Date: Fri, 25 Aug 95 15:52:14 +0200 (MET DST)
Subject: Re: LUTHER BLISSETT


The efficacy of multiple names becomes dubios when there tend to be as many
as 'individual' names. In the 1970s, the 'Mail Art' group
"Blitzinformation" proposed Klaos Oldanburg, around 1980 the
Baltimore-based Krononautic Society used "David A. Bannister", but shortly
after threw their lot in with the Montreal Neoists who adopted the name
Monty Cantsin which was invented by David Zack in 1977. Moreover, Vittore
Baroni, who later became a Neoist, too, had come up with "Lieutenant
Murnau" in 1981, and others attempted to spread "Mario Rossi" and "Bob
Jones."

The authors of the "Luther Blissett" proposal, whom I suppose to be the
Italian Situationauts/Transmaniacs, wrongly ascribe "Karen Eliot", another
multiple name, to Neoism. Karen Eliot was introduced by Stewart Home in
1985 after his declared split from Neoism as a dedicated "anti-Monty
Cantsin" concept. While the Neoists who adopted the name Monty Cantsin
attempted to live and explore the paradox of a persona that was one and
multiple (e.g. a "collective individualist subjectivity"), Karen Eliot was
not supposed to be a person, but only a signature: it should not be used
for daily activities. Home thereby intended to avoid a multiple name being
too closely identified with a specific person, which in the case of Monty
Cantsin he thought was the Hungarian singer and performer Istvan Kantor.
Nevertheless, Karen Eliot became mainly associated with Home's brand of
activities involving the Festivals of Plagiarism and the 1990-1993 Art
Strike campaign. And Home himself refrained from publishing his books which
gained him a reputation as an "underground writer" (see Alan Golding's
recent post) under a multiple name, and he uses neither Karen Eliot, nor
Monty Cantsin for his present, lower-scale activities (the "Neoist
Alliance" mentioned in the text; an organization which consists solely of
Stewart Home himself and claims to have "nothing whatsoever to do with the
old Neoist network", hence rather serving to distract public notions of
"Neoism").

While all these schisms may seem ridiculous to outside observers*, I think
that there can be little doubt that Monty Cantsin remains the multiple name
adopted by the largest number of people (more than 100 since 1977) and the
perhaps only one used to radically experiment with notions of subjectivity
and epistemology.
Apart from that, I do not see much use in one more multiple name except
arriving at the opposite, older strategy - blurring identity by adopting
multiple personae at once.

(I should have commented upon the author's references to Bakhtin and the
construction of "subversive undercurrents" through the ages. Neoism avoided
to define itself in such a tradition, and rather attempted to explore
paradoxes in simultaneouly negating and affirming both dialectical poles,
and neither of them at the same time.)


------
*...and frequently caused by ridiculous circumstances. Stewart Home's split
from Neoism, for example, was effected during a 1985 Neoist apartment
festival in Italy where, shortly after his arrival, two Neoists were
playing a video-taped, unvoluntary sleep deprivation prank on him, waking
him up every once in an hour and forcing him to cut a lemon by half with a
pair of scissors. Home was so annoyed that he left the festival the other
day and decided that this had put then tin lid on it.

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        The Seven by Nine Squares
        :quaintness hereby evens

Neoism and experimental epistemology server. Meanderings in text

        http://fub46.zedat.fu-berlin.de:8080/~cantsin/
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