Post Cinematic Affect Final:Layout 1 7/21/2010 8:57 PM Page 18 Post-Cinematic Affect and her voice – the dividual elements of her persona – are themselves, already, electricity, light (or darkness) and sound, digital matrix and intense vibration. Nick Hooker does not manipulate Jones’ image, so much as he modulates, and actively recomposes, the electronic signals that she already is, and whose interplay defines the field of her becoming.17 In other words, the electronic image is one more iteration – and a particularly visceral one, at that – of “Grace Jones” as a celebrity icon. I say iteration, rather than version, or copy, because there is no original, or Platonic ideal, of a celebrity: all instances are generated through the same processes of composition and modulation, and therefore any instance is as valid (or “authentic”) as any other. “Corporate Cannibal” is only the most recent in a long string of Jones’ reinventions of herself. Over the course of her career, she has continually rearranged her body, her appearance, and her overall persona. Now, there may well be a gap between Grace Jones the private person, and “Grace Jones” the iconic celebrity. Indeed, Jean-Paul Goude, Jones’ partner and artistic collaborator in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the father of her son, says that their personal relationship fell apart when Jones “felt I had started to love the character we had created more than I loved her” (McDowell 2005). But the very point of this anecdote is that “Grace Jones,” the character or persona, exists actually in the world, just as much as Jones the private person does – and precisely because these two do not coincide. Jones the private person is not the model, or the privileged source, of Jones the icon. If anything, the problem for Goude, and perhaps for us as well, has to do with whether it is even possible for Jones the human person to have as full an existence as her image does: to live up to the demands, and the promises, of Jones the celebrity figure.18 In any case, the iconic “Grace Jones” is just as ‘real’ an object, or a presence, as any other – even if its mode of being involves, not just the medium of the flesh, but many other media as well. We encounter “Grace Jones” 18
Post Cinematic Affect Final:Layout 1 7/21/2010 8:57 PM Page 31 Corporate Cannibal concepts. Beyond all those enthralling discourses about race and gender and power and “the body,” the only thing that remains “transgressive” today is capital itself, which devours everything without any regard for boundaries, distinctions, or degrees of legitimacy. Postmodern finance capital “transgresses” the very possibility of “transgression,” because it is always only transgressing itself in order to create still more of itself, devouring not only its own tail but its entire body, in order to achieve even greater levels of monstrosity. Of course, all this has grave consequences for the Afrofuturist project. Without transgression, how can there be transformation or transcendence? In his “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” (2003), Kodwo Eshun points out how problematic posthuman futurism has become, at a time when the dominant order is itself entirely futuristic and science fictional: “power now operates predictively as much as retrospectively. Capital continues to function through the dissimulation of the imperial archive, as it has done throughout the last century. Today, however, power also functions through the envisioning, management, and delivery of reliable futures… The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past” (289). In consequence, the very idea of “the future” seems to have been drained of all hope and all potential. This “future” leaves us blank and numb, even as it arrives in the present and radically changes our lives. In his 1983 film Videodrome, David Cronenberg imagined a “new flesh” of visceral video embodiment. This “new flesh” was a source of both wonder and terror, as well as a political battleground: “the battle for the mind of North America,” we were told, “will be fought in the video arena – the videodrome.” But today, Cronenberg’s extreme vision has become a banal actuality: this is the real message of “Corporate Cannibal.” Grace Jones’ modulating electronic flesh is the chronic condition of our hypermodernity, rather than a radical 31