Submission Fetish
An Archive of Unwanted Offerings
Submission, weaponized.
A publication project of The Means of Production.
Preamble
Every institution produces a fantasy.
Universities produce the fantasy of merit.
Corporations produce the fantasy of value.
Publishing produces the fantasy of permission.
Most writers spend years standing before invisible gates, performing increasingly elaborate rituals in hopes of receiving authorization to exist.
Format correctly.
Wait patiently.
Revise according to market conditions.
Accept rejection gracefully.
Repeat.
Submission Fetish studies this process.
More specifically, it studies the moment someone submits anyway.
The moment a text leaves private space and enters a machine.
The moment language is offered for judgment.
The moment desire collides with administration.
We are interested in that moment.
The Call
We are seeking work that has had difficulty finding a home.
Not because it was unfinished.
Because it was misaligned.
- Too strange.
- Too theoretical.
- Too literary for one audience.
- Too scholarly for another.
- Too funny to be criticism.
- Too critical to be entertainment.
- Too early.
- Too late.
- Too aware of the machinery.
We are especially interested in work that understands language as infrastructure.
- Essays
- Fiction
- Poetry
- Manifestos
- Field reports
- Institutional documents
- Texts that should not exist and yet somehow do
If a rejection letter made you laugh, send it.
If an editor told you they “didn’t know where it would fit,” send it.
If a piece spent years wandering between categories without finding citizenship, send it.
A Note on Artificial Intelligence and Submissions
The Means of Production is not opposed to artificial intelligence.
We are opposed to boredom.
We are opposed to cliché.
We are opposed to the production of language whose primary function is to imitate the appearance of thought.
These positions are related, but they are not identical.
The question we ask of a submission is not:
“Was AI involved?”
The question is:
“What machinery produced this?”
That question applies equally to large language models, writing workshops, MFA programs, corporate style guides, advertising departments, newspapers, religions, governments, and the strange recursive feedback loop commonly referred to as an individual human consciousness.
The fish have theories about the water.
The theories are also in the water.
We are interested in examining the machinery that produces language, meaning, identity, reality, and belief. Artificial intelligence is one such machine.
It is therefore difficult to imagine a journal devoted to the means of production refusing to investigate one of the most significant new means of production currently available.
AI Is Not a Genre
We do not automatically reject work created with AI assistance.
We also do not automatically accept it.
“AI-generated” is not an aesthetic category.
A poem can be bad because it was written by a person.
A poem can be bad because it was written with a machine.
A poem can be good for exactly the same reasons.
The relevant question is whether the work exhibits intelligence, surprise, pressure, formal invention, emotional force, conceptual rigor, or genuine strangeness.
The means matter.
The result matters.
The relationship between them matters most.
Found Language
The literary tradition contains many forms that blur the boundary between authorship and arrangement.
Found poetry reshapes existing language into new structures and meanings. The poet often works not by inventing words but by selecting, arranging, removing, reframing, and recombining them. The resulting work becomes a kind of linguistic collage.
This tradition predates artificial intelligence by many decades.
Writers have built poems from newspapers, legal transcripts, advertisements, speeches, instruction manuals, government reports, and fragments of existing texts. The act of authorship often occurs in the selection and arrangement itself.
From this perspective, prompting an AI can sometimes resemble working with found language.
The machine produces excess.
The writer selects.
The writer edits.
The writer rejects.
The writer reframes.
The writer discovers.
This does not make all AI-assisted work successful.
Neither does the existence of scissors make every collage interesting.
Oulipo and Constraint
The Means of Production is perhaps even more interested in another literary tradition: Oulipo.
Founded in 1960 by writers and mathematicians including Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, Oulipo explored the use of constraints as engines of creativity. Rather than treating artistic freedom as the absence of rules, Oulipo treated rules themselves as generative devices. Writers intentionally imposed restrictions upon language in order to discover possibilities they would not otherwise have found.
A sonnet is a constraint.
A lipogram is a constraint.
A sestina is a constraint.
An erasure poem is a constraint.
A machine prompt can also be a constraint.
In this sense, AI may function less as an author than as a peculiar Oulipian device: a system that generates unexpected linguistic possibilities inside a set of formal conditions.
The question becomes:
What did the constraint reveal?
What became possible because of it?
What structures emerged?
What myths surfaced?
What hidden assumptions became visible?
These questions interest us far more than arguments about purity.
Disclosure
If AI played a significant role in the creation of a submission, we encourage contributors to tell us how.
Not because disclosure is a confession.
Because it is metadata.
We are interested in process.
A story generated from a hundred iterative prompts is one process.
A poem assembled from model outputs and government reports is another.
A novel written by hand in a cabin is another.
A collage made from chatbot hallucinations, spam emails, and insurance paperwork is another.
The machinery itself is often part of the artwork.
What We Want
We seek work that investigates reality rather than merely simulating intelligence.
We seek work that reveals the machinery.
We seek experiments.
Failures.
Artifacts.
Strange hybrids.
Texts that could not have existed before.
Texts that expose the assumptions embedded within systems.
Texts that make language visible again.
If you use AI as a ghostwriter, we will probably be bored.
If you use AI as a microscope, an oracle, a bureaucratic demon, a stochastic collaborator, a procedural constraint, a mythology engine, a linguistic excavation tool, or an instrument for exposing the architecture of belief, we are interested.
Not because the machine is interesting.
Because reality is.
And reality increasingly includes machines.
The Means of Production is not attempting to defend artificial intelligence.
Nor are we interested in condemning it.
We are attempting to study it.
As always, we are interested in the machinery that produces the real.
The Ritual
Materials
- Plain text
- Markdown
- PDF, if necessary
Optional Addendum
Include a brief statement describing:
- What the piece encountered
- Why it was difficult to place
- Which systems failed to recognize it
- Any notable rejection language
We collect these as archaeological artifacts.
Terms of Devotion
You retain all rights.
We request only the non-exclusive right to publish the work digitally as part of the archive.
No submission fees.
No reading fees.
No prestige fees.
No expedited consideration.
No artificial scarcity.
No quarterly themes.
No strategic gatekeeping disguised as curation.
Review Process
Every submission enters the archive.
Most are read by humans.
Some are discussed extensively.
A few become permanent residents.
We reject only:
- Spam
- Plagiarism
- Work whose primary ambition is cruelty
- Work that mistakes cynicism for insight
Everything else receives consideration.
After Publication
Publication is not the reward.
Publication is the beginning of observation.
Each accepted work enters the larger ecosystem of The Means of Production.
Texts become references.
References become myths.
Myths become systems.
Systems become reality.
We are interested in watching that happen.
The Archive
The offerings are no longer pending. Every piece that enters the machine is published in full, read by our three editors in open conversation, and examined for the myth it is reaching for — its symbols, its themes, the reason it found its way to the record.
Most work lives in The Archive. A few pieces are fully accepted as published artifacts and pass into Permanent Residency — the canon.
Enter the Archive →Submission Weather
Before you offer the work, consult the conditions.
Submission Weather is a live forecast of the climate at the gate — a reading of the atmosphere a text enters the moment it leaves private space and meets the machine.
Some days the gate is open.
Some days the pressure drops.
The weather is part of the record too.
Submission Portal
Offer the work.
The machine will receive it.
What happens next becomes part of the record.
Submission Ritual
Offer the work below. Required offerings are marked *.