Minor Compositions

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 6 The Institution Negated? In this episode we are joined by John Foot, Susana Caló, and Godofredo Enes Pereira for a wide-ranging conversation on the publication in English of The Negated Institution, and the radical milieus that shaped it, emerging from the turbulent political and intellectual landscape of the 1960s and 70s. The discussion traces the overlapping trajectories of Franco Basaglia’s movement in Italy – best known for its role in dismantling psychiatric hospitals – and the parallel work of CERFI (Centre d’Études, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles) in France. Rather than treating these as isolated histories, the conversation explores their shared concerns: the critique of institutional power, the rethinking of subjectivity, and the attempt to invent new forms of collective life beyond the confines of medicalized and bureaucratic control. Across the episode, we discuss how these projects navigated the fraught terrain between theory and practice, politics and care, organization and spontaneity. What did it mean to “open” the institution, and what forms of resistance or capture did this entail? How did these movements intersect with broader currents of 1968 and its aftermath? And what can their experiments teach us today, in a moment where questions of mental health, social reproduction, and institutional life have вновь become urgent? The Negated Institution: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/the-negated-institution-report-from-a-psychiatric-hospital/ CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1661 Intro / outro music: Ornette Coleman – Forgotten Children, from The Love Revolution 1968 (recorded at Teatro Lirico, Milan on February 5, 1968)

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 5 Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary In this episode owe are joined by Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler for a wide-ranging conversation on cultural funding, radical publishing, and the changing conditions of collective knowledge production.The discussion begins with Gary Hall’s recent book Defund Culture, which challenges conventional calls to increase arts funding by asking a more fundamental question: what – and who – is cultural funding actually for? Rather than defending existing institutions, Hall proposes that the current crisis in arts funding might be an opportunity to rethink the entire landscape, redistributing resources away from entrenched, upper-middle-class infrastructures toward more collective, plural, and relational forms of cultural production.  From there, the conversation moves into the practical and political challenges of radical publishing today. Reflecting on projects such as Open Humanities Press and Agit Press, Hall and Wheeler discuss the tensions between openness and enclosure in contemporary publishing, the uneven realities of open access, and the difficulty of sustaining collective, non-commercial forms of intellectual work. Wheeler draws on experiences from worker movements to highlight the historical role of print media – newsletters, pamphlets, and leaflets – as machines to produce consciousness, capable of expanding political dialogue beyond academic and activist enclaves.How do these earlier forms resonate with, and diverge from, today’s digital platforms? What happens when knowledge production becomes entangled with the logics of content creation, personal branding, and algorithmic visibility? The conversation explores how financial precarity and platform economies shape what can be said, by whom, and under what conditions: raising questions about whether genuinely collective and autonomous forms of media can exist within, or beyond, these systems. Ultimately this is a question of infrastructure: how to build alternative networks for producing and distributing knowledge that do not simply replicate existing hierarchies. From decentralized publishing models and cooperative platforms to the enduring importance of print as a social and organizational process, the episode maps out both the challenges and the possibilities of creating new cultural forms grounded in collaboration, redistribution, and shared intellectual life. Rather than offering definitive solutions, this conversation opens up a space for thinking through what it might mean to defend/defund culture by transforming it – experimenting with new modes of publishing, new institutional arrangements, and new ways of working together. More on the book: https://www.mediastudies.press/pub/nb-hall-defund/release/4 Open Humanities Press: https://openhumanitiespress.orgAgit Press: https://www.agitpress.net Intro / outro music – Mischief Brew, The Reinvention of the Printing Press

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 4 Wages Against Dreamwork In this episode of Minor Compositions, the usual format is playfully overturned as Richard Gilman-Opalsky stages a friendly “revolt,” taking over hosting duties to interview Stevphen Shukaitis about The Wages of Dreamwork, co-written with Joanna Figiel. What unfolds is less a conventional author interview than a comradely and reflective exchange on the conditions, contradictions, and possibilities of creative labor under contemporary capitalism. Moving between humor and critical analysis, the conversation explores dreamwork as both exploitation and potential: tracing how imagination, desire, and affect are captured within systems of value, while also gesturing toward forms of refusal, collectivity, and insurgent creativity. The episode places the book in relation to broader traditions of radical thought and publishing, unfolding as an open and informal exchange moving easily between discussion and reflection, and between critique and comradery. Intro / Outro Music: Richard Gilman-Oplasky, “A Minor Composition”

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 3 Communism Actually In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we discuss Communist Ontologies with its authors Richard Gilman-Opalsky and Bruno Gulli, exploring their proposal that communism be understood not only as a political program but as a form of life. The conversation ranges across questions of political economy, ontology, and revolutionary subjectivity, considering how Marx’s critique of capitalism points toward the recovery of ways of living beyond the reduction of life to labor. Along the way we discuss the historical contingency of revolutionary subjects, drawing on figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Frantz Fanon, as well as movements like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, to think through how identities and forms of struggle emerge, transform, and sometimes dissolve. The discussion also reflects on the philosophical tension between being and becoming, the limits imposed by carceral systems, and the possibilities opened by imagining new forms of collective life – finding, in the spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois – that the struggle for freedom often begins in small practices of interdependence, imagination, and other ways of doing beyond the logics of capital. More on the book.Bio: Richard Gilman-Opalsky is professor of political theory and philosophy in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois. He is the author of eight books, including Imaginary Power, Real Horizons, The Communism of Love, Specters of Revolt, and Precarious Communism. His work has been translated and published in Greek, Spanish, French, and German. Bruno Gullì teaches philosophy at Cuny-Kingsborough. He is the author of various articles and four books in the field of political ontology, including Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (2005) and Singularities at the Threshold: The Ontology of Unrest (2020). Intro / outdo music: Wukir Suryadi, playing the Minotaur of Titir Image: Judgment of Midas, Unknown Flemish artist, imitator of Hendrik van Balen, late 16th century, via Hermitage Museum; King Midas, Andrea Vaccaro, 1670, via Dorotheum 

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 2 Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective  In this episode of the Minor Compositions, we are joined by Steven Belletto and Grégory Pierrot, in order to discuss Steven’s book Black Surrealist. The Legend of Ted Joans. Together we explore Joans as Beat Generation insider, jazz trumpeter, collage artist, Pan-Africanist, and self-styled Surrealist griot, tracing a life that unfolded as an ongoing experiment in what he called a poem-life. Born in Cairo, Illinois in 1928, Joans moved through Greenwich Village at the moment the Beat Generation was coalescing, opened the first Black-owned art gallery in the neighborhood, staged proto-Happenings, and developed his jazz action paintings before embarking on decades of itinerant movement between Paris, Tangier, Timbuktu, and beyond. The conversation considers how Joans swam across and between currents often kept apart – Surrealism, Négritude, Black Power, and the Black Arts movement – while using humor, performance, and chance encounter as tools of resistance. We discuss jazz poetry, the fugitive, undercommon quality of his practice, and the challenges posed by an archive scattered by design. Reflecting on ongoing efforts to gather manuscripts, journals, recordings, and unpublished works, this episode takes up Joans’s radical dreams: of surrealism as liberation, of counterculture as insurgent practice, and of life itself as a work of art still resonating in the present. More on the book.Bio: Steven Belletto is Professor of English at Lafayette College. He is author of The Beats: A Literary History (2020), No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives (2012), and editor of six books, including The Cambridge Companion to Jack Kerouac (2024), American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960 (2018) and The Cambridge Companion to the Beats (2017).  Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford where he teaches American and African American literature. His research bears on the cultural networks of the Black Atlantic. He is the author of The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (2019). Intro / outdo music: Ted Joans - Jazz is My Religion (1964)

