Stewart Home - Mind Invaders

Mind Invaders, edited by Stewart Home

Publisher: Bread and Circuses 2016

www.breadandcircusespublishing.com

ISBN: 9780993475726

Stewart Home is the author of several books of fiction and cultural commentary, including Defiant Pose, No Pity and Neoist Manifesto/The Art StrikePapers. He lives in London.

MIND INVADERS

A reader in psychic warfare, cultural
sabotage and semiotic terrorism

Edited by Stewart Home

Contents

FOREWORD

The texts collected in this this book represent the peak of a particular current in a (mainly) european subculture. In the mid 1990s desktop publishing software was freely available. Computers, postage and photocopying were relatively cheap (or could be blagged by people with access to an office or college). Mainstream media was expanding and short of content. Whilst the possibilities of the internet were exciting, zines, newsletters and pamphlets remained an effective way of circulating freaky ideas and a vibrant network of radical bookshops, social centres and distributors still existed to facilitate this.

I'd served my apprenticeship in thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth in the late 80s and early 90s but had grown weary of some of the limitations of the group its increasing focus on traditional occultism, its lack of politics and its failure to break away from the templates set down by its founders. A few of us had produced an occulture tabloid called Ov Magazine to try and address these misgivings, but its contents and the way we'd bullishly produced it meant that most of the people in the T.O.P.Y. London Access Point were sufficiently annoyed with us that it all became quite uncomfortable. We left them to it there were too many other interesting things happening. I dived into other activities with the zeal and energy that you take for granted in your twenties.

I'd met Stewart Home in 1988 at the then T.O.P.Y. HQ at 50 Beck Road in Hackney and had been inspired by his absorption (and then rejection) of situationist, neoist and other influences. We'd stayed in touch and got involved with each other's projects - my hair-brained schemes and his surgically planned interventions. I'd conspired to get the Neoist Alliance and London Psychogeographical Association to present to a forum of anarchist occultists, despite them being neither. Stewart's piece here on glop art lead to a number of enquiries from mainstream journalists that culminated in me sneaking into my bosses office whilst she was at a meeting and doing a phone interview with the Independent in which I pretended to be an art provocateur with a grounding in critical theory who was sticking my used chewing gum to adverts in tube stations because... well I forget what I said now, but it made it into the paper.

I initially found texts by the Neoist Alliance texts and London Psychogeographical Association enjoyably disorientating and intriguing. Reading them eventually lead me to the left-communist roots of the situationists and mind-meltingly materialist approach to occultism. If groups like the LPA and Equi-Phallic Alliance made your head hurt, then Decadent Action and the Association of Autonomous Astronauts were a lot more accessible and populist. I missed the launch event of the A.A.A. in 1995 because I was out of my mind on a combination of chemicals and the breakdown of my first long term relationship. (On reflection I can see that rolling home at two o'clock in the morning drunkenly holding forth about ley lines and Amadeo Bordiga can soon wear thin if you are getting up three hours later to begin a shift at Tesco). I'd soon started my own group one small satellite in a network that grew to almost 50 groups in nine countries.

The counter culture I immersed myself in could never be a full-time occupation, but there were many burst of excitement it seemed like every time I collected my mail there was a new publication saying something exciting, comical or provoking. Weekends could be spent on an expedition with the London Psychogeographical Association, perhaps a 3-sided football match in the park, or a visit to the 121 Centre in Brixton where a heated discussion at the Invisible College would be followed by raving hard to the latest speedcore at Dead by Dawn. The working day could be livened up by stealthy use of the photocopier or occasionally by finding a pretext to bunk off and be interviewed by journalists who were either completely sussed or totally clueless. There was a lot of plotting in pubs it seemed like everyone had a new publication, a film, a feud, an event or some music in preparation some of them came to fruition and many didn't, but the international social network around us mutated and evolved alongside the discussions. People were drawn in, or spun off on their own tangents. We were all up to something. Everyone moved in several directions at once.

Looking back, I'm amazed at what we got away with. The A.A.A. talked about class struggle in porn magazines and gay liberation in football magazines. We wound up artists, Odinists and anarchists. Looking through my clippings archive it's not an exaggeration to say that millions of people were exposed to our ideas about leaving this planet behind and the A.A.A. was just one wave in a sea of weirdness.

Of course it couldn't last. Some of the groups and personas anthologised here had their own built-in cut off dates. Others continued I am still occasionally delighted to receive newsletters from the Equi-Phallic Alliance and there are still AAA groups active in France and Italy. Perhaps the intensity was lost and whilst the texts here still send shivers up my spine, the intervening years have diminished my appetite for wackiness. These days anyone can set up a batshit tumblr with some radical quotes juxtaposed with mundane or psychedelic images and far be it from me to denounce them for plagiarising the wrong things. Similarly, we've seen psychogeography's confrontational origins obliterated to make way for polite historical literature. The only projects to give me the same buzz in the last ten years have been Deterritorial Support Group, Proletarian Democracy and the Association of Musical Marxists, but that could be because I'm hopelessly out of touch.

The obstacles we faced in the 1990s remain. Human capacity for pleasure is undiminished - and yet our potential remains agonisingly suppressed. My hope is that this new edition of Mind Invaders can provide inspiration to a new generation of freaks who can push things even further.

John Eden, 2016.

INTRODUCTION

MONDO MYTHOPOESIS

It is incredibly difficult to summarise the bizarre developments that have taken place in what can be misrepresented as the underground in recent years. The origins of the London Psychogeographical Association, Association of Autonomous Astronauts and other even more bizarre groups, are now obscure. The same can be said about the arguments taking place on private Internet servers such as the Invisible College. In line with the slogan anonymous elitism, participation in these forums is by invitation only. Those involved are forever covering their tracks and engineering faked feuds and public slanging matches. They use each others names, as well as constructing collective identities which may be used by anyone, to foster anonymity.

If there is a precursor to all this activity, then it might be found in Neoism, an equally murky movement said to have existed in Europe and North America during the eighties. Unfortunately, information is not only hard to come by, it is often unreliable. This point is illustrated by an anonymous Invisible College text headlined Censorship Is A More Popular Form Of Subjectivity Than Imagination:

The Neoist slogan Its always six oclock, for example, was coined by the Montreal Neoists Kiki Bonbon and Reinhardt U. Sevol, who used to beat up anyone who dared to ask them the time. tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and some East Coast Neoists campaigned for the friendly fascist Vermin Supreme in Baltimore. With support from the graphic design entrepreneur John Berndt, the Groupe Absence advocates radical free trade capitalism, while the godfather of Monty Cantsin, Dr. Al Ackerman, lifted the Neoist slogan Total Freedom from his fellow science fiction writer and drinking buddy Lafayette Ron Hubbard. Of course, these anecdotes are not exactly authentic...