MANUFACTURING DISSENT: STEWART HOME, BILL BROWN AND LARRY O'HARA UNITED IN PHONEY FEUDS DESIGNED TO STIFFLE MUCH NEEDED CRITICAL DEBATE by Monty Cantsin X 6

'At the end of adolescence, a man is a fanatic by definition, I have been one myself, and to the limits of absurdity. Do you remember that period when I poured out incendiary tirades, less from a love of scandal than a longing to escape a fever which, without the outlet of verbal dementia, would certainly have consumed me?' E. M. Cioran

Some of us have known Stewart Home far longer than the likes of Bill Brown, Larry O'Hara and Michel Prigent. These lackeys are currently stoking Home's publicity machine by pretending to criticise him. As Home himself writes in the leaflet Quantity Is Quality: A Challenge To Bill Brown, Larry O'Hara and Michel Prigent and elsewhere, these attacks are so absurd that they simply lend him credibility. How this crew expect anyone to believe that they are involved in a spat is quite beyond us. It is obvious from even the most cursory examination of the documents that spew forth from the various 'sides' implicated in this transatlantic exercise in public relations, that all involved have colluded to create a storm in a tea pot. Why Brown, O'Hara and Prigent have entangled themselves with Home beats us. Home, as we know from long experience, will stoop to anything to get himself noticed and he likes to surround himself with sycophants. While Home loves obviously trumped up charges such the insinuation that he is a 'state asset', he is all too sensitive to the criticisms we have made of his intellectual bankruptcy. Recently, he has been able to evade our critique of his activities by having his chums orchestrate what simple fools take to be a malicious campaign against him.

Stewart Home became a Neoist in 1984. He puts emphasis on the fact that he split from Neoism in 1985 (after a sleep-deprivation prank had been played on him during the Ninth Neoist Apartment Festival in Ponte Nossa, Italy) and that his "Neoist Alliance", which consists solely of himself, has "nothing whatsoever to do with the old Neoist Network." From 1984 to 1985, Home's influence on Neoism was healthy since he did much to revitalise the use of Monty Cantsin as a multiple name and added SMILE magazine to our collective endeavour. His subsequent activities, the Plagiarism and Art Strike campaigns from 1985 to 1989, were marked by his increasingly desperate attempt to find a broader audience.

We see Home's 1990s activities and publications as signifiers of an admirable intellectual decline. Particularly telling is From National Socialism To The Situationist International, a book length manuscript Home is circulating amongst close "friends". In his critique of Raoul Vaneigem, Home's plagiarism of Adorno's work on Kierkegaard neatly mirrors Guy Debord's pointless substitution of "spectacle" for "commodity" in the numerous passages the latter lifted from Marx. We will restrict ourselves to giving just one example of Home's tedious recycling of Hegelian drivel: 'The trajectory of Veneigem's polemic is not towards the determination of subjectivity but ontology: and subjectivity appears not as its content but as its stage... Hegel is turned inward, what for the German Idealist was world history, is for Vaneigem the individual man.'

While many of Home's former friends and collaborators were critical of his blatantly self-serving and ideologically simplified campaigns in the late 1980s, these at least raised the occasional interesting debate. The Stewart Home of 1995/96 is a willingly stupefied caricature of himself. Consequently, his present supporters - or rather, admirers - come from low-brow pop cultural "underground" milieus in London and New York. Being no longer pressed to define his position in negative terms, he has managed to appropriate the brand "Neoism" for his own activities and sell this discourse at the same level as, say, the Discordians (with himself as Robert Anton Wilson), the Immediatists (with himself as Hakim Bey), the Church of the SubGenius (with himself as Ivan Stang) or the pro-situ anarchists (with himself as John Zerzan). Ultimately, Neoists are not interested in Wilson, Bey, Stang or Zerzan.

With Home being more skilled in sloganeering than theoretical debate, his activities have always benefited from unobvious collaboration with friends who remained in the background. In the early 1980s, this was Mike Kemp, a philosophy student who inspired Home's early efforts to reinvigorate Neoism as "practical philosophy", and in the case of the First International Festival of Plagiarism, it was Ed Baxter who made the most lucid and profound contribution to Home's Plagiarism reader. The "Neoist Alliance" as an occult order was inspired both by our 1992 publication Reading For Immortality, which likened Neoism and Neo-Platonism and the research conducted by Richard Essex of the "London Psychogeographical Association". It is Home's misfortune that the LPA Newsletter appears simultaneously with his Neoist Alliance pamphlets and is so obviously superior to his throughput.

Although Home stupidly boasts to his "friends" that by writing an article comparing Hegelian dialectic to the movement of the Neo-Platonic soul, he has exposed various "contradictions" that we are unable to resolve, this bozo has not even responded to the detailed charges made in our text Life Ends Where History Begins. Instead, he issued Quantity As Quality in which he 'demolishes' Bill Brown, a cardboard opponent who is, in fact, colluding with him: 'All I'm saying is that Greil Marcus is a prick, what's so shocking about calling a rock journalist a wanker? The charge of "anti-Semitism" is all a projection on Not Bored!'s part, it certainly isn't there in my introduction to the Polish edition of Assault. Strange though that Brown should wait until three years after the text appeared to attack it. Brown is desperate to prove his pro-situ credentials. Unfortunately his attempts are always so inept that he ends up coming across as thick. In Not Bored! 19 (June 1991), there was a piece entitled Ken Knabb R.I.P.: "Its always a drag when someone reverses things and has the practice prove the theory right (instead of having the theory prove the practice right), but especially where the situationists are concerned. Like they really need to have their theory of the spectacle proved right, again? and at this stage of things?" ' After a great deal of piss-taking and several platitudes culled from his usual Marxist sources, Home dismisses Brown with the following: 'It's clearly pointless to argue with someone whose understanding is so deformed by idealism that they don't even know which side they're supposed to be fighting on.'

