Müntzer's “Theology of Revolution” and Literary Activism in Luther Blissett's <scp><i>Q</i></scp>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article explores the resurrection of the myth of Thomas Müntzer in the historical novel Q, published in 1999 by the Italian collective group of writers Luther Blissett / Wu Ming. The piece assesses the collective's reasons for returning to the German Peasants’ War of 1525 and Anabaptism, while also considering the Marxist tradition of engagement with Müntzer, particularly from Engels and Kautsky to Bloch. These philosophers’ considerations of the relationship between materialism and theology are used in this article as a platform to discuss the central role in the novel of Bloch's rendition of Müntzer's theological communism. Bloch's reading of Müntzer as a “theologian of revolution” is here deemed instrumental in shaping the novel's heroic figure and the collective dimension of his utopian spiritual will of revolution. The essay also examines how Q employs an epic mode of narration to articulate a nomadic struggle between the subversive millennialism of the common people embodied by the hero-narrator, and the authoritarian millennialism of the Roman Church, personified by the character of Q. While reading the novel next to some recent work by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the article argues that the resurrection of the myth of Müntzer functions at an allegorical level in order to, on the one hand, revitalize and popularize utopian radicalism in connection with countercultural activism, and, on the other, warn against the authoritarian potential of utopian myths and the repressive methods of institutional power. The transmedial dimension of Luther Blissett / Wu Ming's work is also considered, while attempting some conclusions about the links between literature, theology and activism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".