Source:
Times of India, Kolkata City edition, 18 June 2015 &Tumblr.com
In an essay entitled
the “The Selfie and the World” Pramod Nayar states:
The
selfie, this essay argues, is a means of social interaction. It is a mediated
presentation of the self that then interfaces, digitally but no less
materially, with the world. The selfie is an act of agency that allows the
individual to interrupt or punctuate the flow of information and conversation
around and about her/himself even as s/he participates in this flow. (Nayar 79)
He then goes on enlist the various
features associated with the vogue of selfies such as the urge to script
ourselves as subjects, the primacy of the body even in the digital age, self-image
as a tool of “empowered exhibitionism” that may even create a culture of
counter-surveillance or endow one with a positive body-image or as a modality
of being within a technological medium of continuous spectacles, visibility and
mutability[i].
What the article does not interrogate is the extent to which the vogue for the
selfies caters to a pervasive postmodern culture where the image reigns supreme
with a hyperreal aura that alluringly invites us to a fragmented dehistoricised
world marked by what Fredric Jameson would call the “waning of affect”. Let me
illustrate what I mean with the help of the recent fad for “horror selfies” in
Kolkata, as pointed out in the earlier article “Skeletons Out of Our Closet”,
in the wake of the so called skeleton-saga revolving around the shocking event
of horror and intrigue involving the residents of 3, Robinson Street, now a veritable
tourist spot in the itinerary of the voyeuristic Bengali citizen.
What sort of
empowered exhibitionism is performed by taking a picture of oneself with a
smiling face while standing in front of a house that has been the seat of
unexpected perversion, horror and trauma? This is neither simple indifference
or insensitivity nor a desperate quest for 15 seconds of fame among the tweeple
or other digizens. Instead the dissonance between the facial expression of the selfie
takers and the grim reality associated with the events that had taken place in
the house in the background point perhaps to a dissociation between the
signifier and the signified which constitutes the age of the hyperreal in
Baudrillard’s terms, where individuals are becoming willing inhabitants of a
simulacra in which horror fails to frighten, death fails to sadden and the
grotesque fails to disgust. What all of this points to, is a digital economy of
images where ethics and affect are equally absent. Since individuals as
subjects are themselves becoming pre-coded by one trend or another (from
clothes, to food, to how you spend time with your beloved to how you organize
your marriage and so on), the entire psychopathology of the individual, within
which such concerns and resultant emotions of anxiety could have been located,
disappears as well. The selfie, therefore, though prompted by a “passion for
the real”, far from being a mode of fashioning one’s own subjectivity becomes another
medium through which the depthless superificiality of postmodern culture, which
Jameson illustrates through paintings of Andy Warhol, comes to the foreground. It
welcomes us to what Žižek would call the ‘Desert of the Real’ where we
encounter a “‘derealization’ of the horror” (Žižek 13)[ii].
Incidentally,
this waning of affect is nothing new in the domain of Indian culture in
general. In the famous Bollywood film, 3
Idiots, starring Aamir Khan, the poverty endured by the family members of
the character played by Sharman Joshi was consistently portrayed through black
and white shots that represented the present through a loop into the 1950s and
60s and the black and white films of those ages. In the process the
debilitating poverty of the family, far from being a source of pathos, became a
source of almost universal laughter and the laughter was made possible by the
dehistoricising mechanism of the film which relegated concerns regarding
vegetable prices to an apparently archaic past, thus unmooring the film from
the lived reality of inflation, starvation deaths and the growing gulf between
rich and poor in the ‘shining India’ of the 21st century. Instead
there only remains the amply marketable tricks of what Jameson would call
“gratuitous frivolity” which again reappears through the horror-selfies doing
the rounds. It is in this context that Jameson further adds,
As for expression
and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the
older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a
liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as
well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling. This is not to
say that the cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of
feeling, but rather that such feelings -- which it may be better and more
accurate, following J.-F. Lyotard, to call "intensities" -- are now
free-floating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of
euphoria…[iii]
It is the same euphoria
that again reveals itself through other online phenomena such as funeral selfies, duckfaces in front of the Vietnam War Memorial and even a Chernobyl Selfie. The latest in this line was an Auschwitz Selfie taken by an American
teenager who could be seen grinning from ear to ear while standing in front of
the erstwhile Nazi prisons inside the notorious concentration camp. In all of
these cases the insurmountable trauma and horror associated with these events
for millions of people became blithely substituted by the carefree euphoria of
the selfie which instantly emptied those sites and memorials of their
significances within the confines of the pictures that immediately went viral
as well. In case of the horror selfies surrounding the incidents of Robinson
Street in Kolkata even the temporal distance applicable in case of the earlier
events becomes negated and a site of appalling disgust becomes an object of
voyeuristic curiosity devoid of ethical or affective paradigms.
Now, more than
ever, it is ethically as well as aesthetically imperative to recuperate the
anxiety and agony of either Edward Much’s iconic ‘Scream’ or “The horror! The
horror!” experienced by Conrad’s Kurtz as such works of art help us recover the
depth of affects and sensibilities that the postmodern regime of images has
dispensed with. Otherwise we too would
soon be flapping in the wind, selfies filled with straw.
Edward Munch's The Scream. Source: Wikipedia
--- Abin Chakraborty
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