This depth narrative has never been without its critics later
structuralists and post-structuralists inverted the story by celebrating
the surface at the expense of depth. [...] From a visual arts standpoint
I have always seen this tussle as echoing the arrival of Warhol on the
scene whose slippery serious anti-seriousness effectively disrupted
Abstract Expressionism’s existentialist claims to psychological depth.
I think the notion of "depth" stands in for interpretation, aka hermeneutics. There can be a liberating effect when a dominant hermeneutic is swept aside, but then, disorientation ensues. I experienced that pretty strongly in the 1980s, when both the post-structuralist "free play of the signifier" and the recombinant commercial imagery of pop art (eg, Jeff Koons) were at their height in the US. At the time a novel by Don DeLillo, "Mao II" which directly references Warhol, allowed me to understand the relationship between those two trends.
Today, most societies are affected by profound disorientation in the face of inequality, climate change, and their knock-on effects (fascistic populism, revolt of oppressed peoples). In the US right now there is a pervasive concern with hermeneutics or so-called grand narratives. The analysis of big data is supposed to reveal the hidden mechanisms of social interaction - that's one version, a mathematized hermeneutics. The history of colonialism is supposed to reveal how racialized injustice is rooted in White subjectivity - that's another version, connected to highly active minority struggles. Broader histories of the rise and fall of civilizations (Hariri, Tainter, even David Graeber) are supposed to reveal what comes after the fall of liberal empire. All of these are, for sure, secularized versions of the interpretative practices of religion, particularly Christianity which is hermeneutic to the core.
I don't think this hermeneutic turn can be brushed away. For people in distress (and that's a lot of us) finding "meaning" is nothing other than reconciling your perception of a damaged world with your aspiration to a better one. Currently I belong to a group called Deep Time Chicago. Its aim is to understand how the relative stability of the earth system is disrupted by the "fossil institutions" that we can see at work in our city - the steel mills, the refineries and petrochemical industries, the airports and freeways, the water and sewage systems, the conversion of all the arable hinterland to GMO agriculture for global trade, etc. Our approach comes directly from geology (the model of scientific depth interpretation, as David pointed out), but it's a geology that in its turn has been transformed by a full-fledged master narrative: earth system science, also known as Gaia Theory.
Struggles over interpretation are difficult and fractious. But if you want to set a collective course toward a viable existence, I am not sure there is another way.
thoughtfully, Brian