S2E1 – In girum imus nocteet consumimur igniSeason 2 opens with a conversation with Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson – filmmakers, artists, and co-founders of Firefly Frequencies – reflecting on radio as a collective, political, and affective medium. Moving between the history of autonomous radio, projects such as Lullabies for the Revolution and Terminal Beach, and collaborations including the Gaza Biennale, the discussion explores sound as a way of creating community, defamiliarizing political experience, and responding in time. The episode also considers radio and publishing as shared infrastructures: voicings, montage, reading groups, remixing archives, and the possibilities of activating past materials for new collectivist futures. Opening Season Two, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni circles questions of listening, drift, and persistence – how we move together through sound, and what it means to keep a frequency alive.Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.orgTerminal Beach: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/terminal-beachAmbient Thought: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/ambient-thoughtLullabies for the Revolution: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/lullabies-for-the-revolutionMemory for Denial: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/memory-for-denial Workers Against Capital: Reading Mario Tronti Sixty Years On: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1666 Music: Intro: Jaydawn & Wukir Suryadi - Moal Ngejat from Pucung, Pangkur Jeung Hujan BedogOutro: Fireflies August 2022

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 43 Communize the city This episode begins with Kike España’ presenting his essay “Communize the City: Towards an Insurgent Vicinity,” a text that examines the contemporary urban condition through the lens of financial brutalism, before segueing into a discussion of themes from it. España argues that cities have become logistical infrastructures of extraction, where financialization, automation, and real-estate speculation converge to displace communities and dissolve social relations. Drawing on thinkers such as Mbembe, Lefebvre, Guattari, and Moten, the essay frames the city-form as a planetary apparatus of expulsion – one that transforms citizenship, civility, and urban renewal into mechanisms of enclosure, discipline, and dispossession. Against this backdrop, España calls for insurgent forms of inhabiting that arise from the ruins of financial brutalism: practices of neighborhood, subsistence, and insurgency that refuse recognition by the dominant order while cultivating new forms of common life. By foregrounding the “informality of the commune” and proposing strategies like neighborhood committees, blocks in struggle, and intercommunalism, the text insists on the possibility of communizing the city from within its fractures. The seminar invites participants to reflect on how these concepts might inform both critical theory and practical organizing in the face of today’s planetary urban crisis. Bio: Kike España is an architect and urban researcher based in Málaga, Spain, with a PhD in urban theory from the University of Seville. He is actively involved in grassroots cultural-urban initiatives, including the social and cultural centre La Casa Invisible, the collective bookshop Suburbia, and the independent publishing house Subtextos. His work bridges academic inquiry and activist practice. He contributes to the Overtourist City research project at the School of Architecture, University of Málaga, and his writings explore themes of gentrification, commoning, and insurgent urbanism. 

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 42 We Are Making a Podcast About Mark Fisher In this episode, we speak with artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter of Close and Remote about their sprawling, collaborative, and genre-bending project We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher. The conversation traces the origins of the film: how an initial spark in Fisher’s writing grew into a hybrid work that fuses documentary, performance, collective creativity, and hauntological fiction. We explore how Close and Remote approached the challenge of translating hauntology into visual and cinematic language: the textures of lost futures, the atmospheres of cultural stagnation, and the ghosts that structure the present. With over seventy contributors and much of the production unfolding openly on Instagram, the film became an experiment in distributed authorship and decapitalised making. Mellor and Poulter reflect on how this process worked in practice: the unexpected turns, the moments of productive chaos, and the ways the networked contributions reshaped the project’s trajectory. They consider, too, how Fisher himself might have responded to such a mode of production, and the tensions inherent in staging anti-capitalist creative work on corporate platforms. Screening dates and more information about We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher can be found at Close and Remote: https://www.closeandremote.net/portfolio/we-are-making-a-film-about-mark-fisher

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 41 Alifuru World: Stateless Histories, Decolonial Futures Discussion with Ferdiansyah Thajib & Hypatia Vourloumis on the forthcoming book Anarchy in Alifuru: The History of Stateless Societies in the Maluku Islands by Bima Satria Putra Putra’s book traces the histories of the Alifuru peoples – those who refused incorporation into the state formations of Ternate, Tidore, colonial empires, and the modern Indonesian nation-state. Drawing from oral histories, early travel accounts, and anarchist anthropology, Anarchy in Alifuru reimagines Maluku not as a marginal zone of empire but as a living archive of statelessness: a site where alternatives to state power and hierarchical authority were practiced, defended, and continually reconfigured. This conversation will explore how these histories of Alifuru resistance resonate with contemporary struggles for autonomy, decolonization, and collective life. How might the legacies of refusal and federation in the archipelago inform critiques of extraction, assimilation, and the persistent violence of the nation-state? What possibilities emerge when we read these histories as resources for thinking – and living – politics otherwise? Together Thajib, and Vourloumis will consider how Anarchy in Alifuru unsettles dominant narratives of modernity and opens space for minor, insurgent forms of world-making. Bios: Ferdiansyah Thajib is a researcher and educator whose work focuses on queer politics, affect, and the intersections of memory, trauma, and collective healing in post-authoritarian Indonesia. Current he is a senior lecturer at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. Since 2007 he has been a member of the KUNCI Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, where he has been involved in developing practices of critical pedagogy, artistic research, and collaborative forms of knowledge production. His writing and projects explore how marginal communities craft modes of survival, endurance, and solidarity.  Hypatia Vourloumis is a scholar of performance, poetics, and anticolonial thought with a focus on Indonesia. She holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from NYU and has published widely in journals such as Women & Performance, Theatre Journal, and Performance Research. She is co-author (with Sandra Ruiz) of Formless Formation (Minor Compositions, 2021) and The Alleys (NP, 2024). Her work often emerges through collaboration with theorists, artists, and activists, engaging questions of aesthetics, politics, and autonomous forms of collective life. Intro / Outro Music: Filastine & Nova - Nusa Fantasma

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 40 Utopia in the Factory? Discussion with Rhiannon Firth & John Preston on their new book Utopia in the Factory. Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics There’s long been this seductive idea that automation, AI, and robotics might finally deliver us into a kind of post-work utopia. You can find it everywhere, from Silicon Valley pitch decks to certain corners of the radical left. The story goes something like this: in the age of “Industry 4.0,” digital manufacturing will allow for seamless, frictionless production. Factories without workers –“lights-out” facilities where machines run the show – become the emblem of a capitalist cybertopia. And then, on the other side, there’s the more radical dream: that these same technologies might be the conditions for Fully Automated Luxury Communism – a reimagined Marxist vision where automation liberates humanity from labour, ushering in lives of collective leisure and abundance. Still others turn back to cybernetics, seeing in the feedback loops of AI, networks, and digital communication new ways to organize – an anarchist cybernetics for the 21st century. But the book we’re discussing this episode, Utopia in the Factory. Prefigurative Knowledge Against Cybernetics by Rhiannon Firth and John Preston, asks us to pause. It questions that technological optimism, not just in its capitalist manifestations, but in its radical appropriations too. What happens when we start to see automation and cybernetics not as tools of liberation, but as systems that can’t quite grasp the messy, tacit, and creative dimensions of human work and cooperation? Through a close critique of automation, AI, and the cybernetic paradigm, they argue that these technologies can never fully capture what makes human making and organizing meaningful. Instead they show, through interviews with workers, makers, and activists, that autonomy, creativity, and desire – those spontaneous, often hobbyist forms of collaboration – remain essential. These are the forms of life and labour that resist being coded, automated, or optimized. And perhaps, they suggest, it’s in these spaces – of hobbying, tinkering, and collective improvisation – that other futures begin to take shape. Bio: Rhiannon Firth is Lecturer in Sociology of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London. She is interested in anti-authoritarian organising within, against and beyond the crises of capitalism. Her research focuses on grassroots utopias, mutual aid and the pedagogical and prefigurative practices of radical social movements. John Preston is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. He has pioneered an original stream of research in the sociology of disasters and existential threats. His work also explores the sociology of education and, most recently, skills and AI. For more on the book: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-87132-0 Intro / outro music: “Sucked Out Chucked Out 1” by The Ex, from “The Dignity of Labour”

