Soapbox 8.0: call for papers

Ways of Structuring

peer reviewed; open to critical and artistic work. 

If structures are determinate and determining, as they have come to seem through the interventions of poststructuralist theory, then ‘ways of structuring’ names a contradiction.  The plurality of ‘ways’ sits in tension with the fixity of ‘structure,’ evoking the very qualities of contingency and flexibility that the concept seems to negate.  For this upcoming issue, we welcome academic and artistic contributions that explore this tension.

For Louis Althusser, the figurehead of structuralist Marxism, ‘structure’ holds an exclusively economic valence: it is the mode of production. But the term also designates a multiplicity of social and cultural arrangements—from patriarchy and colonialism, to language and the University. In these usages, structure appears as a determinant or constraint, but it also names a condition of possibility—as in psychoanalytic theory, where the subject marks the site at which structures fail (see Alenka Zupančič’s What Is Sex? and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire). To imagine ways of structuring is, then, to confront the subject’s constitution by, of, and beyond structure. Posing this condition differently, Raymond Williams’ “structure of feeling” reimagines the scale of the subjective by calling to attention our collective experience of the conjuncture and its mediations. For new formalists like Caroline Levine, it is indeed the material conditions of our current moment which occasion a return to structuralist methodology: we need “to recognise [structures’] necessity, to think with them as well as against them” (133, emphasis in original). Why? “Because,” as she points out, “they have been there all along. And because we cannot do without them” (133).

But what are structures and how do we think with them? For Althusser, structure is famously an “absent cause,” meaning it is legible only in its effects. The invisibility of structure thus creates an imperative for cultural analysis, because, as Fredric Jameson points out, it is in cultural objects that we can best read its effects: “Cultural study allows us to isolate a certain number of specific instances and mechanisms which provide concrete mediations between the ‘superstructures’ of psychological or lived experience and the ‘infrastructures’ of juridical relations and production process” (140).

The grammar of ‘structuring’ names both actions and their consequences, and it engages the subject, the social, and the aesthetic in their condition of erratic interrelatedness. How do contemporary aesthetic forms mediate these contradictions? The forms of text, sound, and visuality that constitute our contemporary cultural landscape all participate in regulating the subject’s relation to structure. Insofar as they are processual and formal phenomena, these mediums also represent ways of structuring in the material sense.

Art’s autonomy from structure, and for structuring—using forms of repetition, completion, and interruption—negotiates relations between the subject and structure, or between the subjective and the objective. What can come of these relations? For Angela Davis, “the tension between the subjective and the objective will eventually provide the impetus towards total liberation” (9), where a way of structuring invites the struggle of contradiction in labour and mediation. In other words, structure demands our participation. How then might we position ourselves in relation to structure, and how is this relation mediated by aesthetic forms? 

For its ninth issue, Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis invites (young) researchers, (established) scholars, and creatives alike to submit works that consider practices, experiences, and methodologies that engage with the struggle, tension and hopeful inventiveness of structure. How does structure’s constitutive contradiction come to be figured? How are the general and the particular formalised? And how can the various hyphenations of structure (de-, re-, etc.) direct us in thinking of structure’s paradoxical faculty—between inescapability and perpetual transformation? 

other possible access points: 

anti-structuring

The hyphenation of anti- evokes a troubling, oppositional mode of relation. How do we take up this oppositional stance—and with whom do we stand? In other words, how do we structure our antagonism to structure?  If, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten assert, “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one” (26), could the anti- be an opposition from within? Juxtaposing structuring and resisting, could antagonism be organised through collective action in protest or other forms of struggle? The anti- as an oppositional praxis may also lead us to consider Sylvia Wynter’s ecumenical counter-humanism, which proposes humanness itself as (narrative) praxis, standing in solidarity with those who have been previously excluded from Western notions of “Man”. Finally, could it be, as Michel Foucault has warned us, that our attempts to resist structure are themselves already inscribed within structures, as effects of structure? Where is the anti- in structure?

infra-structuring 

Roads, bridges, the electric grid, the body. For Lauren Berlant, infrastructure is the “lifeworld of structure”; how itpatterns or organises society. Against a “notion of structure as calcified, as a thing” (Berlant 403), infrastructures—and particularly glitches in infrastructures, the moments when things break down—reveal that structure is not as sturdy as it might seem, but rather ‘only solid when seen from a distance’ (394). 

For Marina Vishmidt, infrastructural glitches mark “cuts” “through which history and power relations can be seen” (265). “Broken infrastructure is loquacious” (266), she writes; it allows us to glimpse for a moment the contingency of social arrangements, and the possibility for different ways of structuring. As a mediation of structure, the infra-structural invites critical reflections on scale and its ambivalent dynamics of rupture and correction. How might the in/stable circulation and organisation of access, labour, gestures and affects be understood?

re-structuring 

Re-structuring names the labour of making possible alternatives to normative structures, and draws our attention to the labour of re-building, both concrete and abstract, material and imaginative. In this regard, we may think of the speculative impulse towards utopia, what counts as utopia, and for whom? 

