48 Van Mourik Broekman, interview.
49 “Ceci n’est pas un magazine,” 24. “Magazine That Mistook Its Reader for a Hat!,” 6.
50 J. J. Charlesworth, “Crisis at the ICA: Ekow Eshun’s Experiment in Deinstitutionalisation,” Mute 2, no. 15 (2010): 20–31. The extended comments on Charlesworth’s article, which included a response from the ICA, were lost to view in one of Mute’s later platform changes.
51 Prug, “Introducing OpenMute,” 9.
52 See the Mute issue “Web 2.0: Man’s Best Friendster?,” 2, no. 4 (2007), especially Dmytri Kleiner and Brian Wyrick, “Info-Enclosure 2.0,” and Angela Mitropoulos, “The Social Softwar.”
53 “Magazine That Mistook Its Reader for a Hat!,” 6.
54 Van Mourik Broekman, post on Empyre.
55 Laura Oldfield Ford, in Josephine Berry Slater and Anthony Iles, eds., No Room to Move: Art and the Regenerate City (London: Mute Books, 2010), 106.
56 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 74.
57 Van Mourik Broekman, in Dean et al., “Materialities of Independent Publishing,” 165.
58 Ibid.
59 J. J. King, “The Packet Gang: Openness and Its Discontents,” Mute 27 (2004): 80–87. See also Howard Slater, “Prepostoral Ouragonisations,” Mute 28 (2004): 88–90, and Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” http://libcom.org/library/tyranny-structurelessness-jo-freeman.
60 Prug, “Introducing OpenMute,” 8–9. Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design.
61 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 102.
62 “CrCollaborativeReviewLibraryContract,” http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php?title=CrCollaborativeReviewLibraryContract.
63 Worthington, “Danger: Contains Books,” 174.
65 See Simon Worthington, Dynamic Publishing: New Platforms, New Readers!, 2013, http://www.consortium.io/research-plan.
66 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 130. Alessandro Ludovico, Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012).
67 Berry Slater, in Berry Slater and van Mourik Broekman, Proud to Be Flesh, 20.
68 Van Mourik Broekman and Berry Slater, interview. Berry Slater, in Berry Slater and van Mourik Broekman, Proud to Be Flesh, 20.
69 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 106–7.
70 Ibid., 102.
71 Van Mourik Broekman, interview.
72 Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Josephine Berry Slater, in Max Jorge Hinderer, “Proud to Be Flesh: An Interview with Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Josephine Berry Slater,” Springerin, 2009, http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=2263&lang=en.
73 Critical engagement with POD has since become more widespread, though see the note of caution from Temporary Services regarding its excessive cost for larger print runs relative to offset and Risograph printing. Temporary Services, Publishing in the Realm of Plant Fibers and Electrons (Chicago: Temporary Services, 2014), 26.
74 Berry Slater addresses this generic magazine strategy with regard to 1990s lifestyle magazines such as The Face and I-D: “The (beautiful) face becomes the magnified signifier of (exceptional) identity, sold to us as something which stands out and resists homogenization whilst, at the same time of course, providing the ultimate lure for consumption and conformity.” Berry Slater, “Editorial,” Mute 2, no. 15 (2010): 6.
75 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 133.
77 Howard Slater, “Guttural Cultural,” Mute 2, no. 5 (2007): 72, 67.
78 Berry Slater, interview.
79 Van Mourik Broekman and Berry Slater, interview.
80 “Up to now the communist press has differentiated itself from the capitalist press only in terms of content, through the propagation of communist principles. In its organization, structure, and numerous specific aspects it remains under the determining influence of the capitalist press.” Adalbert Fogarasi, “The Tasks of the Communist Press,” in Communication and Class Struggle: 2, Liberation and Socialism, ed. Seth Siegelaub and Armand Mattelart (New York: International General, 1983), 151.
81 Ibid., 152.
82 Ibid., 150–51.
83 Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 200, 197, 207, 201.
84 Van Mourik Broekman, post on Empyre.
85 Van Mourik Broekman and Berry Slater, in Hinderer, “Proud to Be Flesh.”
86 Maurice Blanchot, “[The Gravity of the Project],” in Political Writings, 57. Blanchot’s words here come from his preparatory texts for Revue international, a journal that became a victim before it started of its attempted reach and experimental form. See Zakir Paul’s discussion in Blanchot, Political Writings, xliv–xlvii.