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 39 From Disalienation to Collective Care. Institutional Psychotherapy as ResistanceDiscussion with Elena Vogman & Marlon Miguel discussing the work of François Tosquelles and Jean Oury Born amidst the ruins of World War II and the shadow of fascist extermination policies, institutional psychotherapy emerged not just as a form of mental health care, but as a radical mode of resistance. At the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in occupied France, a new approach was forged, one that tore open the walls of confinement and reimagined the psychiatric institution as a space for collective transformation. Patients and caregivers, militants and medics worked together in horizontal structures, creating group therapies and cooperatives that refused both the authoritarianism of the clinic and the colonial logic embedded in psychiatric norms.The recent volume Psychotherapy and Materialism brings this history into sharper view, offering the first English translations of two key texts by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury – figures at the core of this movement. A Catalan exile and anarcho-syndicalist, Tosquelles was instrumental in theorizing the treatment of the institution as inseparable from the treatment of psychic suffering. Oury, later founder of the La Borde clinic, extended this work through experimental practices that would resonate with – and influence – thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Félix Guattari, Fernand Deligny, and Anne Querrien. Rather than containing madness, institutional psychotherapy opened a space for its circulation, listening, and expression – what we might call a politics of disalienation. It unsettles not only psychiatry but also psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and social practice. As these ideas echo into today’s crises of care and mental health, this discussion invites us to think with Tosquelles and Oury: what would it mean to treat our institutions – and ourselves – otherwise?Bios: Elena Vogman is a scholar of comparative literature and media. She is Freigeist Fellow and Principal Investigator of the research project co-principal investigator of the research project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus: Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and visiting fellow at the ICI Berlin. She is the author of two books, Sinnliches Denken. Eisensteins exzentrische Methode (2018) and Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (2019). Marlon Miguel is co-principal investigator of the project ‘Madness, Media, Milieus. Reconfiguring the Humanities in Postwar Europe’ at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and visiting fellow at the ICI Berlin. He holds a double PhD in Fine Arts (Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis) and Philosophy (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). His current research focuses on the intersection between contemporary philosophy, art, media, and psychiatry. He also practices contemporary circus and does practical movement research. Also available on all the usual podcast platforms.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism This discussion brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished by World War II or the death of André Breton, surrealism instead persisted – and continues – as a living, transnational community committed to creative and social transformation. Drawing on their extensive research, which resulted in two special issue of the Journal of Avant-Garde Studies,  Susik and Löwy will discuss how surrealism’s anti-authoritarian investments have manifested across different geographies and political contexts, from postwar Europe to Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and beyond, tracing its presence into the present moment.Rather than treating surrealism as an art-historical artifact or a closed chapter of modernism, this event examines its longevity and adaptability as a vanguard spirit of resistance, one that connects aesthetic experimentation to struggles against domination. What does it mean to recognize surrealism as both historically situated and epochal — rooted in specific contexts yet animated by an ethos that transcends them? How has its “continuous modus operandi” of linking creative production with anti-authoritarian praxis evolved from the exilic conditions of WWII through the upheavals of 1968, the crises of the neoliberal era, and even into present? Susik and Löwy invite us to reflect on surrealism’s ongoing relevance as a force of imagination and opposition in our own time.Bio: Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967, and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance. Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Series. She lives in Portland, OR.  Michael Löwy is Research Director of Sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. His previous books include Redemption and Utopia: Liberation Judaism in Central Europe, Marxism in Latin America and The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America. Image from Gee Vaucher’s “A Week of Knots” project.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor This episode is a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor on the themes of her new book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory. In this provocative work, Mansoor offers a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a rethinking of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on Marx’s concept of prostitution — as an allegory for modern labor — she explores how generalized and gendered forms of work converge in modern and contemporary art. More on the book: “In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.” Bio: Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, also published by Duke University Press. More on the book.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 36 Feral Class Untamed. Unheard. Unstoppable. For this episode with have a chat with Marc Garrett about his forthcoming book Feral Class. The book is Marc Garrett’s raw and resonant memoir of surviving – and creating – on the margins. It delves into the lived realities of working-class artists, charting Garrett’s journey from the edges of cultural production to the heart of radical practice. Through vivid storytelling, biting critique, and moments of dark humour, Garrett reflects on what it means to grow up outside the safety nets of art institutions, forging a path through DIY networks, political resistance, and feral creativity.What does it mean to live as part of the “feral class” – those who exist beyond the permission of gatekeepers, who make art not to be accepted but to disrupt? Join us for an exploration of class struggle, artistic survival, and the wild potential of lives lived in defiance of cultural elitism. This is not just a memoir – it’s a call to arms for those who create from below, with dirt under their nails and fire in their bellies.Bio: Marc Garrett’s life and work embody the intersection of art, technology, and social change, shaped by his working-class upbringing and a commitment to challenging institutional hierarchies. Growing up in Southend-On-Sea, he explored creative expression through street art, pirate radio, and early online activism before co-founding Furtherfield in 1996 with Ruth Catlow, an artist-led community resisting the commercialisation of the art world. Despite personal challenges, including a cancer diagnosis in 2022, Garrett continues to focus on ideas and questions that acknowledge and engage working-class and feral-class contexts as a springboard for more extensive dialogues on creating conditions for social change across art, technology, and ecology. More on the book: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1561The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 35It’s summer and we’re feeling a bit lazy… so rather than record something new, for this episode we’re presenting a recording of a seminar discussion between Stefano Harney & Stevphen Shukaitis that occurred this May in London. It was part of an event organized by CHRONOS from Royal Holloway. You are on the way to destruction, make your time. In this conversation we discuss cricket, CLR James, cricket, a number of other things, as well what was probably the main point of the event, which was re-visiting Stefano and Fred Moten’s book The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. The conversation is long and rambling, maybe like a derive, but hopefully stumbles into enough interesting areas to be well worth your while.Here’s some more vaguely official text to give it a more air of respectability: “Renowned for his intellectually generous and electrifying speaking style, Stefano’s work continues to resonate deeply across disciplines and borders. Those who had the privilege of engaging with him during his time at Queen Mary and the University of Leicester will remember him as a transformative presence, one who played a crucial role in connecting Critical Management Studies to the broader global currents of radical thought and critical theory. In this event, Stefano Harney will be joined in conversation by Stevphen Shukaitis of the University of Essex. Together, they will revisit the enduring impact of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, the seminal work Harney co-authored with Fred Moten and published in 2013 through Minor Compositions, the radical publishing imprint founded by Stevphen. The Undercommons has become a cornerstone text in radical academia and activist circles alike: offering a profound rethinking of the university, the business school, and the very terms of study, fugitivity, and refusal. This promises to be an unmissable evening of dialogue, reflection, and provocation. Whether you're already steeped in the ideas of The Undercommons or just beginning to explore the terrain, we invite you to join us for what is sure to be a powerful and inspiring event.” More on the Centre for Critical and Historical Research on Organisation and Society (CHRONOS) Bios: Stefano Harney is a teacher and writer engaged in collaborative work across classrooms, research, and social practice, with a focus on black studies. He has taught a wide range of subjects, including anthropology, sociology, art criticism, American Studies, and business, at institutions in the US, UK, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Canada, and Germany. Harney was a Hayden Fellow and Visiting Critic at Yale’s School of Art (2020-2021) and an Honorary Professor at the University of British Columbia. He is best known for his co-authored works with Fred Moten, The Undercommons (2013) and All Incomplete (2021), and has also published on management education, public administration, and Caribbean diaspora identity.Stevphen Shukaitis is Reader in Culture & Organization at the University of Essex and is co-director of the COVER, the commons research centre.. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Wages of Dreamwork. Class Composition & the Social Reproduction of Cultural Labor (2024, co-written with Joanna Figiel). He likes to work on projects with his friends, some of which end up resulting in the production of books. The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 34 Communism After Deleuze Discussion with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee about his new book Communism After Deleuze. What if communism was always the secret engine of Deleuze’s thought? This episode uncovers a hidden itinerary running through Deleuze’s work: a subterranean current where the idea of the Third World becomes a cipher for revolutionary desire. Against the grain of liberal economy and creeping fascism, Deleuze's veiled engagements with Marx – sparked by the upheavals of May ’68 – point toward an unfulfilled political project. Join us as we excavate this buried legacy and explore how these forgotten pathways might still resonate, agitate, and assemble today.  More on the book: “Often regarded as an apolitical philosopher, the challenges that Deleuze mounted to structuralism are easy to overlook. By reinvigorating the communist aspect of his political project and linking his ideas to Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee reveals Deleuze's objective: to rescue Marxism from the dogmatic status quo and revive its political agendas. This major undertaking situates his ideas alongside and sets out a new framework for reading the significance of Marxist thought in postwar France. Ultimately, this new understanding of Deleuze's critique of global capitalism opens up his vision of materialistic politics as a means of shaping the people and the proletariat of the future.” Bio: Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 33 Dismantling the Master’s ClockIn this episode, we speak with Rasheedah Phillips about her groundbreaking book Dismantling the Master’s Clock: On Race, Space, and Time. Drawing from Black Quantum Futurism, Phillips challenges dominant, Western notions of time – showing how they have been shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and racial oppression. Why does time seem to move only forward? Why are certain experiences –  like aging or birth – treated as irreversible, even though physics suggests otherwise? Phillips explores how Black and Afrodiasporic communities have imagined and practiced alternative conceptions of time, where past, present, and future are interwoven rather than linear. Bio: Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, lawyer, parent, and interdisciplinary artist working through a Black futurist lens. Phillips is the founder of the AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of the Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism. Phillips’ work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wire, New York Magazine, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and e-flux. Ash Sharma is an independent researcher and writer, and editor of journal darkmatter.For more on the book. 

