Listen, Solarpunk !
Sometimes i feel like this newsletter should be called “practices and failures” because most of the things i have beef and disappointment with are related to practices, case in point : My disappointment with “solarpunk” is not with solarpunk itself, rather it’s with the ways in which the most visibly active parts of solarpunk discourse seem to revolve around aesthetics and their consumption/production rather than the practice of solarpunk itself.
Before I get into all the mess and #discourse, two quotes of Georges Bataille from The Accursed Share :
“The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy-wealth whithout any return. The sun gives without ever receiving.“
and
”We need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror, a self-consciousness that does not steal away when it is time to explore possibility to the limit.”
That’s it.
>Solarpunk is a movement that can be best summarized by people not restrained by substack’s email-lenght limit. So I’m gonna assume if you’re reading this you’re at least a bit acquainted with either the discourse surrounding it or at least the principles on which it grows.
>Also I’m assuming here that solarpunk as a movement is anticapitalist and as an ideal is at least post-capitalist
Praxis is practices.
Or rather, every practice is something’s praxis : something you do that pushes for the coming-about of a desired or undesired future
From this I posit, uncontroversially, that a solarpunk praxis, a praxis that wishes to bring about a solarpunk [world-condition-place-city-self], has got to be based in different/(more) practices than passive moodboarding, (ie: the cultivation of an aesthetic for its own sake.)
This is not to say that generating aesthetics for the face of the movement is bad but that a whole bunch of people crave for something-else™ in sci-fi, something that’s not just dystopiaporn, but a lot of them tend to go full-on utopiaporn, call for some optimistic momentum to come back to their favorite genre’s mainstream and post about #cottagecore and #coffeehouseAU alongside articles about the latest green brand as if that’s solving the problem and not just revitalising it under a different shape.
I can even admit that there seems to be more articles calling for solarpunk than there’s stories actually upholding the term and it’s not that there’s no solarpunks out there, just that some of its most interesting incarnations don’t necessarily know they’re doing solarpunk. (as an aside/example I wanted to say that the Zapatistas are solarpunk but I don’t know what their approach to technologies is, oh well.)
If solarpunk is supposed to “move quietly and plant things” then it should do so with intentionality, with a notion of careful planning in mind, that takes many perspectives into account, that’s the social-anarchist method at least.
We have to go beyond gazing at things that look cool and actually pin down plans for increasing our capacity for self-reliance, self-governance and collective agency, there’s joy there and that joy is far more generative than any photo album.
For example, getting away from easy targets :
“This desalination device delivers cheap, clean water with just solar power”
Sounds solarpunk enough right ?
But this was made by a private company from Finland investing infrastructure into African localities, there’s very specific incentives and possibilities here.
“Basically the running costs are zero, because solar is free says [the ceo] ”
lol.
Maintenance costs, infrastructure set-up costs, plus all the fuel to get this mess in place, and even if these are for free somehow there’s also the filters that needs to get changed regularly, if you set up this system you haven’t freed a population’s need for clean water, you’ve effectively created a population of users, new-serfs who have to work to earn the good filtered water from their corporate lord-benefactors.
Also, like. Just make a system of solar stills. But don’t get it made by government agencies or contracted private actors, get it made by the people who’ll use it and need it. The ones who’ll take care of maintenance, the ones who’ll live by it and through it.
Solarpunk shouldn’t concern itself entirely with energy sources but with the way these sources are implemented, what practices they feed, how they feed them and what future is actually brought about by these.
Then obviously there’s this:
“Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills”
The pull of images is strong, the weight of deceived hopes is stronger. I’ll get into more details afterwards concerning the name solarpunk and what it conjures and entails to me but for now : valuing the aesthetics of “renewables” over their actual material use and history can be deeply harmful to our considerations of sustainability ; especially when people will slap these buzzwords like “decoupling”, “sustainable”, “green” on everything and call it even ; these being generally attempts at switching the power-source of the same system of practices with the belief that it will magically make it into a better system, just doing the same thing with a different name and hoping no one notices.
