Form
- Negation was founded to provide a platform for young radicals who don’t have professional connections or an established writing career. If you’re raw and inexperienced but have ideas you want to express, send us a pitch. This is a magazine that will not require writers to dial anything down, to make any compromises, or to sand off any rough edges for the sake of “professionalism” or “accessibility”. If you already have extensive experience contributing to major publications, this project is not geared toward you.
- Take any angle you want. Write a critique of political economy, a poem, an examination of a film or book, a philosophical investigation, a personal essay, whatever. Your focus and your method don’t need to fit a specific archetype as long as they produce something useful. If you write something that contributes to the understanding of the reader, puts forward new concepts, develops a new vocabulary, opens up new possibilities, conducts interesting experiments, transforms perceptions, etc., we’ll put it out. We don’t want to publish dull summaries of political or cultural moments, narcissistic vanity projects, or empty provocations.
- For a piece to be valuable, it needs to be coherent and logical. A rambling, messy, and awkwardly-written submission with very strong potential will be accepted, but we’ll have an editor work with you to tighten up its structure or clarify any unclear wording and thinking. However, writers will get final approval over the content (and title) of their piece before it gets published; the role of the editor will be collaborative.
- Nothing annoyingly long or avoidably short.
Content
- Never lose sight of capitalist relations of production. You don’t need to place economics at the center of your work, but you can’t drift freely in an idealist vacuum; we’re only interested in publishing thinking that remains tethered to the historical and material reality of capitalism. We want to understand the world we were born into so that we can create a new one, and we’ll never advance in the direction of that goal without a materialist perspective.
- Make sure to cite sources and statistics when necessary.
- Don’t try to minimize, defend, or justify any form of social oppression. We aren’t going to accept any reactionary whining. Just in case, we’ll spell it out: we uncompromisingly oppose racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-indigeneity, antisemitism, national chauvinism, and every other mode of subjugation.
- Break from stagnant traditions and exhausted styles. There’s nothing exciting about regurgitations of old doctrines and discourses. Don’t lean on the crutch of lifeless jargon. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to read the blind, mechanical recitation of the slogans and teachings of long-dead movements. Use the old to construct something new. Infuse your work with the destructive and creative energies of youth.