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 32 States of DivergenceFor this episode we have a discussion with writer and theorist Sven Lütticken, as we delve into his new book States of Divergence. In it we will explore the book’s core themes: the lived experience of accelerating catastrophe, and the emergence of divergent, resistant practices across art, politics, and everyday life. More on the book “Set against the backdrop of global crises, from climate change to pandemics, Lütticken dissects contemporary cultural and political practices that attempt to break free from the disastrous momentum of capitalist modernity. His journey traverses fields including art theory, philosophy, and politics, presenting a nuanced critique of the ways in which deviant temporalities and forms of life confront or adapt to catastrophe. Through a series of essays, the book tackles issues ranging from survival to prefigurative practice, indigeneity and internationalism, and the dialectics of critique and revolution. Lütticken masterfully blends personal narrative, historical inquiry, and theoretical reflection to question what it means to live – and resist – within the contradictions of our time. States of Divergence is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how art, politics, and life intersect in an era defined by ever-deepening contradictions and conflicts. Bio: Sven Lütticken is an art historian. He teaches at Leiden University’s Academy of Creative and Performing Arts and at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of History in Motion: Time in the Age of the Moving Image (2013), Cultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy (2017), and Objections: Forms of Abstraction, Vol. 1 (2022). For more on the book: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1373.Intro music: The Fall - Slang King The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 31 Take This Refusal and Dance To ItThis episode is a conversation with Paul Rekret, centered around his book Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis (2024). In this discussion we explore the book’s key themes through both discussion and curated music selections that speak to the intersections of labor, leisure, and sound. Take This Hammer examines how shifts in work and the economy – from the fragmentation of the working day to the rise of precarious labor – have shaped and been reflected in the forms and experiences of popular music. Rekret traces how the separation of work and leisure, once central to industrial society, has become increasingly blurred in the age of streaming, automation, and remote labor, and considers how music both registers these changes and imagines alternatives. Together, we’ll listen to tracks connected to themes from the book, and discuss how musical forms – across genres like trap rap, dance music, and field recordings – respond to crises of work, economic instability, gentrification, and ecological breakdown. This session is an invitation to think with music: not just as entertainment, but as a way of sensing and sounding out life under capitalism and beyond. This episode is accompanied by an installment of the Saint Monday Mixtapes, which can be accessed here. Bio: Paul Rekret is the author of three books: Down With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence (2017); Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, Polemics (2018); Monopolated Light and Power (with Edward George, Louis Moreno, Ashwani Sharma (2024)), and editor of George Caffentzis's Clipped Coins, Abused Words & Civil Government (2021). He has published on political and cultural theory in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Constellations, South Atlantic Quarterly and his writing has appeared in Frieze, The Wire, Art Monthly, The New Inquiry, and elsewhere. He is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective and works on sound and ecological crisis as part of Amplification/Annihilation. He is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communications at the University of Westminster. For more on the book. Intro music: Guitar Welch, Hogman Maxey, Andy Mosely, and Huddie Ledbetter -  Take This Hammer The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 31 Penny as ProducerPenny Rimbaud is best known as a founding member of the anarcho-punk collective Crass, as well as for his work as a poet, writer, and philosopher. But beyond these well-known aspects of his life and practice lies another, less frequently discussed dimension: his role as a record producer. The original idea for this episode of Minor Compositions was straightforward: sit down with Penny and discuss his work as a producer, focusing in particular on a selection of albums that he considers to represent the best of his production efforts (a list of which is included below). However, as anyone who has ever had a conversation with Penny can attest, things rarely go according to plan, and all the better for that. For Penny, production is never merely about microphone placement, mixing levels, or the technical minutiae of sound engineering. Instead, it is a much more expansive and intuitive process, one that involves engaging artists on a deeper, often psychological level. His aim is not just to capture a performance, but to push artists beyond their comfort zones, to guide them into unexplored creative territory they might not have reached on their own. In this sense, his work as a producer takes on the character of a kind of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis: a practice of care, provocation, and transformation. This conversation marks the beginning of what will be an extended series with Penny, exploring these themes as they resonate across his work in music, poetry, and thought over the years. More than just a reflection on artistic production, this series aims to trace a broader philosophical and ethical project: one that blurs the boundaries between art and life, creativity and critique. There is no authority but yourself, but there is no self…Episode begins with an extended section from Kate Shortt and Alcyona Mick - Convergence & Variations Outro - “The Night” - KUKL Pen’s Production Work Album ListKUKL -  Holidays in Europe D & V – D & V (Inspiration Gave Them The Motivation To Move On Out Of Their Isolation) Hit Parade – Nick Knack Paddy Whack The Cravats –  The Cravats In Toytown Eve Libertine – I am that Tempest For more on Caliban Sounds: https://calibansounds.bandcamp.com The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 29 Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues This episode is a discussion with Paul Buhle, Abigail Susik, and Penelope Rosemont about the newly released book Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture. This collection brings together legendary Chicago surrealist Franklin Rosemont’s writings on popular culture over a period of more than forty years.  Rosemont, a self-taught scholar, poet, and artist, playfully uncovers the sometimes hidden-in-plain-sight writers and artists who managed to be both popular, vernacular, and in their own ways profoundly revolutionary. Rosemont skillfully weaves together what most would regard as unlikely threads. The labor culture of the nineteenth-century anarchist movement gains new meaning when connected to the famed Chicago musicians of blues and jazz. His interests from childhood extended from his favorite animators and comic art – Mel Blanc and Tex Avery, Scrooge McDuck, Mighty Mouse, Krazy Kat, Smokey Stover, and Powerhouse Pepper – to nineteenth-century drug-taker Benjamin Paul Blood, or the barely remembered best-selling utopian writer Edward Bellamy. Palindromes and other wordplay counted along with radical environmentalism, modern dance alongside the “mad” self-taught writer-artist Henry Darger. Bios: Paul Buhle has written, edited, or coedited more than four dozen books, including twenty graphic novels, beginning with Wobblies! He founded the SDS journal Radical America and the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University. He is coeditor of the Encyclopedia of the American Left, a former senior lecturer at Brown University, and the authorized biographer of C.L.R. James. He lives in Providence, RI. Abigail Susik is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work, editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967, and coeditor of the volumes Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance. Susik is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and joint editor of the Bloomsbury Transnational Surrealism Series. She lives in Portland, OR.  For more information on the book: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1723 Intro music: Krazy Kat Theme Song from “Slow Beau” (1927)  The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org 

