Enemie Anonimous

Paul Ingram is a Associate Research Fellow with a PhD on Adorno and Dada. He is the author of a book of poems, Flat Earth (Contraband Books). His work has appeared in such places as Permeable Barrier, Erotoplasty, Psychoanalytical Notebooks, Tentacular, Hollow Earth Review, Pamenar Press Magazine and Babel Tower Notice Board. He has written essays about art and aesthetics for 3: AM Magazine, Dada/Surrealism and Historical Materialism, and also contributed to Critical Theory Today: Limits and Relevance of an Intellectual Tradition (Palgrave Macmillan). Enemie Anonimous was composed-literally put together or constructed-between late 2018 and early 2020, against a backdrop of political contestation following a decade of austerity in Britain. The source material came from an older tradition of struggle, associated with Luddism, the Swing Riots and the Rebecca Riots. These movements have often been caricatured as backward-looking machine-breakers opposed to technological progress, but they were much more radical than that. For the book, I repurposed their anonymous threatening letters, originally sent to landlords, magistrates and factory owners in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and Wales.