Peter Buse

Introduction: A Future for Haunting

Chances are, ghosts will make another comeback. For the time being, however, spectres, apparitions, phantoms and revenants have been eclipsed in the popular imagination by a rage for aliens, extra-terrestrials, conspiracy theories, Martian landings and all manner of paranormal occurrences apposite to millennial fever. In contrast, ghosts seem a little dated, paling in comparison with such sophisticated other-worldly phenomena. A solid core of psychical researchers, ghost-layers and ghost-hunters may remain, but the most dedicated enthusiasts are probably those who make their livings conducting ghost tours in medieval towns, and hosting guests in ‘haunted’ hotels. It is safe to say that to be interested in ghosts these days is decidedly anachronistic. Perhaps the nineteenth century, with its spiritualists, mediums, table-tilting seances, spirit-rapping, Ghost Club and Society for Psychical Research, was the most accommodating historical period for the ghosts which have fallen on hard times in the late twentieth century. And yet, it could also be argued that the nineteenth-century craze for ghosts was already an anachronism. If we follow Keith Thomas’s compelling thesis in Religion and the Decline of Magic, we should properly view as anachronistic any belief in ghosts after the Reformation, which, theologically speaking (for Protestants at least), put paid to the possibility of the return of the dead by dispensing with the concept of purgatory.1

Polaroid into digital: Technology, cultural form, and the social practices of snapshot photography

This essay is part of a larger project on the cultural history of Polaroid photography and draws on research carried out at the Polaroid corporate archive at Harvard and at the Polaroid company itself in Waltham and Concord, Massachusetts. It sets out to make an addition to the understanding of the new social practices generated by digital photography, but does so by examining an old technology rendered obsolete by the new. It outlines the recent history and decline of Polaroid and identifies the specific properties of the Polaroid image: its speed of appearance, its elimination of the darkroom, and the singularity of the final print. It then addresses the significance of the affinities and differences between the old and new ‘instant’ photographies, particularly in terms of the snapshot practices that they encourage.

On the diagonal: Jacques Lacan’s reading lists

For all those who have been stymied by the dense thickets of the Écrits, it is some consolation that Jacques Lacan considered his own writing to be unreadable, not even meant for reading. He said so, with apparent amusement, in his seminar Encore in 1973: ‘Those Écrits, it’s widely known that they’re not easy to read. If I can make a little autobiographical confession – that’s exactly what I thought. I thought [...] they’re not for reading’. In his ‘Postface’ to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis he suggested, however, that it was a different matter with his first transcribed Seminar:

Ocho apellidos vascos and the Comedy of Minor Differences

This article examines the content, contexts, and intertexts of the Spanish romantic comedy Ocho apellidos vascos (Dir. Emilio Martínez-Lázaro, 2014). The film was the Spanish box office smash of 2014, and indeed of all time: within one month of its release it had attracted more spectators than any film screened in Spain except for Avatar. Critics spoke of “a social phenomenon,” trying to account for its huge success with national audiences. That success, the critics understood, had something to do with the ethnicities of the films two lovers—one Andalusian, the other Basque—and the setting of the film, a post-ETA Basque country. Finally, it was said, Spain was able to laugh at the longest-lasting historical trauma that it had endured in the post–civil war era, and by all accounts Basque audiences laughed along with the Spanish. In this article, we consider the ways in which the film makes use of comic conventions to broach problems of difference and conflict. The conflict in question is one that, until recently, has resolutely resisted comic treatment in Spanish film. However, as we demonstrate, Ocho apellidos vascos has not emerged in a vacuum but is, in fact, in dialogue with comic traditions that run from Berlanga to contemporary Basque television and the current trend of “post-humor” in Spanish and Catalan popular culture, particularly as disseminated on the Internet. If Ocho apellidos vascos has reached and satisfied such a wide audience in Spain, it is because it articulates a key message about regionalist and nationalist identifications in a post-ETA landscape. Drawing on psychoanalytical and other theories of humor and comedy, we show how the film is a careful work of compromise, eliding conflicts and dressing up minor differences as major ones.