E28 Band People with Franz Nicolay This episode is a recording of a seminar held at the University of Essex with Franz Nicolay on his book Band People. In it Franz Nicolay explores the working and creative lives of musicians. In it, he argues that to talk about the role of a ‘band person’ is not only to talk about art and craft but also to develop a critique of the value placed on fame and a celebrity culture that requires the singling out of individuals from a collaborative enterprise. Band People foregrounds the political dynamics of cultural labour and the precarity that the working lives of musicians share with a growing segment of the larger economy. It sets out to uncover the wide pyramid of talent and effort that supports the work of making music. The book provides insights into how, in the creative sector, social groups organize themselves, into how musicians navigate aspects of their work such as anonymity and agency, and how the industry creates taxonomies of specialists and stylists, generalists and chameleons, hired guns and band members, road dogs and punch-clock session players, the fan favorite and so on. It asks, who are ‘band people’, the character actors of popular music? Seminar introduced & chaired by Melissa Tyler Bios: Franz Nicolay is a writer, musician, and faculty member in music and written arts at Bard College. In addition to records under his own name, he has been a member of World/Inferno Friendship Society and the Hold Steady. He is the author of The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar and the novel Someone Should Pay for Your Pain. For more information on the book: https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477323533/ The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org Apologies for variable audio quality in the recording.

For this episode we have a discussion of the book Peter Brötzmann: Free-Jazz, Revolution and the Politics of Improvisation with its author Daniel Spicer and long time comrade and fellow radical theorist / free jazz musician Richard Gilman-Opalsky. In it we discuss the countercultural and artistic milieus that shape Brötzmann as an artist, the importance of his work as an organizer and catalyst, and the weird and unfortunate way that radical politics is increasingly edited out of the history of free jazz. More about the book. Here Daniel Spicer has written “the first ever, full-length, English-language biography of one of the most fascinating and inspiring personalities in the history of Western improvised music – and one of the key artistic figures to emerge from the socio-cultural tumult of the 1960s. Drawing on extensive interviews with Brötzmann and key associates, it traces the German saxophonist’s crucial role as a pioneer of European free jazz, his restless travels and collaborations and his eventual superstardom, examining the life and work of a fiercely uncompromising artist with a reputation for gruff intensity and total commitment. Digging deep into the history and aesthetics of free jazz in Europe and beyond, it provides detailed analysis of music by Brötzmann and other major figures, while positioning Brötzmann’s work – and the wider free jazz milieu – in the context of the revolutionary left-wing, humanist and utopian ideals that inspired and underpinned it. Both intimate and wide-ranging, it tells the story of a man and a music that changed the world.” Bios: Daniel Spicer is a writer, broadcaster, improviser and poet. He writes about music for The Wire, Jazzwise, Songlines, WeJazz and The Quietus. He is the author of The Turkish Psychedelic Music Explosion: Anadolu Psych (1965 – 1980). Richard Gilman-Opalsky is professor of political theory and philosophy in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois. He is the author of numerous books including the recently released Communist Ontologies. An Inquiry into the Construction of New Forms of Life (co-written with Bruno Gullì). Intro / outdo music: Unreleased bootleg of the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet - Live in London, April 2011 The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

For this episode we talk with Brixton-based textile artist Scorpio about his life and work. Last summer a quest to learn more about the 1990s militant queer art collective Homocult led us to visiting “Iconic Queer,” an exhibition of Scorpio’s work at the Lambeth Archives. Moved by the power of the work, and sensing there would be interesting stories behind these pieces, which focussed on cycles of torment, development, and personal renewal, we decided to track down Scorpio. The resulting conversation is about Scorpio’s life along with queer politics, counterculture, and art of the 1990s, and making space for the misfits who find sometimes they don’t even feel like they fit within the rules of alternative milieus. Scorpio is a delightful conversationalist, whatever words are written here will inevitably fail to adequately convey the joy and intensity brought to the conversation.For this episode we are joined by Olimpia Burchiellaro, who is the author of The Gentrification of Queer Activism, and a part of the management committee of the Friends of the Joiners Arms, a Community Benefit Society that aims to open London’s first community-run, community-owned, queer pub. This episode was recorded at the MayDay Rooms podcasting studio,Minor Compositions is a publisher of books and media drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life: The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

For this episode, in light of the current sector wide university crisis in the UK, we present the recording of a seminar with Ronald Hartz, David Harvie, and Simon Lilley about their book Shaping for Mediocrity. In 2021, as part of a programme called Shaping for Excellence, bosses at the University of Leicester made redundant numerous scholars in what was simultaneously an attack on academic freedom and trade union organisation. The authors of Shaping for Mediocrity not only had front-row seats in the campaign against these mass redundancies, they were in the ring – both as targeted employees and as trade union officers and negotiators. Shaping for Mediocrity tells the inside story of these attacks and the campaign against them. It situates this story within a longer history of struggle to make the university a place where critical thinking is possible, showing how events in Leicester are both reflective of higher education in the UK following four decades of neoliberal ‘reform’ and a particularly egregious instance of the increasingly authoritarian management of public institutions such as universities.   The crisis in our universities has only worsened since 2021. Three-quarters of institutions are predicted to face financial problems in 2025, dozens are undergoing some form of restructuring and thousands of university workers risk losing their livelihoods.   In this recordings, three of Shaping for Mediocrity’s authors – Ronald Hartz, David Harvie and Simon Lilley – will be discussing their book and exploring the possibilities for resisting mediocrity and remaking the university.    Ronald Hartz is Research Assistant at Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. He is interested in organisation and management studies, alternative forms of work and organisation, and the discursive constitution of organisations. Recently, he became interested in the critical exploration of the transformation of higher education. David Harvie was, until 2021, associate professor of finance and political economy at the University of Leicester and Communications officer and, for nine days before his dismissal, vice-chair of Leicester UCU. He is now a deprofessionalised intellectual and a founding member of inCommons. He’s approaching the end of a two-year term as UCU’s (national) honorary treasurer.   Simon Lilley is Professor of Organisational Studies and Management and Director of Research for Lincoln International Business School, University of Lincoln, U.K. Simon has a first degree in Psychology from University College London and a PhD from the University of Edinburgh. He has previously taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester, Glasgow, Keele, Lancaster, Leicester, the University for Humanist Studies, Utrecht and the International Business School, Budapest. His primary research interests are around Organisation Studies, Social Studies of Science and Technology, Social Studies of Finance, and Digitalisation. Intro / outdo music: Mission of Burma - Academy Fight Song (1980) The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

