Minor Compositions

13/06/2026

10/06/2026

"Football anticipated sociology because the ball always arrives before the professors. First come the children playing in the backyards of the suburbs, then the scouts, then the clubs, then the national teams, and only then do the sociologists arrive to explain what happened. This year, the World Cup is being played in three countries that are themselves monuments to migration. The United States, Canada, and Mexico form a kind of geopolitical triangle within which millions of people have crossed borders, sought work, changed languages, changed religions, or simply tried to survive… �

But the most fascinating case of this World Cup is perhaps not that of the United States. It’s that of Curaçao. A small Caribbean island that seems to have emerged from a postcolonial novel, featuring a national team composed almost entirely of players born in the Netherlands. Here, the racial mix transcends even the racial question. It becomes a question of geography. What is Curaçao? A Caribbean national team? A footballing offshoot of Amsterdam? A legacy of the colonial empire? A tropical branch of the Eredivisie. It’s probably all of these things at once. And it’s precisely this simultaneity that makes the phenomenon interesting. Because contemporary football has ceased to represent stable, delimited populations. It represents flows. It represents migrations. It represents family memories. It represents diasporic networks. It represents children playing for the land of their grandparents, not the land of their birth."
– Luigi Guelpa, Why football always precedes sociology
https://nihilistoptimism.blogspot.com/2026/06/why-football-always-precedes-sociology.html

10/06/2026

One day we’ll finally “make it,” ie publish a book that appears on like which is clearly the new standard of notable intellectual achievement. Either that or we’ll publish Yas Kapital.

09/06/2026

In collaboration with COVER, the commons research centre
Elements of the Revolution: The International Constructivists and the Prehistory of Artistic Research
Tobias Dias, Aarhus University
Wednesday 17th June @ 12PM UK Time, Online

08/06/2026

The Strange Birth of the Social Worker
https://nihilistoptimism.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-strange-birth-of-social-worker.html

For Mario Tronti, the social worker is not born from freedom, cooperation, or the commons. It is born inside capital. The socialization of labour first appears as the socialization of capital itself: workers are brought together, coordinated, and made collective because capital requires it. Cooperation emerges as a productive force of capital before it can become a force of resistance.

Against later autonomist optimism, Tronti insists that socialized labour is not inherently emancipatory. A society can become more cooperative, more collective, even more equal, and remain thoroughly capitalist. The social worker is a strange creature: simultaneously a product of capitalist command and the material basis of new antagonisms. The question is not whether labour has become social, but when social cooperation ceases to function for capital and begins to function for its own struggles.

06/06/2026

Happy Pride!

04/06/2026

"Speaking, protesting, teaching, learning, simply existing on campus in a marginalized identity has become increasingly difficult since the first Trump administration (Trump 1.0). University administrations have either quietly enabled or publicly championed Trump’s curtailments. They have done this by moving from espousing compulsory civility to performing cowardly compliance. Meanwhile, those of us who constitute the undercommons have been meeting in basements and Zoom rooms, sending (smoke) Signals, passing (encrypted) notes, and posting (disappearing) signs.

In what follows, I consider some signs of our Trumpian times and what they say about administrative collusion and scholar-activist existence/resistance. I do that by looking at two types of guerrilla flyers posted during Trump 1.0 and 2.0. But first, a clarification: this is not an essay about saving higher ed, not a call for an enlightened, liberal notion of academic freedom. Those of us who were never meant to be in the academy have never breathed easily there. If “freedom is a measure of breathability” and if “freedom is a place,” academia has never been our liberation zone. We have honed our skills at lighting fires in administrators’ trash cans, seeking to build a decolonial education in the soft underbelly of the institutional beast."

Signs of our Trumpian Times Speaking, protesting, teaching, learning, simply existing on campus in a marginalized identity has become increasingly

01/06/2026

Excellent review of The Wages of Dreamwork by Silvia Federici in the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22698_the-wages-of-dreamwork-class-composition-and-the-social-reproduction-of-cultural-labour-by-stevphen-shukaitis-and-joanna-figiel-reviewed-by-silvia-federici/

31/05/2026

25/05/2026

Behold, for now we are a highly esteemed and respected institution! Restroom graffiti does not lie.