heroic habitus sustainable habitat redux

8/7/2019 Heroic Habitus Sustainable Habitat Redux

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Heroic Habitus vs. Sustainable Cyborg

or

Specularity and Heroism: The role of role-models in James Camerons Avatar

Govinda Dickman, Feb 2011 University of West England

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Once upon a time, the word creativitywas used only to denote one of the divine

characteristics of one being single being: The Creator, aka God. At that time, the notion

that humans (His creatures) might be creative was both morally and grammatically

absurd, and to attempt to use the word in most of its now current nuances would have

resulted in either confusion or anger, depending upon the listener. The term Avatar

has been subjected to a very similar semantic shift it is a Sanskrit word, originally used

to denote the manifestation upon earth of a God.

The Avatar par excellence is the infinite, revealing itself to finite human perception in

terms it can comprehend.

This observation is the crux of my review of the film Avatar(20th Century Fox, 2009),

and is in fact the basis for a radically intercorporeal and ecological mode of cultural

criticism,which has no name as yet but which has become my standard method for

analysing cultural production in general. This is a broadly ecocritical way of looking that

tries to bring into focus the material ramifications of the manner in which language and

representation affects the way that bodies relate to each other in time, space and being.

My intention is to make obvious the interlinked systems, the vast network of human and

non-human entities, which constitute the matrix of every medium and are, essentially,


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the medium in which all media are suspended, and then to ask why this rather self-

evident observation is systematically suppressed by nearly every mode of cultural

utterance.

This focus upon the causal and proximal connections, which are made and broken by

every utterance, every medium, every message, is my attempt at a radically ecological

revision of cultural studies, and of the manner in which culture is traditionally

conceived within this field. The etymological root of the word ecology is theGreek word

(oikos) means home. To those who work in the field of cultural studies, and who

have read Raymond Williams essay on the etymological root of the word culture,

perhaps it will not seem so radical if I say that an ecological approach is the logical

extension of the revolutionary move away from the study of high culture toward a

more democratic focus upon the ontologically plural Everyday, whose radical

multiplicity is the basis of pretty much all contemporary cultural studies. The attempt

to value the broad spectrum of lived experience of people other than the cultural elite

of any given society, actually leads inevitably to a critical re-evaluation of the

anthropocentrism of the term culture itself. Even once it has been stripped of the

classism, racism and sexism inherent in the term high culture, the term culture impliesand cannot avoid the nuance of what is valued, and so remains vulnerable to

facilitating new forms of ideological victimisation, new ways of delineating boundaries

between what is crop and what is weed, what is preserved and what is destroyed, what

is hidden and what is shown, what is normal and what is abject, what is Us and what is

Them.

I believe, as an object of study, culture must be contextualized, grounded in anawareness ofwhere this growing, where this preserving and destroying actually occurs.

What follows is my attempt to move towards a kind ofecologicalmode of cultural

studies, one that situates culture firmly in the bodies it encompasses, and the actually

existing world in which it inheres.


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Im going to try to demonstrate and explain this method in the form of a critical

response to the notion that James Camerons epic ecofiction in any way presents a

viable role-model for environmentally friendly human practice what Karol & Gale

(2005) term a sustainable habitus. Ive chosen this film as the focus for this

experimental critical gaze for a number of reasons. The first is that one of the more

important meanings of the rather poetic and enigmatic italicised statement, with which

I begin this essay, is very well exemplified by this ubiquity: Avatar is an immensely

popular film, one which all of my undergraduate and secondary school students will

have heard about, and which most will have seen.

The second reason is that it would be insane to pass up the opportunity: The ironies

which accrete around this film, the bizarre tension between its ostensible message and

its elided medium, the simple fact that it is called Avatar and that the avatar to which

the title refers is at once (and in so many ways!) both digital icon and physical entity I

can think of no mass produced and mass marketed product of popular western culture,

which so crisply exemplifies the schizophrenia that I wish to bring into view, or which so

clearly mirrors the main themes of my critical method, which are:

1. The manner in which the ephemeral nature of the spectraland specularthingswe encounter in cyberspace, and the insubstantiality of cyberspace itself, has a

strong tendency to elide the speculum in which they appear. By which I mean,

the material and technological substructure, in which the spectre consists, is

always rendered invisible by the presence of the spectre itself. What is lost or

circumscribed - what subjectivity is alienated from in the moment of its

encounter with the avatar - is the invisible matrix of sentient bodies and actually

existing things that brought them together: the ecology that sustains them. The

essence of my argument is that the aforementioned schizophrenia is analogous

to (and caused by) a lack of ecological awareness, and it is an inherent potential


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in all avatars, or at least in the subjectivities that are constructed by their

encounters with avatars; e.g. it often arises as a false utopian/dystopian

tendency to dichotomically oppose cyber spaces and physical spaces, wherein

we fantasise the virtual word in order to semantically elide the phantasmatic

nature of the real world. The avatar is notwhat appears instead of reality it

is, or partakes in, the very essence of phenomenal reality itself, and the fact that

this is not part of how we perceive them raises serious ethical and ontological

questions about the nature and essence of what, in an attempt to dissolve the

facile dichotomy of real vs. virtual, some theorists1

are now calling actuality.

2. The equal and opposite manner in which the immersive and pervasive nature ofcyberspace, the over-determined phenomenological presence (or pseudo-

materiality, or hyperreality) of the spectres we encounter in cyberspace, elides

their basic ephemerality and technicality Culture is the first cyber-space, the

prototype if you will for the computer-based digital cyberspaces, which most

people think of when you say the word cyberspace. As Im fairly certain many

cultural theorists2

would unhesitatingly agree, cyberspace is any intersubjective

consensual space that is networked by language and protocol.

The hidden and crucial role of fantasy and desire in the construction andmaintenance of cyberspace: In cyberspace, from the very beginning, Time &

Space are permeated by Desire. What I mean by this is that cyberspace is

ontologicallyan intersubjective or consensual space, wherein the matter in

which the space consists models the minds in which it inheres, and vice versa. I

intend to argue that this dualistic perception of space, time and being is basically

a cause and effect of a culturally normalized schizophrenia which results in false

perceptions of false objects, a process called identification that it might well

1The focus upon the ergodic phase-space that is created in human subjectivity by games, rituals and

social orders has become a crucial area of study in play theory and game studies, for instance, and is one

of the clearest expressions of this insight that I have yet found. The distinction between real and virtual is

basically irrelevant at the level of the haptic a cue is a cue is a cue

2e.g. Bernard Steigler, Jean-Jaques Barthlmy, Dona Harraway, Espen Aarseth, Helen Kennedy, Jon

Dovey, SethGiddings, DavidGauntlett


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result in ecological disaster in the very near future. Very simply, I believe that

the problem lies in manner in which most human cultures3

ascribe and deny

identity to Self, to Other, and to other than Other: The way we identify affects

our ability to understand the nature and essence of the space and time, which

these two imaginary entities are meant to share.