For this episode we have a conversation with Bernard Marszalek and Peter Bloom about Bernard’s new book Jobs, Jive, & Joy: An Argument for the Utopian Spirit. In it we cover a wide range of topics including tech bros, the place of Bernard’s mum in labor history, and the ongoing quest to have our lives be filled with radical hedonism, collective joy, and non-alienated time. “Utopianism arose in the 19th century as a response to industrialism. Today a new culture needs to address the immanent disasters of climate catastrophe and resource depletion. Foundational to this new culture is the desire to live a life of joyful collectivity that seeks individual satisfaction and group accomplishments. The faux luxuries that today tempt submission to toil soon won’t be an option. In the not-too-distant future, we will have no choice but to align our pleasures with goals that center on friendship, on playful production for use and enjoyment, and on the exploration of our better selves. I call this option, to transcend miserablism, radical hedonism.” More on Bernard’s book here: https://charleshkerr.com/books/jobs-jive-and-joy-by-bernard-marszalek Intro / outdo music: Gid Tanner - Work Don’t Bother Me (1930), from the collection Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music : 1923-1936, Cargo Records, 2012

As part of previewing and preparing for a larger project with Penny Rimbaud, this episode revisits a conversation with Penny from 2017. This was part of the “Stop the City… Revisited” installation which was part of “Discipline the City” exhibition and event series at the Substation in Singapore. It’s an interesting, if somewhat strange conversation, where Pen, as is his wont, answers questions in a way that might seem a bit flip or glib at first, but are actually quite insightful after some further reflection. Señor Rimbaud is, as much as ever, true to his own nature, in the sense that, to borrow an old anarcho-punk piece of wisdom, there is no authority but yourself, and there is no self. Materials from this exhibition & event were released in 2019 as Entry Points. Resonating Punk, Performance, and Art. The intro music is from the performance that night with Awk Wah & Dharma. Stop the City… Revisited: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=832Discipine the City: https://www.substation.org/discipline-the-city-exhibitionEntry Points: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=949Also available on Bandcamp: https://minorcompositions.bandcamp.com/album/entry-points-resonating-punk-performance-and-art

In this episode we chat with Pil and Galia Kollectiv to explore their new book, Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital. Stevphen was originally to take part in the book release event last autumn in London but was unable. So instead we’ve turned that missed event into an excuse for a conversation around Pil and Galia’s work. Topics covered include intersections of performance, labor, and neoliberal culture, examining how artistic expression resists and reframes the commodification of human potential.  "Contemporary art relies on an expansionist, modernist ideal and still progresses through a critique of earlier forms of democratisation. But beneath this democratic drive, lurks a creeping crisis. Under neoliberalism, criticality has become a zone of value production. A self-deprecating irony, exposing and re-enacting this position of impotence, is one of the few gestures left in the arsenal of critical art. Against this irony, this book pits overidentification. This term has been taken to mean a kind of parodic mimicry of institutional power. Using a broad tapestry of sources, from political philosophers to art theorists, from post-Marxist critiques of labour to ethnographic studies, it proposes an interpretation of overidentification that does not collapse into ironic posturing. The authors differentiate this from bad faith flirting with taboo aesthetics by focusing on practices grounded in a genuine identification with power that ushers the kind of excess implied by overidentification. It is these forms of overidentification that destabilise the metastasis of liberal-democracy. Staging forms of critique not so readily absorbed into the structure of the present, these subversive performances herald a future beyond the democratic paradox."Bio: Pil and Galia Kollectiv are artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. They lecture in Art at the University of Reading, Royal College of Art and University of the Arts London. Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital Pil & Galia Kollectiv 

In this episode of Minor Compositions we delve into the complex intersections of gender, power, and contemporary alt-right and neofascist politics with Jack Bratich and Ewa Majewska. Drawing on Bratich’s On Microfascism: Gender, Death, and War and Majewska’s Feminist Antifascism: Counterpublics of the Common, the discussion unpacks how gender dynamics are central to the rise of fascist ideologies in the 21st century. The conversation explores how microfascist tendencies operate in everyday life, particularly in the realms of social reproduction, and examines the ways feminist antifascism offers tools for resistance and building counterpublics.  Bio: Jack Z. Bratich is professor in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at Rutgers University. He is author of Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture as well as coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality.  Ewa Majewska is a feminist philosopher of culture and an affiliated fellow at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin, Germany. She was Adjunct Professor of Gender Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Warsaw and Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, and has held positions as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; Senior Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Austria; and as a fellow at the ICI Berlin. Intro / outro music: Test Department & the  South Wales Striking Miners Choir - Gdansk / Comrades from “Shoulder to Shoulder” (1984)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 20 The Arts of Logistics with Michael Shane Boyle & Elaine W Ho  This episode is a conversation around the new book The Arts of Logistics: Artistic Production in Supply Chain Capitalism by Michael Shane Boyle. For this conversation we are joined by Elaine Ho, who artistic practice explores similar areas to those explored in Shane’s work. Through this conversation explore how artistic practices intersect with the global logistics systems that underpin contemporary capitalism. Today the dynamics of logistical capitalism both shape dynamics of artistic and cultural production as well as arguably are shaped by their being intertwined those very forms of artistic production. How might forms of art produced in the logistical mode offer us a space for viewing infrastructure otherwise? “We live in a world where nothing is untouched by supply chains—art included. In this major contribution to the study of contemporary culture and supply chains, Michael Shane Boyle has assembled a global inventory of aesthetics since the 1950s that reveals logistics to be a pervasive means of artistic production. The Arts of Logistics provides a new map of supply chain capitalism, scrutinizing how artists retool technologies designed for circulating commodities. What emerges is a magisterial account of the logistics revolution that foregrounds the role played by art in the long downturn of global capitalism.” Bio: Michael Shane Boyle is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. Elaine W. Ho works between the realms of art, social practice and language — and since 2015, also a co-conspirator of Display Distribute, a thematic inquiry, distribution service, now and again exhibition space, and sometimes shop founded in Kowloon, Hong Kong. Seeping via the capricious circulation patterns of low-end globalization into other subaltern networks and grammars, Display Distribute’s recent activities include the experimental infrastructure LIGHT LOGISTICS, poetic research and archival unit Shanzhai Lyric, and a peripatetic radio programme of hidden feminist narratives known as Widow Radio Ching. Intro / outro music: Bow Gamelan Ensemble - Massed Percussion (1988)

Episode 19 Emergent Assemblages of Relationist Football with Jamie Hamilton For this episode we talk with Jamie Hamilton, a football coach and tactical writer based at Ayr United in Scotland. Hamilton is best known for coining the idea of relationism in football, which is an approach that emphasizes emergent patterns of play discovered by the players themselves rather than fitting into a set plan determined by the manager in advance. It is an approach that draws from a wide range of philosophical and aesthetic concepts, from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, to the anti-colonial politics of Brazilian football. In what ways might ideas and approaches developed within a football resonate beyond that context? How might looking for emergent dynamics rather than set plans change out patterns of perception and attunement with the environments we operate within and the people with interact with? “Relationism differs from Positionism in that it does not believe future possibilities derive from fixed, known, established concepts. Rather, Relationism proposes (by way of concepts borrowed from French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze) that novel future states emerge to be actual through the establishing of contacts with an infinite set of virtual possibilities which are as yet unknown to us. The virtual is a realm of potentiality – the kindling is already pregnant with the potential of fire, all it needs to actualise it is a spark… The purpose is not to replace Positionism with Relationism in Europe, but nor should European Positionism entirely reject the validity of Relationist systems. Rather, an environment must be nurtured where these contrasting strains of football tactics can be studied, merged and cross-pollinated. Relationist tactics propose that new and unpredictable connections emerge from within the chaotic interactions between players. The routes of ball progression are not pre-meditated through set patterns and repeated automations. New orders emerge from the instability of disordered environments.” Bio: Jamie Hamilton is a coach (UEFA A) at Ayr United in Scotland and a football writer focusing on tactical theory and coaching practice. His writing can be found on Medium. Intro / Outro Music: Ken Vandermark, Eddie Prevost, and Guillaume Viltard, Improv Set Live at Cafe Oto September 2014

