A Brief Note on Cursed Images

The first image posted on cursedimages.tumblr.com 

(28 October, 2015)

 

 

For those who don't know, a cursed image refers to picture - usually a photograph - that in someway unsettles the viewer. The term originates from a Tumblr blog established by an anonymous female film student in 2015 and rapidly spread across all forms of social media. 

 

But what, I hear you ask, actually constitutes such a picture? 

 

Well, an image might be described as cursed due to its content, some technical aspect, or the context in which it was taken or is viewed. Or it might simply possess a mysterious quality that is not quite possible to pin-point, but which nevertheless gives people the willies. 

 

As one commentator rightly says, if a picture needs a caption underneath to explain why it's cursed, then it isn't cursed. 

 

Uncanny ambiguity and a kind of abject (and amateurish) surrealism are key and the very best images oblige the viewer not only to wonder what it is they're looking at or try to figure out the intention of the photographer in taking such a shot, but question the nature of everyday reality and their own place within it. 

 

Thus, cursed images have an existential import, as mundane objects - such as a crate of tomatoes - suddenly appear uncanny, even evil. And yet, as Matt Moen notes:

 

"In a chaotic world that seems to defy logic more and more with each passing day, the cursed image offers us a perverse sense of comfort by reaffirming the fact that it's not just us who seem to be going crazy." [1]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Matt Moen, 'Cursed Images: Finding Comfort in Discomfort', on papermag.com (09 Dec 2019): click here. 

      In the same piece, Moen also makes the important point that the cursed image presents a direct challenge to the carefully photoshopped or deepfake picture by "positing a reality that is far stranger than anything we could fabricate".

 

 

A follow up post to this one on derealisation suggests my photos are more the product of mental dysfunction than the desire to follow social media trends, or subscribe to a creepy aesthetic: click here.  

 

Douglas Murray: The Madness of Crowds

Bloomsbury (2019)

Douglas Murray's new book is conveniently divided into four main sections headed by a single term (dramatically printed in bold even on the contents page): Gay - Women - Race - Trans

Each of these terms plays a foundational role within contemporary culture; they are the four pillars of postmodernity; the terms to which all paths lead and all other signifiers refer. Whilst they provide meaning and allow individuals to forge identities, they are also the true causes of the collective insanity that lies at the root of what is happening today.

That - in brief - is Murray's central argument; one with cultural and socio-political aspects, but which essentially remains a philosophical argument to do with the collapse of old values in an age after God, when even the secular narratives that initially promised to fill the void no longer retain our belief.     

The problem is, Murray is not a philosopher; he's a journalist and public intellectual. And so his analysis tends to be common sensical rather than conceptually challenging and when he does mention philosophers by name, it's only ever in passing and nearly always in a dismissive manner - never once does he engage with their ideas or even think it might be worthwhile to do so.

And that's a real problem for me - even if, broadly speaking, I agree with Murray on many points and share some of his concerns. Perhaps if he did read the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze with serious critical attention he might understand a little better why we are where we are and avoid the anglophonic arrogance that he and others of his ilk (Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro) are prone to.          


Gay

According to Murray, Foucault's views on homosexuality are deeply confused. I don't think that's true: I think, rather, that Murray dislikes any degree of ambiguity and, in the end, Foucault is a little too radical and a little too queer for his liking. For whereas gays, such as himself, want social acceptance and pride themselves on their respectability, "queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into" [37]. 

For Murray, irresponsible queers - along with radical feminists, black militants and trans activists - take things too far; instead of seeking liberal consensus and some form of historical resolution, they just keep banging on about power and politics, identity and intersectionality:

"Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing  how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren't very good at living with each other." [4]

Murray's fear is that this risks a backlash that would threaten some of the advances made in civil rights and sexual freedoms that he supports: "After all it is not clear that majority populations will continue to accept the claims they are being told to accept and continue to be cowed by the names that are thrown at them if they do not." [232]

That's a very reasonable concern, but, ironically, some critics would argue that his moral conservatism is part of that reaction.    


Women

Murray's wish that we might all just get along is developed in his chapter on women and the relations between the sexes. But he seems to think that we'll never get along until everyone acknowledges the innate biological differences between men and women (including aptitude differences) and accepts these as a basis for ordering society, rather than the "political falsehoods pushed by activists in the social sciences" [65]. 

The problem is, of course, that even biological facts are subject to cultural and socio-political interpretation. And even if we could identify biological facts concerning sexual difference in and of themselves, Murray doesn't provide any reason why they should be inscribed within society and its institutions as natural law; why biology should become not only a determining factor but a destiny.  

Murray also worries far too much about silly slogans, hashtags, and memes on social media that betray an apparent war on men being fought by man-hating fourth-wave feminists: things such as 'men are trash', 'kill all men', and references to 'toxic masculinity', etc.

