Pandora’s Box
Avatar, Ecology, Thought
TIMOTHY MORTON
The movie Avatar was so successful because it speaks, and fails to speak, about issues related to ecology, environment, and world, some of the most pressing issues of our age.1 And yet, despite the surface-level anticapitalist and anticolonialist appearance of Avatar, the picture is more complex. Avatar acknowledges the philosophical and political dilemma we face around ecological thought while failing to resolve it. This dilemma is precisely to do with thought and thinking at the very moment at which humans have begun to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth’s crust, thus opening the intersection of human history and geological time now known as the Anthropocene. In this essay, I shall argue that Avatar performs a kind of chiasmic figure-of-eight: on the one hand, it gives us a sense of being-in-a-world that I argue is strictly untenable in an era of ecological emergency; on the other hand, Avatar dissolves this very sense of “being-in”—taking with one hand what it gives with the other. What the Kantian revolution in philosophy opened was, to use a pun that I shall use perhaps too often here, a Pandora’s box that allowed both for the ultimate expression thus far of human nihilism and instrumental reason and for the very ecological awareness that brings this nihilism not so much to an end but to its logical conclusion: reason as both poison and cure, as homeopathic medicine. In so doing, I show that Avatar is not the total assault on modernity it seems to be but holds out, rather, the possibility of a logical conclusion to modernity.
Environmental philosophy often claims to be Heideggerian, but what does this mean? It usually amounts to asserting, without much substantiation, that humans are embedded in a world. A careful reading of Heidegger, however, demonstrates that this view could not be less Heideggerian. On the contrary, as I shall argue in this essay, the fully Heideggerian view is the feeling that the world has suddenly disappeared. This feeling is highly congruent with contemporary developments in the cultural imaginary of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is that geological period defined by the deposition of a fine layer of carbon in Earth’s crust as a result of human activity, starting around 1790. What is called the Great Acceleration logarithmically sped up the processes of the Anthropocene when the Gadget (Trinity test), Little Boy (Hiroshima), and Fat Boy (Nagasaki) began to deposit radioactive materials in Earth’s crust in 1945. The precision with which geology measures this date (against the incomprehensible vastness of geological time) is itself a symptom of the profound disorientation of habitual views of world. These views depend for their coherence on a stable enough contrast between a foreground and a background—but in an era of global warming, no such contrast is available to us.
This chapter shall therefore argue that the notion of “planetary awareness,” then, far from being a utopian upgrade of normative embeddedness ideology, is instead an uncanny realization of coexistence with a plenum of ungraspable hyperobjects—entities such as climate and evolution that can be computed but that cannot directly be seen or touched (unlike weather or this rabbit, respectively)—and nonhuman beings. Moreover, the sense of being “in” a world itself is, in Heideggerian terms, a covering over of the very being that it endeavors to assert. The anthem of the current era, instead, is “We Aren’t the World.” As we shall see, Avatar dramatizes this perilous ambiguity. On one hand, its stunningly immersive graphics and sentimental suction make us feel as if we are practically enveloped by its world. On the other hand, the disorientating scales and strange luminous aesthetics of the Pandoran forest and its inhabitants promise something much more disturbing, and, I shall argue, much more ecological.
OF PLANET-SENSE
One of the key charms of Avatar is its dramatization of a fantasy about distributed interaction (where action takes place in multiple places and times at once, owing to devices such as internet technology), a fantasy that one can’t help seeing as a displacement of human hopes and fears about online activity and identity; the very term avatar, it is well known, denotes an immaterial “skin” for an online space. The Na’vi are connected to their planet, Pandora, via a kind of organic Internet, a “living,” breathing “good” version of the “bad” interconnection of the humans. The plot is essentially that the protagonist, Jake Sully, gradually identifies with, then fully pours himself into, his Na’vi avatar. It is more desirable to be one of the Na’vi, because they are not dislocated from their planet as humans are. In part, this is because the planet Pandora itself provides them with a palpable communal awareness, a thrilling mirror play of feedback: the planet’s entire biosphere is a brain–mind. I shall be calling this feedback awareness planet-sense.
