Lectura en Inglés, Avatar: The Body and Vision

The camera obscura and the stereoscope contribute largely to the modes of visuality that govern our contemporary practices of ‘looking’. Within a chamber’s enclosures, a camera obscura streams light in through a small aperture to ‘reflect’ an image of the ‘outside’ world onto an opposing wall within this contraption. On the other hand, the stereoscope consists of a binocular utensil where the viewer places a ‘three-dimensional’ photograph before two lenses and positions the instrument to entirely dominate their field of vision. Although both tools share similarities in providing ‘rendered’ ‘representations’ of the world, these devices differ significantly in the degree to which vision is corporealized. While the camera obscura creates a separation between the ‘seer’ and the ‘seen’, the stereoscope ‘reduces’ this ‘distance’ to provide the viewer with a different optical experience. Correspondingly, the role of these visual instruments has heavily influenced the spheres of film and photography in the Western world. For example, readings of James Cameron’s Avatar can summon various aesthetic and narrative elements that examine the technical and theoretical legacies of both the camera obscura and stereoscope. This essay shall compare and contrast the conjectures of both technologies while exploring their roles in relation to analyzing Avatar. Additionally, I argue that the dissection of both technologies through examining Avatar registers greater trends in how we understand the ‘acquisition of knowledge’ through these operations of vision.

As previously mentioned, the camera obscura’s function was to ‘produce’ an image of whatever was external to the interior of the apparatus through a natural phenomenon involving light and aperture. According to Jonathan Crary, the camera obscura was at one point the “most widely used model for explaining human vision, and for representing the relation of a perceiver and the position of a knowing subject to an external world.” As the ‘viewer’ saw the image of the ‘outside’ world decontextualized and isolated within the confines of the camera obscura, the subject was also able to make the distinction between this ‘outside’ and themselves. With the proliferated use of this device, the binary separation of ‘internal’ versus ‘external’ was embedded into the larger organization of Western thought. Furthermore, the notion that this optical device was distinctly and absolutely separate from the observing subject only contributed to the concept that the viewer was an internal entity that received knowledge through visualizing ‘outside’ objects, and that scientific knowledge was to be emanated from ‘seeing’ the external.

Through the use of the camera obscura, vision was also understood to be ‘separate’ from the rest of the body’s functions. The ‘decorporealization’ of vision through this apparatus is best explained by Geoffrey Batchen, in which he explicates that “the act of seeing was passively transparent to the world being seen and in that sense sundered from the physical body of the observer.” It can be understood from this postulation that the viewer’s visual consumption was meant to be objective, disqualifying the body from reacting to the vision before them in any way. The perception of space took part in this determination since the images were perceived to be ‘outside’ of the body, producing the belief that viewers we participating in ‘objective’ vision.

The stereoscope invoked a different type of visual experience, in which the separation of ‘observer’ and ‘observed’ was ostensibly clouded by an invitation of the body to unite with vision through a new type of ocular participation. With its two magnifying lenses, photo-card placeholder, and masked edges fitted for the insertion of a face, the stereoscope essentially blocked off the entire peripheral vision of the user-observer to focus their gaze on the image(s) before them. These images produced an impression of depth because they were created to simulate a binocular rendition of perspective. This differed radically from the camera obscura’s implicit perception of space. According to Linda Williams, the “loss of perspective of the camera obscura model of vision plunged both the high-modern and the low popular observer into a “newly corporealized” immediacy of sensations.” With the stereoscope, the body was now literally ‘incorporated’ into a new practice of vision through depth, dimensionality, and corporealized involvement.

The corporealization of vision can be understood in the context of Avatar, where human subjects are able to ‘enter’ and ‘exit’ Na’vi bodies in order to visually witness an ‘external’ species from the bodily perspective of a ‘native’. Avatar imparts the historically familiar story of ‘unprecedented’ cultural encounters followed by colonial enterprises and instances of miscegenation. We are presented with the narrative of human colonialism exploiting the resources of another planet while native communities organize resistance.

Before interacting with members of the Na’vi ‘tribe’, the human characters of Avatar undergo a process in which their human bodies are put to sleep and their ability to ‘see’ is transported to the physical vessel of a Pandoran ‘native’. Like the stereoscope, the peripheral vision which situates the ‘observer’ as ‘separate’ from the ‘observed’ through perception of space is eliminated from the humans appropriating the Na’vi body. They can no longer define their ‘objective’ distance from what they see as the contextual cues of their ‘human’ environment are abandoned in order to adopt a total, peripheral, and dimensional vision that unites the body’s reaction to vision’s understanding of depth.

For example, the first scene in which Avatar’s protagonist, Jake, is ‘transported’ from his human body to a Na’vi vessel demonstrates this

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