I'm surprised Mr. Murray has the the time or patience to read the latest tweets from Laurie Penny et al and would suggest he spend less time on social media (which, in an interlude following this chapter, he describes as a massively disruptive force that dissolves the public/private distinction and ultimately leads to group think and mass hysteria).*     

Race

It's not only queers, feminists, and the tech giants of Silicon Valley who are foisting us off with "things [we] didn't ask for, in line with a project [we] didn't sign up for, in pursuit of a goal [we] may not want" [120], it's also those anti-racists who "turn race from one of many important issues into something which is more important than anything else" [122], writes Murray.  

Just when black and white people were learning to live together in the same perfect harmony as the keys on Paul and Stevie's piano, along came critical race theory and black studies to fuck things up with "a newly fervent rhetoric and set of ideas" [122] that don't simply celebrate blackness, but problematise (and even demonise) whiteness.

Why, it's almost as if race were a political issue to do with power and privilege ... things which, as we have noted, Murray wishes to turn a blind eye to; just as he wants us all to be colour-blind: "the idea of which Martin Luther King was dreaming in 1963" [126]. To get beyond race is such a beautiful thought, says Murray. But, obviously, it's not going to happen: not least of all because race isn't simply a question of skin colour, as Murray acknowledges; it's a time bomb.  
 

Trans

Murray writes:

"Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans [...] trans has become something close to a dogma in record time." [186]

That, unfortunately, seems to be the case: and whilst I have no problem with trans individuals, dogma and/or doxa, should always be challenged - even genderqueer dogma.

Anyway, moving on ... I was fascinated to discover that:

"One of the most striking trends as the trans debate has picked up in recent years is that autogynephilia has come to be severely out of favour. Or to put it another way, the suggestion that people who identify as trans are in actual fact merely going through the ultimate extreme of sexual kink has become so hateful to many trans individuals that it is one of a number of things now decried as hate speech." [196]

This surprised (and disappointed) me as someone who has written positively about autogynephilia and eonism in the past on Torpedo the Ark: click here, for example. Why must everything - even changing sex - be presented as a spiritual journey and an issue to do with human rights?**

Call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather think in terms of desire and seduction, perversion and pathology. And if I were a transwoman, the last thing I'd want to be is some kind of sexless figure like a nun whose newly constructed vagina is a sign of sacrifice and suffering rather than a site of potential pleasure.    

To conclude: The Madness of Crowds is an informative and interesting book, rather than an important and inspired one; a piece of intelligent journalism, rather than a work of philosophy. A book that ends with a call to love, as if it weren't precisely such idealism that got us into the mess we're in today.

Notes

* Murray will later go on to say: "The arrival of the age of social media has done things we still have barely begun to understand and presented problems with which we have hardly started to grapple. The collapse of the barrier between private and public language is one. But bigger even than that [...] is the deepest problem of all: that we have allowed ourselves no mechanisms for getting out of the situation technology has landed us in. It appears able to cause catastrophes but not to heal them, to wound but not to remedy." [174]

One suggests Murray read (or re-read) Heidegger's classic 1954 essay The Question Concerning Technology, which might deepen his thinking on this point and also provide him with a wider perspective. I suspect, however, that Heidegger would be another of those philosophers that he'd dismiss for lacking clarity (though he could hardly accuse the latter of being a crypto-Marxist).  

** Murray provides the answer to this question:

"If people have a particular sexual kink then [...] it is hard to persuade society that it should change nearly all of its social and linguistic norms in order to accommodate those sexual kinks.  [...]
      If trans were largely, mainly or solely about erotc stimulation then it should no more be a cause to change any societal fundamentals than it would be to change them for people who get a sexual thrill from wearing rubber. Autogynephilia risks presenting trans as a softwear [i.e. non-biological] issue. And that is the cause of the turn against it. For - as with homosexuals - there is a drive to prove that trans people are 'born this way'." [198-99] 

Readers might be interested in a post on Douglas Murray's previous book, The Strange Death of Europe (2017): click here.        

What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

But don't tell my heart / My achy breaky heart

I just don't think he'd understand

As Nietzsche was fond of pointing out, in so far as antithetical values exist, then things often originate in their opposite.

Thus, it's not surprising that the modern American success story is one rooted in the terrible failure of the original pioneers in conflict with the inhuman conditions of the continent itself. They eventually tamed the American wilderness, but at an appalling cost to themselves and it was later generations who reaped the reward of their efforts.    

D. H. Lawrence, who has a unique insight into American history and literature, identifies this cost, arguing that in order to break the back of the country, the early Americans had to sacrifice something essential within themselves: "the softness, the floweriness, the natural tenderness" [119].  