The third reason Ive chosen this film as the focus of this analysis, is the aggressively

publicized notion that Avatar is an environmentalist project of some sort, and that it

in some way exemplifies a new and ecologically sustainable attitude toward nature

that we might want to inculcate as a permanent part of our psychic and physical

comportment toward the planet. As well as being a very carefully established aspect of

the Avatar brand identity, this idea has been the text and subtext of many of even its

most negative reviews4, and is moreover a claim implicit in Camerons own account of

the ecosystemic representations to be found in this film5. When he tells us that a

certain (read miniscule) proportion of the films theatrical revenue will be dedicated

to environmental causes, he presents this as proof that leftist environmentalism is

what the film has always been all about. This claim is absurd, because his statements

deny (or elide) both the very undemocratic cultural semiotics in which the film consists,

3This statement is not intended to elide the violent history of globalization, nor to compound the process

by which alternative modes of being have been systematically wiped out or warped by progressive

patriarchalism, which manifests most frequently as aggressively expansionistic imperialism. War and

oppression have set the tone for the development of every culture on this planet in one way or another,

even those that were not built on this model. We must not forget the reasons whyhuman beings of so

many different kinds and conditions all come to partake in the schizophrenia that is characteristic of the

imperial weltanschauung does not mean that they are all alike, or that globalised neoliberalism is in any

way the natural evolution of human culture, as some people seem determined to infer from the fact

that it has, effectively, rendered every other option unviable or invisible.

4The bibliography includes a cultural reference section where youll find a list of URLs whose intention

is to give a sense of what Avatarmeans to people by illustrating some of its actual cultural impact. This

does include some reviews of the sort just described, but it focuses more upon identifying the actions,

habits and perceptions, which this film has induced or inspired. I find this collection of ramificatory and

indexical signs, of tangible results and palpable resonances, more eloquent than even the most delicate

analysis could ever be.

5http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xd21he_avatar-sequel-to-be-a-deep-sea-affa_news and

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/25/james-cameron-avatar-2-3 and

http://patdollard.com/2009/12/say-it-aint-so-james-cameron-admits-avatar-fuels-left-wing-agenda/


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the quintessentially hierarchical nature of the systems of both its production and its

consumption, and the much greater stream of revenue that will be generated by the

gigatonnes of decidedly non-eco-friendly plastic merchandise and spin-off tech, which

mustbe factored into any realistic picture of what the film actually is6.

It may come as some surprise that I consider this eco-critical method appropriate for a

secondary school syllabus, when one considers the range of influences that have gone

into shaping it. One of the greatest technical and ethical difficulties I have faced in

writing this essay has been trying to decide on whether to just do the critique, so that

its evident that this complicated mish-mash of idiosyncratically interpreted theory can

actually result in a valid and rigorous analytic method that is also actually quite simple

to teach and do, or to explain the method, so that the analytic gaze itself is more

available for evaluation and critique. I hope that you will find the balance I have settled

upon satisfies both the practical need for clarity andthe ethical need for transparency. I

feel I am impelled to address the latter point, because I really do have an odd take on

some of the theories I deploy here: Im a community film-maker and sometime political

activist turned academic; Ive come to the ideas I use here by strange paths, and am by

no means an expert in many of the fields upon which I touch. It is an ethical tradition in

cultural studies writing to account for ones subjectivity before embarking upon an

ideological discourse, and so I feel morally obliged to begin by admitting that this

method, this way of looking, is what happens when someone who is hired to teach a

critical and culturally embedded mode of media production feels obliged to understand

more about the field in which they work, but is too embarrassed to ask explicitly, in case

people accuse him of being a fraud, and begin to ask uncomfortable questions about

6greenwash |grn w sh; -w sh | noun

disinformation disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public

image : the oil companys highly publicized campaign to preserve the 12 remaining plants of a rare species

of cactus which once grew abundantly in an area whose ecosystem their operation has irreparably

compromised, is yet another example of their corporate greenwash.


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what hes doing teaching in the first place. It is a very idiosyncratic synthesis of some of

the most notoriously difficult areas of cultural theory, most of which Ive encountered

autodidactically, outside of the cultural and pedagogic frameworks of the disciplines

wherein the theories themselves pertain. The sea in which I flounder is a very heady

interdisciplinary brew:

1. A lot of phenomenology, but in the mode of Emmanuel Levinas or Julia Kristeva,rather than the closed egological loop of Heidegger and Husserls philosophy.

Egology is a term coined by Levinas in his critique of philosophy in general and

Heidegger in particular, whose focus upon the primacy of what he perceived

(and I assume experienced) as a sort of primordially alienated human

subjectivity led both him and Husserl to what Levinas perceived as serious errors

in thought and judgment, not the least of which is blindness to the ontologically

intersubjective (or ecological) nature of their own subjectivity.

2. Donna Harraways cyborg theory, but filtered and modified by a slow anddifficult familiarization with certain elements of post-humanism and the post-

anthropological philosophy of Stiegler and Barthlmy;

3. Deleuzian ontology, insofar as I understand it; my first philosophical training wasin Buddhist Abidharma, and I found Deleuze and Gauttaris approach to language

(especially the idea of the rhizome) instantly recognizable, which led me to

grapple with their frankly mind-boggling and often incomprehensible texts, and

whatever commentaries upon them, which I could find. Deleuzians around the

world will probably howl in horror to hear me say this, but Ive come to the

conclusion that his anti-taxonomic ontology is extremely close to the Mahayana

Buddhist teachings on emptiness and form, up to and including the ethics he

and Gauttarri felt were implied by it a theory for which I present as proof the

whole approach to perception and the question of what therapy ought to be

that is implied in the term schizanalysis.

4. I also make extensive use of Charles Saunders Pierces semiotic method, thoughit must be said that my use of this system is extremelyidiosyncratic, and I am not


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certain that the gentleman in question would recognise or approve of my

interpretation of his taxonomy of signs. The main difference between my

approach and CS Pierce is that, having read Deleuze, I began to believe that

Pierces taxonomic approach was fundamentally, indeed radically misled, and

that in fact what Pierce had stumbled upon was an interesting series of

observations about modalities of signing, in which subjectively apprehended

individual signs may participate, given the right contexts and conditions. His

taxonomy is useful to me only on the understanding that a) the type of sign

which appears to appear is actually a modality of signing that is allowed to

dominate in any given sign process, and the dubious entity status of the sign is

a culturally and contextually specific construct, and b) in fact, all signs, always, in

all ways, participate simultaneously in all modalities of signing.

