The Enemy: launch issue
The Enemy is a triannual online journal that invites writers, artists, academics, and activists to present essays and projects outside the mainstreams of their practices and disciplines.
Our launch issue will include:
A current look at fame by David Robbins
A photographic report by Roe Ethridge
A response to the new vogue for curating Iranian art by Gelare Koshgozaran
A previously unheard audio performance by Michael Smith and Mike Kelley
A meditation on a lost Scottish pop star by Hedi El Kholti
An appraisal of the absence of politics by Amanda Hunt
A reconsideration of the bully epidemic by C.J. Pascoe
A selection of new poems by Graham Foust
An investigation into neurofetishism in contemporary culture by Adrian Bangerter
A retort to lap-dancing by Mimi Cabell
A take on historical formation after YouTube by Elizabeth Anne Watkins
An enemy is a fluid entity, unfixed and ever-changing. It is something or someone that harms or threatens something or someone else; an adversary, a hostile force, a tenacious opponent. The very notion of an enemy suggests a position, a cause, and a binary of natural or cultural differences in force or belief. Depending on one’s subjective position, an enemy could be that of the state, of ignorance, or of hypocrisy; conversely, the enemy could be logic, rationalism, or science. In this journal, the concept of the enemy serves as an antipode to the trivializing accumulation of friends, followers, and likes.
The Enemy is a conscious incongruity—an online journal that, by necessity, shares a platform with what its contents will most often criticize: a culture’s increasing brevity of argument, social media that breed acquiescence over action, and hegemonic monitoring of tastes and transactions. Nevertheless, we attempt to begin a dialog through the presentation of positions both seemingly commonplace and aggressively countercultural, and we hope that as a noncommercial project, independent of either academy or sponsor, and absent any social media tools, we can offer a spectrum of voices and views beyond the mainstream and the market-stream.