Postmodern theory replaces four inherited depth models with surfaces

Evidence

Overhastily, we can say that besides the hermeneutic model of inside and outside which Munch’s painting develops, at least four other fundamental depth models have generally been repudiated in contemporary theory: (1) the dialectical one of essence and appearance (along with a whole range of concepts of ideology or false consciousness which tend to accompany it); (2) the Freudian model of latent and manifest, or of repression (which is, of course, the target of Michel Foucault’s programmatic and symptomatic pamphlet La Volonte de savoir [The history of Sexuality ]); (3) the existential model of authenticity and inauthenticity whose heroic or tragic thematics are closely related to that other great opposition between alienation and disalienation, itself equally a casualty of the poststructural or postmodern period; and (4) most recently, the great semiotic opposition between signifier and signified, which was itself rapidly unraveled and deconstructed during its brief heyday in the 1960s and 1970s. What replaces these various depth models is for the most part a conception of practices, discourses, and textual play, whose new syntagmatic structures we will examine later on; let it suffice now to observe that here too depth is replaced by surface, or by multiple surfaces (what if often called intertextuality is in that sense no longer a matter of depth). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 64

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘depthlessness’ that replaces ‘waning of affect’ tradition — the four repudiated depth models are the scaffolding for understanding postmodern surface.
• XREF: Jameson’s four depth models map onto the hermeneutic/depth-vs-surface distinction that also appears in your soundscape reading (keynote vs signal; lo-fi erasing depth).