Green Planets (42 page)

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.