In this section I play on the possibility that the phrase “sense of planet”—as in Ursula Heise’s book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet—is in fact a subjective genitive, which is to say that “sense of planet” means that the planet itself can “sense.”2 Even if humans are the only “persons” on Earth, which now seems astonishingly unlikely, they act as the planet’s sense organs insofar as they are its direct outgrowths, and insofar as sentience just is an “interobjective” system’s emergence as information-for some “perceiver.” That is to say, sentience is somewhat in the eye of the beholder: as we now know, for instance, plants are in some respects sentient, though they lack the hardware that animals have. But Earth senses us in a far deeper and more disturbing way, since environmental awareness is predicated on an always-already. Our fear as to whether global warming has started or not is directly correlated to our uncertainty as to what the weather is telling us. This fear and uncertainty is an ironic product of the fact that global warming has indeed started. Unable to see it directly, we assess global warming insofar as it takes the measure of us. A tsunami assesses the fragility of a Japanese town. An earthquake probes the ability of humans and their equipment to resist the liquefaction of crust. A heat wave scans us with ultraviolet rays. These largely harmful measurements direct our attention to human coexistence with other life-forms inside a gigantic object that just is, yet is not reducible to, these life-forms and ourselves. The Anthropocene—the term for human intervention on a scale recognizable in geological time—is the ironic name for a moment at which the nonhuman is discerned to be inextricable from the human, a variation of the noir plot of the Oedipus story in which the measurer turns out to be the measured. To understand the contemporary age, then, is to understand the form of the Oedipus story—namely, how we still remain within the confines of agricultural ritual, a plot that plots the world as graspable, technical object and horizon, a plot that eventually leads nowhere but to what I shall define precisely as a specific kind of doom. What underlies sense of planet, then, is planet-sense, experienced by humans as physical enmeshment in a trap that is by no means free, pleasant, or utopian, precisely to the extent that it is a “global” awareness—but cognitively liberating nonetheless.
This is not the political affect of planet-sense in Avatar. Indeed, the movie seems designed quite specifically to thwart this weird, “evil” loop, the Möbius strip that defines the contours of ecological awareness. Evil indeed is a banned category in the movie, which seems rather to operate with a Spinozan (that is to say, Californian) logic of health and pathology. One way to understand the work movies do is to imagine that they embody forms of thinking.
Let’s do a thought experiment and wonder what it would be like if the universe were structured according to the logic of the film. It makes sense sometimes to look at movies this way—as pictures of the world, just like philosophy. One way to understand such pictures is to magnify them by imagining what reality would be like if the picture were wildly, totally successful. We shall see that the reality of Avatar is one in which things like planets can have thoughts and feelings. We will also see that it is a reality in which evil is a banned category. There is one word for such a picture, and that word is Spinoza.
There is but one substance—symbolized by the planet and its sentient sprouts, one of which is the Na’vi—in which mind and body are indistinguishable, a plane of immanence with no ontological gaps. There is a smooth continuum between what on Earth is called body and what is called mind. Thus, via the organic internet, the Na’vi are able to reincarnate by titrating their essence into another body, just as at the end of the film the human protagonist Jake Sully is able to become one of them, in a seamless manner. The humans with their militaristic science are simply confused or perhaps mentally ill, not evil. They blunder around violently: there is no evil, only inadequately expressed conatus, the will-to-exist that takes joy in imposing itself on the rest of the planet-substance. It wasn’t that the humans were evil to rob the planet of its unobtainium—they were confused. If the humans had only read the government health warning embedded in the unobtainium, as it were, they would never have tried mining for this mineral. This view edits out something very powerful: why have the humans even wanted unobtainium in the first place? Were their reasons really rational, only confused? Or is unobtainium something like (to quote another movie) an “obscure object of desire”? There is no way, in the logic of the movie, to see what the humans are doing as fundamentally wrong or evil. This is self-defeating, since according to this view, the Na’vi are simply more successful at playing the game humans are playing. They are upgraded humans—or we are downgraded Na’vi. By wishing for and consuming the right things, we will create a just society; we just have to change our ways a bit. Isn’t this the dominant environmentalist paradigm of our age?
There is no fundamental difference between humans and the Na’vi. This raises a deeper issue. There is no nothing, no nothingness, in a reality that contains no ontological gaps—for instance, the gap between brain and mind, filled by the suggestiveness of cinematic imagery to render the planet of Avatar a sentient world. There is not even nothing, for Spinoza’s substance is everything. For Spinoza, the entity nothing is oukontic, that is, not even nothing: substance is everywhere, without lack. But what was opened up from the time of Kant—that is, from the opening of the Anthropocene—was indeed a nothingness that is better described as meontic. This is a weirdly “positive” nothing that is not absolutely nothing at all, but rather a kind of flickering nothing, or a quality of nothing-ness. This is the nothingness that Hegel banishes to the outer reaches of his philosophical system, a pure self-reference that he describes as “the night in which all cows are black.”3
Hegel’s nothingness was a reaction to Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason had discerned a threatening gap in the real. Measurement, understanding, calculating, are predicated on reason, but this reason is an abyss that I cannot directly access. I can count and measure, but I can’t display the concept of number itself, even to myself—I must rely on indexical signs, such as pointing to my fingers and counting “One, two, three …” But these signs are precisely not number as such. Yet I can think number. There is thus a gap, a crack, in reality, a crack that allows me to think reason not as playing with preestablished pieces of thought, but as thinking in itself. It is as if I have discovered a gigantic, empty ocean just behind my head, an ocean that I can’t understand, but which I can think. An abyss of reason. This abyss might, indeed, not be quite human—it is as if there is an alien, impersonal presence at my core, a void that is not oukontic but meontic.