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 18 Anxiety as Vibration with Ana Minozzo For this episode we talk with we chat Ana Minozzo about her new book Anxiety as Vibration: A Psychosocial Cartography. What can anxiety do if approach anxiety not simply as a problem to be solved, but also as a potential site of rupture and transformation? And what tools might we find in a rethought version of psychoanalysis, embedded in community based practices? “This open access book draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari alongside Lacan and Freud to offer a radical psychosocial survey of the status of anxiety. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book examines key issues in contemporary diagnosis and points towards possibilities for forging a more creative clinic. Departing from a feminist, non-Oedipal positioning towards psychoanalytic texts, the author invites art theory, medical humanities and philosophy into a conversation that seeks to answer the question: What can anxiety do? Here, Ana Minozzo explores the possibilities of an encounter with the Real as a sphere of excessive affect in psychoanalysis, and terms this meeting a ‘vibration’.” Bio: Ana C. Minozzo is a psychoanalyst and researcher based in London, UK. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Psychosocial Studies at the University of Essex where she is part of the FREEPSY collective research on the legacies of free psychoanalytic clinics. Intro / Outro Music: The Observatory - Everything is Vibration Spreaker Link: 

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 17 Militant Aesthetics with Martin Lang For this episode we talk with art historian and painter Martin Lang about this book Militant Aesthetics: Art Activism in the 21st Century. How are practices of art activism changing in the current political and media climate? What tensions exist within these forms of political engagement and how can they be productively worked with rather ignored or denied? “Protest art is not a new concept and yet this book argues that after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 distinctly 21st-century forms of art activism emerged. On the one hand these became militant as artists retained belief in the possibility of radical political change through art. On the other hand, this belief developed in a hostile environment, when anti-terror legislations reclassified activists and artists as terrorists. Militant Aesthetics sheds light on numerous international case studies of modern art activism and the different ways they can be classified as militant. Combining these examples with the pioneering thought of Badiou, Žižek, Rancière and Mouffe, Lang investigates the instances, attributes and rules of militant art in order to introduce a new overall theory of 21st-century militant aesthetics.” Bio: Martin Lang is Senior Lecturer in fine art at the University of Lincoln, UK. He trained as a painter before completing a PhD in History & Philosophy of Art, researching militant forms of art activism. He makes paintings, photographs and activist actions that tackle themes of authenticity, science fiction, political imagination and post-truth. Martin's research in art and politics has been widely published in academic journals including Art & the Public Sphere, Ekphrasis and the Hazlitt Review. His book Militant Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2024) has been described as "a significant remapping of activist and political art" (Karen van den Berg). He also writes for Trebuchet magazine and the Conversation.  Intro / Outro Music: Joseph Beuys - Sonne statt Reagan

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 16 Sports & the Avant-Garde with Przemysław Strożek For this episode we talk with Przemysław Strożek about the relationship between avant-garde arts and sports in the 1920s and 1930s. We discuss two of his books, one as editor: Sport and the European Avant-Garde (1900–1945); and one as sole author: Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads: Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR, 1920–1932. What was the role of avant-garde artists in the emergence of working class sports cultures during this period? How did they contribute to the shaping of the politics of mass sporting events such as the Workers’ Olympics? And what might these histories tell about the relationship between sports, politics, and art for today and into the future? Bio: Przemysław is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences and Research Associate at the Archive of the Avant-garde in Dresden. He has a PhD habilitation and occupies himself with the history of avant-garde, modernism and contemporary art. He sometimes curates exhibitions and also wrote a book about how sport and art have intermingled. Intro / Outro Music: Stuart Pearce - Theme From Red Sport International

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 15 Class, Disasters, and Mutual Aid with John Preston and Rhiannon Firth For this episode we talk with John Preson and Rhiannon Firth about the relationship between class, disasters, and mutual aid. The conversation is formed mainly around re-visiting their 2020 book “Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom” but branches off to discussing broader issues including nuclear war, live sociology, and conspiracies. “This book considers how the UK government’s response to the recent COVID-19 pandemic disadvantages the working class, and how mutual aid, based on anarchist principles, can be used as a force for social change. The authors draw on Marxist and anarchist thought in class theory and social movement analysis to demonstrate that the virus and its material and discursive consequences are an active part of continuing class struggle and class interpolation. Preston and Firth examine how plans for quarantine and social isolation systematically work against the needs of the working class, and rely on classed assumptions about how markets and altruism operate. In the face of neoliberal methods of dealing with a pandemic, ranging from marketization, disaster capitalism, to a strengthening of the State, Coronavirus, Class and Mutual Aid in the United Kingdom explains how radical alternatives such as social movements and mutual aid can be implemented to better cope with current and future crises.” Intro / Outro Music: Dead Kenny G's cover the Dead Kennedys "Kill The Poor” 

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 14: Revolutionary Love & the Deep Commons with Matt York For this episode we talk with Matt York about his book Love and Revolution: A politics for the Deep Commons “Based on award-winning research, Love and Revolution brings classical and contemporary anarchist thought into a mutually beneficial dialogue with a global cross-section of ecological, anti-capitalist, feminist and anti-racist activists – discussing real-life examples of the loving-caring relations that underpin many contemporary struggles. ​ Such a (r)evolutionary love is revealed to be a common embodied experience among the activists contributing to this collective vision, manifested as a radical solidarity, as political direct action, as long-term processes of struggle, and as a deeply relational more-than-human ethics. The theory developed in this book is brought to life through the voices of Tom at the G20 protests in Toronto, Maria and her permaculture community in Mexico, Hassan on the streets in Syria, Angelo and his comrades occupying squares in Brazil, Dembe and his affinity group in Kampala, and many more.” . Open access version of the book can be found here: https://www.deepcommons.net/book-love-and-revolutionBio: Matt York lectures in political theory and philosophy at University College Cork.Opening / outro music: Gogol Bordello, “Oh No!” (from Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 13: Up Against the Real with Nadja Millner-Larsen For this episode we talk with Nadja Millner-Larsen about her book Up Against the Real Black Mask from Art to Action. “With Up Against the Real, Nadja Millner-Larsen offers the first comprehensive study of the group Black Mask and its acrimonious relationship to the New York art world of the 1960s. Cited as pioneers of now-common protest aesthetics, the group’s members employed incendiary modes of direct action against racism, colonialism, and the museum system. They shut down the Museum of Modern Art, fired blanks during a poetry reading, stormed the Pentagon in an antiwar protest, sprayed cow’s blood at the secretary of state, and dumped garbage into the fountain at Lincoln Center. Black Mask published a Dadaist broadside until 1968, when it changed its name to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (after line in a poem by Amiri Baraka) and came to classify itself as “a street gang with analysis.” American activist Abbie Hoffman described the group as “the middle-class nightmare . . . an anti-media phenomenon simply because their name could not be printed.” Bio: Nadja Millner-Larsen is visiting assistant professor in the Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program at New York University. Opening / outro music: Refused, “Poetry Written in Gasoline” (from The New Noise Theology)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 12: The Subhumans & Punk Historiography with Ian Glasper For this episode we talk with Ian Glasper about his book Silence Is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans. In the conversation we cover broader issues of ‘punk historiography’ and documenting more marginal musical, artistic, and political milieus that one is a part of (rather than falling on or relying about existing dominant narratives). Ian has ben writing about punk since starting his first zine in 1986, switching to writing books in the early 2000s as he grew increasingly frustrated that existing histories of punk tended to focus on the best known and most visible artists, completely neglecting the much wider and vibrant array of bands and musics. Bio: Ian Glasper is the author of numerous books on the history of punk including Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984 (2004), The Day The Country Died: A History Of Anarcho Punk 1980 – 1984 (2006), Trapped In A Scene: UK Hardcore 1985 – 1989 (2009), and Armed With Anger: How UK Punk Survived The Nineties (2012). Opening / outro music: The Subhumans, “All Gone Dark” (intro) and “From the Cradle to the Grave" (outro)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 11: Italian Operaismo with Gigi Roggero This episode of the Minor Compositions podcast is recorded as part of the Ultradependent Public School exhibition at BAK (https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/ultradependent-public-school-2/) For this episode we are talking with Gigi Roggero about his book Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method. In this conversation we cover a range of topics including the birth and development of operaismo as a political tendency, the concepts of class composition and political formation, and rethinking how we approach and re-activate radical histories in the present. “Italian Operaismo provides a clear overview of the central moments in that tendency's development: from the Italian labor movement's crisis of direction in the 1950s, the encounter with the “new forces” within the working class at FIAT and elsewhere in the early 1960s, and the political journals Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia, to the experience of Potere Operaio and other organizations a decade later. Roggero provides a rereading of operaismo that is both salutary and provocative, one that stresses above all the role within it of subjectivity and political engagement, demonstrating the continued relevance of its subversive method as a tool for reworking the categories of radical and revolutionary thought. Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 10: Autonomia and Art with Jacopo Galimberti https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/minor-compositions This episode is a discussion with Jacopo Galimberi about this book Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988) “During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello.This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Classs signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio’s exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians’ zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group’s experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.”  For more on Jacopo’s book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2800-images-of-classOpening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 9 Compound LyricismThis episode intersperses a performance by experimental Indonesian doom folk metal band Senyawa (recorded in Folkestone in April 2022) with a discussion with their vocalist and lyricist Rully Shabara. The interview covers topics including his approach to writing lyrics, use of allegory and imagery, and how this has changed over Senyawa’s musical evolution since their formation n in 2010 in Yogyakarta. This episode serves as a preview for the first translation into English of Rully’s lyrics for Senyawa, which will shortly be published by Minor Compositions.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 8: After the InternetFor this episode we have a discussion with Tiziana Terranova about her recently released book After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common. We cover a range of topics including the shift from the internet as open network to the rise of corporate platforms, the psychopathologies of digital culture, and capitalism’s need to continually impose scarcity whenever new forms of social cooperation and commoning threaten its dominance over social life. What are the possibilities today for using digital tools to build new forms of commons both inside and against, and outside of the walled gardens of the corporate platform complex?This discussion is a preview of the “Promoting Commons Presents and Futures Symposium” symposium that planned by the Centre for Commons Organising Values Equalities and Resilience on February 17th, 2023. For more information on that go here: https://www.essex.ac.uk/events/2023/02/17/promoting-commons-presents-and-futures-symposiumOpening / Outro song: “Combat pop” by Lo Stato Sociale (2021)