Additionally, re-structuring envisions and materialises alternatives through particular relations to contradiction. Following Rosa Luxemburg’s suggestion on capitalism’s arrival to its own impossibility, what forms of organisation might the political take in what is to come after? And whose labour will this depend on? The question of re-structuring also operates spatially, as Henri Lefebvre argued that “capitalism is not just about the production of things in space but, perhaps even more importantly, capitalism is about the production of space” (Prey 1). 

de-structuring 

Derridean deconstruction follows structures of meaning through their instabilities and incompletenesses, to the point where the structure seems to fall apart. This is not an erasure of structure, but rather an attention to the fact structure is not always organised. How is de-structuring itself a mode of structuring while also being its negation? We can also think of disidentification (Muñoz), queerness as refusal of identity (Edelman), and the acceptance of a spectral state of suspension (Foreman). Does neoliberalism’s erosion of social forms give the project of deconstruction a different political valence? And if structures are always already absent and disorganised, how can they be dismantled?

self-(re)structuring

How does structure name the intersection between the objective and the subjective? While the subject, in the Althusserian view, is “an effect of structure” (Jameson 284), the care for the subjective also enables the (re)production of the structure. Here, we can think with the interventions of Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici and Leopoldina Fortunati, or Nancy Fraser’s intervention in Cannibal Capitalism to understand capitalism’s implications for acts of subjectivity.

the details 

Essay Submissions 

• We are inviting extended proposals in MLA formatting and referencing style to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net. 

• Each proposal must include an abstract of 300-500 words and a writing sample developing the argument (500 words). The sample is meant to indicate the intended structuring and weighing of the various elements of your text; we understand and expect that this will change again during drafting and editing. 

• The proposal should include a preliminary bibliography. 

• Submissions should be sent as a file attachment (.docx) to the email, and the file's content should be anonymised.

Creative Submissions

• Guidelines for creative submissions are more flexible. If text-based, we accept excerpts of finished works up to 1500 words. We also accept pitches/abstracts between 300 to 500 words in connection with a writing sample in the chosen creative form. Please keep in mind our spatial limitations: we publish and print in book format, and we have a limited number of pages to give to each submission. 

• We are also open to visual submissions (excluding moving images), provided they are accompanied by an artistic statement and an explanation of how the work connects to the theme, up to 500 words. 

• A sense of the formatting possibilities can be garnered from previous issues and our Instagram (open-access PDF versions are available on our website). There is no guarantee images will be printed in colour. 

• Visual submissions need to be anonymised and not contain the author’s name. 

The deadline for submissions is June 1st. Conditional acceptances will be sent out before the end of the month of June. Upon acceptance, the authors of the academic essays will be asked to submit a 4000-6000 word full draft by the beginning of September (specific dates tbd). The editing and publishing process will span the next academic year (September 2026 - February 2027). 

works cited

Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism : Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. 1970,https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

Berlant, Lauren. “The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times.” Environment and Planning. D, 

Society & Space, 34(3), 2016, pp. 393–419. 

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. MIT Press, 1994. October Books.

Davis, Angela Y. Lectures on Liberation. Peace Press, 1969.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2004, Durham.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch : Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. London: Penguin Books, 2022. Print.

Foreman, Iain. “Spectral Soundscapes: Exploring Spaces of Remembrance through Sound.” Interferencejournal.org, 2009, www.interferencejournal.org/spectral-soundscapes-exploring-spaces-of-remembrance-through-sound/.  

Fortunati, Leopoldina. The Arcana of Reproduction. Verso Books, 2025.

Fraser, Nancy. Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet and What We Can Do about It. Verso Books, 2023.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Minor
Compositions, 2013.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Routledge, 2007.

Lesjak, Carolyn. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2, 2013, pp. 233–77.

Levine, Caroline. “Structures All the Way Down: Literary Methods and the Detail.” Modern Language Quarterly 84(2). Cornell University, 2023.

Luxemburg, Rosa. Reform or Revolution. 1900.https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/

Muñoz, José E. Disidentifications : queers of color and the performance of politics. University of 

Minnesota Press, 1999.

Prey, Robert. “Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Music Streaming Spaces.” Sociologia, vol. 9, no. 3, University of Bologna, Jan. 2016, pp. 1–22, https://doi.org/10.2383/82481. Accessed 11 Oct. 2023.

Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Vishmidt, Marina. “Between Not Everything and Not Nothing: Cuts Towards Infrastructural Critique.” Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989. Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh eds. The MIT Press, 2017, pp. 265-269.

Williams, Raymond L. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 2009. Marxist Introductions.

Wynter, Sylvia and Katherine McKittrick. 2015. “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle” and
“Unparalleled Catastrophe for our Species?” Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Ed.
Katherine McKittrick, Duke University Press. pp. 1-89.

Zupančič, Alenka. What Is Sex? MIT press, 2017. Short Circuits.

suggested bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 2, Jan. 1998, pp. 281–88,

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Penguin Books, 2021.

Kornbluh, Anna. “Against Anti-Theory.” e-flux notes, 2024.

Kornbluh, Anna. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. University of Chicago Press, 2019. 

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.

Lonzi, Carla. “Let’s Spit on Hegel.” Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel. Edited by Patricia
Jagentowicz Mills. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Print.
pp. 275-299.

Matrix. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. Pluto Press, 1985.

Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010.

Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. Methuen, 1987.