Minor Compositions

23/07/2025

From that time Stafford Beer decided the best way to describe class war would be with a nifty little diagram.

23/07/2025

ephemera: theory & politics in organization - Organizing for apocalypse
Organizing for apocalypse: https://ephemerajournal.org/issue/organizing-apocalypse

It is sometimes asserted that most people find it easier to envision the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. In this special issue, we address this assertion head-on by exploring what it might mean to organize for apocalypse. As the contributions reveal, the notion of apocalypse means different things to different people. It might even be interpreted as an empty signifier. However, for large parts of the world’s population, the apocalypse does not point to a distant future but represents a (very real) lived experience in the present. In any case, as global temperatures continue to rise, while pandemics spread at lightning speed, and as military superpowers continue to act both irresponsibly and unpredictably, many are currently coming to the realization that the world – as we know it – might be coming to an end. What comes after the apocalypse is an open question, of course, which provides plenty of space for social and political imagination.

22/07/2025

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 30 Penny as Producer
https://youtu.be/v8iLUhm_NLs

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

21/07/2025

Live interview broadcast/podcast with Marc Garrett, discussing his new book Feral Class

Feral Class
July 28th @ 7PM UK Time, online: https://www.facebook.com/events/1272333564234340

Untamed. Unheard. Unstoppable. Feral Class is Marc Garrett’s raw and resonant memoir of surviving – and creating – on the margins. This event 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.

Organized by Minor Compositions & COVER

This event will be edited into an episode of the Minor Compositions podcast.

.essex

21/07/2025

Review of Karen Kurczynski’s The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

“It can be remarkably difficult to neatly place or explain Asger Jorn’s work – or to pin down his place in the intertwined histories of radical art and politics. As Iwona Blazwick once observed, Jorn’s theoretical project was as massive as it was arduous: he sought to recast elements of Surrealism – magic, children’s art, so-called ‘primitive’ art and automatism – and fuse them with strands of Scandinavian romanticism and libertarian activism, all within a materialist and Marxist framework. This is as simple as it sounds, which is to say not at all. In The Art and Politics of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Won’t Give Up, Karen Kurczynski offers an excellent and much-needed overview of Jorn’s development and of his decades-long effort to achieve this synthesis. The significance of the Situationist International – to which Jorn contributed decisively – for contemporary art, architecture, film and critical theory is undeniable. Yet Jorn’s own role within the SI has often been overlooked, despite the fact that from 1957 to 1961 he was one of the figures most responsible for articulating and sustaining its early practices. His conception of the avant-garde rested on the conviction that the artist must introduce what is truly new – something unexpected, potentially unwelcome and seemingly useless or worthless. Kurczynski’s account brings this paradoxical, generative vision of Jorn to light.”

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22223_the-art-and-politics-of-asger-jorn-the-avant-garde-wont-give-up-by-karen-kurczynski-reviewed-by-stevphen-shukaitis/

21/07/2025

19/07/2025

Lovely oral history of Café OTO, the best musical venue in the UK

The story behind the legendary Dalston music venue.

18/07/2025

18/07/2025

Tribute to the legend that was James C Scott in Fifth Estate
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/james-c-scott-1936-2024/

17/07/2025

Incoming 2026 Jubilee Saint Calendar incoming... with cover by James Koehnline, as always

16/07/2025

"There is a kind of central contradiction here that the Situationists were unable to resolve, and at the same time, a dark, unacknowledged awareness that the genuine political element lies precisely in this incommunicable and almost ridiculous clandestinity of private life. For surely it — the clandestine, our form of life — is so intimate and close that, if we try to grasp it, all we are left with is impenetrable, odious, everyday life. And yet, perhaps it is precisely this promiscuous, shadowy presence that contains the secret of politics, the other side of the arcanum imperii on which every biography and every revolution is shipwrecked…

Guy did not consider himself a philosopher but, as he once told me, a strategist. And yet, bringing to light — beyond all vitalism — the intimate intertwining of being and living was certainly then, as it is today, the unavoidable task of thought and politics." - Giorgio Agamben on his friendship with Debord

Giorgio Agamben on his friendship with Guy Debord and the elusive clandestinity of political life.

16/07/2025

Happy 163rd birthday to legendary journalist, sociologist, and civil rights activist Ida B Wells.