Avatar

Yesterday I got out to see Avatar at the theater. I have to say, I have not been that immersed in a film environment since I saw Star Wars as a kid. With all due credit to Cameron and his cinematography team (not so much the actors, however) I don't think my response was simply because of cool visuals. Or rather, it had to do with the visuals, and with the film production team's ingenuity, but not in the way that these comprise the productive forces of most other films. What was unusual about my experience with Avatar was that the cultural studies hemisphere of my brain--the skeptical, ideology-critiquing, perpetually discontent half--was at one with the nihilistic, pleasure-seeking half. This union is the object of thought for thinking about the viewership of Avatar and for the future of cinema.

The movie quite obviously calls attention to what an 'avatar' is, what it means to inhabit, act through, and be affected through another's body. You don't need a Judith Butler bibliography to figure that out. Nor is it especially coy about linking various layers of avatarism. The perfect form is that which provides the jumping-off point for the film's narrative: the transfer of one consciousness from one whole body to another. This is then weighed against the avatarism of a human controlling a robot body from within, or controlling a robot body from a distance; or, in the other direction, the philosophical avatarism in which the universal (or life force) takes shape through the particular (or organismic). These are problems worked on within the film, but raised to such a pitch that one almost has to confront the avatarism of film itself. Precisely to the extent that the protagonist effectively inhabits his Na'vi avatar, the viewer does the same. Lapses in affect--body and mind as a unitary being--are the criterion by which the viewer judges in cinema. Even the film's failures (like its unoriginal plot, Fern Gully Redux) are intelligible within its formal success at the level of technicity.

I wouldn't recommend this movie on the basis of its narrative elements. Nor would I recommend approaching cinema in general as if it were a medium of pure narrative. Avatar is important because it basically accomplishes a theoretical trajectory set out early in the twentieth century concerning what it means to have a body and the possibility of exchanging that body--that mass of flesh strangely dis/obedient and inescapable--for another. Cinema has gestured toward this exchange for the whole of its existence; so has literature. We are now extremely close. Avatar points to the technological, factical gap between 'literally' inhabiting another body, but it performs the fallacy of that distance. That form of difference belongs to an old and dead imaginary of the body (Mary Shelley never saw cinema). It is not so much 'technology' as some imaginary externality belonging to the gods that has changed as us, and by virtue of the actual existence of technicity as something embedded in humanity. Avatarism is the new affect. As tangential evidence, I would also point to the huge effect Cameron had in determining affective modes with Titanic (the young female Werther of its day) and Terminator.

Gesamtkunstwerk 2.0

The "work of art" was a hypothesis that was finally disproven around the time of Benjamin. The Gesamtkunstwerk offers something different, however, than an addition of the forces of individual works of art. As Engels would point out, it separates itself qualitatively by the fact of its unique level of accumulation. Nietzsche was right to cut down Wagner's resuscitation of a political metaphysic via the Gesamtkunstwerk, but the idea anticipates the form that aesthetic productivity must take in the next generation of capitalism (ie, the world we were born into). What we are close to realizing is the all encompassing advertisement, in which every object is actively being pitched by an investor (and hence behind every object there stands a capital flow underwriting the venture) and every presentation of objects take the form of an engaging narrative.

These kinds of ads were previously considered "high concept" but they are becoming the norm; or if the skill of narrative carries too high a price, they can at least attain the anxious ambivalence of insecure and sarcastic youth. On the other front, NBC's 30 Rock has done the best work to ironically incorporate, as in a vacuole, the pleasures and perils of the discourse of advertising. But that model and its opposition are bound to collapse, leaving us with a life that has both the curious twists of a fate of an unrevealed novel and the opportunities for buying back tokens of our life in every atomic aggregation.

Horizon

I was looking at the horizon for a long time and had to question how I would see it without knowledge of the spherical earth. The paradox I see is this: the horizon is the marker for where we cannot see any more, but we can't see 'nothing.' It is the visible non-visible. This is an important phenomenon for the development of the human mind. In the spherical model we tell ourselves we see the atmosphere as it overshoots and wraps around the solid world, the sea disappearing by virtue of its curvature. Yet as it appears in human phenomenology this is a line, not a curve, and looking out to sea or across vast fields it is one of the flattest naturally occurring lines. (Seriously, where else in nature would we find something approximating not only the flatness of the line but its geometric being as an indefinite series of contiguous points). Where two discrete elements meet we cease to see, and so conceive of their difference in a specific situation of the visible non-visible. Looking past this, however, without a knowledge of outer space, there is a re-circling of the elements as they continue their trajectories past the border of the failure of sight.

Dictatorship of the Vegetarian

Craig has his excellent post up on animal rights and anthropocentrism at The Inhumanities, in which he makes a distinction between State societies which believe that 1) they are the model of the human and that 2) they should exterminate nonhumanity, in contrast to non-state societies which share 1) but not 2). The conclusion is that anthropocentrism is not the problem per se, but how that fairly common attribute of culture reacts with State organization.

I like how Craig has linked veganism to historical phenomena, ie, the State, providing a target for opposition larger than the boycott but smaller than Christian ontology. This historicization also makes available a number of resources developed for resisting the State.

What comes to my mind, in particular, is the doctrine of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I'd put this in parallel with the ethical meat position that aims to regenerate something like the relation to killing animals we find in non-State societies--which, at the least, simply cannot kill animals at the same level of scale as the factory farming of State societies. (Cleaning dead bodies in an artisanal rather than Fordist set-up is neither easy nor quick and constitutes a form of skilled rather than unskilled labor). If such a re-ritualized valorization of meat eating is what ethical meat holds as its normative social goal, the road to this as other than an exception or fetish (ie, as a social mode rather than a commodity) requires a theory of how one gets from State to non-State relations to animals and meat. If the State is directly attached to the social forms of mass meat eating (the factory farm, the normalization of plentiful, cheap meat) then ethical meat maintains a fantasy of the dictatorship of the vegetarian that would provide the link between the present and a society in which ethical meat recaptures its ritual meaning.


Discourse on ethical consumption recapitulates the Marxist argument that in a communist society labor wouldn't be alienated, or we wouldn't have a totalizing instrumental view of nature, or objects wouldn't confront us as commodities--that in whatever way, something we occasionally access today as an exception invested with fetish value would be normalized and de-fetishized. Following Craig's astute diagnosis of the entanglements of State and meat, we can see that half-way measures like ethical meat don't really believe in themselves except insomuch as they believe that vegetarianism is the condition of their reason.