Minor Compositions

firefly frequencies
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Minor Compositions: Publishing the Unruly, the Radical, and the Yet-to-Come. Minor Compositions is a research theorizing publishing project that is located, at the moment, within the London metropolitan basin of collective intelligence. Its main aim is to bring together, develop, and mutate forms of autonomist thought and practice, avant-garde aesthetics, and an everyday approach to politics. More information: https://www.minorcompositions.info As well on this webstite, Minor Compositions can be listened to via all the usual podcast type places including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc...

  1. Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary

    23 HR AGO

    Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary

    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.org Agit Press: https://www.agitpress.net  Intro / outro music – Mischief Brew, The Reinvention of the Printing Press

    1hr 5min
  2. Wages Against Dreamwork

    6 DAYS AGO

    Wages Against Dreamwork

    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”

    1hr 9min
  3. Communism Actually

    10 MAR

    Communism Actually

    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

    1hr 32min
  4. Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective

    24 FEB

    Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective

    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)

    1hr 10min
  5. In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

    2 FEB

    In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

    S2E1 – In girum imus nocteet consumimur igni Season 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.org Terminal Beach: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/terminal-beach Ambient Thought: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/ambient-thought Lullabies for the Revolution: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/lullabies-for-the-revolution Memory 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 Bedog Outro: Fireflies August 2022

    1hr 6min
  6. Communize the city

    09/12/2025

    Communize the city

    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.

    59 min
  7. We Are Making a Podcast About Mark Fisher

    25/11/2025

    We Are Making a Podcast About Mark Fisher

    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

    56 min
  8. Alifuru World: Stateless Histories, Decolonial Futures

    11/11/2025

    Alifuru World: Stateless Histories, Decolonial Futures

    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

    1hr 12min
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About

Minor Compositions: Publishing the Unruly, the Radical, and the Yet-to-Come. Minor Compositions is a research theorizing publishing project that is located, at the moment, within the London metropolitan basin of collective intelligence. Its main aim is to bring together, develop, and mutate forms of autonomist thought and practice, avant-garde aesthetics, and an everyday approach to politics. More information: https://www.minorcompositions.info As well on this webstite, Minor Compositions can be listened to via all the usual podcast type places including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc...

Information

  • Creator
    firefly frequencies
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    47
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright firefly frequencies
  • Show Website
    Minor Compositions

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