Le Sous-Psychodrame : une nouvelle forme dramatique de Jean-Luc Lagarce

"The Sub-Psychodrama: a New Dramatic Form by Jean-Luc Lagarce. It is exactly by a neologism of a “sub-psychodrama” that the playwright and French director Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957-1995) defined one of his plays. The similarities between psychodramatic practices and Lagarce’s dramatic works are obvious. As in the context of psychodramatic practice, Lagarce’s characters take on roles and identify with them from a carnal as well as linguistic point of view. The situation in which Lagarce’s characters meet is very close to that which is, among others, treated by psychodramatists: the dialogue is not initialized, the individuals are stuck in their reproaches and focus only on their own points of view. Lagarce’s characters use the theatricalization, the putting in voice of a dramatic text of one of them in order to launch the speech that awaited this moment of expression. The sub-psychodrama, while being a poetic and dramatic concept of Lagarce, reveals the dialogical malaise in the contemporary society that the sub-psychodrama quotes while highlighting the complex mechanisms of the intersubjective perception as well as the mechanisms of our individual and collective memory. Both reflective self-perception, which goes from oneself to oneself, and transitive perception, which goes from oneself to the other or from the other to oneself – in the context of a speech act. The sub-psychodrama presents itself, therefore, as a dialogical and perceptive field of battle where the spoken word is in search of its answer. The sub-psychodrama invented and developed by Lagarce puts the concept of paper beings – linguistic puppets – at the same level, while promoting the coalition of puppet theater and word drama. Keywords: Lagarce, contemporary French drama, word drama, psychodrama, sub-psychodrama. "

Le sous-psychodrame de Jean-Luc Lagarce : une toute nouvelle forme dramatique et discursive du théâtre contemporain

It is exactly by a neologism of a « sub-psychodrama » that the playwright and French director Jean-Luc Lagarce (1957-1995) defined one of his plays. The similarities between psychodramatic practices and Lagarce's dramatic works are obvious. As in the context of psychodramatic practice, Lagarce's characters take on roles and identify with them from a carnal as well as linguistic point of view. The situation in which Lagarce's characters meet is very close to that which is, among others, treated by psychodramatists: the dialogue is not initialized, the individuals are stuck in their reproaches and focus only on their own points of view. Lagarce's characters use the theatricalization, the putting in voice of a dramatic text of one of them in order to launch the speech that awaited this moment of expression. The sub-psychodrama, while being a poetic and dramatic concept of Lagarce, reveals the dialogical malaise in the contemporary society that the sub-psychodrama quotes while highlighting the complex mechanisms of the intersubjective perception as well as the mechanisms of our individual and collective memory. Both reflective self-perception, which goes from oneself to oneself, and transitive perception, which goes from oneself to the other or from the other to oneself - in the context of a speech act. The sub-psychodrama presents itself, therefore, as a dialogical and perceptive field of battle where the spoken word is in search of its answer. The sub-psychodrama invented and developed by Lagarce puts the concept of paper beings - linguistic puppets - at the same level, while promoting the coalition of puppet theater and word drama.

Visual and Screen-Based Research Methodologies

Visual and screen-based research practices have a long history in social-science, humanities, education, and creative-arts based disciplines as methods of qualitative research. While approaches may vary substantially across visual anthropology, sociology, history, media, or cultural studies, in each case visual research technologies, processes, and materials are employed to elicit knowledge that may elude purely textual discursive forms. As a growing body of visual and screen-based research has made previously-latent aspects of the world explicit, there has been a concomitant appreciation that visual practices are multisensory and must also be situated within a broader exploration of embodied knowledge and multisensory (beyond the visual) research practice. As audio-visual projects such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2013), Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), and Margaret Loescher’s Cameras at the Addy (2003) all demonstrate, screen-based research practices are both modes of, and routes to, knowledge. These projects also demonstrate ways in which screen-based visual research may differ from research exclusively delivered in written form, most specifically in their capacity to document and audio-visually represent intersubjective, embodied, affective, and dynamic relationships between researchers and the subjects of their research. Increasingly, as a range of fields reveal that the incorporative body works as an integrated “perceptive field” as it processes sensory stimuli, visual and screen-based research practices will fulfil an important role in facilitating scholarly access to intuitive, affective, embodied, and analytical comprehension.

Plerosis and Atomic Gestalts

SummaryFranz Brentano, 1838–1917, introduced the intriguing concept of “plerosis” in order to account for aspects of the continuum that were “explained” by formal mathematics in ways that he considered absurd from the perspective of intuition, especially visual awareness and imagery. In doing this, he pointed in directions later developed by the Dutch mathematician Luitzen Brouwer. Brentano’s notion of plerosis involves distinct though coincident points, which one might call “atomic entities with parts”. This notion fits the modern concepts of “receptive field” in neurophysiology, “perceptive field” in psychology and “differential operator” in the formal theory of scale space. We identify Brentano’s boundary points as the primordial atomic Gestalts of visual imagery. The concept deserves to play a key role in Gestalt theory.

Plankton reach new heights in effort to avoid predators

The marine environment associated with the air–water interface (neuston) provides an important food source to pelagic organisms where subsurface prey is limited. However, studies on predator–prey interactions within this environment are lacking. Copepods are known to produce strong escape jumps in response to predators, but must contend with a low-Reynolds-number environment where viscous forces limit escape distance. All previous work on copepod interaction with predators has focused on a liquid environment. Here, we describe a novel anti-predator behaviour in two neustonic copepod species, where individuals frequently exit the water surface and travel many times their own body length through air to avoid predators. Using both field recordings with natural predators and high-speed laboratory recordings, we obtain detailed kinematics of this behaviour, and estimate energetic cost associated with this behaviour. We demonstrate that despite losing up to 88 per cent of their initial kinetic energy, copepods that break the water surface travel significantly further than those escaping underwater and successfully exit the perceptive field of the predator. This behaviour provides an effective defence mechanism against subsurface-feeding visual predators and the results provide insight into trophic interactions within the neustonic environment.