[LINK] "Avatar blues and the hopelessness of Pandora"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at openDemocracy, Tony Curzon Price's essay criticizes Avatar for its abandonment of those Enlightenment ideals based on the idea that it's possible to define the universe in terms of reason, with its grim implications for the ability of humans to rationally understand and respond to our own environmental crises.

The quotes are behind the lj-cut so as not to spoil those of my readers who haven't seen the film yet. (Go. Flawed but interesting is good.)

The environmental plot makes Pandora herself the central character: all life on the planet shares information with all other life in a supra-organism into-which individual life-parts (species, if that's the right word for parts of a greater quasi-conscious whole) dock using a kind of universal wetware connector that anyone with a drawer-full of highly-specialised computer cables should drool over. Join tendrils with the horses or birds and the humanoids can gently exercise their Edenic roles of masters.

In Hesiod's telliing, the story of Pandora is different. She is fashioned by Zeus from earth and sent to punish Prometheus for starting the industrial revolution. She does not provide much of an answer to the giant's first push down the slippery slope towards Halliburton. Indeed, her role is basically retributive. That is why all the ills of the world flow from the box that she opens. This is a story in which humanity is cursed for its God-like desire to transform nature with fire. It is the industrialist's version of the fall described in Genesis. But Pandora famously preserves hope, absent from the Genesis story. The transformation of nature through fire carries with it the prospect that we might be able to put things back together again. There is no secret ingredient needed. No divine salvation or forgiveness in the Greek version of the fall. The contents of Pandora's box despite everything offers hope.

[. . .]

The noble, beautiful and savage princess sees him at his inexpert prayer and tells him an important truth: Pandora-Gaia is a blind life force, not a moral force. She won't take sides. The Na'avi, who know Pandora-Gaia intimately and directly through their wetware docks and traditions, know that life does not care. Like an important strand of ecological Gaians today, they understand that no amount of understanding of the delicacy and complexity of life will force life to find value in humanity -- or in anything else. Value cannot come from the way things are, but has to stand on its own in the way things should be. This is where hope should exist: in the possibility that action reshapes it.

But Cameron ducks the problem in a particularly depressing way. When the battle looks hopeless, Pandora-Gaia does come to the rescue; she does take a side. The noble savages don't understand. The collective consciousness has changed, has become normative.

But how? Here's Cameron's unlikely answer: just before the Messianic marine's prayer, the scientist, Sigourney Weaver with her analytical understanding of Pandora-Gaia joins the collective mind in death. As she drifts into it, she murmurs not "The horror! The horror...", but "The beauty ... the beauty!" Pandora-Gaia is transformed by the analytical understanding that the scientist brings. Value, it seems, is an automatic product of joining together the primitive, quasi-conscious whole with scientific understanding. But this just flies in the face of our understanding of value since the Enlightenment; it renders trivial the sight that Kant saw when the scales fell from his eyes: that there is no room value in a world that is only understood objectively.

Go, read the whole thing.