Improper Names

Abstract

This book offers a genealogy and theory of the improper name—defined as the adoption of the same pseudonym by organized collectives, affinity groups and individual authors. Improper Names focuses on shared pseudonyms that make their appearance in Europe and North America at three critical historic junctures: the Industrial Revolution, the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, and the emergence of the network society. While proper names designate a referent as part of the operation of a system of signs, improper names fail to circumscribe a clearly defined domain. An improper name differs from other collective subjects of enunciation in that its progenitors are ultimately unable to control third-party usages. The book examines this tension between centralization and decentralization, the We and the I, by focusing on five case studies: Ned Ludd, a pseudonym shared by the English machine breakers of the early nineteenth-century known as the Luddites; Alan/Allen Smithee, an alias adopted by Hollywood film directors from 1969 to 1999 to disown films that were re-cut by film producers; Monty Cantsin, an “open pop star” created by U.S. and Canadian mail artists in the late 1970s to share their reputation and critique bourgeois notions of authorship as originality and novelty; Luther Blissett, a folk hero of the information age introduced by Italian media activists in the 1990s to prank the media and the culture industry; and Anonymous, a signature globally shared by Internet activists to protest against censorship and restricted access to information and information technologies.

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