AVATAR AND LACANS GRAPH OF SEXUATION: Deleuzian Postscript on SF

I recently read a post by Adam Robbert on his blog KNOWLEDGE ECOLOGY about the noetic wonder of the world as seen through what he calls "Uexkllian ontology" and I exclaimed But this is exactly what is good about AVATAR, despite the heroic wishfulfilmen fantasy! Reflecting on why I liked the film and Zizek scorned it, as does Bryant, I decided that I could explain the difference of approach to the film in terms of Lacans graph of sexuation. Zizek often interprets films by subtracting out any noetic alterity and just seeing the oedipal drama. He stays for this sort of interpretation on the left side of the graph, that of transcendence and oedipalisation. He focuses on the heroic wishfulfilment in the case of AVATAR, just as he concentrates on the familial wishfulfilment in the case of WAR OF THE WORLDS: One can easily imagine the film without the bloodthirsty aliens so that what remains is in a way what it is really about, the story of a divorced working-class father who strives to regain the respect of his two children. Therein resides the films ideology: with regard to the two levels of the story (the Oedipal level of lost and regained paternal authority; the spectacular level of the conflict with the invading aliens), there is a clear dissymmetry, since the Oedipal level is what the story is really about, while the external spectacular is merely its metaphoric extension. (p57) His monist reductive ontology can be seen in the assertion that in each case the Oedipal level is what the story is really about, relegating the alterity to the status of mere metaphoric gift-wrapping. One sees the absurdity of this approach very clearly in a film like AVATAR where the world-making is the defining feature of the film, especially as Pandora is a planet of noetic abundance. So in fact to appreciate AVATAR and many other science-fiction films and novels we must situate ourselves on the right side of the graph, that of immanence and the pluralist unconscious. Of course if you leave out all that is difference and alterity and archetype, then all that remains is sameness, identity, and the stereotype. Faced with the awesome, marvelous, sublime world of Pandora, whose imagined existence is a devastating critique of our world, one ignores all the metaphorics and concentrates on what the film is really about. But the metaphorics of the film are what it is really about. This time the alterity is not the hostile Martians of War of the Worlds, for in this film we are the hostile aliens, but more radically an entire imaginatively rich and detailed world, a figuration of the unconscious as a whole and no longer of the irruption of certain of its elements into our world. The stance proposed in relation to the unconscious is more radical too, we are invited to go over to its images, its energies and values not so much to save it, that is narrative foregrounding, as to save ourselves. SF is defined as the literature of cognitive estrangement precisely because it explicitly constitues itself by means of alterity, and so dwells on the right side of the graph. Imagine what Zizek would have to say about the novel DUNE (or the film). The oedipal drama is deliberately foregrounded as is the heroic wishfulfilment, but the aim in fact is to deconstruct the hero and the oedipal monomyth and to open us out onto a pluralist ontology as the later novels make even clearer: In his Golden Path, Leto sought a divergence of futures. Divergence is itself the grand theme of God Emperor of Dune. Leto is determined to smash the human psychological need for an illusory universe in which all tales converge on a final Big Message. This theme is the climax of Herberts original design from the early 1960s to obliterate the monolithic hero myth , argues Bob Bogle. So I can only conclude on a positive note: Let's forget Lacan. Lets read more SF. Let's read DUNE. Or as Levi Bryant ironically advises, situating himself as usual on the left side of the graph (transcendence) but inadvertently giving useful advice to those on its right side (immanence): Go watch Avatar.