87 Berry Slater, interview.
88 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 148.
89 Ibid., 150; Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 118.
90 Gary Genosko, Félix Guattari: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Pluto Press, 2009), 44–45. For more on Guattari’s relationship to the practical politics of publishing, see Gary Genosko, “Busted: Félix Guattari and the Grande Encyclopédie des Homosexualités,” Rhizomes 11–12 (2005–6), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue11/genosko.html, and François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. D. Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
91 Genosko, Félix Guattari, 41.
92 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33.
93 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, “Editorial: Just a Few of Our Many Products,” Mute 25 (2002): 5.
94 Worthington, interview.
95 Berry Slater, interview.
96 Bergson, Matter and Memory, 95, 32.
97 Josephine Berry Slater, “Editorial,” Mute 2, no. 15 (2010): 6. Typical of Mute’s empirically routed approach to these more abstract themes, her point here is made in reference to Ekow Eshun’s formulation of the ICA’s vision, where his statement “All that matters is now” serves as an innovation-sounding apology for accommodation with neoliberal cultural and economic norms.
98 Bergson, Mater and Memory, 33.
99 Van Mourik Broekman, interview.
100 Pauline Van Mourik Broekman and Simon Worthington, foreword to Berry Slater and van Mourik Broekman, Proud to Be Flesh, 11.
101 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8. The quotation actually refers to “desiring-machines,” the precursor concept to “assemblage.”
102 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 130.
103 The first minifesto was inspired by Quim Gil, who suggested to the board that readers would be keen to hear about the magazine’s processes of transformation.
104 Van Mourik Broekman, “Mute.”
105 “CrCollaborativeReviewLibraryContract.”
106 “Fallout, 1999/2000,” http://www.metamute.org/fallout_1999_2000.
107 Comedia, “The Alternative Press: The Development of Underdevelopment,” Media, Culture, and Society 6 (1984): 95–102. Charles Landry, Dave Morley, Russell Southwood, and Patrick Wright, What a Way to Run a Railroad: An Analysis of Radical Failure (London: Comedia Publishing, 1985).
108 Ibid., front matter.
109 Van Mourik Broekman and Worthington, foreword, 12.
110 Van Mourik Broekman, “On Being ‘Independent’ in a Network,” 4.
111 Ibid., 5; van Mourik Broekman and Berry Slater, in Hinderer, “Proud to Be Flesh.”
112 Comedia, “Alternative Press,” 97. Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 130. For critique of the Lockean model of the proprietorial laboring subject that is implicit in some discussion of “free labor,” see Mitropoulos, “Social Softwar,” though the point here concerns simply the difficulty of earning a living.
113 Gholam Khiabany, “Red Pepper: A New Model of the Alternative Press?,” Media, Culture, and Society 22, no. 4 (2000): 447–63.
114 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 77.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Van Mourik Broekman, “Mute.”
118 Van Mourik Broekman, “Mute’s 100% Cut by ACE—A Personal Consideration of Mute’s Defunding,” Mute 3, no. 1 (2011): 18.
119 Josephine Berry Slater, “Editorial,” Mute 3, no. 1 (2011): 21.
120 Van Mourik Broekman et al., Mute Magazine Graphic Design, 130.
121 Pauline van Mourik Broekman, “New Model Mute,” http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/new-model-mute.
6. Unidentified Narrative Objects
1 Zhisui Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, trans. Tai Hung-chao (London: Arrow Books, 1996), 115–16.
2 Nikita S. Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York: The New Leader, 1962), 7.
3 Alain Badiou, “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?,” in The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2010), 151.
4 Mao Tse-tung, Mao Tse-tung Talks to the People, ed. Stuart Schram (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 99–100.
5 Ibid., 38.
6 Marx, as cited in Khrushchev, Crimes of the Stalin Era, 8.
7 Marx’s letter to Blos is usually seen as the origin of the concept of the personality cult, though its first signs can be traced back earlier, to Marx’s reaction to such patterns of association attendant on Ferdinand Lassalle, as apparent in an 1865 letter where he objects to Lassalle’s “bombastic self-adulation” and Der Social-Demokrat’s “lick-spittling cult of Lassalle.” Karl Marx, “Letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, 23 February 1865,” in Marx and Engels, Complete Works, 42:101.
