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. Our list moves across political theory, philosophy, cultural studies, art and aesthetics, labour, social movements, and histories of radical thought and practice.
We approach publishing as more than the production of books. A book can be a point of encounter: a way of bringing people, histories, arguments, and struggles into relation. Publishing can create conditions for study, conversation, experimentation, and collaboration. Minor Compositions therefore works through books but also through events, workshops, conversations, podcasts, archives, and other forms of collective inquiry. This approach has been central to the project from the beginning. Rather than understanding the publisher simply as a producer of cultural objects, Minor Compositions has approached publishing as a form of participation in wider processes of political and intellectual composition. Books are not ends in themselves but part of the social relations through which ideas circulate, movements remember, and new possibilities are developed.
Minor publishing
The name Minor Compositions draws partly from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of the minor: practices that work within existing languages and institutions while bending them towards other possibilities. It also draws from the autonomist concept of class composition – the continual organisation and reorganisation of capacities for collective action. For us, the minor does not mean insignificant or marginal. It describes ways of working beneath, across, and sometimes against established forms of cultural authority: creating connections between theoretical work and lived practices that may not ordinarily appear within the same institutional spaces. This means taking seriously forms of knowledge produced through organising, artistic practice, refusal, experimentation, and everyday life, as well as through universities and established intellectual traditions.
Publishing as collective infrastructure
Minor Compositions is committed to making radical work as widely accessible as possible. Our books are published in print while also being made freely available to read and download online wherever rights and circumstances allow. Open access is not an afterthought to the project. It reflects a broader understanding of knowledge as something produced socially and strengthened through circulation, use, translation, discussion, disagreement, and reuse. At the same time, books require material infrastructures: editing, design, printing, distribution, storage, postage, events, websites, and many forms of frequently invisible labour. Part of our work is therefore to experiment with ways of sustaining independent publishing without abandoning commitments to accessibility and collective ownership of knowledge. In this sense, publishing is itself an object of inquiry. We are interested not only in what gets published, but in how publishing might be organised differently.
Books, study, and collaboration
Since 2009, Minor Compositions has published more than seventy books and worked with writers, artists, organisers, researchers, translators, and collectives across many different contexts. Alongside the book programme, our Study Sessions create spaces for conversations around new publications, ongoing research, political questions, artistic practices, archives, and histories of struggle. Many of these conversations also circulate through the Minor Compositions podcast and other online formats. The project has grown through collaborations rather than according to a conventional publishing model. Its relationship with Autonomedia has been part of that from the beginning: Minor Compositions operates as an Autonomedia imprint while developing its own editorial programme, collaborations, and forms of organisation. In 2025, Minor Compositions also became a Community Interest Company in the UK, providing an additional structure through which the publishing project can develop as a collectively oriented cultural infrastructure.
What has remained consistent is a simple proposition: publishing can be a way of thinking, organising, and studying together.