From Capital to Karma: James Cameron’s Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) participates in an underacknowledged yet widespread contemporary resuscitation of Neoplatonism. In the Timaeus (c. 360 BCE), Plato introduces the concept of the demiurge: “Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence . . . a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related” (29-30). Pandora, the distant, color-saturated moon on which most of Avatar‘s action takes place, is precisely such a world. The Egyptian-Roman philosopher Plotinus (c. 204-270 CE), influenced by Plato, identifies the demiurge as the nous, the divine mind–a universal One containing neither division nor distinction. Unlike the orthodox Christian belief expressed in the concept of ex nihilo, that a deliberative and thoughtful God created the universe out of nothing, Plotinus understands the cosmos as emanating ex deo (out of God), and, therefore, that the unfolding of the cosmos is a consequence of the existence of the One and a confirmation of its absolute transcendence. Plotinus’s concept of World Soul synthesizes these beliefs. While Avatar does not reference Neoplatonism directly, for Pandora’s humanoid inhabitants, the Na’vi, all Pandoran life, their own included, is organized through the power of Eywa. Eywa is, as the film’s narrative makes explicit, the indivisible “mother” who emanates from and is the crystallization of Pandora itself. She safeguards that world’s “balance of life.”
 
We might expect critics on the right to denounce the film’s “soft-headed environmentalism” and identify Avatar as a product of “Hollywood’s long history of anti-military sloganeering”, as well as scorning the film as pagan, emblematic of a “Godless Hollywood” that “ignores, laughs at or disrespects religion” (Goldstein). Vatican Radio pronounced the film “a wink towards the pseudo-doctrines which have made ecology the religion of the millennium” (Squires). Patrick Goldstein suggests that “moviegoers are far more comfortable with a fuzzy, inspirational form of pantheism like ‘Avatar’ than they are with an openly biblical message” (Goldstein). While moviegoers cannot be so conveniently lumped together, the ideas depicted in the film that contribute to its “fuzzy . . . pantheism” help explain Avatar‘s enormous appeal.
 
Now, to write within the academy about any contemporary influence of the Neoplatonic beliefs expressed in the concept of World Soul outside of philosophy or religious studies is not a common undertaking. The concept’s explicit metaphysical orientation, its inherent forms of magical thinking, are traditionally seen as largely opposing the foundations of empiricism, rationalism, dualism and materiality that inform Western academic thought. To examine Avatar as indicative of a wider popular resurgence of such metaphysical beliefs, however, does not mean that one must hold such beliefs.¹ Nevertheless, Avatar‘s core politics are animated by its depiction of an idealized future society predicated on a carbon-based, biological network of networks operationalized through the metaphysical logic of World Soul. Avatar‘s future world, where the precepts of World Soul appear to have materialized through a fusion of a religious calling with those of networked sentience, appeals to contemporary U.S. society, which is both increasingly networked and professes a high degree of religious faith. Moreover, the film operates within a culture whose political economy is in part based on the technology that feeds into building the networked world that, in a virtuous circle, we are told as users we ought to desire. The fetishization of new digital technologies, and of the new more generally, plays a role here, yet in complementary or accretive fashion, so too do the immersive 3D techniques that Cameron applies to Hollywood filmmaking. 3D allows audiences greater experientially-induced identification with the onscreen spectacle, and the film’s coupling of technological affectivity with its genre hybridity of fantasy and science fiction works synergistically to propose to audiences that the fantastical “magical empiricism” on offer might actually come to pass. In short, the affect of the visual technology itself helps validate the potential that the Neoplatonic ideals on display can be actualized.
 
Writing for Salon, Scott Mendelson calls the film “a staggering achievement in visual effects and 3D technology” (Mendelson). Technology is also the star of Andrew Leonard’s Salon review: “‘Avatar’ is a film that people want to see, because, quite simply, the 3D special effects used to create the astonishingly beautiful alien world of Pandora are, ahem, out of this world.” For the New York Times‘s Manohla Dargis, “‘Avatar’ shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own” (Dargis). “Amateur” reviewers on sites such as imdb.com variously assert that the film’s 3D effects work to include spectators in the cinematic experience in ways not before experienced. Computer generated (CG) animation allows Cameron to create what many consider a new cinematic spectacle. For many commentators, technology is Avatar‘s implicit hero.
 
