Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  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 scholast
ic 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 id
ea 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.