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 7 Feminism, Punk and the Avant-GardeFor this episode we have a discussion with Becky Binns about her recently released book Gee Vaucher: Beyond punk, feminism and the avant-garde. We cover a a range off topics including Gee’s work in relationship with punk and artistic countercultures, as well as the changing historiography of punk and feminism. Does art produced in collective projects or by artists not seeking personal notoriety get lost within the historical narrative? Have the conditions for the production of autonomous art and life vanished, and how we might collectively create them again?Opening / Outro song: “The Mystic Trumpeter” by EXIT (Recorded at the International Carnival of Experimental Sound, 1972) Gee Vaucher: Beyond punk, feminism and the avant-gardehttps://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526147912/

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 5 Squatting, Art, and Gentrification For this episode we have a discussion with Clarrie Pope and Alan W Moore around squatting, art, and gentrification, as well as a range of related topics. The idea is to explore these topics, but coming from different angles, for instance how writing a graphic novel about squatting is different from a personal account or political or academic writing on the same topic. How do these different modes of writing affect the stories that we tell, and how we can communicate with different kinds of people? Welcome Home was written by sisters Clarrie and Blanche Pope, and is inspired by their experience in squatting and housing struggles, as well Blanche’s time spent working in care homes. They want to give readers insight into the class, race and gender politics involved in both through a humorous look at the way in which these issues affect the minutiae of people's lives.Alan W. Moore worked as a critic, artist and organizer in NYC for 30 years. He worked with the artists’ group Colab, and co-directed ABC No Rio and the MWF Video Club. He took a PhD in Art History from CUNY in 2000, and published Art Gangs with Autonomedia in 2011. He began to study squatting in Europe in 2009, publishing the zine House Magic (2009-16). He co-edited Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces (Other Forms/JoAAP), and wrote Occupation Culture (Autonomedia), both in 2015. In 2022 he published Art Worker, a memoir (JoAAP). He lives in Madrid, and blogs at "Occupations & Properties" and "Art Gangs.”Opening / Outro song: “Bello e impossibile” by Gianna NanniniWelcome Home by Clarrie & Blanche Pope: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1047Occupation Culture: Art & Squatting in the City from Below by Alan W. Moore: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=684Temporary Autonomous Art (October 2021): https://www.taaexhibitions.org/

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 4 The Weight of the Printed WordIn this episode we have a conversation with Steve Wright, about his book The Weight of the Printed Word: Text, Context and Militancy in Operaismo. In it we discuss the role of print production and document work in the history of Italian operaismo and autonomist Marxism. What role did the production of various forms of print material play in the emergence of these politics, and how did they change and develop along with how the movements themselves evolved?Steve Wright is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. He has written widely on operaismo, including Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (2002).Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 3 Surrealism and the War on WorkIn this episode we have a conversation with Abigail Susik, about her book Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work. We cover a range of topics including the centrality of work refusal to the history of Surrealism, automatist practices and aesthetic sabotage, the class composition of labor that influenced the beginning of Surrealism, why relationships with Communist Parties are ‘complicated,’ and why sewing machines are sexually dangerous.Abigail Susik is an art historian who writes about surrealism, work, technology, and protest cultures. Her books include Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (2021) and the co-edited volumes: Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (2022); Surrealism and Film After 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (2021).Opening / outro music: Gid Tanner - Work Don’t Bother Me (1930), from the collection Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music : 1923-1936, Cargo Records, 2012

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 2For this episode, as something of a preview to the upcoming publication of Paolo Sollier’s book Kicks, Spits, and Headers. The Autobiographical Reflections of an Accidental Footballer we have a conversation with Gabriel Kuhn about the relationship between radical politics and sports, particularly focusing on his book Soccer Vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics. Topics covered include the evolving role and visibility of politics in sports, a range of community run and politically oriented clubs, and speculations about which football club Deleuze supported (Liverpool, obviously).Gabriel Kuhn is a former semi-professional soccer player from Austria who today lives in Sweden as an author, translator, and union organizer. He founded the DIY publishing outfit Alpine Anarchist Productions in the year 2000, has published numerous books with PM Press, and blogs at LeftTwoThree.Alpine Anarchist Productions: https://www.alpineanarchist.orgGabriel Kuhn at PM Press: https://blog.pmpress.org/authors-artists-comrades/gabriel-kuhn/LeftTwoThree: https://lefttwothree.orgIntro / outro music: “Paolo Sollier” by Rabat from “Resta Ribelle” https://nabatofficial.bandcamp.com/album/resta-ribelle

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 1: Communizing PublishingThis first episode of the Minor Compositions podcast is a discussion with Nick Thoburn about experimental publishing and communizing media.Nick Thoburn is Reader in Sociology at the University of Manchester. He writes about publishing, political theory, social movements, and architecture, and is author of "Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing" (2016) and "Deleuze, Marx and Politics" (2003).Nick Thoburn's ideas about political publishing are developed further in the following texts, freely available online:'Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing'https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/anti-book'Twitter, Book, Riot: Post-Digital Publishing against Race'https://researchdestroy.com/Thoburn_TwitterBookRiot.pdf 'A Crisis of Politics and a Crisis of Media Form' - an interview about anti-book publishinghttps://bangkokartbookfair.info/co-op/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/OA_White-Fungus_A-CRISIS-OF-POLITICS-AND-A-CRISIS-OF-MEDIA-FORM_-1.pdf