5. Baudrillards taxonomy of simulacra has received a similar treatment; I love itbut I use it with great care. Baudrillards taxonomy can easily be deployed in a

rather paranoid attempt to take control of our encounters with simulacra that

effectively places us at odds with what simulacra (and we) actually are. From my

experience of teaching this very valuable theory at undergraduate level, I have

found it can allow the analyst to deny the fact simulacra are primordiallyauthentic part and parcel of subjectivity itself. This can lead to errors that

equate to scapegoating hyperreality by semantically constructing a non-existent

Them and accusing them of trying to pull the wool over an equally non-

existent our eyes by creating this or that simulacrum These errors can be

avoided if one has a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between

perception and reality that is inherent in intersubjectivity itself; and if one is

aware that the 4 orders of simulation are inevitably and inherently synchretic,inseperable, the same. The first thing I teach is that any to attempt to

distinguish categorically between types of simulation present in any given sign,

is to enter in conflict with the nature of the sign itself.

6. The area I have studied most thoroughly and systematically are the post-


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structural approaches to cinema and media-in-general, which ultimately led

away from a linguistic approach to language. You could interpret everything I

write here as a sort of radically post-Marxist version of Baudrys apparatus

theory, since it emphasizes the importance of tearing ones gaze away from the

spectacle and looking at the whole speculum instead, I suppose Ive been very

influenced by post-Marxist critiques of Marxist critical theory and the closely

related tradition of psychoanalytically informed cultural critique, especially

insofar as this approach was applied by Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida, Said (and

others) to a systematic critical appraisal of the methods and aims of

anthropology and sociology, and as it is deployed in the post-colonial critique of

language and identity to be found in the work of bell hooks, Elspeth Kydd,

Thomas Laqueur, (and others...).

7. Pierre Bourdieus theory ofhabitus is one of the key ideas in this essay, butviewed very much in the light of feminist and post-feminist phenomenology,

especially Luce Irigarays wonderful critique of Lacanian psycholinguistics and her

writing on the speculum. In the end, though I have no formal training in it, I

would say that this body of psychoanalytically informed writing has been the

most influential upon me. I cannot imagine thinking about culture withoutthinking about Michel Foucault and the critical debates his sometimes-flawed

but always brilliant insights have initiated. I cannot imagine imagining without

Judith Butler and Elizabeth Groszs (to me) revolutionary focus upon the

materiality of subjectivity, first encountered via Gail Weisss writings on

intersubjectivity. These are the people who taught me that bodies think space

and vice versa, and while I own that I might well have totally misunderstood all

of them, I remain grateful to them for the language they have helped me todevelop, and for the thoughts this language has allowed me to think, and for the

things which these thoughts have allowed me to realize, for better or for worse

Culture is medium and medium is culture. What I mean by this is: Not only are all


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media culturally embedded techniques of utterance, they are, primarily, the

technological utterance of cultural itself; every utterance utters culture. This is because,

in cyberspace (and culture is the cyberspace par excellence) identitycircumscribes, or

precedes and defines, entity. Therefore, to make an utterance is either to iterate the

culture in which the medium of that utterance is embedded or consists, or it is to

change it, challenge it, baffle or elude it. Cultured subjectivity is, and always has been,

the quintessential cyborg, for one of the prerequisites of its being is that it has

internalized the social gaze upon itself, and more-or-less successfully habituated the

techniques and technologies by which it becomes intelligible to itself and its field.

Donna Haraway makes a very useful distinction between this kind of cyborg the pre-

technical, or proto-technical, or primordial cyborg we all already are by virtue of our

intersubjective natures - and the phallological cyborgs, the attempts to literally become

embodied as the phallic power of technology itself, that are exemplified by the more

conventionally understood half-man-half-machine model. The latter she characterises

as a kind of spectre, a fantasy that can never actually be realized, for they are the over-

determination of a very masculine conception of the super-ego, which results in an

attempt to reify a phantasmatically male super-self, via technique and technology. One

of the reasons I so like post-humanism is that it has given us the basis of a fairly good

working definition of sanity to add to Freuds list of socially viable socialized

subjectivities: the ability to clearly distinguish between egological cyborgs, who

neurotically literalise (fetishise or internalize) technologies in order to increase their

material agency, and ecological cyborgs, who embody and embrace their

intersubjectivity, their permeability, their specularity.

If mediation is how culture utters itself to its selves, then avatars (identities) are the

medium/message, which entities must utter within culture in order to be and be

understood. To make a non-cultural utterance, to appear not as an avatar, but as


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alterityitself

is difficult to imagine. Indeed, it is the very definition of unimagineable. This

observation is arguably the basis of both feminist phenomenology and post-colonial

critical thinking, which in pointing out that when we explore the envelop of the

intelligible, we discover the boundary beyond which lies the abject - both in their way

seek to remind us that, in reality if not in actuality, we encounter alterity all the time:

The internal and external truth of each object we encounter in experience, including the

self who encounters, is genuinely alternative to what we imagine. Its right there, in

front of our noses. Why do we see spectres instead? It is because, from the very

beginning, the Time & Space in which identity is constituted are manifestations of

Desire We see spectres, because we are cyborgs regarding (ourselves in) a speculum.

What is a spectre? Avatars are spectres, as Ive already suggested. Heroes are spectres,

as are villains. Selves are spectres, and so are Others. When it comes right down to it,

you would be hard pressed to identify a single object in your phenomenological sphere

that is not a spectre, because identity itself is spectral, and all processes of identification

are specular. For this reason, the most I can assert about any given spectre / avatar /

thing, is that to encounter it is to encounter a sign, albeit be a sign that upon closer

inspection appears to be without clear referent or referee, whose precise modality and

location is necessarily unclear because part of the task of such signs is to create modality

and location.

If it is a sign, it will be what all signs always are: a phenomenological complex of the

indexical, the iconic, the symbolic andthediagrammatic.

Index What are the material and phenomenological prerequisites for what you are


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looking at? What is this direct evidence for? A whole material history is always masked

or encoded in what appears, as are the corporeal and cultural schemata of perception

itself: To seek for the index is to consider everything that had and has to happen in

order to make this trace, this HereNow, here, now It is to regard all things as causes

and effects, within an infinitely receding web of causes and effects. As an example, the

film Avatarexists only by virtue of its reference to (or deference to) a vast technical,

technological and cultural superstructure some call history: it would be both

unimaginable and unachievable outside of the very specific physical and psychological

contexts of its production, viz. the technosphere of globalised post-modernity.

