Minor Compositions

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