass communication in order to … re-appropriate of a ludic [read, playful or spontaneous] practice and show a different relationship with mass media.

Nicholas O’Shaughnessy has written about bin Laden’s manipulation of media to create just such an identity in Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction (2004). Videos of bin Laden in heroic guises alternately emphasise his mystique as a freedom fighter, his authority as a mullah, his demeanour as international statesman, yet he is arguably none of these things.

Like Robin Hood, the intention is to hit and then to go into hiding thanks to the loss of individual identity. Many other groups have used a collective or multiple name in order to carry out performance acts at a social or artistic level. Some of the most influential, from which Luther Blissett takes inspiration, come from the context of the ‘70s. The rise of multiple-use name, for instance, is mostly evident and popularized in the ‘70s and ‘80s, especially within artistic subcultures like Mail Art and Neoism [see Monty Cantsin]. The latter is a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists guided, broadly speaking, by a practical underground philosophy. It operates by means of collectively shared pseudonyms and identities. Most of its activism is arranged through pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and, as a consequence, has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy any categorization and historical and spatial location.

Of course, there is nothing ludic or whimsical about the AQ brand-actors. But the points about deterritorialisation and depersonalisation are too obvious to ignore.

One of the most important aspects in the Luther Blissett performances is a deep knowledge of information techniques in order to exploit the circulation of information via mass media and, eventually, to realize its purposes. This has been largely shown in one of their most famous and complex pranks.

This was played by dozens of people in Latium, central Italy, in 1997. It lasted one year and was placed in the backwoods of Viterbo, involving newsworthy issues like black rituals, Satanism and spreading of media panic. Local and national media reported for a long time news about the activity of a satanic sect placed in Viterbo. Like the TV show about missed people, facts were not scrupulously checked. Rather, the circulation of the news helped the diffusion of panic among population, leading politicians to claim officially a war against Satanism. When Luther Blissett claimed its responsibility by means of local newspapers for the whole prank and the production of the sheer amount of evidences, Blissett activists called their act as an example of homeopathic counter-information: in other words, by injecting a calculated dose of false news in the media, they meant to show the unprofessional way of working of many reporters, and how easy was to exploit media as a resonance box for the diffusion of the panic.

Al-Qaeda is, if nothing else, a very adept and skilled manipulator of the media. Ayman al-Zawahiri famously stated years ago: “We must get our message across to the masses of the nation [ummah] and break the media siege imposed on the jihad movement. This is an independent battle that we must launch side by side with the military battle.”

[T]he exploitation of mass media aimed at the management of reality through the press or television … has increasingly become a profession. As Boorstin (1961) noted, one of the most relevant aspects in the field of news diffusion is the creation of what he calls pseudo-events, a ‘new kind of synthetic novelty which has flooded our experience’. This kind of event is symptomatic ‘of a revolutionary change in our attitude toward what happens in the world, how much of it is new, and surprising, and important.’ In other words, a pseudo-event is an artificial event, created with the aim of calling attention and planned for specific purposes. The main features of the pseudo-event, as Boorstin indicates, are 1) to be not spontaneous, but planned, planted or incited; 2) that the event is planned primarily for the purpose of being reported and reproduced; 3) to be ambiguous, and this is the very kind of relation with the event and reality itself; 4) to be intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

… since the birth and increase of public relations, we have assisted [in] a gradual process of commodification of the information flow. As news has become something to be sold, a general shift to what is newsworthy and what is not has occurred, and the entire information flow has become dependant on business and political strategy of communication.

And bin Laden and al-Zawahiri know the processes of this far better than Western prosecutors of the GWOT.

[Luther Blissett becomes] the source of information through the creation of a pseudo-event, and perpetuates the prank through the construction of a manufactured message. This practice of media guerrilla … is played in the twilight zone which surrounds what they call the verifiable core of the news. This uncertain area is built on myths, urban legends, hearsays, that journalists exploit in order to turn a news into something more attractive, that can be sold more easily. The process of injecting a calculated dose of false news in the media is, in this context, not different from every process of information management. What is different is the lack of any commercial or political objectives to achieve, because these pranks are only a sort of act of demonstration. Furthermore, the revelation of the media bluff by means of media themselves suggests to citizens a reflection upon how easy is to manipulate the source of information, and, moreover, how easy is to create a pseudo-event aimed to attract the media interest. On the other hand, if in Luther Blissett’s view the revelation of the bluff is the final stage of a general act of demonstration, for others this is the worst thing that could happen. For strategic communication, that works for commercial purposes or for taking the attention away from a uncomfortable fact, the revelation of what “lies behind” is the failure of the strategy rather than the success.

An interesting thesis if applied to AQ. Intelligence being what it is, i.e. incomplete and sometimes erroneous, certainly misinterpreted at times, we do not know what real connection there may be between AQ-brand’s media broadcasts and any intended kinetic actions.

In Postscripts on the Societies of Control Deleuze points out that contemporary societies are witnessing the dissolution of every institutional boundary, leading to a process of decentralization of every previous form of power. Foucault (1980) [probably Discipline and Punish] had theorised the birth of disciplinary societies as a replacement of the previous system of sovereignty. This led to the rise of institutions – such as schools, hospitals, prisons or factories – which were able to exercise power by means of discourses. As Deleuze notes, ‘[t]he disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass.’ In societies of control, on the other hand, power is not fixed or centralized any more, but is rather nomadic and exercised through abstract representations like codes, data and passwords. In this context, ‘[w]e no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become dividuals, and masses, samples, data markets, or banks’ (Deleuze). This transformation in also visible through the machines that power uses to exercise control:

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society – not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old society of sovereignty made use of simple machines – levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy and the production of viruses (Deleuze).

