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12 Pandora’s Box Avatar, Ecology, Thought timothy morton The movie Avatar was so successful because it speaks, and fails to speak, about issues related to ecology, environment, and world, some of the most pressing issues of our age.1 And yet, despite the surface-level anticapitalist and anticolonialist appearance of Avatar, the picture is more complex. Avatar acknowledges the philosophical and political dilemma we face around ecological thought while failing to resolve it. This dilemma is precisely to do with thought and thinking at the very moment at which humans have begun to deposit a thin layer of carbon in Earth’s crust, thus opening the intersection of human history and geological time now known as the Anthropocene. In this essay, I shall argue that Avatar performs a kind of chiasmic figure-of-eight: on the one hand, it gives us a sense of being-in-a-world that I argue is strictly untenable in an era of ecological emergency; on the other hand, Avatar dissolves this very sense of “being-in”—taking with one hand what it gives with the other. What the Kantian revolution in philosophy opened was, to use a pun that I shall use perhaps too often here, a Pandora’s box that allowed both for the ultimate expression thus far of human nihilism and instrumental reason and for the very ecological awareness that brings this nihilism not so much to an end but to its logical conclusion: reason as both poison and cure, as homeopathic medicine. In so doing, I show that Avatar is not the total assault on modernity it seems to be but holds out, rather, the possibility of a logical conclusion to modernity. Environmental philosophy often claims to be Heideggerian, but what does this mean? It usually amounts to asserting, without much substantiation, that humans are embedded in a world. A careful reading of Heidegger, however, demonstrates that this view could not be less Heideggerian. On the contrary, as I shall argue in this essay, the fully Heideggerian view is the feeling that the world has suddenly disappeared. This feeling is highly congruent with contemporary developments in the cultural imaginary of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene 207 Pando ra’s Box| M o rto n is that geological period defined by the deposition of a fine layer of carbon in Earth’s crust as a result of human activity, starting around 1790. What is called the Great Acceleration logarithmically sped up the processes of the Anthropocene when the Gadget (Trinity test), Little Boy (Hiroshima), and Fat Boy (Nagasaki) began to deposit radioactive materials in Earth’s crust in 1945. The precision with which geology measures this date (against the incomprehensible vastness of geological time) is itself a symptom of the profound disorientation of habitual views of world. These views depend for their coherence on a stable enough contrast between a foreground and a background—but in an era of global warming, no such contrast is available to us. This chapter shall therefore argue that the notion of “planetary awareness,” then, far from being a utopian upgrade of normative embeddedness ideology, is instead an uncanny realization of coexistence with a plenum of ungraspable hyperobjects—entities such as climate and evolution that can be computed but that cannot directly be seen or touched (unlike weather or this rabbit, respectively )—and nonhuman beings. Moreover, the sense of being “in” a world itself is, in Heideggerian terms, a covering over of the very being that it endeavors to assert. The anthem of the current era, instead, is “We Aren’t the World.” As we shall see, Avatar dramatizes this perilous ambiguity. On one hand, its stunningly immersive graphics and sentimental suction make us feel as if we are practically enveloped by its world. On the other hand, the disorientating scales and strange luminous aesthetics of the Pandoran forest and its inhabitants promise something much more disturbing, and, I shall argue, much more ecological. 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...

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