Dear Students,
Looking again at what you read last semester, based on the syllabus I have from Chris Pavsek. You read both Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author”. These texts, particularly the Barthes, which is relatively straightforward, are a good background/related to the Colebrook we looked at today and will return to briefly next class.Perhaps you want to review your notes on them.
Also it seems you read Jameson’s “Postmodern Condition” well, the concept there, as I mentioned today of “depth models” also relates to the “problems with representation” that Colebrook discusses. What is at issue is the assumption that the world is defacto meaningful (therefore deep) and interconnected; that representation, or the signifier, or interpretation, has a way of suggesting, by continually referring to something outside itself (therefore transcendental) that that “something” exists. Jameson articulates a tension between modern “depth” and postmodern “surface.” We were not using that language today, however his description of depth models repudiated in ‘contemporary’ (at the time of Jameson’s writing) theory include, as he says, the “signifier and signified” (which we /Colebrook did discuss). These theories seek to destabilize the idea that there is “something,” a realer real, beyond or below experience. Something whole, unified, undivided, but by and large unavailable to direct experience which the available term (the appearance, the symptom, the signifier) represent, thereby suggesting not themselves but their referent as the essential meaning giving condition.
Here is an excerpt from Jameson’s section on depth models:
“What we can at least suggest is that the poststructuralist critique of the hermeneutic, of what I will shortly call the depth model, is useful for us as a very significant symptom of the very postmodernist culture which is our subject here.
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 Volante 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).”