ACADEMIA Letters
Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the
Horror-Selfie
Abin Chakraborty
Introduction
Declared as “the international word of the year” by Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, the
‘selfie’ has become an integral part of the modern digital generation. According to OED, “a
selfie is a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or
webcam and uploaded to a social media website” (Oxford Dictionaries, 2013). Social media
sites continue to be flooded with millions of such photographs involving both celebrities and
ordinary citizens. As Brooke Wendt reports, “More than 130 million user images and videos
have been hashtagged with the word ‘selfie’ on Instagram. #I, #me, #myself, #self, #selfie,
#selfies, and #selfportrait account for over 439 million user images and videos as of June 2014”
on Instagram alone (Wendt 7). According to Google, in 2014, people took approximately 93
million selfies per day on just Android models (Brandt, 2014).
However, such rapidly growing popularity of selfies has also come under growing critical scrutiny from a variety of disciplines, many of which have been quite scathing of this
burgeoning cultural trend and what it connotes. Selfies have been associated with social
media-driven narcissism, (Nauert, 2015) the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathology and
Machiavellianism (Fox & Rooney, 2015), with body dysmorphia (McKay, 2014) and they
have been deemed harmful to others and capable of causing accidents. On the other hand,
selfies have also been associated with empowerment (Nemer and Freeman, 2015), therapeutic use of body-positive self image (Tiidenberg, 2014), an assertion of authenticity (Koliska
and Roberts, 2015) and so on.
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Abin Chakraborty, abin_chakraborty@yahoo.co.in
Citation: Chakraborty, A. (2021). Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the Horror-Selfie. Academia
Letters, Article 762. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL762.
1
India too has been a part of this global phenomenon as evident from numerous selfies
taken by celebrities, including statesmen, cricketers and actors, the advertisements of various
mobile phones which highlight the capacity to take excellent selfies and the way in which they
throng the social media circuits of ordinary Indians. However, the most significant indicator of
the popularity of selfies is perhaps a recent ‘bollywood’ song from a film starring Salman Khan
that almost serves as a universal invitation for taking selfies. My paper would be examining
a specific socio-cultural feature associated with such selfies by situating the practice within
the context of the gruesome events surrounding the house at 3, Robinson Street in Kolkata
which shot into the limelight in 2015. In the process, the article would also contest the claims
of certain Indian scholars like Pramod Nayar regarding the nature of selfies and what they
signify.
Examining the postmodern horror-selfie
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. 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” (Jameson
10). I will illustrate my arguments with the help of the fad for “horror selfies” in Kolkata
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, temporarily a veritable tourist spot in
the itinerary of the voyeuristic Bengali citizen.
From 11 June 2015, newspapers and news channels began to be flooded with news of the
death by fire of Aurobindo De and the consequent discovery of the decomposing skeleton her
daughter and the bones of her two pet dogs from their apartment which was also inhabited by
Partho De, Aurobindo De’s son and the bother of Debjani De. Apparently Partho had been
living with his sister’s corpse since December 2014, when she died and apparently the death
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Abin Chakraborty, abin_chakraborty@yahoo.co.in
Citation: Chakraborty, A. (2021). Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the Horror-Selfie. Academia
Letters, Article 762. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL762.
2
itself was brought about by the demise of her two pet dogs (Banerjee, 2015). As soon as
news of such perverse happenings began to spread, the house became a tourist attraction and
visitors frequently started taking selfies in front of the house, beginning a bizarre event of
tragedy tourism - a trend that was also witnessed during either the fire at Park Street or the
earthquake in Nepal.
But 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 nor 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 (Baudrillard 1), 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, far from being a mode of fashioning one’s own subjectivity becomes another
medium through which the depthless superficiality 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). 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…” (Jameson 14-15).
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
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Abin Chakraborty, abin_chakraborty@yahoo.co.in
Citation: Chakraborty, A. (2021). Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the Horror-Selfie. Academia
Letters, Article 762. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL762.
3
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 which 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.
Conclusion
Such waning or absence of affect, as well as ethics, points to a larger crisis regarding the very
constitution of the self in the contemporary postmodern society. Sentient beings are characterized by both their emotional responses or affect as well as their ethical perspectives that
determine their action. The apparent collapse of both our affective and ethical paradigms, as
demonstrated by the horror selfies and other related phenomena can only signify the emergence of a void which people attempt to fill, however unsuccessfully, either with recurrently
updated profile pictures or status updates or new acquisitions or through other performances
conditioned by a ceaseless repetition complex. This is precisely the kind of subject that late
capitalism ideally requires as absence of affect and ethics also means being indifferent to
the material predicaments experienced by oneself and others through one’s immersion in the
spectacle of the global market. Therefore, now, more than ever, it is ethically as well as aesthetically imperative to recuperate the anxiety and agony of either Edward Munch’s iconic
‘Scream’ or “The horror! The horror!” experienced by Conrad’s Kurtz as such works of art
help us recover the ethical and affective depth that the postmodern regime of images has dispensed with. Otherwise, like Eliot’s Hollow Men, we too would soon be flapping in the wind,
selfies filled with straw.
Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Abin Chakraborty, abin_chakraborty@yahoo.co.in
Citation: Chakraborty, A. (2021). Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the Horror-Selfie. Academia
Letters, Article 762. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL762.
4
References
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Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Abin Chakraborty, abin_chakraborty@yahoo.co.in
Citation: Chakraborty, A. (2021). Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the Horror-Selfie. Academia
Letters, Article 762. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL762.
5
12. Tamaghna Banerjee, “Here’s looking at you horror house”, The Telegraph, 16 June
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jsp#.V9w13fl97IV
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Academia Letters, March 2021
©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0
Corresponding Author: Abin Chakraborty, abin_chakraborty@yahoo.co.in
Citation: Chakraborty, A. (2021). Skeletons and Beyond: ‘Waning of Affect’ and the Horror-Selfie. Academia
Letters, Article 762. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL762.
6