Icon What does it look like? To which senses does it appear, and how is it brought

there? An example, from the film under discussion: The megarealistic iconography

created via a stereoscopic fusion of video footage of the actress Zoe Saldana and some

mighty clever CGI is also a fusion of symbolic memory-cognition and corporeal

perception-synaesthesis. The 10ft tall blue-skinned Pocahontamazon who appears

instead of Saldana and CGI, the character Neytiri, is a synaesthetic spectre, or

simulacrum. That she is spectral is an inevitable artifact of her synaesthetic essence;

that she is simulacric is an artifact of her specularity, and of the manner in which

spectators are conditioned to relate with synaesthetic spectres. My point is that icons

are actually intertextual symbols, in both the semiotic and psychoanalytic senses of this

term; they are syntheses of realistic and phantasmatic cues, that create in an

appropriately conditioned subjectivitythe experience of a quasi-encounter with a

hyperreal spectre (presence-that-masks-absence-of-self-and-absence-of-indexical),

which we experience as both new and uncannily familiar: sacred, mesmeric, erotic,

threatening, phantasmatic, cool, huge, tiny etc.

Symbol What does it mean and to whom? What kind of tool is it, and what systems of

representation contain or sustain it? What is it for, and who has found uses for it?


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Symbols are tools - both technological and abstract and so always serve a

generalisable function within an apparatus of some sort In Peirces definition, the

symbol par exellence lacks direct correspondance with the referent it hypothetically

indicates / discursively assumes, but this does not (necessarily) mean that symbols are

artificial in the sense thats implied by the convention of using words and abstract

designs as examples of the symbolic. The symbol maysimply be an instrumentalised

icon, or a generalised index! In the symbol, there is always a tension between the

general and the specific, the homogenous and heterogenous, the homogenic and

schizogenic. As an example of what I mean, the physical realism of Avatars

iconography also functions a symbolic iteration of a very culturally specific distinction

between the real and the imaginary.

Diagram Diagrams are instructional, structural, and technical. Diagrams are maps,

techniques, paradigms, and programs. Diagrams are ontological (in Heideggers sense

of this word), and as such all diagrams may be regarded as programmatic what

Deleuze and Guattarri called biogrammatic. This modality of signing, which might also

be termed ergodicsigning, or haptic signing is the least studied, the most mysterious,

and indeed has only recently been identified as (ahem) significant. In a nutshell, the

study of signs required the challenge that post-modernity brought to the whole notion

of significance before it could become evident how crucial it is to engage with signs at

this level of operation. CS Pierce, whose taxonomy of signs I have hijacked in here,

thought diagrams were merely a special class of icon. What he failed to grasp was that

the meaning of diagrams is not significant, in that it is not innate in the sign itself and

so will not be found if it is sought there. As has now been noted in many fields

(psychoanalysis, game studies, play theory, intercultural communication studies) the

classic linguistic and literary-studies approach to the study of signs has suppressed

awareness of the importance of the physiological and psychological responses that are

triggered in the body that perceives the cue, and of the dynamic context in which those

signs appear. To identify the diagrammatic/biogrammatic aspect of a given sign allows


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you access to both of those suppressed realities, for it is to ask What does this sign

program or entail? What do the manners in which it appears to a given subjectivity,

and the manners in which it does not appear to that same subjectivity, simply imply

about itself, the perceiving subjectivity, and the world where they both seem to appear?

Though I call it a sign in order to foreground the interplay of index, icon, symbol and

diagram which is common to all signs, and which will prove so useful in my critique of

Camerons film, the more conventional definition of the spectre is a phantasm a

desire-born pseudo-entity (identity), a cathectic symbol whose job is to shape and

mobilize libidinal energy, that can appear only in a speculum. What, then, is a

speculum? It is mirror, and it is probe. Fundamentally, specula are, or inhere in,

techniques: theyre ways of seeing that instrumentally manipulate/mitigate the ever

present tension between mimesis and poesis that is ontologically innate to interpretive

perception. Their function is to triangulate subjectivity in relation to the environment:

to tell us who and where we are. We may say that specula are ontologically ecological

(or ecologically ontological?), if we recall that ecoin = home, surrounding, context,

connective system, matrix.

That all perceivable or imaginable things are spectres is not, in itself, a problem except

to petulant philosophers or belligerent demagogues who refuse to accept what that

implies for any project that has absolute objective understanding as its goal. That

phenomenal reality (Deleuzes plane of immanence) is primordially simulacric only

becomes problematic when hyperreality ceases to be a genuinely ecologicalprocess,

and becomes what Levinas called egologicalinstead. This is why Levinas always insisted

that ontology doesnt inform ethics: it is ethics.

To clarify: Whilst specular techniques can be purely ideological (technical), theyre more

often quite manifestly technological. Specula always at least partly create what they


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appear to reveal, and that is why both they and the spectres that appear to appear

within them fall into the category of simulacra, or hyperreality. However, its important

never to lose sight of the fact that, while the spectre will always be spectral and

specular, this does not imply that it is ephemeral: The hyperreal may be illusory7, but

that does not mean it is immaterial! I therefore tend to define specula either as

materially manipulative ways of looking that make some things visible and other things

invisible, or ways of seeing that bestow and deny material agency.

It is this link between specularity and agency that is important here. There is a rich and

deliberate controversy in Vedic and Buddhist philosophy about whether, when one

regards the phenomenological manifestation of a deity (called an avatar), one regards

the God itself, or merely encounters some aspect of its agency, its manifest power. I

dont intend to provide a solution to this metaphysical puzzle here; I mention it because

I wish to point out that the answer to the question ofwhat, precisely the worshipper

encounters when they encounter an avatar very often boils down to a prescription, a

foreclosure-via-description (or discursive circumscription) ofthe worshippers agency:

Avatars are phenomenological phenomena they dont appear to worshipping

subjectivities; they appear as the subjectivity called worship.

When we regard James Camerons Avatar, there is a world of difference between what

we are seeing, and what we are looking at. What we are looking at is a gargantuan

material and ideological apparatus that extends way beyond the frame in time, space,

and matter; what we are seeing is a megarealistic diegesis, a hyperbolically realistic

NowHere whose pseudo-immanence is phenomenologically over-determined: it

7For me, the most useful definition of the ontic/ontological status of phenomena is to be found in

Mahayana Buddhist abhidharma (the metaphysical branch of Buddhist philosophy). Specifically, I refer to

the unbreakable link between ethics and ontology that is implied in the Heart Sutra, and in the

Mdhyamaka philosophy of Nagarjuna, which describe phenomena as empty of inherent existence, but

warn against both materialistic and nihilistic interpretations of emptiness.


