Minor Compositions – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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 

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)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 12: The Subhumans & Punk Historiography with Ian Glasper

For this episode we talk with Ian Glasper about his book Silence Is No Reaction: Forty Years of Subhumans. In the conversation we cover broader issues of ‘punk historiography’ and documenting more marginal musical, artistic, and political milieus that one is a part of (rather than falling on or relying about existing dominant narratives). Ian has ben writing about punk since starting his first zine in 1986, switching to writing books in the early 2000s as he grew increasingly frustrated that existing histories of punk tended to focus on the best known and most visible artists, completely neglecting the much wider and vibrant array of bands and musics.

Bio: Ian Glasper is the author of numerous books on the history of punk including Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984 (2004), The Day The Country Died: A History Of Anarcho Punk 1980 – 1984 (2006), Trapped In A Scene: UK Hardcore 1985 – 1989 (2009), and Armed With Anger: How UK Punk Survived The Nineties (2012).

Opening / outro music: The Subhumans, “All Gone Dark” (intro) and “From the Cradle to the Grave" (outro)

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 11: Italian Operaismo with Gigi Roggero

This episode of the Minor Compositions podcast is recorded as part of the Ultradependent Public School exhibition at BAK (https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/ultradependent-public-school-2/)
For this episode we are talking with Gigi Roggero about his book Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method. In this conversation we cover a range of topics including the birth and development of operaismo as a political tendency, the concepts of class composition and political formation, and rethinking how we approach and re-activate radical histories in the present.

“Italian Operaismo provides a clear overview of the central moments in that tendency's development: from the Italian labor movement's crisis of direction in the 1950s, the encounter with the “new forces” within the working class at FIAT and elsewhere in the early 1960s, and the political journals Quaderni rossi and Classe operaia, to the experience of Potere Operaio and other organizations a decade later. Roggero provides a rereading of operaismo that is both salutary and provocative, one that stresses above all the role within it of subjectivity and political engagement, demonstrating the continued relevance of its subversive method as a tool for reworking the categories of radical and revolutionary thought.

Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 10: Autonomia and Art with Jacopo Galimberti https://fireflyfrequencies.org/podcasts/minor-compositions

This episode is a discussion with Jacopo Galimberi about this book Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962–1988)

“During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello.This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Classs signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio’s exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians’ zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group’s experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.”  

For more on Jacopo’s book: https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2800-images-of-class

Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades

This episode intersperses a performance by experimental Indonesian doom folk metal band Senyawa (recorded in Folkestone in April 2022) with a discussion with their vocalist and lyricist Rully Shabara. The interview covers topics including his approach to writing lyrics, use of allegory and imagery, and how this has changed over Senyawa’s musical evolution since their formation n in 2010 in Yogyakarta. This episode serves as a preview for the first translation into English of Rully’s lyrics for Senyawa, which will shortly be published by Minor Compositions.

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 8: After the Internet with Tiziana Terranova

For this episode we have a discussion with Tiziana Terranova about her recently released book After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common. We cover a range of topics including the shift from the internet as open network to the rise of corporate platforms, the psychopathologies of digital culture, and capitalism’s need to continually impose scarcity whenever new forms of social cooperation and commoning threaten its dominance over social life. What are the possibilities today for using digital tools to build new forms of commons both inside and against, and outside of the walled gardens of the corporate platform complex?

This discussion is a preview of the “Promoting Commons Presents and Futures Symposium” symposium that planned by the Centre for Commons Organising Values Equalities and Resilience on February 17th, 2023. For more information on that go here: https://www.essex.ac.uk/events/2023/02/17/promoting-commons-presents-and-futures-symposium

Opening / Outro song: “Combat pop” by Lo Stato Sociale (2021)

For this episode we have a discussion with Becky Binns about her recently released book Gee Vaucher: Beyond punk, feminism and the avant-garde. We cover a a range off topics including Gee’s work in relationship with punk and artistic countercultures, as well as the changing historiography of punk and feminism. Does art produced in collective projects or by artists not seeking personal notoriety get lost within the historical narrative? Have the conditions for the production of autonomous art and life vanished, and how we might collectively create them again?

Opening / Outro song: “The Mystic Trumpeter” by EXIT (Recorded at the International Carnival of Experimental Sound, 1972)

Gee Vaucher: Beyond punk, feminism and the avant-garde
https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526147912/

Episode 5: Squatting, Art, and Gentrification with Clarrie Pope and Alan W. Moore

For this episode we have a discussion with Clarrie Pope and Alan W Moore around squatting, art, and gentrification, as well as a range of related topics. The idea is to explore these topics, but coming from different angles, for instance how writing a graphic novel about squatting is different from a personal account or political or academic writing on the same topic. How do these different modes of writing affect the stories that we tell, and how we can communicate with different kinds of people?

Welcome Home was written by sisters Clarrie and Blanche Pope, and is inspired by their experience in squatting and housing struggles, as well Blanche’s time spent working in care homes. They want to give readers insight into the class, race and gender politics involved in both through a humorous look at the way in which these issues affect the minutiae of people's lives.

Alan W. Moore worked as a critic, artist and organizer in NYC for 30 years. He worked with the artists’ group Colab, and co-directed ABC No Rio and the MWF Video Club. He took a PhD in Art History from CUNY in 2000, and published Art Gangs with Autonomedia in 2011. He began to study squatting in Europe in 2009, publishing the zine House Magic (2009-16). He co-edited Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces (Other Forms/JoAAP), and wrote Occupation Culture (Autonomedia), both in 2015. In 2022 he published Art Worker, a memoir (JoAAP). He lives in Madrid, and blogs at "Occupations & Properties" and "Art Gangs.”

Opening / Outro song: “Bello e impossibile” by Gianna Nannini

Welcome Home by Clarrie & Blanche Pope: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1047
Occupation Culture: Art & Squatting in the City from Below by Alan W. Moore: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=684

Temporary Autonomous Art (October 2021): https://www.taaexhibitions.org/

In this episode we have a conversation with Steve Wright, about his book “The Weight of the Printed Word: Text, Context and Militancy in Operaismo.” In it we discuss the role of print production and document work in the history of Italian operaismo and autonomist Marxism. What role did the production of various forms of print material play in the emergence of these politics, and how did they change and develop along with how the movements themselves evolved?

Steve Wright is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. He has written widely on operaismo, including Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (2002).


Opening / outro music: The Potere Operaio Anthem, as sung by Oreste Scalzone and Comrades