Minor Compositions

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 37 Universal Prostitution & the Crisis of Labor 

This episode is a conversation with Jaleh Mansoor on the themes of her new book Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction: A Counterhistory. In this provocative work, Mansoor offers a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a rethinking of Marxist aesthetics. Drawing on Marx’s concept of prostitution — as an allegory for modern labor — she explores how generalized and gendered forms of work converge in modern and contemporary art.

More on the book: “In Universal Prostitution and Modernist Abstraction, Jaleh Mansoor provides a counternarrative of modernism and abstraction and a reexamination of Marxist aesthetics. Mansoor draws on Marx’s concept of prostitution—a conceptual device through which Marx allegorized modern labor—to think about the confluences of generalized and gendered labor in modern art. Analyzing works ranging from Édouard Manet’s Olympia and Georges Seurat’s The Models to contemporary work by Hito Steyerl and Hannah Black, she shows how avant-garde artists can detect changing modes of production and capitalist and biopolitical processes of abstraction that assign identities to subjects in the interest of value’s impersonal circulation. She demonstrates that art and abstraction resist modes of production and subjugation at the level of process and form rather than through referential representation. By studying gendered and generalized labor, abstraction, automation, and the worker, Mansoor shifts focus away from ideology, superstructure, and culture toward the ways art indexes crisis and transformation in the political economic base. Ultimately, she traces the outlines of a counterpraxis to capital while demonstrating how artworks give us a way to see through the abstractions of everyday life.”

Bio: Jaleh Mansoor is Associate Professor of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia and author of Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia, also published by Duke University Press.

More on the book.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 36 Feral Class

Untamed. Unheard. Unstoppable. For this episode with have a chat with Marc Garrett about his forthcoming book Feral Class. The book is Marc Garrett’s raw and resonant memoir of surviving – and creating – on the margins. It delves into the lived realities of working-class artists, charting Garrett’s journey from the edges of cultural production to the heart of radical practice. Through vivid storytelling, biting critique, and moments of dark humour, Garrett reflects on what it means to grow up outside the safety nets of art institutions, forging a path through DIY networks, political resistance, and feral creativity.

What does it mean to live as part of the “feral class” – those who exist beyond the permission of gatekeepers, who make art not to be accepted but to disrupt? Join us for an exploration of class struggle, artistic survival, and the wild potential of lives lived in defiance of cultural elitism. This is not just a memoir – it’s a call to arms for those who create from below, with dirt under their nails and fire in their bellies.

Bio: Marc Garrett’s life and work embody the intersection of art, technology, and social change, shaped by his working-class upbringing and a commitment to challenging institutional hierarchies. Growing up in Southend-On-Sea, he explored creative expression through street art, pirate radio, and early online activism before co-founding Furtherfield in 1996 with Ruth Catlow, an artist-led community resisting the commercialisation of the art world. Despite personal challenges, including a cancer diagnosis in 2022, Garrett continues to focus on ideas and questions that acknowledge and engage working-class and feral-class contexts as a springboard for more extensive dialogues on creating conditions for social change across art, technology, and ecology.


More on the book: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1561

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

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 35

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

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 34 Communism After Deleuze 

Discussion with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee about his new book Communism After Deleuze. 

What if communism was always the secret engine of Deleuze’s thought? This episode uncovers a hidden itinerary running through Deleuze’s work: a subterranean current where the idea of the Third World becomes a cipher for revolutionary desire. Against the grain of liberal economy and creeping fascism, Deleuze's veiled engagements with Marx – sparked by the upheavals of May ’68 – point toward an unfulfilled political project. Join us as we excavate this buried legacy and explore how these forgotten pathways might still resonate, agitate, and assemble today. 

More on the book: “Often regarded as an apolitical philosopher, the challenges that Deleuze mounted to structuralism are easy to overlook. By reinvigorating the communist aspect of his political project and linking his ideas to Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee reveals Deleuze's objective: to rescue Marxism from the dogmatic status quo and revive its political agendas. This major undertaking situates his ideas alongside and sets out a new framework for reading the significance of Marxist thought in postwar France. Ultimately, this new understanding of Deleuze's critique of global capitalism opens up his vision of materialistic politics as a means of shaping the people and the proletariat of the future.”

Bio: Alex Taek-Gwang Lee is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication at Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 33 Dismantling the Master’s Clock

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.

Minor Compositions Podcast Season 1 Episode 32 States of Divergence

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

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 31 Take This Refusal and Dance To It

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

Minor Compositions Season 1 Episode 31 Penny as Producer

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.