8 Yves Cohen, “The Cult of Number One in an Age of Leaders,” trans. Steven E. Harris, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 3 (2007): 601.
9 Ibid., 599. Cohen shows that this disavowal was intrinsic to the Bolshevik personality cult, fashioning its formal aspects in particular ways.
10 Louis Althusser, “Note on ‘The Critique of the Personality Cult,’” in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976), 80.
11 Badiou, “Cultural Revolution,” 150, 151.
12 The Economist, May 24–30, 2014. Amy Kazmin, “Modi Personality Cult Dominates India Election,” Financial Times, April 8, 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/96b8ca94-bed0-11e3-a1bf-00144feabdc0.html#axzz35FkEXAiA. For a damning critique of Modi’s culpability in the 2002 genocide in Gujarat and the fascist underpinnings of his Hindutva ideology, see Gautam Appa and Anish Vanaik, eds., Narendra Modi Exposed: Challenging the Myths Surrounding the BJP’s Prime Ministerial Candidate (London: Awaaz Network and the Monitoring Group, 2014). Thanks to Chetan Bhatt for this reference.
13 Wu Ming, “Grillismo: Yet Another Right Wing Cult Coming from Italy,” March 8, 2013, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=1950.
14 Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism,” in Communist Hypothesis, 151.
15 Ibid., 253.
16 Ibid., 250, 252.
17 Ibid., 251.
18 Ibid., 251–52.
19 Amadeo Bordiga, “The Guignol in History,” 1953, https://libcom.org/library/guignol-history-amadeo-bordiga.
20 Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays, ed. Alex Trotter (New York: Autonomedia, 1995), 176.
21 For details of the many domains and dimensions of the personality cult, a truly “multimedial” and “intermedial” production, see Cohen, “Cult of Number One.”
22 Debray, “Socialism: A Life-Cycle,” 14, 18, 15.
23 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 266.
24 Berlin was not alone; each of the thirty-four university cities debased itself with its own book burnings.
25 Hitler’s relationship to the author-function also included its property form. In a letter recommending early release, his prison governor noted of Mein Kampf, “[Hitler] hopes the book will run into many editions, thus enabling him to fulfill his financial obligations and to defray the expenses incurred at the time of his trial.” Oberregierungsrat Leybold, “Oberregierungsrat Leybold’s Statement about Adolf Hitler in Prison,” September 1924, http://www.hitler.org/writings/prison/. Nazism was of course funded by industrial capital, not by individual book sales, but the latter did no harm to Hitler’s personal finances. By 1933 he had apparently made about 1.2 million Reichsmarks from the income of his book, some 250 times more than the annual income of a teacher. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mein_Kampf.
26 My focus here on the textual production of myth is in no sense intended to obscure its other modalities. For a captivating mythopoesis across the mediums of performance, installations, and comics, see David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan’s project Plastique Fantastique, http://www.plastiquefantastique.org/.
27 Wu Ming and Vitaliano Ravagli, Asce di guerra (Milan, Italy: Tropea, 2000). Wu Ming, 54, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: William Heinemann, 2005). Wu Ming, Manituana, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Verso 2009). Wu Ming, Altai, trans. Shaun Whiteside (London: Verso, 2013). Wu Ming, L’armata dei sonnambuli [The army of sleepwalkers] (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 2014). Wu Ming has also published a novella, Previsioni dei tempo [Weather forecasts] (Milan, Italy: Ambiente, 2008), and a sizeable body of short stories, as well as numerous books under their individual monikers of Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, and so on (where the numerals are derived from the alphabetical order of their surnames). This chapter is not a close reading of Wu Ming’s novels but a critical treatment of their work available in English translation and toward my specific concern with mythopoesis.
28 Wu Ming 1, in Robert Baird, “Stories Are Not All Equal: An Interview with Wu Ming,” Chicago Review 52, nos. 2–4 (2006): 250.
29 Wu Ming, “Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise/Greeting the 21st Century,” in Wu Ming Presents Thomas Müntzer, trans. Michael G. Baylor (London: Verso, 2010), xxxvii.