Does the planet Pandora not evoke this abyss? The film’s audience first plunges into it on board Jake Sully’s transport ship. As a Na’vi, Sully then dives from a floating island atop his winged reptilian mount, in a blissful ballet that evokes the pure freedom amid vertiginous terror we discover in the experience of the Kantian sublime. This is indeed science fiction—the thrill of science as such, the aesthetic plunge into the abyss of reason, evoked by the Yes-album-like architecture of floating islands and arches (Yes being a progressive rock band whose appeal also lies in a fusion of science and a world-saving, hippie aesthetic).
What has happened to our thought experiment? We have discovered something weird—Avatar’s “world without gaps” depends on reason, which implies gaps. The very attempt to produce a gapless, immersive world depends on dynamiting the world into a vast and threatening abyss—the gigantic realm where number is never the same as counting. This isn’t just an implicit message in the movie. This realm of reason is the condition of the movie’s physical reality, the fact that we can see it at all, since to produce it, an immense amount of computation (counting and other forms of calculating) was required. An immense battery of machines evokes the world of Avatar, implying a vast transcendental abyss, namely, an abyss we can’t see or touch—the abyss of reason.
I can access something like a virtual reality version of the ocean of reason through the aesthetic, in particular through this experience of the sublime. I can at least glimpse the vertigo of reason’s abyss when I try to count to infinity, and realize that I can’t—which realization precisely is how infinity must be thought.4 I have discovered a part of reality (the noumenal, in Kant’s terms) that transcends what I can understand (the phenomenal, again in his terms). This transcendence is the mortal philosophical enemy of immanence, the trademark of Spinozism. On this view, there is an ontological break between the physical biosphere-brain and the mind assembled by its neural connections between its trees and other life-forms. The abyss of Pandora, our thrill ride between its floating islands, threaten the Spinozan continuum, destabilizing any fantasy of uncomplicated embeddedness. This means that the viewer’s attempt to resolve the movie contains an inevitable gap.
Idealism is one way to close the gap in the real. This is Hegel’s solution—and in a sense many viewers of Avatar have done a Hegel by taking it simply as fantasy. Another solution is to collapse again the gap in the real into some modified version of materialism—Deleuze, Bergson, Whitehead: to paper over the crack with the spackle of matter. Surely this is one reason for the appeal of Spinozism in modernity—it allows for a pantheism that is not so different from atheism, since everything is of one substance and thus God. This spackling approach is rather like what this essay has described as the more sophisticated approach to viewing Avatar. But for all its visions of oneness, Avatar also invites us to see twos: humans and Na’vi, Earth and Pandora, floating islands and abysses, planets and space, modernity and ecology. These twos are mashed together in the person of Sully, whose very name suggests a dirtiness that seems excluded from the pristine world of Pandora, a dirtiness associated with an excess of thinking over its physical conditions: “Oh that this too too sullied flesh would melt” moans Hamlet, first voyager in the ocean of reason (“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”).5 It is virtual reality that enables this mash-up to take place—virtual reality that is perhaps the analogue within the space of the movie for the viewer, who exists within a video-game culture where movies are part of a larger ludic space. This mash-up is a basis for the fantasy work that Avatar asks us to do. There is the possibility that human virtual technology could be replicated in the nonhuman world, and that the two could then communicate. But another aspect of the fantasy is that one of the communicators and one of the communication media must “win.” Thus under the possibility that humans and nonhumans can communicate is a darker fantasy—the idea that the nonhuman media are simply more efficient and powerful versions of the human one. Human technology is a debased version of Na’vi technology, and if we could only harness it, make our technology more harmonious with “nature”… Underneath the idea of humans and nonhumans communicating is another idea, which just is what is called modernity—the idea that we can do things better, stronger, faster, with less “noise” (such as social hierarchy) getting in the way. Modernity is what generated the environmental emergency that gives rise to movies such as Avatar in the first place. Thus to replicate the Na’vi media system is really to progress along the same path that brought directors such as James Cameron to make gigantic movies about how modernity is flawed. We seem to be caught in a loop.
The movie speaks about its nonsynthesis of these dualities in the person of the dying Jake Sully, who must finally be uploaded from the human virtual computer into the Na’vi natural world-system rather than continue to live a double life. Both/and is not possible in a world of unique and discrete beings. A radical choice must be made, akin to love, in which I select one being from all the others. This choice is, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, synonymous with evil, a radical imbalance. The scene in which Neytiri cradles the gasping Jake, infant-small in comparison, shows us this asymmetry in an extreme way: the love of a mother for an infant is excessive, “evil” in its hostility to other beings that might threaten it. For a magical moment, it is as if the movie is able to show that condition for the harmony between Jake and Neytiri is this pre-Oedipal asymmetry, in which the beautiful luminous being admires the ugly, dirty, sullied tiny one.
We must now take a short detour through the abyss of reason, which is precisely what Avatar hopes we can avoid. I shall try to shoot some threads back toward the movie as we go.
