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. 2 days ago

    Disrupting the Transition

    In this episode, we speak with Nicholas Beuret and Keir Milburn about ecological transition as a terrain of class struggle – not simply a technical shift in energy systems, but a contested reorganisation of investment, work, infrastructure and everyday life. They examine how the existing green transition uses ecological crisis to stimulate investment and renew capitalist growth while imposing job losses, higher costs and deteriorating services on ordinary people. From Port Talbot to local conflicts over net zero spending, broken promises have produced a sense of betrayal that the right increasingly exploits, while centrist governments retreat from climate commitments without offering workers a meaningful alternative. Against this politics of managed decline, the conversation develops the idea of radical abundance: less wasteful and extractive production, but more housing, energy, healthcare, free time and democratic control over collective life. Drawing on the Lucas Plan, pharmaceutical commons, workers’ cooperatives, public-common partnerships and community energy, Beuret and Milburn explore how disruption might be combined with the construction of durable alternatives. The question is not only how to resist the transition imposed from above, but how to build the institutions, infrastructures and collective power needed to shape another one. More on the books discussed in this episode Or Something Worse Radical Abundance Bios Nicholas Beuret is a lecturer in environmental politics and economic geography at the University of Essex. With a background in both activism and academia, he explores the intersections of climate change, capitalism, and social justice. His work has been featured in the Guardian, The Ecologist, Open Democracy, and Undercurrents. Nicholas lives in the UK, where he continues to write, teach, and engage in environmental advocacy. Keir Milburn is a writer, researcher, and activist. He has a background as an academic in political economy and organisational theory. He has written over a hundred articles and book chapters in venues ranging from academic journals, such as Urban Studies, to media commentary in outlets such as The Guardian, The Independent, and The Nation. His book Generation Left provoked debate across several countries on generational political divides driven, in part, by generational imbalances in asset ownership. He is co-director of the action-research organisation Abundance.

    Disrupting the Transition

  2. 27 Jul

    What’s the Use? Entanglement, Indebtedness, and Minor Socialities

    In this episode, we speak with Erin Manning and Giovanni Marmont for a conversation about how use might be detached from productivity, mastery, and measurable achievement. Moving between studious use, the pragmatics of the useless, colonial property, football, maple syrup, improvised infrastructures, and the struggle to reclaim time, they explore forms of collective life grounded in entanglement rather than individualism. What becomes possible when study is no longer treated as self-investment, land is not reduced to property, and practices are allowed to remain partial, experimental, and unresolved? More on the books discussed in this episode A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons – https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1647 Out of the Clear – https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1165 Join the Minor Compositions mailing list: https://lists.aktivix.org/mailman/listinfo/minorcompositions  Intro / outro music – The Ex – (Sucked Out Chucked Out) 2 from “Dignity of Labour”

    What’s the Use? Entanglement, Indebtedness, and Minor Socialities

  3. 13 Jul

    Enduring Otherwise

    Minor Compositions Podcast Season 2 Episode 7 Enduring Otherwise  In this episode, we talk with Ferdiansyah Thajib about his book Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research in Aceh, Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Ferdi explores how queer and trans Muslims build meaningful lives within social, religious and political conditions that often refuse them recognition. The conversation moves through Indonesia’s shifting legal landscape, conservative religious politics, Sharia law in Aceh and the everyday spaces where other forms of life become possible – from trans-run hair salons to more inclusive Islamic communities. Ferdi also discusses his approach to affective ethnography, the influence of his own experience as a gay Muslim and the importance of care, emotional labour and mutual support within activist communities. Rather than reducing queer and trans life to either victimhood or heroic resistance, Enduring Otherwise asks how people live with contradiction, sustain relationships and make worlds otherwise. More on the book: https://nyupress.org/9781479839339/enduring-otherwise/ Bio: 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.

    Enduring Otherwise

  4. 21 Apr

    The Institution Negated?

    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)

    The Institution Negated?

  5. 24 Mar

    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

    Defund Culture by Any Means Necessary

  6. 18 Mar

    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”

    Wages Against Dreamwork

  7. 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

    Communism Actually

  8. 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)

    Jazz is My Religion, Ted Joans is My Perspective
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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
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright firefly frequencies
  • Show Website
    Minor Compositions

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