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Reflections on Notes on Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales (Steven Shaviro)

In this reflection, I will focus on the sections of Shaviro’s article, Notes on Post Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales, published in Vol.14 of Film Philosophy, dealing with the affective qualities of Grace Jones’ ‘Corporate Cannibal’ video. Shaviro’s attention to Jones, a Jamaican born media icon, connected with my thirst for qualitative media research about Caribbean induced phenomena. More profoundly, the article attracted my attention because of its promise to offer sophisticated insight into cinematic affect.

Shaviro’s thesis posits that the framing of Jones’ media image is both empowering and problematic. While it repositions black femininity beyond the bonds of hegemonic containment, it inadvertently operates to reformulate racial and patriarchal tropes that distort powerful feminist and anti-racial arguments. He concedes that despite these reservations, Jones plays an important role in interpreting the Afrofuturist paradigm. If anything, she disrupts it, upending it, and wrong siding it to inspire new interpretations.   

Shaviro believes that as forms of expressions, media products are both symptomatic and productive. They are symptomatic, because they tap the complex social processes of human interaction, contorting and transforming them into what Deleuze and Guattari calls “blocs of affect”. Alternatively, in their productive form, they acquire an inherent degree of agency, which works to constitute the very processes within which they emerge.

From the onset, readers need to appreciate the distinction between classical cinema and digital cinema in attending to Sahviro’s analysis of Jones’ media positioning. He turns to Deleuze to settle on the form’s two separate technological characteristics, noting “Where classical cinema was analogical and indexical, digital video is processual and combinatorial.”  For Deleuze digital video allows for the creation of meta-identities, through decomposition, recomposition, and the manipulation of a range of independent parameters (Deleuze 1995, 180, 182).

Within the capitalist system, digital media becomes a powerful and profitable mode of production, not unlike classical cinema. Shaviro notes, “Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance (p.2).The ensuing product of these production processes are not only tangible commodities, but also affective phenomena with innate exchange value. Therefore, media products such as films and videos become machines for generating affect. “As such, they are not ideological superstructures, as an older sort of Marxist criticism would have it. Rather, they lie at the very heart of social production, circulation and distribution. They generate subjectivity and they play a crucial role in the valorisation of capital,” he writes (p.3).  

Shaviro warns that this affect is not emotion, but rather beyond it, more abysmal and unconscious. He calls on Brian Massumi (20002) to emphasis this distinction. “For Massumi, affect is primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presubjective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive; while emotion is derivative, conscious, qualified and meaningful, a ‘content’ that can be attributed to an already-constituted subject.” In that sense, affect then is the reification of some affective dynamic (p.3). Hence, from the capitalist perspective, emotions are commodities for investment, but emotion is not so submissive, neither is it so easily captured, and almost always, as Massumi notes, there is a surplus that eludes its captors (Massumi 2002, 35) (p.4)

Shaviro rejects the traditional tendencies in scholarship to distance affect theory from Marxist theory, by arguing that they operate on a similar plain. “In a certain sense, emotion is to affect as, in Marxist theory, labour-power is to labour. For labour itself is an unqualifiable capacity, while labour-power is a quantifiable commodity that is possessed, and that can be sold, by the worker,” he notes (p.4)

Following Jameson, Delueze, and Guattari, Shaviro approaches films and music videos as affective maps that actively work to construct and mediate social relationships and manipulate individual feelings. He maps affective flows in three chutes: the ‘control society’, financial flows, and allures. The notion of the ‘control society actually belongs to Deleuze, who uses it to discount Foucault’s panoptical society. In its most basic form, it explains how capitalism commodifies, brands, and markets the subjective experience (p.8). The second dimension, financial flows, incorporates economic derivates and instruments that nurture the global economy, and allure refers to the attraction of an object beyond its conspicuous qualities, which in pop culture is usually loaded with affective power.

Grace Jones’ Corporate Cannibal video was posted on You Tube on July 4, 2008, and has so far received almost one and a half million hits. The video is a critique of capitalism both lyrically and visually. Jones’ overexposed and oversaturated blackness contorts and squirms into a hypnotic cadence that foregrounds the superhuman distortion of her body as a carnivorous metaphor of the capitalist structure. For Shaviro, the ‘Corporate Cannibal’ video speaks more to the effect of modulation than of metamorphosis, pointing out that “Metamorphosis is expansive and open-ended, while modulation is schematic and implosive. Metamorphosis implies ‘the ability…to move laterally across categories’ (Krasniewicz 2000, 53); (p.14).

This manipulation of Jones’ figure embodies modulation as the apex of what Deleuze considers the control society. For Deleuze, modulation functions, ‘like a selftransmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another’ (Deleuze 1995 (p.15). The exaggerated and surreal space in which the video positions Jones’ body conjures asexual and racial quandaries, but Shaviro reads them unconventionally, seeing Jones’ body primarily as a machine, “an electronic signal whose modulations pulse across the screen (p.16). Shaviro critical stance subscribes to the concept of the relational space advance by Leibniz, Whitehead and Harvey, which hold that the creation of space is inseparable from the process which defined them (Harvey 2006, 123).

According to Shaviro, Jones’ image therefore becomes resistant and revolutionary. He writes, “She does not just give voice to a black female perspective that was previously excluded from public expression. In addition, she also transgresses the very sense of what it means

to be a self or a subject at all (p.17). From this viewpoint, by shredding her human physiology, Jones, promotes the Afrofuturist tradition of resituating historical injustices of black people into a futuristic critique. Indeed it was capitalism and the Anglo-Saxon order that raped her ancestors of their humanity, transforming them into things, through slavery and endemic racism. It is the same capitalism that delimited women into spheres of commodification. Corporate Cannibal, therefore, becomes Jones condemnation of this very institution, and within it Shaviro believes, “She revivifies, and reclaims the powers latent within, all of these reifications. She embodies, and transmits, flows of affect that are so intense, and so impersonal and inhuman, that they cannot be contained within traditional forms of subjectivity (p.19).

Jones’ video does, however, present a dichotomy, for her resistance is situated within the structures and models of the very capitalism that she attacks. She is then schizophrenic: both anti-capitalist and capitalist in one, a contradiction which Francesca Royster sees as a common feature of her repertoire. Shaviro agrees with Royster noting that “Jones has always been an aesthetic and cultural extremist. But ‘Corporate Cannibal’ gives extreme expression to a world in which there are no extremes any longer – since everything can be tweaked or  modulated in one way or another, until it finds a niche within which it can be successfully marketed” (Royster 2009, 91) 

Jones' manipulation of race, sexuality, and gender to serve capitalist interests strains the Afrofuturists project, since the manufacturing of future reality is now big business.  Eshun notes, “The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past’ (p.289).

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     Shaviro, S. (2010) Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate, and Southland Tales," Film-Philosophy 14:1