Accepting transcendence means diving into the cold abyssal ocean of reason to see what it might contain: Husserlian phenomenology discovers all kinds of “intentional objects” there, floating like shoals of fish. Far lower down, Heidegger’s U-boat patrols the depths, sliding through the opaque darkness of angst. Far above, on the surface of the ocean of reason, float the islands of “facts”—in other words, regions of preestablished pieces of calcified reason that were taken before Kant to be real things: the notion, for instance, that everything must have a cause, without understanding what causality as such might be. These islands are what scholasticism took to be truth, so that Kant’s discovery of the abyss of reason is like the discovery of a third dimension in a world inhabited by stick people. Fleshing out Hume, Kant realizes that it just is impossible to establish causality without diving into the abyss of reason. Scientific facts are beings that are correlated to events in a statistical way. This is what allows cigarette companies to assert, quite correctly, that the causal link between smoking and cancer cannot be proved, since scientific facts just are statistical correlations. Science is Humean: in other words, science is based on statistics rather than on metaphysical “certainties.”6 This is what allows global warming deniers to assert, also quite correctly, that the causal link between human fossil fuel burning and climate change can’t be proved. Indeed, this problem is more existentially and politically urgent than the smoking problem—since by the time it might be proved beyond doubt, global warming will be catastrophically irreversible.7 The world of ecological awareness is a world of anxiety, because there is a fundamental gap between the empirical data and what they mean, and ecological entities such as biosphere and climate are huge enough to make us painfully aware of this gap.
Pandora—it’s the name of the ever-giving planet the humans fantasize about in Avatar. But it’s also the name for a box in which all the evils of the world are kept. It is not so difficult to see that what Hume and Kant did—and subsequently “gigantic” science that discovered things like biosphere and evolution—was to open up a Pandora’s box in the second sense. The plenitude of data evokes anxiety. If everything is equally real and unique, there is no hierarchy, no reality-confirming world that allows me to differentiate between things in advance. To see the universe as a weird, structurally incomplete set of discrete beings necessarily pushes us toward anxiety, an affect in which things become flat since they do not match my inner space, another unique being in itself. Modern philosophy is the confrontation with nothingness—and so is modern consumerism, in which there is no good reason (given in advance by a king or a priest or whoever) why I should buy this particular bottle of shampoo. Or indeed why I should be fascinated with this unobtainium, whose very name is a punning circularity: part of why I need it is simply because I can’t obtain it (easily). This self-swallowing serpent of a syndrome is precisely what Avatar is designed to make us think we can circumvent. But it appears that since the nothingness is what this chapter has called the logical conclusion of modernity, we must in the end pass through the nothingness as a necessary phase of thinking and coexisting, to see what might lie on the other side.
Avatar is not alone in trying to leap over nothingness. Dominant forms of nihilism itself, for instance, could be viewed as a reaction-formation against the disturbance of meontic angst: this is Heidegger’s view, which I share. What is required for thinking is not to wish away the ocean that provides the reason for the problems identified by Hume, as if we could unthink the fact that we are three-dimensional beings. Heidegger correctly saw that the task was to voyage beneath nihilism, not to take flight above it or to try to circumvent it. The ocean of reason seeps through the cracks in the pavement of prepackaged facts, a metaphor I choose deliberately in an age in which the ocean is beginning to inundate Pacific islands, precisely because of the Anthropocene that is the flip side of the Kantian “Copernican turn.” For Kant had decided that the human–world correlate was what gave reality to things: the ocean of reason is human, or at any rate an aspect of my (human) mind. But what if the ocean went deeper than the human, in spite of it, outside of it. This is a frightening thought if you are an anthropocentrist. But don’t gigantic computational machines—the ones that made Avatar possible—prove that every day, every time we switch them on? This thought, that reason isn’t really human, has preoccupied us mightily since the late eighteenth century—since the invention of the steam engine and the march toward all kinds of unobtainium. Consider how contemporary “speculative realist” philosophy deals with it. These philosophies understand that Kant and his Pandora’s box cannot be rejected, and that one could see the last two hundred years of philosophy as a struggle to restrict what had happened in the late eighteenth century.8 Yet some of these very philosophies continue to make humans the special openers of Pandora’s box. They are trying to contain what lies inside. Yet what if my (human) ocean of reason was just one such transcendental gap in the world? What if the same kind of gap exists between a slice of pineapple and a cereal bowl? Or between a slice of pineapple and itself? This possibility is what inspired Graham Harman to discover, at a depth unheard of in the Heideggerian U-boat, below Heidegger and implied by him in the tool-analysis, but never explicitly spoken, a gigantic coral reef of what he calls “objects,” by which he means any entity whatsoever: a human, an iPhone, the movie Avatar, the fiction of the Na’vi, spoons, leather, and tornadoes. A truly animist view, the view the Na’vi hold, in which everything is a “person,” is not a world of smoothness, but a riot of anxiety in which I confront the full uncanniness of things. Astonishingly, this view is the logical end-point of reason itself.
Yet at the end of Avatar, the “alien” humans must return to a poisoned Earth, and we must exit the cinema. What did we really see in there? Did we really see that modern humans have fallen from a state of nature in which there were better, stronger media, taller, healthier bodies and more integrated minds, and a sense of being part of something bigger than us? Or did we see a brief, somewhat disturbing glimpse of our future selves—people who had made friends with the nothingness that erupts out of Pandora’s box, the philosophy and science of the modern age, people coexisting with other people who are not the same as us, uncanny people with four legs, wings, scales, and fur?
