In this month’s episode of Parallel Streams we listen to an episode of a podcast produced by Minor Compositions and published under a Creative Commons licence.

Minor Compositions “explores the unruly intersections of art, politics, and social struggle, tracing lines of flight through music, performance, literature, sport, and everyday life”.

 

PARALLEL STREAMS

EPISODE 11 | NOVEMBER 13 | 2026

 

INTRODUCTION

Sophie Hope

 

COMMENTARY

Minor Compositions is an independent publisher and collective research project creating tools, spaces, and infrastructures for collective study at the intersection of autonomous politics and radical aesthetics. It is an imprint of Autonomedia, the New York-based radical publisher with which the project has been connected since its founding in 2009. Minor Compositions publishes books that emerge from and contribute to social movements, artistic practices, political experiments, and forms of collective inquiry. The list moves across political theory, philosophy, cultural studies, art and aesthetics, labour, social movements, and histories of radical thought and practice.

In this episode we listen to Episode 5, entitled Defund culture by any means necessary, in which Gary Hall and Seth Wheeler have 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?

The episode is introduced by Sophie Hope, who first brought it to our attention.

 

REFERENCES

Minor Compositions https://www.minorcompositions.info/podcast/

Defund Culture https://openbookcollective.org/books/book/5679981/

Open Humanities Press https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/

Agit Press https://www.agitpress.net/

Autonomedia https://autonomedia.org/