I recently reviewed Bernhard Siegert's CULTURAL TECHNIQUES and Florian Sprenger's MEDIEN DES IMMEDIATEN for the literary journal PARAGRAPH. For those of you that don't have a subscription, find the PDF attached here and the full text below. If you have a subscription option through your university, please go that route. I assume it's good for the journal to have clicks generating in some record somewhere. If that's not an option then best to download the PDF I linked. PARAGRAPH has good formatting, much better than my quick and dirty reproduction below. 

Untimely Mediations: On Two Recent Contributions to ‘German Media Theory’

BERNARD DIONYSIUS GEOGHEGAN

I wrote book reviews of Bernhard Siegert's forthcoming "Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real" and of Florian Sprenger's "Medien des Immediaten. Elektrizität, Telegraphie, McLuhan" for the forthcoming issue of PARAGRAPH. It was a pleasure to be able to contribute something to this great journal, and also to comment on trends in germanophone media studies for Edinburgh University Press, which has done so much in recent years to put cutting edge conceptual work before anglophone readers. I'm also pleased to review something coming out from Fordham, another press championing pathbreaking publications and translations. The late Helen Tartar championed publication of this book by Siegert and perhaps this review can serve as a small tribute to her important and enduring legacies in critical thought.

The Archiv für Mediengeschichte is one of the crown jewels of contemporary research on the history, theory, and philosophy of media. It seems to me that journal success sometimes means a sort of bureacratization and neutralization of its identity--more submissions arrive from afar, peer reviewing procedures start sifting out the most idiosnycratic texts, etc--but the Archiv has maintained and even enhanced its mission & identity for a decade or so now. The CFP for the next issue on "Models and Modelling" just came out. I bet it'll be a great issue and it's a great opportunity to publish in an exciting venue.

Deadline: Apr 30, 2014

So my comrade in gadget theory, Grant Wythoff, and I have been bouncing notes back and forth for a year or so about the return of the apparatus to media theory. I suppose it'd be more precise to say it never left. But the sources for "apparatus theory" have shifted over the years. In the 1970s and early 80s work by Baudry, Comolli, Mulvey, etc. on film as an ideological apparatus (appareil/dispositif) swept film studies. In the last fifteen years however another, intersecting theory of the apparatus has taken hold in media studies, science studies, theories of digital cinema and so on. Notions of a productive, assembly-like apparatus (dispositif) put forth by Foucault, Lyotard, Agamben and Deleuze today dominate contemporary apparatus theories.