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. 3h ago

    Fugitive Study, Autonomous Media

    What becomes possible when study is detached from education, accreditation and the demand for individual improvement? And what kinds of social relations emerge when study is approached not as preparation for a qualification or career, but as something worth doing in itself? Here are are joined by Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World, and Giovanni Marmont, author of A Studious Use: Designing from the Undercommons. Together they explore study as a collective and intrinsically motivated practice, distinct from the institutional forms that usually organise, measure and give credit for it. Meyerhoff discusses his concept of “modes of study” as a way of historicising education and making its dominant forms appear less inevitable. Drawing on experiences including the Experimental College of the Twin Cities and Abolitionist University Studies, the conversation considers what happens when grades, credits and other external rewards are removed, and when relationships among participants become central to sustaining study. Marmont develops this through his account of study as attentive engagement, collective tuning and shared indebtedness: less a matter of acquiring something for oneself than of becoming increasingly responsive to how our actions are entangled with those of others. The discussion also considers the difficulties involved in creating alternatives. Projects outside universities can easily carry academic assumptions, hierarchies and habits with them, reproducing the very forms they hoped to escape. Free universities, para-academic publishing and other autonomous initiatives therefore raise questions not only about where study happens, but about the social forms through which it is organised. From there, the conversation turns toward media and publishing. Rather than beginning with a predetermined output – a book, podcast or journal – the participants ask what forms of media might grow from the kinds of relationships and practices of study being created. Publications can become points of entry into further encounters rather than finished products: occasions for extending conversations, making connections and sustaining collective inquiry. The episode also introduces Minor Compositions’ emerging formulation Fugitive Study, Autonomous Media: an attempt to think of publishing less as the production of content than as the creation of spaces, relationships and infrastructures through which study can continue to happen. More On Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World  A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons  Intro / Outro Music: DNA – Taking Kid To School

    Fugitive Study, Autonomous Media

  2. Aug 23

    Counter-Accounting, Refusal, and the Future of the Strike

    In this episode we speak with Abe Walker and Callum Cant about how workers produce knowledge of their own exploitation – and when making that knowledge visible risks strengthening the systems of management and control they oppose. Beginning with Walker’s work on counter-accounting, the conversation explores workers’ attempts to challenge official narratives through alternative records, inquiries and measures. While such practices can expose wage theft, impossible workloads and managerial deception, they may also reproduce the assumptions of productivity, efficiency and accountability embedded in management’s own tools. This leads to a wider discussion of workers’ inquiry, strategic opacity and the problem of becoming legible to fellow workers without becoming more governable by employers. The discussion then turns to quiet quitting, deception, sabotage and other informal refusals that often emerge where collective organization is weak. Against the tendency to dismiss these as merely individual withdrawal, Walker and Cant consider how hidden or dispersed acts of non-compliance might develop into shared forms of struggle. Drawing on Cant and Matthew Lee’s work on the 1926 General Strike, the episode revisits the role of rank-and-file workers who expanded the strike beyond the intentions of official leadership. From small militant networks to mass pickets, workplace marches and solidarity extending beyond particular trades, the strike became a means of creating new collective subjects across workplaces and communities. The conversation concludes by asking what these histories offer workers confronting platform capitalism, algorithmic management and increasingly authoritarian workplaces today: how can workers use employers’ knowledge against them, build power from seemingly minor forms of resistance, and transform refusal into collective action? Abe Walker – Holding labor to ac(count): quiet quitting and the limits of the anti-work imaginary    Callum Cant and Matthew Lee – The Future in our Past: The General Strike, 1926/2026

    Counter-Accounting, Refusal, and the Future of the Strike

  3. Aug 10

    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

  4. Jul 27

    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

  5. Jul 13

    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

  6. Apr 21

    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?

  7. Mar 24

    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

  8. Mar 18

    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
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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
    53
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright firefly frequencies
  • Show Website
    Minor Compositions

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