30 Jenkins, “How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution.”
31 Wu Ming, “Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise,” xxxvii–xxxviii.
32 Ibid., xxxix.
33 Wu Ming 1, “Interview for Contravenção, 14.12.2003,” Giap Digest 24, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giapdigest24.html.
34 Georges Sorel, cited in Wu Ming 1, “Tute Bianche: The Practical Side of Myth Making (in Catastrophic Times),” 2001, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest11.html.
35 Wu Ming, “From the Multitudes of Europe Rising Up against the Empire and Marching on Genoa (19–20 July 2001),” 2001, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giap_multitudes.html.
36 Wu Ming, “Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise,” xxxvi.
37 Ibid., xxxvi–xxxvii.
38 Ibid., xxxvi.
39 Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, the Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 86. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 219. I have explored the political ramifications of this thesis, and its intimate relationship to Marx’s formulation of the proletariat, in Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2003).
40 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 223. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.
41 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 171.
42 Deleuze, Negotiations, 176.
43 Marco Amici, “Urgency and Visions of the New Italian Epic,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 14.
44 Wu Ming 1, “New Italian Epic: We’re Going to Have to Be the Parents,” http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/outtakes/NIE_have_to_be_the_parents.htm. Wu Ming, New Italian Epic: letteratura, sguardo oblique, ritorno al futuro (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 2009), cited in Amici, “Urgency and Visions of the New Italian Epic,” 7.
45 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 258.
46 Wu Ming, “1954, a Pop-Autonomist Novel: A Re:inter:view with Wu Ming,” 2002, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest16.html. Wu Ming, “The Best Interview Since . . . ,” 2000, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/Giapdigest3.htm.
47 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131, emphasis added.
48 Ibid., 46, xii.
49 Timothy S. Murphy, Wising Up the Marks: The Amodern William Burroughs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 44.
50 Dimitri Chimenti, “Unidentified Narrative Objects: Notes for a Rhetorical Typology,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 40.
51 Wu Ming 1, “New Italian Epic.” The subject of a considerable volume of debate and argument in Italy, the New Italian Epic (NIE) named a loose constellation of themes, literary techniques, and political investments along the lines that I am exploring here, but it was not intended to establish a new genre and was deemed to have soon passed. As Wu Ming 1 reflected in 2009, “the time element is important, because it prevents the NIE from transforming into a current, or worse, a school. The NIE, as a nebula of works published between 1993 and 2008, is already finished. On the other hand, the common features identified in those works definitely will return in new novels, but the challenge is to go beyond the ‘already seen’ and ‘already cataloged.’” Jadel Andreetto, “Intervista con Wu Ming sul New Italian Epic,” Panorama, http://archivio.panorama.it/cultura/libri/Intervista-con-Wu-Ming-sul-New-Italian-Epic, my loose translation with Google Translate.
52 Pier Paolo Pasolini, cited in Emanuela Patti, “Petrolio, a Model of UNO in Giuseppe Genna’s Italia De Profundis,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 92.
53 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 269.
54 Valerio Evangelisti, “Literary Opera,” http://www.carmillaonline.com/2008/05/06/literary-opera-evangelisti-e-lucarelli-sul-new-italian-epic/, translated on the Wu Ming “New Italian Epic” entry in Wikipedia.
55 Chimenti, “Unidentified Narrative Objects,” 42.
56 Wu Ming, cited in Patti, “Petrolio, a Model of UNO,” 86.
57 Wu Ming, “1954, a Pop-Autonomist Novel.”
58 Wu Ming, “The Perfect Storm, or Rather, the Monster Interview,” trans. Jason Di Rosso, 2007, http://www.manituana.com/documenti/0/8246/EN.
59 As Simone Brioni has recently explored in an interview with Wu Ming 1, Manituana here exemplifies a concern with postcolonial questions—of empire and nation, racialization, migration, and liminal territory—that features in much of Wu Ming’s writing, most especially in the more recent works produced under their individual monikers, often in collaboration with writers outside the collective. Simone Brioni and Wu Ming 1, “Postcolonialismo, Subalternità e New Italian Epic,” http://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/?p=20012.
60 Emanuela Piga, “Metahistory, Microhistories, and Mythopoeia in Wu Ming,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 56.
61 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 219.
62 Ibid.
63 Wu Ming, in Loredana Lipperini, “Manituana, the Clash of Civilizations and George Bush’s Ancestors,” http://www.manituana.com/notizie/20/8188.
