Informe de libros sobre virginia postrel

Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies and its similarities to James Cameron's Avatar

James Cameron is no dynamist, in fact, he's quite the opposite. This you can perceive from his cinematographic work, such as the blockbuster Titanic, where he exposes himself as a technocratic stasist as he directs the epic story of the perfect machine that fails; the sinking of the unsinkable ship,reflecting the technocratic fear for an unplanned future and one run by machines, where the evil machine kills its maker. Technocrats believe in a top sight planned future and standardized living. And no machine should ever reach perfection.

Similarly in the 90's television series, Dark Angel, Cameron portrays a wrecked post-apocalyptic world, where a government group experiments on people andturns them into mutant killing machines, until a group of rebels breaks out and escapes, and is forced to live like outcasts in a world close to its end, and end caused by machines turned against their maker.

Avatar however, a project that Cameron devoted more than a decade of his life to, is no stasist film. The movie conveys a message much opposed to stasism, whether Cameron is aware of it ornot. Avatar also depicts a post-apocalyptic scenario, where humans are forced to explore outer space and the planets within it in order to obtain resources that have been long since extinct on Earth. In Pandora, a military invading force imposes themselves upon the natives, the Na'vi, teaching them English in schools managed by bio-scientists, whose main objective is to study life on the planet,and the culture and beliefs of the indigenous people.

At first, this posture may seem a little reactionary, since Cameron makes a call to nature, a summon back to basics, to being one with nature, to rural civilization, as he portrays the Na'vi people hunting only to eat, living in harmony with the forest around them...they even live in a tree! But to the director, the message his filmtransmits, the idea it fosters has a mind of its own, it evolves independently of the plan designed for its evolution, which is certainly ironic, having in mind that this natural, unplanned, evolution is the pillar of the dynamist posture.

This message is conveyed through the very dynamist Na'vi, who manage to limn the main characteristics of a dynamist through their regard and respect for property, therespect for life itself, their understandment of the abundance of the existing resources in the forest. The Na'vi understand the importance of local, individual knowledge, one that is tacit and can only be achieved through experimentation, through trial and error, through infinite combinations of ideas and discoveries, through individual experience, which is a very dynamist concept. The Na'viperceived the invasion of the alien group as a learning opportunity, and when Jake Sully appears in Home Tree, they pursue this knowledge, they seek to understand him, and his viewpoint, beliefs, and ways. Mo'at, the spiritual leader explains to Jake Sully, when he inquires about the school and the avatars that ran it, that “you cannot fill a cup which is already full”.

The Na'vi are acivilization that respects their ancestors and understand the value of their knowledge, and their experiences, instead of disregarding them and perceiving them as obsolete and simply, old. This reflects the way they evolve, the way the build upon the foundation created by others before them; they don't start from scratch but take on where others left off. This is represented in evolving traditions, onesthat adapt and adjust to change, instead of rigidly maintaining it's original guidelines. As Postrel illustrates it; “buildings are adapted to new uses over time” And the nested systems of buildings can be related to the design of Home Tree: site, the location of the building, in this case, Home Tree was situated on top of a very rich soil. The second system is the structure creating a central...