WE AREN’T THE WORLD
Kant’s project was the first in a rather long series of “end of metaphysics” arguments in continental philosophy. Pre-Kantian metaphysics had, he argued, relied on prepackaged concepts that floated around unexamined. What were the conditions of possibility of these concepts, these facts? Supposed facts, he argued, were just projections, in the same way that we think the sun is rising and setting, whereas we are in fact hurtling through space on a planet revolving around the sun, spinning on its axis. From the bottom of the ocean, we undergo another Copernican turn, as we realize that the abyss of reason that Kant opens up, the third dimension that bisects the stick-figure world of scholastic metaphysics, is only the human–world gap. There is an iPhone–world gap, a pineapple–world gap, a galaxy–world gap. A Pandora’s boxful of gaps. Indeed, what is really proclaimed, from the bottom of the ocean, beneath nihilism, is that there is no world.
Why? Because there is no top-level box, no set of sets, into which everything fits, of which everything is a part. This lack of a top level is totally obscured in Avatar, whose vision is of holistic oneness, a vision that depends upon the idea of a top level—the biosphere itself. A hundred years into the Anthropocene, Husserl had discovered shoals of factical fish darting around in what Kant took to be the unified, singular containers of time and space, fish such as hoping, asserting, hating. These intentional objects are units that are not simply symptoms of the mind that produces them: they have some kind of autonomy, which marks the difference between psychologistic logic, which sees logic as a symptom of the (human) mind (or rather, brain), and phenomenology, which understands logic as ontologically prior to psychology. Each intentional fish in the ocean is discrete.9 In the same way, and at roughly the same time, Cantor discovered discrete transfinite sets, sets that seemed to lack a definite or smooth bridge between them: the set of real numbers contains the set of rational numbers, but is separated from it infinitely. What Cantor discovered were beings that could be members of a set that radically transcended them, giving rise to the irksome Russell set paradox, the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Another way of saying the same thing would be to suppose that a mind is not simply an emergent product of neurons and brain activity.
Thus if we think about it, there is a way in which the logic of a world full of gaps contradicts the aesthetic logic of Avatar, a contradiction that has a salient political resonance. Despite the dominant message of the movie, the biosphere of Pandora is not reducible to its components. If it were, we would confront a purely mechanistic holism of interlocking parts, a contexture in which one thing matters the same as—which is to say as little as—anything else. Nor, however, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, for the whole is simply another being, another entity with an unbridgeable ontological chasm between it and the beings that are its members. If we were to accept this holism, Avatar’s biosphere would simply be a more efficient machine than the human mechanisms that exploit it. On this view, the final confrontation between Miles Quaritch, in his alien-killing cyborgian outfit, and Neytiri on her leopard-like mount, is one between equally matched pieces of machinery. If Pandoran society is not simply a more efficient form of Western modernity, it must take the form of a Pandora’s box—that is, a being that contains an infinitude of other beings that cannot be reduced to it: a set whose members are not members of themselves. Pandora’s box, a paradox.
What Cantor did was precisely to have opened Pandora’s box. He discovered that there might not be an integral top level that bestowed smoothness to reality, at least the region of reality associated with logic. If thought is a reflex of reality in some sense, then reality is profoundly disjointed, riddled with gaps, voids, wormholes to other universes. To think is to open Pandora’s box, an image whose instrumental yet ecological resonance Avatar expresses fully, like two halves of a torn whole that, in Adorno’s words, do not add up together. This fractured quality of the movie might explain its massive popularity—like a myth, it is an attempt to compute a problem that we have not yet fully thought out.
In the world of Pandora’s box, there are meontic nothings everywhere, between, for instance, the set of real and the set of rational numbers. Trying to find a smooth bridge between these sets (the “Continuum Hypothesis”) drove first Cantor, then Gödel, insane, as if reason was indeed toxic to humans, an obsessive plunge into the Kantian abyss that could easily result in fatality. Trying to turn nothingness into a thing, into something given—forgetting precisely that at this depth, there are no factical islands, no stand-out “truths,” no solid pre-given mounds of metaphysical dirt. It is indeed, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, not the sleep of reason that breeds monsters, but rather the hypervigilance of an overactive rationality.10
This is why Zermelo and Fraenkel smoothed out Cantor’s sets with a simple fix: they were not sets, but rather “classes.” This is somewhat the same as the logician Alfred Tarski smoothing out the sentence “This sentence is false” by ruling that it isn’t a sentence. The trouble with this procedure, which was the early twentieth-century direct response to the monsters of reason discovered by Cantor, is that one could construct an ever-escalating series of “viral” sentences to get around the rule. Consider for instance the following:
This is not a sentence.
