Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible, eds. Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Culture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 416 pp.

Review by Cassandra Xin Guan

9 February 2022

Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Culture is a timely collection of critical essays that illuminates the aesthetic constitution and political deployment of depth in historical and contemporary media formations. The anthology speaks to a prevalent anxiety encapsulated in Thomas Friedmann’s dire warning that “recent advances in the speed and scope of digitization, connectivity, big data and artificial intelligence are now taking us ‘deep’ into places and into powers that we’ve never experienced before—that governments have never regulated before. . . . Everything is going deep” (quoted on p. 1). Acknowledging but ultimately refusing the paranoid rhetoric that accompanies totalizing visions of technological control, Deep Mediations is a scholarly response to the imaginary of ungovernable networks and “deep” surveillance technologies. Its editors, Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible, have constructed a polycentric framework to accommodate the full spectrum of theoretical positions from which questions pertaining to the status of depth in film and media can be meaningfully articulated. Consisting of seventeen essays grouped into four thematic sections, the book takes in a range of critical methodologies variously informed by phenomenology, philosophical aesthetics, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, media archaeology, new materialism, gender studies, and infrastructure studies. While insisting on the centrality of spatial metaphors in our understanding of media, the editors do not offer a framework for synthesis. Rather, they have organized the problematics of depth in such a way as to underscore the diversity of approaches to the theorization of media today.

To this reader, the four self-contained sections of Deep Mediations are reminiscent of attending caucus meetings at a multiday conference. Each conversation revolves around a specific conceptualization of the overarching theme, the meaning of which is stabilized by a shared critical paradigm. In this way, part 1 of the book is dominated by the concerns of phenomenology and film aesthetics, containing essays that remediate the perception of distance and proximity in film history and film theory. Part 2 approaches the criticism of contemporary art cinema and documentary practices via methods of textual analysis that hearken back to the amalgamation of post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and ideology critique in '70s screen theory. Those who defend this critical project emphasize a politics of form realized at the level of individual film texts. From Jennifer Fay, who writes about “dreaming at face value” (p. 133) in the time of late capitalism, to Scheible, whose essay on Citizen Kane and Citizen Four envisions surface connections across multiple modalities of depth, members of this critical caucus deliberately reject depth epistemology in favor of surface reading/listening practices. Part 3 centers critical approaches that mobilize models of spatial depth to produce global analyses of media ecologies. In contrast to film theory’s traditional focus on experience, language, and representation, this section of the book points toward a new paradigm of critical realism. In a series of case studies on mining films, GIF animations of sinkholes, undersea cable networks, and arial imaging, depth ontology is transformed into a historical method. Finally, returning full circle to the present moment, part 4 registers media studies’ infrastructure turn and a new receptivity to the concerns and methods of science and technology studies (STS). The scholarly perspectives gathered here offer insightful analyses of deep-learning and deepfake technologies, as well as the cultural drivers of their development.

Despite the book’s nominal ambition to think space in cinema and digital culture, the coexistence of different critical paradigms that impose distinctive, and often contradictory, limits on the conceptualization of depth is never fully resolved. The different sections of Deep Mediations do not build up to a coherent turn or proclaim a triumphant return of depth ontology. What they effectively accomplish, as the editors promise in the book’s preface, is to illustrate “the range of scales at which ideas and discourses of depth operate” and bring into focus the proliferation of “depth mediators” in which we find ourselves, as subjects and as bodies, entangled (p. xvii). The lack of resolution feels deliberate. One senses the constructive instinct of a doyenne in these extensive collaborative undertakings. In a revealing passage, Redrobe and Scheible identify the figuration of depth as one of the few conceptual issues that has managed to retain a central place in an increasingly heterogeneous field: “This persistence of depth’s significance and value across the evolving landscape of the field makes the discourse around the term simultaneously, and almost paradoxically, both a red thread of continuity—the ground of the field—and a figure or index of change” (p. xvii). The result of this conviction is a self-reflective exploration of film and media theory that abandons the arboreal structure of disciplinary genealogy to highlight moments of intradisciplinary plasticity and cross-disciplinary hybridity.

Deep Mediations is at its best when offering close readings of spatial artifacts that forcibly assert their artifactuality. The reader will find a succession of brilliant historical analyses, from Lisa Han’s study of deep-sea observation and sensing by US military intelligence to Brooke Belisle’s consideration of dimensional proxies in the machinic operations of deep learning, which demystify the fascinating impression of depth, or the lack thereof, as the product of cultural practices recursively conditioned by media apparatuses and technological milieux. The most glaring problem of this anthology is the scarcity of non-Western perspectives in an otherwise imaginative survey of spatial mediation. Is there a global history of space—a geography of media attentive to specific local constructions of distance, time, alterity, and representational artifices? And what would be the geopolitical consequences of considering depth mediation in this light? One might want to foreground, when speaking about practices of depth, the ways critical fabulation has been called on to resist or subvert dominant world constructions. Deep Mediations shows that the return of depth hermeneutics in contemporary culture is conditioned by the historical aftermath of failed globalization. This recognition instills hope that media theory has traversed the postmodern fantasy of seamless integration across depthless networks. A new and sustained critique of media is needed to unmask the deep structures underpinning global systems of oppression, while repudiating invocations of mythical depth in ethnonationalist and right-libertarian ideologies.