The cuts, lay-offs and tuition-fee hikes that are besetting higher and further education internationally are undoubtedly a direct response to financial crisis and its ricocheting bomb of personal, commercial and national debt. But they also have deeper roots. They should be understood as part of the more gradual process of what George Caffentzis, in his analysis of the international situation, calls the 'breakdown of the edu-deal'; the inability for capital, and therefore the state, to pay for the costs of producing a well educated workforce or to guarantee that investment in education will...

Becoming Impersonal: JOSEPHINE BERRY SLATER, TOM CLARK, JESSE DARLING, ROZSA FARKAS, ANTHONY ILES, SCOTT LENNEY, KATRINA PALMER, JOHANNES PAUL RAETHER, TOM ROBERTS, MARINA VISHMIDT, THE WINE AND CHEESE APPRECIATION SOCIETY

Manifesto for a Theory of the 'New Aesthetic' - An irreverent guided tour of the 'New Aesthetic' by Curt Cloninger, The Missing Factory - John Roberts considers why work remains absent from film and culture more generally, Barbara Says - Industry Does it Faster - Roman Vasseur reviews the Artist Placement Group's historic brokerage of bureaucracy and art, The Ghosts of Participation Past - Josephine Berry Slater reviews Claire Bishop's recent book, Artificial Hells, Listener As Operator 3 - Howard Slater finds in jazz a response to the experience of slavery which preserves and propels a...

Edited by Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Anthony Iles and Oliver Lerone Schultz Fe lix Guattari's visionary term 'post-media', coined in 1990, heralded a break with mass media's production of conformity and the dawn of a new age of media from below. Understanding how digital convergence was remaking television, film, radio, print and telecommunications into new, hybrid forms, he advocated the production of 'enunciative assemblages' that break with the manufacture of normative subjectivities. In this anthology, historical texts are brought together with newly commissioned ones to...

Felix Stalder's extended essay, Digital Solidarity, takes it's point of departure from the waves of new forms of networked political organisation which have met the onset of the global economic crisis of 2008. Following Karl Marx, Stalder lays out how in the current period there are emergent contradictions between applied innovation and technical progress and the economic institutions whch organise or restrain this progress. The contradictions between forces of production and relations of production are placed in a context in which we have left McLuhan's Gutenburg Galaxy behind for good and...

This book documents the f irst life-cycle of the Post-Media Lab (2011-2014). Taking up Felix Guattari's challenge, the Lab aimed to combine social and media practices into collective assemblages of enunciation in order to confront social monoformity. Here we draw together some key essays, images and art projects by the Lab's participants, as well as a close documentation of its associated events, talks, and exhibitions, to create a vivid portrayal of post-media practice today. With contributions by: Clemens Apprich, Josephine Berry Slater, Micha Cardenas, Sean Dockray, Mina Emad, Bogdan...

This book is a psychoarchaeological reconstruction of an art collective, irational.org, who existed in the times of the internet. The material reconstituted here was derived, after irational.org's disappearance, from multiple requests for data from their archived art server. These requests, made by post, were submitted by the author, V.M., to an unidentified and unreliable Data Auditor, using a Secure Access Protocol. It is rumoured that access to the archive was securitised by irational.org because it contains highly sensitive, possibly incriminating, data. The psychoarchaeologist's...

Rejecting the dichotomy of centralism and horizontalism that has deeply marked millennial politics, Rodrigo Nunes' close analysis of network systems demonstrates how organising within contemporary social and political movements exists somewhere between - or beyond - the two. Rather than the party or chaos, the one or the multitude, he discovers a 'bestiary' of hybrid organisational forms and practices that render such disjunctives false. The resulting picture shows how social and technical networks can and do facilitate strategic action and fluid distributions of power at the same time. It is...