28. Ibid., 37.
29. See Jasper Bernes, “The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor,” in Communization and Its Discontents, ed. Benjamin Noys (New York: Minor Compositions, 2011), 157–72. Bernes takes up the questions that motivates Žižek’s piece, arguing for political response to the increasing tendency of capital to generate groups and people who appear outside of the system but remain deeply a part of its operations: “Examining capitalism in this way, as a process of production that contains moments both inside and outside of the workplace, allows us to expand our notion of antagonistic agents, to expand our notion of the proletariat—so that it includes the unemployed, students, unwaged house workers and prisoners.” Bernes, “Double Barricade,” 164. See also Aaron Benanav and Endnotes, “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes 2 (June 27, 2012), http://endnotes.org.uk/articles/1, where Benanav, with Endnotes, makes a cogent argument for a reconsideration of Marx’s general law of capital accumulation (that increasing amounts of surplus capital always and of necessity generate growing populations of surplus labor beyond the amount required by capital to keep employment rates and wages low) in light of the current historical conjuncture. For a discussion of unemployment, see also Fredric Jameson, “Political Conclusions,” in Representing Capital (London: Verso, 2011), 139–51.
30. Mark S. Jendrysik, “Back to the Garden: New Visions of Posthuman Futures,” Utopian Studies 22, no. 1 (2011): 36.
31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 208.
12
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.
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