All the identificational sectarianism surrounding the SI makes it boring, stupid and an unpleasant matter to deal with. Many people falsely imagine we are in some way interested in this crap because Stewart Home fraudulently sold them "Neoism" as "an avant-garde movement in the tradition of Situationism and Fluxus", thereby dragging us all into the mud. In Quantity As Quality, Home demonstrates that Bill Brown, who is merely pretending to be one of his "critics", has no understanding of the Marxist theory of "praxis", as if having read and understood Marx is prerequisite for conformist posturing of a nominally politically correct variety! The SI cocktail appeals to every would-be "radical" bohemian who knows nothing about Benjamin, Adorno, Lukacs, Althusser or Tel Quel and who can therefore be tricked into genuflecting before the SI "gospel" in the same way that Scientologists are deceived into believing L. Ron Hubbard is a "genius" for "inventing" what is actually a low-brow repackaging of Freud, Korzybski, behaviourism and gnosticism. In both cases, the effect improves over temporal distance. Greil Marcus is the best example of this.

To Home's credit, he's read just enough Marx to know that over an extended word count, he won't fool all of the people all of the time. It is Home's inflated ego and desperation for fame that leads him to collaborate with brain dead morons like Brown and Prigent. Home knows a good thing when he sees it, which is why he quotes John Young's dissing of Brown's Open Letter rather than continuing with criticisms of his own: 'Actually, it seems that a better move for Home would be to declare himself a rabid anti-Semite. Then the English-speaking world would have no doubts about his honesty and integrity (that's 2 out of 3), the Poles - according to the logic of this letter - would swarm to buy his book, and he could always later declare a change of heart in the preface to the Israeli edition... Home's rabid anti-Semitism might well increase sales in Israel... "Declare yourself a Jew, or anti-," they curse, "and be done with it, it's all the same. Who gives a fuck about the impossible distinction except the Diasporan racket?" Perhaps, smart as Moses, wise as Solomon, Home is a "Diasporan racketeer," working both sides, as the dancing Sabras sing, switching, splitting hairs, with changeling ease, laughing at hard-bitten jokes on yokels.'

Of course, Home goes on to trot out all the old chestnuts about the endless attempts to smear Marx as an anti-Semite during the cold war. He recounts in tedious detail a CIA sponsored project that entailed Degobert D. Runes issuing an English translation of On The Jewish Question under the title For A World Without Jews by Karl Marx. As one would expect, there is also a pointless recapitulation of Adorno's position on anti-Semitism. However, while Bill Brown's Open Letter is neither racist nor intelligent enough to have been sponsored by the CIA, trivial accusation of anti-Semitism such as those made in the Not Bored! text and other documents published by its author, help create a climate in which bigotry is able to thrive. More significant however, is Home's failure to bring up Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution in his defence of The Assault On Culture. Given the line Home takes, he should have dealt with this book and his failure to do so is indicative of the huge gaps in his knowledge and his general ignorance.

Home concludes Quantity As Quality with a standard example of his low-grade humour. He explains how he "tele-guided" Michel Prigent into a highly compromising collaboration with the Green Party reformist Larry O'Hara. Home then talks about how O'Hara will see it as being in his interest to get Bill Brown onboard his "anti-Home" campaign: "However, this presents a number of problems, since until Prigent undergoes yet further decomposition, he is unlikely to want to collaborate with a fan of Greil Marcus. My aim is to bring these two factions together, so that they rub up against, and thereby irritate, each other." To cut Home's overblown verbiage down to manageable size, he egotistically "challenges" Brown, Prigent and O'Hara to unite on the basis of their opposition to him, thereby proving his importance as 'a world-historical figure', yawn...

It is amazing that these sycophantic admirers have yet to catch onto the fact that they are being used. One can imagine how stupid they must look going around boasting of being "in" on Home's "joke". These saps are deluding themselves into thinking Home is their "friend" and that they will benefit from "collaboration" with him. There is only one sure way in which these suckers can cut their losses and come out of this without further humiliation. We call on Bill Brown, Larry O'Hara and Michel Prigent to make a full confession of their connivance with Stewart Home on a publicity stunt that has taken the form of various absurd and unbelievable "attacks" upon their "friend". Furthermore, we call upon them to unequivocally denounce Stewart Home for compromising them through involvement in this scam, so that the underground milieus in which they move will have no cause to continue to doubt their honesty, integrity and good faith.

Monty Cantsin x 6 in their capacity as instantly revocable delegates of Collective Action For A Pregroperativistic Neoism.

Previously issued as a leaflet.

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