Green Planets (40 page)

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.