ABSTRACT
With the end of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ and the advent of new technologies the written text and the book are being called into question. The mode of perception is shifting: a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving is replacing the linear-successive. A more superficial yet simultaneously more comprehensive perception is taking the place of the centred, deeper one whose primary model was the reading of literary texts. Slow reading as much as theatre, which is laborious and cumbersome, is in danger of losing its status compared to the more profitable circulation of moving images. Literature and theatre, which are aesthetically mutually dependent on each other in a productive relation of repulsion and attraction, are both being demoted to the status of minority practices. Theatre is no longer a mass medium. To deny this becomes increasingly ridiculous, to reflect on it increasingly urgent. In the face of the pressure created by the attraction of the united forces of speed and surface, theatrical discourse emancipates itself from literary discourse but at the same time draws nearer to it in terms of its general function within culture. For both theatre and literature are textures which are especially dependent on the release of active energies of imagination, energies that are becoming weaker in a civilization of the primarily passive consumption of images and data. Neither theatre nor literature is essentially characterized by reproduction but rather organized as a complex system of signifiers.