And so on.11 It appears that, as Lacan later observed, there is no metalanguage: no vantage point outside of sentences—or sets, or for that matter spoons—from which to pronounce with perfect authority the rules of sentences, spoons, or sets. One finds oneself phenomenologically glued to whatever one is thinking, saying, physically or mentally grasping, and so on. Like the mirror that sticks to Neo in The Matrix, reality can’t be peeled away. Isn’t this one of the deeply structural layers of Avatar itself? If something happens to your virtual body, your Na’vi avatar, you are hurt or die. The virtual experience of “being in” the Na’vi world is not totally vicarious. You can bleed. And vice versa: if Miles Quaritch pulls the plug in the human world, your Na’vi avatar collapses. This lack of a true and rigid separation between virtual and actual is why the Na’vi think of the human avatars as evil spirits—a thought that Neytiri and others do their best to dispel. But in a sense, it is quite a significant thought. What ecological awareness is like is very much a kind of coexistence with weird spirits, zombies, half-physical, half-psychic entities, in a non-thin, non-rigidly defined zone. This is what happens when we choose to let go of a rigid difference between human and nonhuman, not some back-to-nature happy stupidity.
What Heidegger means by world is precisely this inability to peel myself out of my own skin. This is precisely the opposite of what is meant by world in the common way: a top-level container into which everything meaningfully fits. This meaningfulness itself depends upon some further rather fishy criteria. Worlds require, for instance, a single stable correlator to make sense of them: my world, which revolves around the stable reference point of myself, appears as a series of backgrounds and foregrounds. Worlds depend upon the notion of away, and in a time of ecological awareness, what is shattered is precisely this illusion of away, because now we know that the waste we flush goes into the wastewater treatment plant, or the Pacific Ocean, and so on. If there is no away, there can be no foreground–background distinction; thus there can be no world, because my correlation to the world depends upon my ability to establish such a distinction. In this sense, the worlding of Pandora is a desperate attempt to put the uncanny beings back inside Pandora’s box and close it. To be convinced of a foreground–background distinction now requires thousands of gigabytes of graphics processing, incredible, immersive art reminiscent of the massive gatefold album sleeves of the 1970s, and so on. It is this gigantic, industrial-scale desperation that the movie works with—and in the very attempt, it undermines the world, because it must rely on (literally) globally distributed computational systems to achieve the illusion.
Since there are as many correlators as there are beings, and since all these beings have a world in some trivial sense, there is no (one) world, and the concept of world is severely weakened. Yet as we have just seen, the problem is much more severe than that. This is because world is the meaningful and coherent set of things that surround me, correlated to me, and we have just shown that there can be no such set, only a non-totalizable, not-all plenum of discrete beings. There is no reason why some of these beings can’t be countries or football teams or unions, but this proves the point in another way. Lithuania isn’t reducible to its borders or its roads or its people or its boundaries on a map, or its grasses or its sand. It is not the sum of, or greater than the sum of, these components added together (the latter idea is organicism). Strangely, then, ecological awareness implies the end of the world. It would be better, as Brecht would have said, to start with the bad news that “We Aren’t the World,” as Michael Jackson didn’t put it. And we see this only in negative in our viewership of the film and its (failed) attempt to depict that kind of wholeness in which we are actually the world.
Those passages of Being and Time that address the notion of angst have to do precisely with a sense of the loss of a world. In the experience of anxiety everything becomes horribly flat and meaningless.12 Angst strips away the metaphysics of presence that seems to guarantee that I am “in” a world, ruthlessly revealing that to be a mere convenient fiction. I am, rather, suspended in a nothingness. It is as if instead of trees and flowers and birds I encounter a strange ethereal mist that appears to have no depth, or is perhaps of infinite depth—there is no way to tell.
This chapter’s understanding of Heidegger must then be juxtaposed against the supposed “Heideggerian” environmentalist discourse of world and embeddedness. Consider the concept of worlding in Haraway. This somewhat user-friendly version of “world” is far from adequate as a basis for the ethics and politics that Haraway derives from it. Consider only the “world” of witch-dunking in the Middle Ages, or the “world” of lynching in the segregated American South. Just because something constitutes a world is no reason to preserve it. But there is a more serious problem—there is no such thing as a world, or “world” is so diluted—since it applies equally to thumbtacks, bottlenose dolphins, and packets of chips—that it ceases to be significant.
The idea that everything is interconnected is usually a more “rational,” less drastic-seeming version of “we are the world” thinking. Interconnectedness fits well with modernity on many levels—just consider many advertisements, not exactly for products, but for globalization, especially the ones that were broadcast on TV in the United States in the 1990s. It sounds so “right,” and of course it sounds very “ecological.” And yet, another way to close Pandora’s box is to emphasize that everything is interconnected. Why on earth would a sensible ecological philosopher want to deny the primacy of that fact? Yet interconnectedness-speak blocks us from thinking Pandora as a set of unique beings that cannot ever be regarded as totally complete and consistent, which is what I have been arguing is the recipe for a more cogent ecological thought.
