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Frantz Fanon is most often read as a thinker of colonial violence, racial domination and revolutionary rupture. But what happens if we attend instead to the Fanon concerned with creation, popular participation, self-management and the capacity of people to build new forms of life together? In this episode, we discuss Mark Purcell’s Discovering Democracy in the Work of Frantz Fanon with Purcell and Mrinalini Greedharry. The book proposes a distinction between a “major Fanon,” organised around negation, critique and the destruction of oppressive structures, and a “minor Fanon” who emerges in moments of affirmation, collective experimentation and democratic self-management. This minor Fanon appears in discussions of Algerian villagers taking responsibility for their own affairs, but also in Fanon’s psychiatric practice and his attempts to create forms of institutional life in which patients participate actively in their own care. The conversation explores both the possibilities and the tensions of this distinction. Can anti-colonialism, anti-racism and anti-fascism be understood primarily as negative projects, or can resistance itself form part of the construction of new relations? How far can creation and affirmation be separated from the work of confronting structures of domination? And might Fanon’s psychiatric practice – shaped through experimentation, failure and encounters with the social and cultural realities of Algeria – complicate any straightforward division between destruction and creation? The discussion moves through Fanon’s relation to institutional psychotherapy, questions of cultural specificity and postcolonial thought, and the importance of recognising the capacities that oppressed people already possess. Purcell draws on Zora Neale Hurston as an example of attending to Black creativity, life and cultural production rather than allowing racism to determine the entire field of attention, while the conversation considers what might be gained – and what might be lost – by shifting political emphasis from opposition toward creation. More broadly, the episode asks what a radical politics of affirmation might look like without abandoning the necessity of resistance: how critique, collective experimentation, cultural production and the creation of new forms of life might coexist rather than being treated as mutually exclusive political choices.  More On the Book Intro / Outro: Is It Possible – Hopeless Dregs of Humanity Thumbnail based on a still from Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l’hôpital psychiatrique Blida-Joinville, au temps où le Docteur Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956 (True Chronicles of the Blida Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in the Last Century, when Dr Frantz Fanon Was Head of the Fifth Ward between 1953 and 1956). Drected by Abdenour Zahzah.

For Heritage Open Days 2026, we took a copy of Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch to Colchester Castle and read several passages inside the building. In 1645, the Castle was used to imprison and interrogate women accused of witchcraft during the East Anglian persecutions associated with Matthew Hopkins. Federici does not mention Colchester itself, but she does single out Essex, noting that most English witch trials occurred here and connecting this concentration to enclosure, land privatisation, poverty and the destruction of collective forms of life. For Federici, the witch hunt was not simply an eruption of superstition. Those accused were disproportionately poor women, while their accusers were often landlords, employers and wealthier neighbours. The persecution of “witches” was also bound up with attacks on forms of knowledge, mutual dependence and social autonomy that stood in the way of a new economic order. Reading Caliban and the Witch inside Colchester Castle makes that history unusually tangible. This was not simply a backdrop to persecution, but part of its infrastructure: a place of imprisonment, interrogation and coercion. There was also something fitting about reading a book so concerned with enclosure on the one day of the year when entry to the Castle was free. Less a remembrance of “witches,” then, than of the people who were made into witches, and of what their persecution tells us about enclosure, poverty, gender, knowledge and power.

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

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

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.

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”

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.

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)

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

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”

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

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)

S2E1 – In girum imus nocteet consumimur igni Season 2 opens with a conversation with Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson – filmmakers, artists, and co-founders of Firefly Frequencies – reflecting on radio as a collective, political, and affective medium. Moving between the history of autonomous radio, projects such as Lullabies for the Revolution and Terminal Beach, and collaborations including the Gaza Biennale, the discussion explores sound as a way of creating community, defamiliarizing political experience, and responding in time. The episode also considers radio and publishing as shared infrastructures: voicings, montage, reading groups, remixing archives, and the possibilities of activating past materials for new collectivist futures. Opening Season Two, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni circles questions of listening, drift, and persistence – how we move together through sound, and what it means to keep a frequency alive. Firefly Frequencies: https://fireflyfrequencies.org Terminal Beach: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/terminal-beach Ambient Thought: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/ambient-thought Lullabies for the Revolution: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/lullabies-for-the-revolution Memory for Denial: https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/memory-for-denial Workers Against Capital: Reading Mario Tronti Sixty Years On: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1666 Music: Intro: Jaydawn & Wukir Suryadi - Moal Ngejat from Pucung, Pangkur Jeung Hujan Bedog Outro: Fireflies August 2022

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 43 Communize the city  This episode begins with Kike España’ presenting his essay “Communize the City: Towards an Insurgent Vicinity,” a text that examines the contemporary urban condition through the lens of financial brutalism, before segueing into a discussion of themes from it. España argues that cities have become logistical infrastructures of extraction, where financialization, automation, and real-estate speculation converge to displace communities and dissolve social relations. Drawing on thinkers such as Mbembe, Lefebvre, Guattari, and Moten, the essay frames the city-form as a planetary apparatus of expulsion – one that transforms citizenship, civility, and urban renewal into mechanisms of enclosure, discipline, and dispossession. Against this backdrop, España calls for insurgent forms of inhabiting that arise from the ruins of financial brutalism: practices of neighborhood, subsistence, and insurgency that refuse recognition by the dominant order while cultivating new forms of common life. By foregrounding the “informality of the commune” and proposing strategies like neighborhood committees, blocks in struggle, and intercommunalism, the text insists on the possibility of communizing the city from within its fractures. The seminar invites participants to reflect on how these concepts might inform both critical theory and practical organizing in the face of today’s planetary urban crisis. Bio: Kike España is an architect and urban researcher based in Málaga, Spain, with a PhD in urban theory from the University of Seville. He is actively involved in grassroots cultural-urban initiatives, including the social and cultural centre La Casa Invisible, the collective bookshop Suburbia, and the independent publishing house Subtextos. His work bridges academic inquiry and activist practice. He contributes to the Overtourist City research project at the School of Architecture, University of Málaga, and his writings explore themes of gentrification, commoning, and insurgent urbanism.

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 42 We Are Making a Podcast About Mark Fisher  In this episode, we speak with artists Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter of Close and Remote about their sprawling, collaborative, and genre-bending project We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher. The conversation traces the origins of the film: how an initial spark in Fisher’s writing grew into a hybrid work that fuses documentary, performance, collective creativity, and hauntological fiction. We explore how Close and Remote approached the challenge of translating hauntology into visual and cinematic language: the textures of lost futures, the atmospheres of cultural stagnation, and the ghosts that structure the present. With over seventy contributors and much of the production unfolding openly on Instagram, the film became an experiment in distributed authorship and decapitalised making. Mellor and Poulter reflect on how this process worked in practice: the unexpected turns, the moments of productive chaos, and the ways the networked contributions reshaped the project’s trajectory. They consider, too, how Fisher himself might have responded to such a mode of production, and the tensions inherent in staging anti-capitalist creative work on corporate platforms. Screening dates and more information about We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher can be found at Close and Remote: https://www.closeandremote.net/portfolio/we-are-making-a-film-about-mark-fisher