Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  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).

  13

  Churning Up the Depths

  Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and “Oceanic”

  MELODY JUE

  The first time I watched the BBC’s Blue Planet documentary series, I was fascinated by deep-sea footage of a dark, calm pool of water whose surface was carpeted by a bed of mussels. How could there be a second surface of water—underwater? David Attenborough’s voice patiently explained that this was in fact a deepwater brine lake: “During the Jurassic period, the water here was shallow and became cut off from the ocean. The area soon dried out, leaving a thick layer of salt and other minerals up to 8 km thick. When the ocean water returned after the region rifted apart, the super-saline layer at the bottom of the Gulf became an underwater lake. Now brine, which is continually released from a rift in the ocean floor, feeds the lake.”1 Seeing this underwater lake, I began to rethink my spatial intuition. The ocean, for us, is commonly conceptualized as a Cartesian volume that can be gridded and measured, with a surface only at the top.2 This dominant metaphorical sense of “depth” as the below and “surface” on top is based on the normal position of a human observer. By surprising us with a counterexample of a unique “surface” within the depths, Blue Planet reveals both the pervasiveness of our land-based perspective of surface and depth and how it colors the terrestrial metaphors we live by. We expect a surface on top and depth underneath in both reality and in figurative language, but there may be other possible senses of these terms.3 The underwater lake example suggests a stigmatism, or misalignment of the figurative and the literal figures, which produces a kind of cognitive estrangement similar to what we experience in science fiction about oceans and aquatic beings.

  This chapter discusses how the cognitively estranged environments of SF challenge our terrestrial senses of surface and depth. As case studies, I focus on two texts: Polish writer Stanislaw Lem’s seminal 1961 novel Solaris and Greg Egan’s novella “Oceanic.” Solaris imagines a sentient ocean and its responses to scientific investigation, while “Oceanic” imagines smaller-scale ocean microbes whose chemical excretions produce religious feeling. In both texts, oceans disrupt human practices of symptomatic reading and valuation of depth. Gender and sexuality also play key roles, for in both texts a feminized “nature” no longer accommodates the kind of scientific penetration that would accompany a deep reading. Instead the feminine—as a character, and the element of water—disorients male protagonists in both texts, such that they rethink their relation to transcendental or “deep” knowledge and epistemological limits. In the following analysis, I hope to churn up the “clean” model of surface versus depth through science fictional estrangements, using Solaris as a diagnosis of habitual figurations of depth, and “Oceanic” as the story that imagines how the mutual relations of human and nonhuman suggest alternative relati
ons to depth and interpretive practices. Rather than considering depth as a single definable concept, both stories introduce other possibilities through the participation of nonhumans to suggest an ecological and participatory sense of figurative meaning.

  SOLARIS

  Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) dramatizes scientific attempts to penetrate and understand the ocean-planet Solaris according to the classic model of surface/depth, provoking a crisis that is jointly scientific, masculine, colonial, and terrestrial. The novel begins with psychologist Kris Kelvin, an expert on “Solaris studies,” moving from a transport ship to the space station above Solaris in a kind of embryonic pod. The space station, hovering from an Archimedean standpoint above the planet, would seem to offer the scientists an ideally objective location from which to study Solaris. Yet Solaris has long been suspected of sentience on a planet-wide scale: it may be altering its own orbit in space, and it routinely throws up radiant, geometrically complex structures from its surface. In one early description, Kelvin calls the Solaris ocean “a monstrous entity endowed with reason, a protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet and idling its time away in extravagant theoretical cogitation about the nature of the universe. Our instruments had intercepted minute random fragments of a prodigious and everlasting monologue unfolding in the depths of this colossal brain, which was inevitably beyond our understanding.”4 Here, Kelvin draws an analogy between psychological and oceanic “depths,” reading the ocean planet as both a geological and psychological text where visible currents and large three-dimensional surface structures might be seen as evidence of “thinking”—a sort of distributed cognition throughout the planetary body. Yet the legibility of the planet-as-text proves elusive, for the planet-ocean Solaris enacts an insistent détournement against scientific legibility, psychoanalysis, and symptomatic reading, deflecting human attempts to understand the Solaris ocean as either a physical environment or a colossal brain. Solaris modifies the instruments scientists submerge into its ocean, producing “a profusion of signals—fragmentary indications of some outlandish activity, which in fact defeated all attempts at analysis.”5 Lem’s fantastic ocean resists both physical and epistemic human penetration, an impervious mirror surface with depths that remain cognitively out of reach to whatever extent they even exist at all. Fredric Jameson calls this Lem’s “Unknowability Thesis,” in which Solaris “resists scientific inquiry with all the serene tenacity of the godhead itself.”6