In other words, America was conquered and subdued, but only once the pioneers were heart broken.

This broken heartedness had two main consequences: firstly, the people became creatures of pure will; secondly, they (unconsciously) became physically repulsive to one another. With regard to the first of these consequences, Lawrence writes:

"The heart was broken. But the will, the determination to conquer the land and make it submit to productivity, this was not broken. The will-to-success and the will-to-produce became clean and indomitable once the sympathetic heart was broken." [120] 

Having repeatedly come up against the malevolent spirit of the American continent and been defeated by it, the early settlers lost their instinctive belief in the inherent kindness of other people and the essential goodness of the universe itself (a belief which, according to Lawrence, lies at the core of the human heart).

When this happens, the result is either "despair, bitterness, and cynicism" [120], or people make their hearts hard - hard enough to eventually shatter - and exercise a new (individual) will; a will-to-succeed if possible, but, ultimately, to persist no matter what and in the face of everything:

"It is not animality - far from it. [...] They have a strange, stony will-to-persist, that is all. [...] It is a minimum lower than the savage [...] Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousness except that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest."[123]

Of course, they continue to worship a benevolent God and subscribe to a moral world order - continue to be good neighbours and upstanding citizens, etc. - but their faith and behaviour no longer comes from the heart and they are no longer genuinely connected by a shared warmth of fellow-feeling. They fall out of touch into wilfulness and idealism. And this leads to the second consequence:

"While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another [...] They smell in each other's nostrils. [...] Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually." [121]

I don't know if there's any truth in this great psychic and physical transformation, but, amusingly, it helps Lawrence explain the American twin obsessions with plumbing and personal hygiene:

"The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American 'plumbing', American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and anti-septic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about 'halitosis', or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don't mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement." [121] 
 
As Lawrence goes on to note, this repulsion for the physicality of others - and, indeed, our own bodies - has spread from America to Europe and the rest of the modern world, as our literature reveals:

"There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in André Gide [...] in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience." [122]

Of course, Lawrence wrote this ninety years ago, so doubtless things have changed since then; though whether they have changed for the better or for the worse is debatable. Perhaps the inward revulsion for any kind of physical contact with other people has only intensified and extended - thus the triumph of social media.

For whilst there may be various forms of online abuse and trolling to contend with, at least friends don't smell on Facebook ...

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Bottom Dogs, by Edward Dahlberg', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 117-24. All page refs. given in the post are to this work.   

It's worth noting that despite what Lawrence says here about the dangers of a broken heart, he had himself expressed a poetic preference for such: "For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. / It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack." See 'Pomegranate', in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923): click here to read online. It can also be found in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), on p. 231. 

The image used for this post is the Broken Heart Emoji on Apple iOS 11.2: see emojipedia.org for details.

The lyric quoted underneath is from 'Achy Breaky Heart', a country song written by Donald L. Von Tress and most famously recorded by Billy Ray Cyrus for the album Some Gave All (Mercury Records, 1992). The track was also released as a single on 23 March 1992. The lyrics are © Universal Music Publishing Group.

PC Plod Wants You to Think Nice Thoughts

It seems that in the wake of the recent Islamist terror attacks in Manchester and London, several police forces up and down the UK - at the bidding of their political puppet-masters - are issuing warnings to users of social media to think carefully about what they're posting. 

The force in Cheshire, for example, have a notice (dated June 6th) on their Facebook page that reads: 

"Although you may believe your message is acceptable, other people may take offence, and you could face a large fine or up to two years in prison if your message is deemed to have broken the law."

This, I must say, is pretty outrageous and has rightly attracted the scornful attention of those who know how the often spurious charge of hate crime is frequently used to justify the closing down of free speech and serious debate.

One person responded, for example, by pointing out the ludicrous nature of a situation in which there are insufficient resources to fully monitor the thousands of suspected extremists residing in the UK - including the 650 jihadis known to have returned after fighting for IS - but money and manpower is made available to keep an eye on Facebook, just in case someone somewhere says something that might possibly hurt someone else's feelings.

As several other people angrily informed Cheshire police, it's this abject pandering to political correctness whilst victims of recent atrocities are still being mourned, which causes the greatest offence.

However, as Breitbart journalist Jack Montgomery reminds us, the Cheshire Constabulary are by no means the first British force to be criticised for an apparent obsession with policing social media: Greater Glasgow Police, for example, was roundly mocked after warning Twitter users to think carefully before posting and to always use the internet safely following the Brussels bombings in March 2016.

In this case, the police even provided members of the public with a convenient list of questions (see above) that should always be asked before venturing an opinion - a list which must have George Orwell spinning in his grave ...