Vernacular Photographic Genres after the Camera Phone

What is the place of photography in a book on genre? Genre theory, as Garin Dowd notes, has played a ‘minor role … in the areas of the musical, visual, and plastic arts’, with the most fertile ground found in literary studies (Dowd, 2006, p. 21). In genre studies, visual culture is nonetheless prominent, but mainly in its narrative-based forms, such as cinema and television. John Frow, in his introduction to genre, cites as relevant the following visual or plastic arts — drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, television, opera and drama — but does not mention photography (Frow, 2006, p. 1). In photography studies, meanwhile, genre is neither a key category of analysis nor subject to extensive theorization. Photography critics usually call their object a medium or consider it primarily a technology with specific properties, a distinction behind which many controversies rage. In the key volume Photography Theory, for example, central figures in photography studies lock horns and come to a stalemate over issues such as ‘medium specificity’ and photography’s ‘indexicality’ (Elkins, 2007, pp. 183–196, 256–269). Nowhere in this dispute does genre raise its head.

Psychoanalysis on Sunday: Lacan, Cinema, Comedy

This article examines the place of film comedy in Jacques Lacans psychoanalysis. It takes as its starting point Lacans 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 Lacans reading of the film in relation to his other interventions on cinema, which are scattered throughout 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 Lacans 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.

THE DOG AND THE PARAKEET: lacan among the animals

Abstract 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.

Introduction: Right in Front of our Eyes

One of the most popular, because easy to understand, products of contemporary cognitive psychology is the so-called ‘McGurk effect’. The effect was first outlined in Nature in 1976 by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald, who discovered by chance the potential for visual cues to interfere with auditory information in the perceptual field. Experiments have shown that if a sound recording of the same repeated phoneme (for example, ‘ba ba ba’) is paired with recordings of a set of lips pronouncing first the same phoneme (ba ba ba) and then a different one (for example, ‘fa fa fa’), the visual information will tend to override the auditory. More often than not, the perceiver of the audio-visual recording will first hear ‘ba ba ba’, and then hear ‘fa fa fa’, even though the sound has not in fact changed. The lessons derived from the McGurk effect are predictable: that speech perception depends on sensory integration, that vision is the dominant sense, and that our eyes can be tricked, or rather, that our eyes can trick our other senses.

Polaroid, aperture and Ansel Adams: rethinking the industry-aesthetics divide

This article takes the history of Polaroid photography as an opportunity to question a presupposition that underpins much thinking on photography: the split between industrial (i.e. useful) applications of photography and its fine art (i.e. aesthetic) manifestations. Critics as ideologically opposed as Peter Bunnell and Abigail Solomon-Godeau steadfastly maintain the existence of this separation of utility and aesthetics in photography, even if they take contrasting views on its meaning and desirability. However, Polaroid, at one time the second largest company in the photo industry, not only enjoyed close relations with those key representatives of fine art photography, Ansel Adams and the magazine Aperture, but it also intermittently asserted the ‘essentially aesthetic’ nature of its commercial and industrial activities in its own internal publications. The divide between industry and aesthetics is untenable, then, but this does not mean that the two poles were reconciled at Polaroid. While Aperture may have underplayed its commercial connections and Polaroid may have retrospectively exaggerated its own contributions to the development of fine art photography, most interesting are the contradictions and tensions that arise when the industrial and the aesthetic come together. The present article draws on original research undertaken at the Polaroid Corporation archives held at the Baker Library, Harvard, as well as with the Ansel Adams correspondence with Polaroid, held at the Polaroid Collections in Concord, Massachusetts.

Benjamin's 'Arcades': An Unguided Tour

Preface: Beginnings Acknowledgements 1. Encounters 2. Arcades 3. Method 4. Judaism 5. Modernity 6. Magic 7. Empathy- Einfuhlung 8. Insurrection 9. Angel of History 10. Awakening 11. Advertising 12. Nations 13. Jeux/Joie/Jouissance 14. Idleness 15. Night 16. Nazis Index