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envelops our sensorium, and so transfixes our attention upon the spectacle of the

present moment. This misleading disjuncture between whatis, and what is revealed

may be characterized as a none-too-subtle conflation of the iconic and the indexical

(realistic vs. real), or the symbolic and the indexical (truth vs. proof). The main effect of

this conflation, this masking of the symbolic nature of the signs and techniques the film

deploys, is to elide the material, social and psychological preconditions of those signs

and techniques. This elision is an essential part of both the ideological and aesthetic

impetus of the film, for without it, the illusion would have no power, no impact, no

meaning: no value.

This notion ofvalue is essential to Pierre Bourdieus theories about social identity

performances, which focus upon the interdependence of the habitus (the habitual

complex of behavioural and attitudinal comportments adopted by individual

subjectivities), the intersubjective socio-cultural fieldin which those subjectivities

subsist/consist, and the relative capital, or status, or value, which may be ascribed to

identities within that field. The identities performed, perceived or embodied by habitus

aredurable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as

structuring structures (Bourdieu, 1977, p.72), by which he means thatcultivated

performances express a learned, conditioned or contingent belief in the value or

identity of the things we perceive and project. For a social being, the meaning or

cultural capitalof any given object, practice or attitude is inextricable from the field

where it has value. Though he himself is very vague on what precisely might be the

social and psychological mechanisms that define the relationship between habitus,

capitaland field, PierreBourdieus model of enculturationimplies some form of

speculum: The ascription of value implied in the term capitalseems analogous with the

Freudian notion of libidinal projection and cathexis, and the unconscious (or un-self-

conscious) internalization of the value system, implied by the term habitus, seems to

imply that we have become some ambulent form of technical gaze or gazing

technology. How else are we to explain the manner in which external/cultural value


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systems become manifest as behaviours, comportments, attitudes?

Prior to Bourdieu, the term habitus was used, primarily, in the field of orthopaedic

medicine: Its first meaning, the meaning which synchretically circumscribes its use in

cultural studies and psychoanalysis, is the way we tend to hold our bodies (in certain

situations). In psychoanalysis and cultural theory the focus shifts from the actual

physical comportment that it originally denoted, to the contextually specific

performance: the situation. This shift in focus from comportment to situation reflects

the decentralization implicit in Lacans theory of the Gaze, and indeed habitus has been

presented as symptom, proof, performance or manifestation of the internalized Gaze. It

has come to denote the learnedattitudes and predispositions we carry into archetypal

situations (or by which we perceive those situations): our cultured habitual perceptions

of things and our resulting habitual comportment toward them.

If habitus is a kind of synaesthetic speculum - a culturally constituted cyborg that

sees, embodies and enacts identity- then perhaps an ecotopian revolution

begins within the feedback loop between individuals performative attitudes

towards things, and the manner in which these things are represented in their

cultures? This, I think, is the intuition that has led Cameron and others to claim

that Avataris eco-friendly: Integral to the much hyped notion that there is an

ecological message to the film is the claim that the Navi - the aliens who seek

to protect their planet from rapaciously capitalistic human invaders - are

performative exemplars of an ideal ecological habitus.

Certainly, most reviewers seems to concur that Avatar is a mainstream

ecofictional epic, with a barely concealed anti-colonial (or racist, depending on

how you spin it) subtext


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but, although its makers are acutelyaware of the changing cultural capital

(ahem) of environmentalism in the shadow of climate crisis, a conservative and

realistic response is notwhat Avatar the film, Avatar the cultural fairground,

induces in its audience. Despite its ostensible ecological and colonial topicality,

the behaviours and attitudes, the comportment-towards-things, the habitus that

Avatar mediates in all its intertextuality, is denialistic consumer frenzy8

Ecstasis is the centrifuge of the Elysian aesthetic that seeks to transport the spectator to

a world made by lightning, which I call megarealism.

What are you looking at? What are you seeing? What are you looking for and what are

you being shown? No matter how perceptive you are, most of what you are looking at

is invisible to you: either imperceptible, or occluded, or simply elided by the very act of

seeking. Lens, screen, mirror, telescope, microscope, language, taxonomy, paradigm,

theory, toy, story, quest: All representational or simulatory techniques and

technologies inevitably repress/elide some phenomena whilst foregrounding /

magnifying others. They appear to do this in order to bring somethinginto focus for

someone, but as Irigaray points out, their true and secret activity is to bring the gazing

someone into focus, by locating them in relation to the gazed-upon. The entire

corporeal and cultural field of the spectral/specular subjectivity - the matrix of power

relationships which gives both the someone and the something their intelligibility -

is implied by the speculum: a taxonomy implies taxonomists and everything required

for them to taxonomise; gynecological specula imply prostrate and passive women and

probingly active doctors; megareal cinematic icons imply synaesthetic corporeal

subjectivities capable of comprehending synaesthetic symbols, and somewhere for their

8I refer you again to the list of URLs at the end of this essay, which provides specific examples of the kind

of cultural practice that have been inspired and facilitated by the film.


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encounter to occur etc.

The kind of spectre seen relies upon what kind of spectator you are, and what kind of

speculum prefers you. Or is that vice versa? In the case ofAvatar, the spectre appears

to be a synaesthetically megarealistic cinematic simulacrum which is both aesthetically

and ideologically focused upon ecstasis, transport: a quintessentially technicalfictional

world (or NowHere) called Pandora, which Camerons very large production team and

20th

Century Foxs equally impressive marketing department have applied every effort

to render (sic) immersive, pervasive and ubiquitous in the HereNow of the audiences

everyday. I say appears to be because the hyperbolically real NowHere of Pandora

both is and is not the true spectre, in the same way that any given simulacrum both is

and isnt the hyperreality in which it inheres.

The hyperreality created by megarealistic (hyper-technical) systems of representation is,

emphatically, not the spectral dreamworlds that appear to appear in the speculum of

the cinematic apparatus. Nor is it the illusory sense of always-already-thereness

bestowed upon the specular subjectivity that believes it regards the spectre, but is in

fact invoked by it. Ultimately, the hyperreality is the HereNowbeyond the frame, the

world where something like this film can exist, and make sense as a cultural utterance.

More brutally: the hyperreality is the world where intelligent analysts purport to regard

Avataras an example of ecologically sensitive storytelling, or where people are

encouraged to regard taking a ride on a roller-coaster through a digital simulation of a

phantasmatic wilderness, as a form of nature worship!

Can a megarealistic representation of pure fantasy ever constitute an ecologically and

environmentally sustainable ideal for the mental and physical disposition of human

beings toward the objects that comprise their reality? Do any of the characters in Avatar

represent a credible model for a sustainable habitus (Karol & Gale, 2005)?


