Before experiencing your hyper-real, super computer generated glory my every thought and imagination was evil. Did someone propose building a smoke and fire factory in the middle of Fern Gully? I was for it! For it!
I burned apple orchards to the ground, just to provide light for my evening meal. I water boarded Bambi and played Tenacious D tracks, loudly, to break up Wiccan drum circles. When Mother Earth appeared in a spirit dream, pleading with me to, like Scrooge before, change my ways, I used the sinister Tibetan maneuver to make her holiness vomit petroleum. Then set her afire and laughed a hearty, head thrown back sort of laugh.
Was there no end to my anti-nature perfidy?
No, there was no end to it.
But then I saw Avatar and everything changed.
Now, I want to gather round the sacred zoopflarp tree with all the other blue whovians, singing songs and summoning Lerpblerp dragons to take me on swoopy rides to the floating waterfall islands of lemon scented bliss, and inexpensive candy.
Ah ha, here's another view:
[...]
But a telling tic in the film is the repeated compulsion to explain the persistence of (physical) wounds among the human characters. Given the level of technology in the film's 2051, both Sully's useless legs and the colonel's scars could easily have been repaired, and the script goes out of its way to say why the two characters they remain disabled and maimed respectively: in Sully's case, it's because he can't afford the medical treatment; in the colonel's, it's because he "likes to be reminded of what he's up against". Such explanations are clearly unconvincing - the narratively underdetermined wounds can only be explained as libidinal residue which the film cannot fully digest into its digital Imaginary. The wounds prevent the disavowal of modern subjectivity and technology which Avatar attempts at the very same moment that the film invites us to admire it as a technological spectacle.
If we are to escape from the impasses of capitalist realism, if we are to come up with an authentic and genuinely sustainable model of green politics (where the sustainability is a matter of libido, not only of natural resources), we have to overcome these disavowals. There is no way back from the matricide which was the precondition for the emergence of modern subjectivity. To quote one of my favourite passages in First As Tragedy: "Fidelity to the communist Idea means that, to repeat, Arthur Rimbaud, ... we should remain absolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of 'modern instrumental reason' or 'modern technological civilization'." The issue is, rather, how modern technological civilization can be organised in a different way.
Link --
<http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011437.html>
.d.