Corporate Cannibal

This week's post is on the Steven Shaviro's "Post-Cinematic Affect". In it, Shaviro writes on Grace Jones, and her music video for "Corporate Cannibal". Having seen the video, immediately it has a sort of 90's pop music feel to it, which is surprising since it was made in 2008.

In a twitter conversation, a number of questions arose regarding the video visual elements and its content. For example, what is it about the pause after the word "man" in the lyric "I am a man _____ eating machine"? Is it that man is eating machine (perhaps corporate machine)? or a machine who was created to consume man. I wondered about this considering the notion of "creating" persons through the phenomenon of celebrity.

Could it also be that the manipulation of Grace Jones throughout the video was a sort of experimentation with identity? Was Grace Jones creating herself? As Shaviro explains, she is consistently recognizable especially due to her confrontational presence. The thought here is that the aggressive visual fluctuation in the video demanded a sort of acknowledgement. Despite its shifting, the fact that she occasionally returns to a recognizable version of herself implies a sort of command over form.