Avatar: A disembodied cybernetic dreamscape

I just finished Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture. In it, he tells the story of how the communalist movement of the 1960s evolved into the technoutopian vision of the 1990s. It’s a compelling story, although it left me feeling distressed as I watched the characters tend toward a corporatist libertarianism as they “sold out”. (The pendulum swings yet again….)

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I want to talk about Avatar. Yes, the movie with the blue people set on Pandora. The deep-seated appeal of this singular cultural artifact becomes clear when looked at in the historical context of the cybernetic- and LSD-Influenced counterculture as well as, later, the digerati.

Two overarching concepts from the culture Turner describes permeate the movie. First is the cybernetic view of individuals — biological and otherwise — as nodes in a network, sensing, transmitting, receiving, and reacting to surrounding conditions in a giant feedback loop, just as the control system of an electromechanical device is, in the literal, electrical engineering sense of the word, a feedback loop. This, in an explicit way, is the very structure of Pandora’s biology, spiritualized by the native people, and romanticized by humans.

The second concept is disembodiment. Whether it was through electronic music (in the 1960s sense), strobe lights, and drugs, or later with networked computing and computer-mediated communication, Turner claims that many in the communalist-counterculture–turned-technoelite sought to leave the confines of the body for “an opportunity to feel a psychic union with others”. As a modern (or hypermodern, cyberpunk) interpretation of the word “avatar” would suggest, Avatar lets us imagine what it’d be like not only to become disembodied, only to reappear in a networked, interconnected virtual reality or cyberspace (whatever those words even mean anymore), but to actually leave one’s human body for a genuine alternative reality in which such connectedness is not only the norm, but real, meaningful, and organic.

But disembodiment is a non-ideal solution to the connectedness people seek. Because human biology lacks the networking hardware of Pandora’s life (c’mon, the pairing of a hunter with his bird is exactly like trying to pair with a Bluetooth device, complete with epic struggle), people use technology to escape their bodies and connect with others. But without that limitation, the protagonist of Avatar ultimately stops experiencing the cyberbiological world through technologically mediated disembodiment, and comes to fully embody that deep, network-like connection with all beings on Pandora.