Although Deleuze refers here to the virus in the field of computer technology, I think it may be relevant to carry out the metaphor of infection to examine the nature of the antagonism of the Luther Blisset Project. In many passages of its manifesto, Luther Blissett has often compared their action with that of a virus: a calculated dose of false news (the core of verifiable news) is put in circulation. Successively, it links itself with the general process of news production and goes, at the end, to infect the flow of information, that is effectively embodied by the dissemination of moral panic for something that has never happened. What is relevant, however, is that the revelation of the prank works like the antidote to the infection which is given exactly by the material authors. All this has been made with the intention of revealing the whole mechanism: this raises several and crucial questions about who actually acts as a virus … If these pranks are performed with the aim to make people aware of a more balanced relationship between mass media and individuals it is possible to argue that probably the real infection is perpetrated by those who seek to hide their practice and exploit news production for strategic purposes. What has been called a viral attack could be seen, at the end, as the ethical implication.

There is no prank with AQ. Or is there? As Faisal Devji has said about suicide bombs, these are ‘not actions that can be seen in strategic or instrumental terms. They are not means to an end. There is no ‘end’, as such.’ If AQ operates in an ethical rather than political space, as Devji contends elsewhere, in Landscapes of the Jihad (2005), its actions become purely speculative once they lose their functionality.

At the same time, it is significant that, in this study’s perspective, a nomadic and decentralized form of power, as highlighted in Deleuze’s societies of control, leads consequently to a mutation of the concept of antagonism. Luther Blissett has noted that the simple counter-information is not effective anymore because the context and “the enemy” have radically changed. Consequently, I think it is essential to draw attention to the structure of the multiple-use name in relation to the post-panoptical form of social control. As a result, to contrast a decentralized form of power, a decentralized form of antagonism is needed.

For these reasons, I will adopt here another metaphor taken from Deleuze and Guattari [e.g. A Thousand Plateaus]. I think it is fruitful to analyze the loss of the individual identity through the lens of the concept of the rhizome. The metaphor of the rhizome is used by Deleuze and Guattari to give an idea about a way of thinking which is not centralized, but is rather characterised by principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity and rupture. This kind of thinking is opposed to the [arboreal] structure, which is by contrast linear, hierarchic and sedentary. Generally speaking, the rhizome has not a centre, but many nodal points, and one of the main features is to be accessible from many entries. Furthermore, if a part of the rhizome is cut off , it is able to find alternatively new directions and to link randomly with other points or nodes.

The recent work Understanding Alternative Media has advanced a rhizomatic approach to interpret some of contemporary alternative media. One of the main feature of this interpretation is the highly level of elusiveness through which a rhizomatic alternative media works.

The concept of multiplicity constructs the rhizome not on the basis of elements each operating within fixed sets of rule, but as an entity whose rules are constantly in motion because new elements are constantly included. The principle of asignifying rupture means that ‘a rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.

Its intrinsic being constantly in motion, its fluidity and its quality of being pluri-accessible make an alternative media based on a rhizomatic structure hardly difficult to identify and, at the same time, it is complex to find the source of their message production. In this perspective, we can consider the action and the structure of the Luther Blissett Project as based on a rhizomatic structure. The loss of the individual identity and the sharing of a multiple-use name calls for the abandonment of one of the most strict parameters through which societies of control exercise their power: that is to say, the proper name. This embodies the last resort through which control can be exercised. On the other hand, the renunciation of the proper name makes it difficult to identify any physical action or intellectual production, undermining in this way every form of dataveillance. The adoption of the multiple name is, in this perspective, rhizomatic because its elusiveness and heterogeneity are disguised under the homogeneity of a unique name. In this context, any question about intellectual property is erased, and any attempt to locate a centre is undermined.

In its attempt to demonstrate how easy is to make fun of the culture industry, the Luther Blissett phenomenon has shown how much difficult is trying to locate an entity which has no centre and is rhizomatic in any development. It is impossible, in this sense, to behead something that has no head. Therefore, if everyone can be Luther Blissett, no one could be at the same time.

There is much of relevance to the global jihad in this article. I’ve written elsewhere about the rhizomatic nature of globalised insurgency and I think it is a useful analogy with which to approach the slippery nature of the media space in which AQ and their associates act, and in such a sophisticated fashion. Is the Luther Blissett analogy similarly useful? Perhaps ideas of pranks and revelation are too pomo to be of real analytical utility but viruses, media manipulation, depersonalised actors and decentralised information propagation are definitely, to my mind, partly why the global insurgency is so difficult to counteract. Whether bin Laden is the original Luther Blissett, or al-Qaeda, is not particularly important. No-one knows, in a technical sense, if bin Laden is still alive, for example.

I’ve only partially commented on Paolo’s article for reasons of time but I will probably return to it at a later date. He makes no mention of al-Qaeda or terrorism, but the comparisons are clear, and it may prove to be another useful avenue of research.