64 Wu Ming, Manituana, 160–61.
65 Ibid., 6.
66 Piga, “Metahistory,” 58.
67 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 141.
68 Ibid., 220. Deleuze mentions as an example the work of Charles Burnett, Robert Gardner, Haile Gerima, and Charles Lane, though he detects related experimental procedures also in the Arab cinema of Youssef Chahine and in Pierre Perrault’s cinema of Quebec, among a number of other “third world” or “minority” cinemas, which form a groping movement toward a “modern political cinema” that unfurls the condition that “the people are missing.” Ibid., 216.
69 Wu Ming, 54, 1.
70 Wu Ming 5, in Baird, “Stories Are Not All Equal,” 253.
71 Wu Ming, “A Class Apart, That Is: A Hundred Years of Cary Grant,” trans. Bianca Colantoni, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/outtakes/100yearsofcarygrant.htm.
72 Ibid. The embedded quote is from Italo Calvino’s Lezioni Americane.
73 Wu Ming, 54, 50.
74 Ibid., 49.
75 Ibid., 42.
76 Wu Ming 1, “Cary Grant: Style as a Martial Art: A Conversation with Wu Ming 1,” 2005, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/giap/giapdigest32_3.htm#style.
77 Ibid.
78 Chris Petit, “The Concept of Cary,” The Guardian, May 21, 2005, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/may/21/highereducation.fiction.
79 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 222.
80 Ibid., 148. Deleuze draws selectively on Mikhail Bakhtin and Pasolini in developing his concept of free indirect discourse, a term that is more usually associated with the bourgeois aesthetic form of the novel, as I noted in chapter 1.
81 Wu Ming 1, “New Italian Epic.”
82 Ibid.
83 Rachel Donadio, “Underworld,” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/books/review/Donadio-t.html?_r=0.
84 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 150. Gilles Deleuze, “The Shame and the Glory: T. E. Lawrence,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, 118.
85 Blissett, “Mondo Mitomane.”
86 Wu Ming 1, “New Italian Epic.”
87 Wu Ming, Manituana, 33.
88 L. M. Findlay, “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 2,” in The Future of the Page, ed. Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 131.
89 Ibid., 129.
90 Angelo Petrella, cited in Roslba Biasini, “Reconsidering Epic: Wu Ming’s 54 and Fenoglio,” Journal of Romance Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 72.
91 Wu Ming 1, “The First Time I Saw Malcolm,” 2005, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/outtakes/malcolm.htm.
92 Wu Ming 1, “Malcolm’s ‘X’ and Memory,” 2005, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/outtakes/malcolm.htm.
93 Ibid.
94 Wu Ming 1, “First Time I Saw Malcolm.”
95 Wu Ming 1, “Interview for Contravenção.”
96 Gilles Deleuze, “Nietzsche’s Burst of Laughter,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 130.
97 Ibid.
98 Wu Ming 1, “The First Time I Saw Malcolm”; Wu Ming 5, “From Malcolm to Hip Hop through Ghost Dog,” 2005, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/outtakes/malcolm.htm.
99 Angela Y. Davis, “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 37–45.
100 Ibid., 43.
101 Wu Ming, “Perfect Storm.”
102 Ibid.
103 There is an engaging consonance here with Deleuze’s comments on the desubjectifying “sonorous particles” of the voice: “Some of us can be moved by certain voices in the cinema. Bogart’s voice . . . it’s a metallic thread that unwinds, with a minimum of intonation; it’s not at all the subjective voice.” Gilles Deleuze, “Cours Vincennes: On Music 03/05/1977,” http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=5&groupe=Anti%20Oedipe%20et%20Mille%20Plateaux&langue=2.
104 Wu Ming 1, in Enrico Manera, Giuliano Santoro, and Wu Ming 1, “Il più odiato dai fascisti. Conversazione su Furio Jesi, il mito, la destra e la sinistra,” Giap, January 15, 2013, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/giap/?p=10807.
105 Wu Ming, “1999–2009. Hey, You Bastards, We’re Still Here! Experi-ment #1,” 2009, http://www.wumingfoundation.com/english/wumingblog/?p=310. Wu Ming’s “portrait” was created before the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the subsequent restoration of authoritarian state power, events that lend it significant further associations.