Peter Buse

The first Polaroid went on sale in 1948, putting into the hands of consumers a camera that could produce a unique print in just one minute, and without any need for a darkroom.  By the 1970s Polaroid had become the second biggest photography company in the world, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they were making the world’s most popular cameras.  This book is the first study of Polaroid photography as a mass popular form.  It shows what made Polaroid different from other sorts of photography and how users of instant photography adapted and changed the way they took pictures with this new technology. 
Snapshot photography is normally thought to be about making memories, but Polaroid turned cameras into toys, and brought photography for millions into the present tense of play.  For this reason, the Polaroid was from the very start known as a ‘party camera’, and its users ‘the life of the party’, anticipating by almost fifty years the camera as a social networking tool.

The book goes behind the scenes to reveal Polaroid’s unsuccessful digital strategy in the 1980s and 1990s, and brings the story of Polaroid and digital up to date by examining the arrival on the scene and growth of ‘The Impossible Project’, the company that has reinvented instant analog photography for the Web 2.0 generation.  It also explores the history of Polaroid’s links with artists and the artworld, focusing on Ansel Adams’ role as a consultant for the company, his work to promote Polaroid photography beyond the amateur field, and the longstanding relationship between Polaroid and Aperture, the most important photo-art magazine in America.

The book draws heavily on the recently opened Polaroid Corporation archive at Harvard, as well as the now closed Polaroid Collections archive.  It is richly illustrated with images taken from the archive, as well as examples of different types of Polaroid film.

This paper examines the role of participatory cinephilia in the resistance to censorship near the end of the Franco regime in Spain (1968–1974). It takes as its case study the letters pages, or Consultorio, of “Mr Belvedere” in the commercial Barcelona-based film magazine Nuevo Fotogramas. Reconstructing as much as possible the identities and concerns of those who wrote to the magazine, the paper concentrates above all on the distinctive style and mode of address of “Mr Belvedere” and the relationship and community that he built up with suffering cinéfilos and cinéfagos deprived of films, in whole or in part, by the censor. The paper concludes that the Consultorio not only had a key function in the continued transmission of film knowledge under the dictatorship, but that Mr Belvedere’s playful and ironic style was consistent with the overall disposition of Nuevo Fotogramas, whose deliberate frivolity was in itself a challenge to the regime’s values and norms.

This article explores “the play element in photography”, to adapt a key phrase from Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938). The context for this exploration is the melancholic paradigm that dominates much of contemporary writing and thinking about vernacular or popular photography, a paradigm that emphasises memory, death and mourning, at the expense of other practices and dispositions, not least the ludic. It notes that the existing literature on photography and play concentrates almost entirely on humorous images: optical jokes, trick photography, and a wide variety of distorted pictures. But play is an activity, a practice, as much as it is a product or an outcome. In other words, the ludic in photography is not just a quality of the object photographed, but of a photographic doing. Following this principle, the article shows the ways in which key modes of play such as competition, chance, make-believe and vertigo, are at work in photographic practices old and new, including in the aerostatic photography of Félix Nadar, with which it begins and ends.

This article conducts a genealogy of Freud’s never fully-developed concept of the narcissism of minor differences, which first appears in his writings in 1917, and then three more times with slight variations.  It starts with an earlier articulation of the concept in 1908 in a letter from Ernest Jones in Canada to Freud.  The article outlines the background to Jones’ presence in Canada and his assessment of Canadians, and goes on to argue that in its subtle differences from Freud, Jones’ version of the concept provides a clarification of what is essential in Freud’s version.  Among the questions it helps us answer is whether minor differences beget narcissism or narcissism cathects minor differences.  The article concludes that Freud does not so much borrow from Jones, as provide an analysis of Jones’ letter through his modifications of it.  The article finishes by arguing that the concept provides a different route into the philosophical and psychoanalytic question of the love of the neighbor, an issue central to the ethics of Jacques Lacan, and subsequently to Žižek and Santner.

This article explores the place of the animal and animals in Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that the standard accounts of Lacan on the animal, including the influential intervention by Derrida, depend almost exclusively on the Écrits and Lacan's early seminars, overlooking late Lacanian texts and seminars. It starts by examining perplexing instances in Lacan's seminar of " silliness " or " stupidity " – what he himself calls bêtises. The bêtise, which Lacan says plays a critical role in clinical practice, is then treated as the way into a discussion of the place of the animal in Lacan's seminar, and how it changes between early and late seminars. Écrits and the early seminars consistently locate animals in the imaginary while denying them access to the symbolic, a realm exclusive to the human animal at this stage of Lacan's thinking. The article then shows how this earlier work rests heavily on ethology, especially key figures such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, who disappear entirely from the late Lacan, along with the assumption that animals are caught up purely in the imaginary. If the bees and rats of Seminar XX: Encore do not act as a language-less foil to the desiring human subject, the article asks, what function do they play in the later Lacan? Part of this reading is dedicated to a reassessment of Derrida's account of the animal in Lacan, an account which is often taken to be the final word on the subject.