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The real question, of course, is How are people likely to interpret and respond to these

representations? In the end, it really depends on what you think heroes (or

sustainability) are

By this I mean three things:

1. what you think is representative of the heroic, and why?2. what you thinkheroes are made of, and why?3. what do you think heroes are for, and why?

If the Navi are exemplars of a sustainable habitus, it behooves us to ask: What is the

identity of the Navi? What do they embody for us?

Regarded narratalogically, taken at face value as fictional characters in a story, the

Navi may be heroes, but theyre not the hero! They are the human protagonists

enemies-turned-mentors/lovers, in heroic contention with (mirrored by/opposed to)

the technological forces of the acquisitive and destructive capitalist war machine, which

has brought the true Hero to their planet: Jake Sully, a paraplegic mercenary seeking

legs.

In the storythe Navi are real, and the Avatar of the films title is a mixture of human

DNA (Sully) and the DNA of an unrevealed Navi donor: a suit for Sully to wear so that

he can breathe an atmosphere poisonous to humans a wilderness so wild it is

anathema to human life, Otherness epitomized as space. The avatar bestows agency,

and we may recognize it as a speculum. It is designed to fulfill a fantasy, a desire: it will

allow the hero to go where humans may not, to spy among the Navi, and basically


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perform superhuman feats of physical and cultural prowess This element ofsuperness

is important: Avatars plot and mise en scene more or less entirely consists in

intertextual references to other Hollywood movies, and to genres whose primary

function has been to iterate the cultural superiority of white folks, to be easy on the eye

and mind of the spectator/consumer who is basically a prisoner of their own privileged

immobility.

In reality, which does and doesnt have any relation to the diegesis, the Navi continue a

long line of exoticised Others in post-colonial narratives, which provide both the racial

and gender stereotypes for Avatar: Theyre not real alterity, theyre what the white

protagonist wishes he was, when in truth he is / regards himself as the bad guys

Theyre the Tonto who exists to valorize (and serve) our Lone Ranger. Reading the racial

and political semiotics of Avatar, we find that the film is a matrix of references to

popular culture; it contains characters and narratological tropes from well-known

westerns (especially Pocahontas and Dances With Oscars), post-digital war movies, a

whole host of sci-fi & fantasy films and computer games, and is structurally identical to

deep cover thrillers. Its aesthetic impact inheres in the same racist and sexist

binarisms that define urban paranoia, nationalism, and the post-colonial condition in

general

Since Navi culture is an idealisation of, rather than an alternative to, the colonial

worldview whose actual manifestation is abhorrently performed by the humans, it

may or may not be genuinely sustainable (or even feasible!) The Navi exist only as a

reflective duality, troped by comparison to the brutal technological agency of the

humans in the story. Its clear from this comparison that Cameron wishes us to regard

the use to which the Navi put their environment as the epitome of an humble and

skillful self-sufficient habitus, but if we actually seek a coherent system of planet-saving

practices here wed be very hard pressed to find it: The Navi are competitive, and have


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a very technologistic relationship with their environment. The key metaphor is the

weird conflation of control and union symbolized by the very literal manner in which the

Navi bond with the planet, by literally jacking in with their capital phalli. The horses

and dragons with whom they thus bond become theirmounts, not vice versa, and the

ritual by which they bond with the earth itself is based upon the Balinese performance

of the Ramayana, which is a performative metaphor for the ego itself! The centre

directs the circumference, the ego is at once transcended and iterated in the waves of

energy projected by the collective. Very beautiful to behold and surely better to

participate in, but not alterity, not yet Though they worship via union with the planet,

by jacking into it in the manner just described, it is not the planet which they worship, if

the form of that worship is any evidence: what they worship is the tension between

ecstatic individuation and oceanic immersion the need to be vs. the urge to merge.

And indeed, from the evidence of the rest of the film, the Navi seem to regard Pandora

mostly as a kind of dangerous playground: Potentially lethal, but great fun, if you know

the rules and if youve developed the mastery (sic) required to survive a basically

poisonous and inimical wilderness

If the Naviare role-models, what they actually embody and perform is dichotomy:

Theyare made of the same stuff as what they ostensibly oppose!

This schizophrenia is present on every level of signification: Regarded as iconic symbols

in a megareal story that is and isnt about how we should relate with the environment,

theyre tragic 10ft tall superwarriors, ecosensitive dragontamers who are more than

human, and yet who exist to serve humans theyre love interest, theyre

psychotherapeutic healers, theyre sexual competitors. The question, which the film

refuses to beg: What is it that makes Neytiri such a willing mentor to the storys

flawed/broken/seeking protagonist, Jake Sully? What has she, or the Navi, to gain from

this transfer of agency, in a battle against the technologistic agents of human greed?


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Regarded indexically they are, of course, technology incarnate: pure tool, pure user,

pure player.

Regarded as diagram

When you look at what the Navi are actually made of, they are an amazing synaesthetic

synthesis of the inner and outer reality of the urban proletariat who comprise the films

target audience. As such, the spectre which appears ought to be completely unique in

each person who perceives them, for what appears when we regard them will depend

upon how we are situated within the field of cultural memory where climate crisis and

10 ft blue ecowarriors and Pandora and dragons and augmented reality and

pervasive locative media and 3D BluRay find their meaning Surely, we will each

relate differently with amazing CGI depending on for instance - whether we regard it

in the capacity of consumer, producer, or outsider? Even the shot of adrenalin and

seratonin which human bodies produce in response to the scale and speed and volume

of such techonological extravaganzas will ramify something very different to say, the

teenaged 21st

century urbanite whose excitement will induce them to buy the DVD and

the virtual reality toy and the collectors cards, and the person whose job it will be to

make those things

True, but not true enough. I say ought to be rather than is because I believe that

any genuine plurality or multiplicity of meaning that the films content and form might

achieve is suppressed in a number of ways, and that perspectival homogeneity is one of

the primary aesthetic effects of megarealism, and of spectacle. In explanation, I

return to the specular nature of Pandora, and the objects that appear to appear within


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it: Theyare symbols in both the linguistic and psychoanalytic sense, whose

function/action is to create what Judith Butler calls intelligibility- a coherent and

circumscribed reality, complete with someone to experience it. I may safely categorize

them as spectres in the spectatorial (egological, rather than ecological) sense, for three

reasons:

