Minor Compositions Podcast 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”

Discussion 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 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 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 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=1561

The Minor Compositions podcast is in made in collaboration with Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org

It’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

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.

In 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. 

For 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

This 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

Penny 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 List
KUKL -  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

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 26: We Don’t Need More Heroes with Scorpio


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

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 25 Shaping for Mediocrity

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=832
Discipine the City: https://www.substation.org/discipline-the-city-exhibition
Entry Points: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=949

Also available on Bandcamp: https://minorcompositions.bandcamp.com/album/entry-points-resonating-punk-performance-and-art

E22 - Subversive Performance in the Age of Human Capital with Pil & Galia Kollectiv 

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 

E21 - Feminist Antifascism v Contemporary Microfascism  

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)