This article examines the place of film comedy in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. It takes as its starting point Lacan’s most extensive consideration of a single film, the comedy Never on Sunday (1960), directed by Jules Dassin and set in the Greek port of Piraeus. It places Lacan’s reading of the film in relation to his other interventions on cinema, which are scattered through his seminars and are more numerous and heterogeneous than generally assumed, drawing especially on cinema of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The article shows how Lacan’s analysis of Never on Sunday contributes to the articulation of a theory of comedy in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, a seminar best known for its treatment of Antigone and tragic drama. It then locates this theory of comedy and reading of Never on Sunday in relation to key concepts of The Ethics such as jouissance and the moral good(s). It finishes by proposing a general model of Lacanian reading as “cut” rather than interpretation, that is, an analysis that does not seek to account for a text as a whole but, rather, to find the correct point at which to break into it.

This article addresses the theme of the special issue – that which is right in front of our eyes – by way of the problem of reading Jacques Lacan's seminars. It begins with a brief publication history of the seminars, including the centrality to this process of their editor, Jacques-Alain Miller, as well as some of the controversies and disputes arising from this editorship. It then goes on to consider how Lacan in the seminars rejects the classical critical mode of explication de texte, offering instead a model of reading drawn from the psychoanalytic clinic – reading as a form of extraction. This mode is then more specifically defined as surface extraction, with mining as an analogue. It is a reading strategy that Lacan also calls reading 'diagonally', en diagonale in the French, translated simply as 'skimming' but with references in Lacan's usage as wide as mathematics and set theory. This method is then compared with Freud's claim in 'The Moses of Michelangelo' and elsewhere that psychoanalysis fastens onto 'secrets and concealed things', which are right out in the open, waste matter (der Abhub) that bypasses conscious perception. As a sort of experiment the article then puts this mode of extraction to work on Lacan's own seminar. Where readers of Lacan usually plunder his texts for formulae, mathemes or aphorisms, the approach here is to fasten on a regular, but seemingly inconsequential feature of Lacan's seminars – the texts that he recommended, and sometimes insisted, that his audience should read. From these, the article constructs some Lacanian reading lists, concentrating particularly on Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, but also drawing on a number of recently translated or still untranslated seminars, such as Seminar VI: Le désir et son interpretation, Seminar X: Anxiety, Seminar XVI: D'un Autre à l'autre, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XVIII: D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant. The article concludes by asking what Lacan's reading suggestions and the manner in which he made them tell us about a specifically psychoanalytic teaching practice.

This paper examines the history and meanings of Polaroid, or ‘one-step’ photography at the point of its obsolescence.  It asks in what ways technological change relates to the fields of society and culture and argues that Polaroid instant photography can be fruitfully analysed to shed light on more recent developments in the digital image, which is also marked by its instantaneity.  Three key properties of Polaroid photography are identified – its speed, the absence of a darkroom, and the singularity of the image – and considered in terms of the Bataillean concept of intimacy.

This paper takes up the question of “things” in contemporary English theatre by examining a trivial, even banal prop which appears in any number of plays: the stage telephone. After outlining the highly conventionalised function of the stage telephone as a pretext for exposition and a guarantee of the integrity of off-stage space, the paper examines a number of departures from the convention, including Tom Stoppard’s post-modern citation of the stage telephone in The Real Inspector Hound and Caryl Churchill’s exploitation of its sonic and visual properties in Serious Money.  The paper concludes with a consideration of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, a play without telephones, but one which nonetheless reflects profoundly on what is at stake in the humble stage telephone, that is, the status of telecommunications in the theatre.

This chapter outlines some of the most influential comic theories and theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  It considers what aspects of the comic different theories emphasize and what aspects they put to one side.  It starts with the festive and re-creative theories of Barber and Frye and considers their relation to the Cambridge ritualists.  It then moves to the populist theories of the comic epitomised by Bakhtin, moving from the carnivalesque to the idealizing of the comic hero by Charney, Gurewitch, Torrance and Gates.  The chapter then considers politically inflected comic theory in the form of Marxist critiques of mass culture and feminist rethinking of comic forms. It then moves onto philosophical investigations of the comic, all of them at odds with the Aristotelian tradition: Langer, Morreall, Nikulin.  To finish, the chapter considers the influence of psychoanalysis on comic theory (Zupančič), as well as reflecting on those theorists who deployed the comic in their own writing style.

This chapter takes up the question of media archaeology as a mode of collecting, and the collection as a media archaeological object. It asks whether media archaeology, in its materialist attitude, emancipates the object, as Ernst and Benjamin suggest, or whether it verges towards a mere connoisseurship in its fetishisation of outmoded processes and technologies. It takes as a case the recently rediscovered Chicago street photographer, Vivian Maier. It interrogates Maier's hoarding and media archaeological practices, as well as those of the guardian of the largest part of her archive, John Maloof, whose own media archaeological passions are much in evidence in his film Finding Vivian Maier (2013).