1) Pandora, and all it contains, is spectral, insofar as (if I am one of the people atwhom the film is targeted) every character, every event, every aspect of the

design and plot, is part of a pre-existing moral or aesthetic spectrum: the sphere

of intelligibility. Everything in this film is instantly recognizable, either

reassuringly similar to, or not-unpleasantly different from, something I already

understand if I am a certain kind of subject used to relating in certain ways to

certain predefined objects. The formulaic plot, the ever-so-conventional power

relationships embodied by the ever-so-conventionally gendered characters

Even what is new in this film is new in a way that is pleasantly intelligible a

logical progression of existing ideological and aesthetic codes. For me, this is

especially and ironically true of the ideology of technological progress that is

evidenced and exemplified in the physical realism of the next level computer

generated imagery, but it pertains in truth quite fractally: in the design, in the

plot, in the performances, in the bone and flesh of the film Its there in the

night-club naturalism of the colour schemes; its evident in the faux-

revolutionary manner in which the heroic and the villainous are troped; its

implicit in the design of the alien race, the Navi, the oh-so-hip quasi-ethnic

stereotypes who seem custom-made for the sensibilities of a computer gaming

generation used to precisely this kind of patronizingly racialised trope:

majestically endowed ecowarriors, blessed by nature and rendered heroically

tragic in the image bows and arrows against gunships. Theyre a kind of sexy

blue phantasm, a not-quite-alien who (ostensibly) performatively and

narratologicallysymbolises a naturalness reminiscent of other autochthonous


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Others we have known: Native Americans and Indian Indians, and Africans and

Rastafarians, and the Elves in Lord of The Rings, and pussycats... The story

happens very far away in time and space (NowHere, here pronounced

nowhere), but its set in an uncannily familiar place, for NowHere is topologically

(in Homi K Bhabas rather poetic sense of the word topoi) identical to HereNow.

On every level, we find that spectrality, or intelligibility, is the ideological and

aesthetic centrifuge of the film.

2) Pandora, and everything that occurs there, is specular, insofar as every aspect ofthe plot and mise en scene is reassuring or pleasing to the white heterosexual

spectator for whom they have been contrived it makes me feel good about

being who I am, reflects me back to myself in a flattering way. Zoe Saldana, who

plays the native Neytiri, for instance, is the perfect not-too-Exotic Other to

serve as love interest for the not-too-conventional white male hero, Jake Sully.

Judith Butler would, I think, be quick to point out that Sullys is the only body

that matters on Pandora, in two senses. Firstly, it is the safety of Jakes body

that is what is always at stake, and secondly, it is the agency of that body, its

capacity to affect other matter, which is what the story is all about... Jake Sullysstatus as hero and of the white male body as natural site-of-heroism is iterated

and validated by the love of Neytiri, an aesthetically idealized Pocahontamazon

whom I know is not real, but may experience as an almost-real 3D 10ft tall tribal

killer witch from Hollywood heaven, who willingly abdicates her personal and

social power for love of some indefinable quality embodied by the white

protagonist If I stop and ask what that quality is, it appears to be the very

same competitive agonistic striving which, for instance, drives the films villains,but part of the pleasure of this kind of film is that it allows me to deny the fact

that the only difference between heroes and villains within an agonistic

framework is that heroes win. Heroes are allowed what the villains are denied.


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3) Finally: Pandora, Neytiri, Sully et al can be recognized as spectres because, like allspectres, their very immanence suppresses the conditions of their appearance

megarealistic symbols are haptic icons, pre-eminently (indeed, spectacularly)

immanent: theyre loud, theyre huge, and theyre sexy. They are hyperbolically

phenomenological, and they are everywhere. Avatarreally is all around you, and

Im not referring only to the 3D audio-visuals. Each medium creates a massive

network of people and things, linked and defined by (visibilised and invisibilised

by, uttered into and out of being by, culturedby) countless thousands of

synchronized technological performances, or habits. The system of systems of

habits and things linked by Avatar is vast, to say the least. James Cameron is

everywhere that Rupert Murdoch, media and memory are

and Murdoch, media and memory are everywhere.

Megareal avatars are phantasmatic as well as representational technology. They utter

culture, and are uttered within culture: Not only the digital and narratological wizardry

that produces ecstasis but also the whole material and immaterial world that such

wizardy implies, or entails.

What is the absent, unseeable god whose manifestation is the avatar: Visible only to

the cyborg, and all that is visible to the cyborg?

It can only be the matrix itself, the whole assemblage of material and psychological

techniques each of us is linked into, which creates spectatorial cyborgs, hungry and

ready for the appearance of phanatasmatic Avatars in the pervasively megareal medium

ofculture


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and which elides the whole rapidly diminishing world of material things, the real world

which invisibly becomes subsumed by the rapidly expanding matrix in which the

medium is embedded. The 3D film had the longest and largest ever cinematic release in

Hollywoods history, running up to the day of the DVD/BluRay release, and it was sold

out every day in many places. It has earned more than any other film, ever, and it has

given birth to a new era of 3D digital cinematech, interactive domestic merchandise,

computer games, VR toys, the next generation of televisions and- an industry,

basically. A whole new industry of hyper-immersive 3D mediatech.

The aesthetic centrifuge of megarealism is ecstasis, the rollercoaster from HereNow, to

a NowHere very like it, and Back Again, and this centrifugal force is present in every

aspect of the film and its merchandising carnival. Avatar is a hyperbolic happening in

the pervasive medium of culture itself: Its an intertextual cultural fairground and

marketplace that proliferates around the 3D rollercoaster ride of the film, which is,

absolutely, for all its patent fiction and impossibility, loosely based on real events:

Both inside and outside the film, Avatar creates a hyperreality where the insubstantial is

made substantial, and the material is rendered immaterial: The sheerpresence of

hyperbolically realistic ecological icons and environmental sounding symbols,

systematically veils their decidedly non-ecofriendly material and historical indexicality.

Avatar is, without doubt, a structuring structure that tends to structure people and

their habits regarding things and each other, on an enormous scale. The number of

people involved in making it a cultural reality, whose days and nights and thoughts and

actions it defined and continues to define, is only partly revealed by the very long credit

sequence. In so many ways it exemplifies what I mean when I say All media are modes

of cultural utterance, as well as being culturally embedded modes of utterance.

Moreover, it is of course inseparable from other cultural structures that iterate the

same identity patterns (because it arises from them, and feeds back into them).


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In so many ways, it is true to say that Avatarexists in the form that it does, appears as it

does where it does and when it does, because some things and people have been made

visible and others invisible, in order that a hyperbolic megareality could appear The

visible is made invisible, and vice versa; the material is made immaterial, and vice versa;

the near is made far, and vice versa.

