Minor Compositions

Minor Compositions is a research – theorizing – publishing project that is located, at the moment, within the London metropolitan basin of collective intelligence. Its main aim is to bring together, develop, and mutate forms of autonomist thought and practice, avant-garde aesthetics, and an everyday approach to politics. To take up a useful distinction made by Alan Toner, this is to see not from a position of ‘producer consciousness’ (“we’re a publisher, we make books”) but rather from a position of protagonist consciousness (“we make books because it is part of participating in social movement and struggle”). So the production of a text is not something that is thought in isolation but how it connects and develops moments of thinking collectively. This draws a good deal of inspiration from the autonomist notion of militant research and workers’ inquiry, expanding it beyond inquiry into particular bounded workplaces into a more general investigation of cultural labor, social reproduction, and the relationship between antagonistic energies and attempts to govern them.
As for how and why it came into being, that is a bit like asking why the chicken crossed the road. It was there, which is to say that there was seen to be some particular questions that could be usefully explored through such an approach. In the past ten years, or even longer (forty or fifty years) there has been increased interest in radical politics as cultural politics. Here one can see that the aspects of the anti-globalization movement that were focused on most were its cultural politics, the theatricality or the playfulness of demonstrations. Similarly, and very much connected to this, there has been a rise of interest in political art, or ‘activist art’ within the museum and gallery world. It is problematic that this interest in art and politics often neglects questions of political economy. Cultural politics becomes substituted for all forms of politics. But to raise the specter of political economy is not a call to return to some sort of reductive Marxism that sees cultural struggles as adjuncts to the ‘real struggles’ around labor. And it’s through the autonomist notion of class composition, looking at the relation between the building of social movement potential to radically transform the world and the continual effort to turn these energies into new modes of capitalist production and governance, that this question can be opened and re-thought in a different, and hopefully more useful manner.