While Avatar has become the poster child for the much anticipated onslaught of 3D entertainment devices, I nonetheless find it odd but telling, given the culture’s ongoing fascination with networks and the information technologies upon which they rely, that the issue of the connections between networks and the world of spirit explicitly raised in the film’s narrative has been all but ignored by reviewers. In a Facebook review, science fiction author Samuel Delany does acknowledge that “the rhysomatic [sic] wholeness of the alien world is suggested several times,” but he is more concerned to argue that the film fails ethically due to its aesthetic incoherence. Chasm-wide plot holes, Delaney suggests, inhibit viewers from connecting the dots in ways that Cameron might have wished. What viewers are left with are the haptic sensations delivered through CG and 3D effects (Delany). Yet the “rhysomatic wholeness” noted by Delaney–a wholeness manifesting through a wetware- or carbon-based future world network–lies at the core of the film’s oddly nostalgic appeal: for two hours and forty-two minutes, spectators experience fluttering on the edges of a collective post-Hive Mind fantasy: an inverted prelapsarian vision of the individual as a networked empath who is also already part of the tree of knowledge. Experientially, then, the film’s outstanding special effects work synergistically with its depiction of the Na’vi as a pre-Cartesian society, a 3D global village literally in touch and connected with the wider sentient world they inhabit.
 
As the film’s narrative unfolds, the Na’vi’s long queues of braided hair are revealed as neural links able to mesh with other Na’vi as well as with Pandora’s other sentient creatures, trees included, which also possess similar biologically-constituted, USB-like connective links. The Na’vi are more than “noble savages”: while conducting field experiments on the root system of one of Pandora’s giant trees, scientist Grace Augustine (Signourney Weaver), head of the corporate research unit responsible for developing avatar bodies that replicate the Na’vi, explains to her associates the power of the rhizomatic system that undergirds the “sacred” Hometree around which the Na’vi organize their existence. In Cameron’s screenplay, copyrighted in 2007 following a decade’s work, Augustine’s announcement occurs more than halfway through the film as part of an argument inside the corporation’s base of operations. In the film release, however, the revelation is depicted at the tree itself and occurs much earlier. This suggests a heightened comprehension by the filmmakers that Avatar‘s plot would cohere better if the idea that the Na’vi constitute a biological networked society were communicated earlier on. The key parts of Augustine’s dialog are as follows:
 

I’m not talking about pagan voodoo here–I’m talking about something real and measureable in the biology of the forest. . . . What we think we know–is that there’s some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora . . . That’s more connections than the human brain. You get it? It’s a network–a global network. And the Na’vi can access it–they can upload and download data-memories . . . . The wealth of this world isn’t in the ground–it’s all around us. The Na’vi know that, and they’re fighting to defend it.²

The scene makes clear that the Na’vi form part of a sentient planetary whole–a network linked not through wires or Wi-Fi but through carbon-based forms of wetware. The entire network constitutes a biological life form. It is here that the film most directly reveals itself as participating in a resurgence of Neoplatonic thought reformulated to concord with what Manuel Castells terms “the rise of the network society” and the concomitant rise of real virtuality. The utopian suggestion is that the Na’vi have evolved biologically in ways that humans have not. Their network, while vulnerable to Earthly fire power, is vastly superior as a form of planetary intelligence to anything conceived by the human intelligence of Pandora’s marauding colonialists. Those humans in the film with whom the narrative asks us to identify are open to understanding the Na’vi as part of a global network within which each component constitutes a biological interface. As such, the Na’vi are allegorical, a figural device that serves to simulate the possible (and therefore, the desirable). By depicting the Na’vi in this way, the film hints at the seductive powers potentially available to beings of all kinds able to move beyond ideologies of overly atomistic individualism so as to see the world as One.

 
The genealogy of Neoplatonic influence on Idealist expectations for transcendence through electronic and, more recently, digital technologies is lengthy. The Web and services such as Google offer a contemporary vision of the world’s intelligence as a single, organized network. Earlier Neoplatonically-inflected networked visions include H.G. Wells’s 1938 prophesy of a World Brain, Teilhard de Chardin’s 1950s utopian proposal for an electronic noosphere (1964), Kevin Kelly’s aforementioned Hive Mind that reduces each individual human to a “dumb terminal” until connected to electronic networks (1994), and Pierre Lévy’s concept of the electronic hyperbody (1997). What distinguishes Avatar‘s future vision of a Neoplatonic World Soul from these earlier proposals is that it can depict the actualization of a networked intelligence through an evolved collectivity of embodied agents, humanoid and otherwise, who retain individuality yet are always collectively conjoined to Eywa, the earth Mother. In this way, Pandora’s world of empathetic networked individualism is a hybrid of Neoplatonism’s World Soul and of Cartesianism’s mind-body dualism. This is one strong reason why the film resonates so powerfully with contemporary audiences increasingly directed to understand themselves primarily as individuals yet also as monads networked through information technologies.