On the eve of total climatic disaster, there are many possible roles an ultrarealistic

ubiquitous synaesthetic representation of an ecological Hero in 10 dimensions could

play, will play, especially since there are millions of them: it will be drug, living,

inspiration, model, exemplar, ally, crutch, hurdle, gatekeeper, competitor, enemy,

friend, proxy, scapegoat, tool, target, treasure, toy...

Ultimately, though, toolis the key word: Heroes, like all avatars, are tools to lead

subjectivity in the direction of certain attitudes and behaviours they create the reality

that requires them, and are created by it. Megareal digital eco-warriors are both more

and less diagrammatic than the term role model implies: they show the way or

open the door to many things, each of which will be sustained, but not one of which is

actually notably sustainable.

Buy me, Im ecological!

This fantasistic denial of material reality via the megareal representation of the realish is

the precise antithesis of sustainable behaviour, but it should not come as a surprise:

How can a role-model that is fundamentally alienated (i.e. competitive and

manipulative) and a system of representation that is ontologically simulacric (i.e.

specular and phantasmatic) be deployed in communicating either the realor the notion

ofinterconnectedness, which many now recognise as an essential characteristic of any


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truly sustainable human ethos?

Jung regarded Heroes and hero-worship as an ineluctable aspect of corporeal

subjectivity, believing that they are primordial archetypes whose function is to

embody good. Post-structuralist theorists regard them as historically contingent

entities, believing that both heroes and the good they embody are cultural

constructs - hyperreal stereotypes that are part of how culture inculcates a

consensual ideal of mental and physical comportment. Whether theyre naturally

arising archetypes or culturally defined stereotypes, heroes may be regarded as

specular figures, because they are a) the product of a Gaze, and b) a mirror in which

we discover ourselves.

If we are truly lucky, our heroes will lead us gently and wisely to the present moment

and demand no fee for it, for we have no choice but to follow them (in our way) once

we perceive them (in our way) and that is what the heroic archetype means, in its most

basic sense...

Spectres are always simulacric. Hero worship and the representation of heroic acts

for emulation or adulation tend to reify both the phantasmatic hero and the reality

that demands their being. If the hero is a spectre then the quest is the speculum in

which they appear, and the quest is a mirror whose egocentric logic subsumes

everything into an antagonistic framework: Quests both linguistically and

performatively construct the Other as mere shadow of the Self

The autopoetic dialogue of Self and Other is instrumental in the means by which

social beings are cultivatedby their perception of their existential field and the

relative value of objects within that field, and so develop the orthopedic habitus that


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Pierre Bourdieu describes. The rhetorical impact of heroic narrative is that the

ethos embodied by the heroic habitus is somehow absolute, a good thatpertains

equally in all possible circumstances. Yet, as the material exigencies of cultures

change, so the behaviours and attitudes expected and required of the ideal citizen

also change, and so the Hero is a role-model always in flux The hero of one era (or

age) frequently reappears as the villain or victim of another, and in a sense this

recycling is the inevitable destiny of all heroes:

The cultural capital of the Hero depends on whether the actions and attitudes they

epitomise are deemed by those in power, to be "sustainable"

By "sustainable" I do not (unfortunately) mean ecologically sound, except insofar as

the hero iterates and polices the dominant paradigm of the ecoin; I simply mean that

the ethical paradigm embodied by the Hero is valued by those dominant within a

given field of cultural production, who wish to sustain that ethos because it is

advantageous to them, or to the stability and growth of said culture. Historically, it

must be observed, the Heroic paradigm has not been notably sustainable in either

the current environmental or the strict semantic senses of the word! Considering

the agonistic nature of the conventional heroic paradigm, it is debatable whether

the conventional Hero can be considered sustainable at all: I repeat - How can a

role-model that is fundamentallycompetitive, alienated, and contentious be

deployed in communicating the notion ofinterconnectedness, which many now

recognise as an essential characteristic of any truly sustainable human ethos?

We are most fortunate, then, that the antagonistic or manipulative/acquisitive

relationship with Other is not true of all heroes. It is far from true of truly heroic people,

and this is the real problem: Agonistic heroism has a tendency to repress the very

existence of the truly heroic, for in a cultural marketplace where the cathectic power of


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the heroic archetype has become the central commodity of a multi-billion dollar industry,

it isin competition with it.

The trulyheroic worldview really embodies interconnectedness. The subjectivity it

implies would be barely recognizable as subjectivity, for it imagines Selves and Others

and Time and Space very differently from the alienated individual who, for instance,

needs and perceives agonistic heroes. Truly heroic people embrace a union with alterity

that is grounded in the present moment, not the ecstatic/phantasmatic HereNow, and

so in the truly heroic habitus, fantasy and perception are not opposed, and bliss (or

fulfillment) is sought/found, not in the nihilistic frenzy of conflict and catharsis, but in

the boundless openness of the present moment


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Bibliography/Reference

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representation in Alfonso Cuarons Children of Men. London: Continuum

Baudrillard, J (1981). Simulations and Simulacra. Accessed online24/04/2010 at

http://files.meetup.com/1392983/Baudrillard,%20Jean%20-

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Butler, J (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the discursive limits of sex. London: Routledge

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Haraway, D (1991). "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in

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World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York : Harper & Row, pp. 165 -171

Levinas, E (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith. London:

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Massumi, B (1987). Realer Than Real The simulacrum according to Deleuze and

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Cultural Reference

L.A.R.P (Live Action Role Playing)

Microcultural: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk2vR8w2sjc

Macrocultural: http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=avatar+costumes&um=1&ie=UTF-

8&ei=cAtUTdmSLImJhQeQmsTrBQ&sa=X&oi=product_result_group&ct=title&resnum=3

&ved=0CGEQrQQwAg

C.A.R.P (Computer Assisted Role Playing)

Microcultural: http://vimeo.com/8306210

Macrocultural: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKrx82WfCXo

Hypercultural: http://james-camerons-avatar.wikia.com/wiki/Avatar_Wiki

Previews: Culture is medium

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xd21he_avatar-sequel-to-be-a-deep-sea-affa_news


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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JWk_JIE3Ow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9w8f0gtq5No&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKrx82WfCXo&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRdxXPV9GNQ

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/dor/objects/800318/avatar/videos/avatar_hardware.

html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2_vB7zx_SQ

http://uk.movies.ign.com/dor/objects/800318/avatar/videos/avatar_trl_082109.html;js

essionid=aj0tfmwvyawb?show=hi

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJKxcbcvxa4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrzOUA3z9vA&feature=related

Reviews: Medium is culture

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Themes_in_Avatar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dIOw2sffHI

http://vimeo.com/groups/5484/videos/9389738

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXraSkgssFk

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1208038/Avatar-How-James-Camerons-

3D-film-change-face-cinema-forever.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rBAooEJRTU

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