The rise of global interconnectedness has been reflected in contemporary philosophy. Recent philosophy has witnessed a rise of relationist ontologies that stress the notion of embeddedness and interconnection—the turn to Whitehead and to Spinoza. These ontologies are in effect attempts to erase the memory of deconstruction, behind which lurks the (genuine) threat of the Heideggerian uncanny, which in turn was a “destructuring” (Destruktion) of the sclerotic certainties of Western metaphysics. Why? Because relationism forgets Kant, grandfather of the “end of metaphysics”—forgets the fundamental ontological cut between phenomena (things we understand and observe) and noumena (things-in-themselves). The difference between relationism and deconstruction can be observed in the history of deconstruction’s engagement with structuralism, which just is relationism applied to linguistics, and very successfully. Derrida showed how meaning, for instance, depends upon language, which depends upon the opacity of the signifier, the technical supplements of signifiers such as ink, paper, pixels, or iPads, and so on. Not everything is quite contained in a relational system—something always escapes, in order for the system to function as a system. Sets of relations, then, float on top of uncanny, alien beings that are not subject to these relations, and yet they try to include such aliens even as they exclude them, thus resulting in aporia and paradox.
The easiest way to link this to Avatar is to think about how the movie depends upon a massive technological apparatus—and yet it cannot speak about this layer directly, for fear of destroying its message. In the movie, powerful technology enables the humans to interact with the Na’vi. “Outside” the movie, powerful technology enables us to imagine an alien world. Without the technology—which depends on the kinds of “rare earth” that just is unobtanium to structure the silicon wafers that physically support the software—there would be no movie, no back-to-nature fantasy, no we-are-the-world.
Avatar is unable to speak the technologies that enable it. Avatar was produced because of gigantic cloud-based computing systems that enabled a worldwide distribution of artists and other technicians to work in sync. This worldwide distribution precisely announces the end of the world as such, as world depends on distances that these technologies have abolished. James Cameron waited precisely for such cloud-based systems to emerge before making Avatar. The piercingly psychedelic world of Avatar, like some fluorescent Yes album by Roger Dean, depends upon the world-destroying (because time and space collapsing) technological apparatus of cloud computing. This is perhaps reflected in the film, in which, as in the Yes art of Roger Dean, floating pieces of world hover like jagged islands. The movie seems thus to suggest that we are looking at how things stand after the end of the world—the point is, should we be trying to put the pieces back together again?
The hypnotic intensity of Avatar’s graphic design grips us on a sub-Kantian aesthetic level, a level dismissed as kitsch, that is, the bad taste of the other, a realm of disgust that one must learn how to spit out in order to perform true taste.13 In order to have the attunement of beauty, in order to have the aesthetic experience that calibrates us to the Kantian ocean of reason, there must already be, always already, this hypnotic, magnetic field of compulsion between me and something else, some not-me, some alien being. Just as the realm of objects subtends the dark waters of angst and nihilism, so a bejeweled, scintillating sparkle of kitsch subtends the straitlaced cleanliness of beauty—it is this hypnotic, magnetic level that philosophy has habitually labeled a realm of evil, because precisely of its agency. Thus, while watching Avatar, it is as if we are seeing naturalistic pastoral, but on acid, where trees and fungi have become huge, luminous, Day-Glo, radiant as if they were made of some dangerous isotope.
FIGURE 1 Les Fleurs du Mal: Night in Avatar
The movie is unable to contain this preternatural, glowingly “evil” dimension, which just is the transcendental realm of aliens, of objects, rearing its irreducibly ugly head, in the face of the smoothed-out Spinozan metaphysics that is the film’s official ideological frame. Seeing this is not the privilege of a specially gifted viewer—the phenomena are there in plain sight, so that our experience of Avatar is fascinatingly fractured, in a way that makes the movie compelling. The very attempt to force viewers to accept an ecological view of interconnectedness results in pushing humans to accept the proximity of a more-than-human non-world of uncanny strangers. And indeed, this non-world is already populated by technological devices whose cloud-being outstrips their localizable, physical embodiment for us as desktop machines or handheld devices. A gigantic non-world of technology, lying just to the side of the world of Avatar, reflected within it as the asymmetrically doubled “bad” internet of the humans and the “good” internet of the Na’vi. It is tempting indeed to see these with Melanie Klein as the “good breast” and “bad breast” of the necessarily psychotic infant—in which case, when it comes to ecological awareness, humans have a lot of growing up to do.14
Thus when, in the climactic battle between humans and Na’vi, Sully as a Na’vi summons by telepathy ferociously toothy psychedelic beasts to rip apart the cyborgian humans in their body-extension armor, we are compelled to experience a thrill, a sadistic thrill that without doubt goes all the way back to Kant—the thrill of a reason unleashed, a reason that is beyond the human, that might lurch into the human stick-figure world and annihilate it with the flick of a switch or, in this case, the snap of fluorescent jaws. We are placed on the side of the inhuman, not simply of the marginalized or victimized Other, but of a technologically weaponized, distributed reason, a planet-sense that overrides our need for tasteful aesthetic distance, sentimentally overwhelming us, jerking tears and laughter. (It is truly frightening the extent to which this movie can force one to cry.) Yet this is no regression to some metaphysical paradise island. It is rather a sentimentality that is far from regressive but instead absolutely futural, post-Romantic, post-Kantian, the overwhelming flood of an ocean of reason inundating the islands of fact, of metaphysics. The call of nonhumans below the resonance of Da-sein, below the dark icy waters of angst, the nothingness Heidegger thought was the precious property of humans, but which has turned out to be the fissure in anything—a teacup, a jar of Marmite, a meteor—between its withdrawn essence (its in-itself) and its appearance (the phenomenal). The human who brings this on, Sully, himself dies in his summoning of these beings, his avatar mortally wounded recursively eliminates him, and he is swept up into the gigantic arms of his lover, into the good breast, which nourishes him and “restores” him to life—a life without the human, not a restoration so much as an evacuation, a download.
