Modalities or Surfaces: Postmodern Poetics and a Riddle

This article will examine the playing with aesthetical surfaces in postmodern theatre and how itreflects the poetics and the cultural logic of late capitalism. Surfaces are examined as aestheticelements of the postmodern culture of the image. This culture is not neutral as it seems toreject the modern spiritual depth, for instance, sense of history and hermeneutic depth. Thearticle examines the riddle concerning how the absence of these aspects of human thought insurfaces generates the spectators' need to produce coherent individual activities, trajectories,and eventually acoherent culture. This reflexive mechanism of surfacesis analyzed within theframework of Donald Norman's (2005) cognitive principles of design. Starting from thepremise of Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's (1987) and Lev Vygotsky's (1978) notions ofplay, it is interpreted that postmodern stage and culture works, metaphorically, like the plane ofimmanence, the way of thinking in which an agent is able to move, make transitions andcrossings in a revolutionary way without restrictions of reality's conditions. However,culturally the blurring of boundaries between play and reality may lead to delirium andill-founded practices. Theatre and art examine these ill-founded practices but involve in theirpoetics a strong dimension of reflexive level of human cognition. This reflexive level is anexplanatory perspective, which helps spectators examine theatre's mechanisms as metaphors ofcultural logic, to achieve a critical position extrinsic from the flux of postmodern culture. Thispoetics is examined in several cases of theatrical representation including Sofia Coppola's filmThe Bling Ring (2013), The Need Company's production The Lobster Shop (2006), KristianSmeds' production The Unknown Soldier (2007) and in several casesof postmodern art and stagedesign