What Avatar gestures toward, then, is a genuine “postmodernity,” a historical moment after modernity, in which humans have incorporated the nothingness that leaks out of Pandora’s box into a new way of being and thinking ecologically. It gestures toward this future moment, without ever quite being able to tell us to go there, or even wanting with all its heart to push us there. This new moment is available directly on and in front of the surface of the film, not in some esoteric depth, as I hope now to show.
Ecological awareness is indeed as it goes in the film. Ecological awareness is not a return to innocence, but rather a joyful Oedipus who blinds himself with horrified pleasure, knowing he is the evil he was seeking, the cause of the environmental disaster (Greek miasma, plague)—Oedipus, answerer of the riddle of the Sphinx, whose question concerned the human and its strangely dislocated embodiment (four legs at dawn, two legs at noon, three legs at eve). Oedipus, figure for a self-destructive tendency within reason itself, which is revealed not as entirely on the side of humans, through the very processes of Enlightenment, of self-outstripping, that Kant himself bankrolled.15 Avatar directly makes this into a theme with its depictions of humans bent on destruction in a self-destructive way. The reduction of thinking to the human–world correlate is part and parcel of the instrumentality that created the Anthropocene. At the very moment at which thinking decides it can only talk about talking about access to things, humans are directly intervening in Earth’s crust, facts that are two sides of the same coin. The promise of a cozy familiarity with nonhumans, a handshake or finger-touch across the reaches of space, is bought at the price of a reason that churns up Earth in its blind refusal to see its own complicity, its inability to attain metalinguistic escape velocity from what it is thinking and what it is churning.
FIGURE 2 Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright!
Thus there arise true aliens, strange strangers, products of reason’s reach into life as such—the beings revealed by evolution are non-chimps, nonhumans, non-insects, non-species, the joke of Darwin’s title The Origin of Species being that this is a book that argues that there are no species and they have no origin.16 The very attempt to exit Earth ends the world, not by allowing us to float free in space, but by gluing us every more tightly to the viscous gravitational pull of the aesthetic dimension, which is now discovered to emanate from all things, not only from things humans want to hang in art galleries, a dimension that Plato was quite accurate to describe as an evil realm of demonic magnetism.17 The “death of god” and the long march of eliminative materialism go hand in hand with the rebirth of evil and of radically transcendental realms, realms that are now found to inhabit plastic bottles, pellets of Plutonium 239, and tree frogs, but which can be located nowhere in ontically given, phenomenal space. The crack in the real discovered by Kant multiplies everywhere, like crazy paving. The disenchantment of the world gives rise to the reenchantment of the world! But not as a benevolent world, not as a world at all—but rather as the threatening proximity of aliens, aliens wherever we tread, flashing their compelling webs of illusion, a non-total crowd of leering clowns. This is the non-world that ecological awareness glimpses, not in spite of nihilism but through it, underneath it. The void is the meontic nothing of a pair of cat’s eyes (Figure 12.2).18
This is the dark ecological truth that Avatar tries to peel away from the ostensible “message,” but which it simply can’t help but reveal in every luminescent tendril of color, every glowing resonance, the very filmstock that seems to gaze at us with night eyes:
Tyger Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?19
Notes
1. Avatar, directed by James Cameron (2009; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2010), DVD.
2. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Colombia University Press, 1982).
3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9.
4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 103–17.
5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.2.243 (141).
6. Judea Pearl, Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78–85.
7. Wendy Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks,” Theory, Culture and Society 28, no. 6 (2011): 91–112 (106–7).
8. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2009), 112–28.
9. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2006), 1:275–76.
10. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
11. See Graham Priest, In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege.
12. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 131–34, 171–72, and esp. Section 40 (172–78).
13. See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,” Diacritics 11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–25.
14. Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 61–64.
15. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60.
16. A full explication of the strange stranger can be found in Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15, 17–19, 38–50. See also Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Matlock, Angelaki 5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3–18.
17. Plato, Ion, trans. Benjamin Jowett, available at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ion.html (accessed May 27, 2012).
18. I am of course referencing Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3–11.
19. William Blake, “The Tyger,” in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965; rev. 1988).