It’s warranted we should feel fucked up in our fiction, nothing wrong with acknowledging the horrors of the everyday, that said I do understand not every fiction needs to be an outrageous portrayal of the horrors of the human soul (though that’s always more interesting to me than tweeshit), but if solarpunk aims specifically at taking over the mantle of speculative fiction aimed at the future, it needs to reject naivety, which is not the same as rejecting utopianism either, it’s simply a recognition of the fact that there might never be a time beyond efforts and hardships.
The problem is not in making utopian stories or aesthetics, it’s what you do with those ; if you’re intent on making a movement then how you consume, produce and share these stories/products/practices/things is more important than their general mood or aesthetics because it’s what will allow them to live and, given the current seeds of the subgenre, the most solarpunk thing to do is not moodboarding but trying and bridging your own self towards others’ and recognizing the fact that you’re always, have always, will always be interconnected to them.
Your self is a cell, infinitesimally small against the totality, but not isolated from it even as your reality-tunnel restricts you to that perspective. And as your self moves through the world you might not perceive it but there’s many flows you foster in your movement, some more than others.
What you do matters. That’s the crux of solarpunk’s existential grounding, right? “What you do has, in fact, an impact on the rest of the world, and later on you might even perceive that impact because your actions are processual rather than isolated.”
Going further we might consider that our (revolutionary) actions make us as much as they generate the world we wish to live in.
This is on process and praxis. But I also want to think of post-scarcity, the solarpunk ideal.
Post-scarcity is a big word, for a lot of people it contains both post-struggle as well as post-material-concerns, post-pain and other aspirations and often what seems to come out of it is also “post-needs” ? I reject that conception, post-scarcity is less about negating our needs and more about the generation of new needs, beyond the very basic concerns most of us spend a lot of time thinking and trying to fulfill every god damn day.
Post-scarcity is supposed to be about how we’re going to create better problems to concern ourselves with, to achieve that I think we’d see the potentials of an organized and positively liberated human and non-human totality made manifest. To me, post-scarcity sounds like rethinking our very conceptions of work, leisure and routine itself.
What the grumpy old man is saying is that automation and gamification of work don’t have to be dystopian ploys for corporate ends, the latter in particular can be a selftaming-process, a set of practices which, if implemented in the right context can translate to generative joy, that feeling that’s supposed to be at the base of solarpunk.
After all, if I understand It correctly, this genre concerns itself with (apparently) utopian desires, production and consumption, where the totality of society is engaged in a process of either healing, repairing or maintaining the social realm and its Natural supercontext (first nature as bookchin would say) in a sustainable and viably expansive equilibrium.
Basically, Solarpunk is the project of generating Bookchin’s fabled Third Nature: that state of nature that would be a reconciliation of First(natural) and Second(social) Nature into a wholeness, a new kind of totality.
I think it’s important for solarpunk to declinate itself if it wants to be effective : let it adapt to every locality. Don’t think about a solarpunk world, think about your solarpunk town, locality, environment, change you nearness into a solarpunk nearness.
BUT THIS IS NOT A MANIFESTO.
This is just grievances, notes, observations, nothing here is a call to arms, i’m just whining about arrangements of words and pictures, about practices and failures.
On words.
“Solarpunk” could have emerged somewhere in 2008. I say could because the name has been coined repeatedly by different people online throughout the last two decades and most have had similar ideas of what the term meant to them : “post-cyber-steam-punk genre/movement, optimistic, ecological-friendly tech, stories”.
As the description for something not yet created, the term was coined with the intent of manifesting a corpus ; the point of these posts, texts, notes and others was to attract the people who’d generate its substance.
In contrast, Cyberpunk was arguably coined mid-movement (1983), after the 1960/1970s new waves of western sci-fi writers who were trying to inject more “adult” themes in the genre and to move past the family-friendly flavor and simplistic formalism of the sci-fi of their times which was dominated by prudent tales and moralistic fables.
Sci-fi beatniks like PKD, Delany, Heinlein, Leguin, Tiptree, Moorcock, Ellison and others laid the road for the cyberpunks that came after ; young writers-texture-makers who’d rather design universes as having self-referential histories of their own rather than simply recreating empty decorum-worlds where moral theatrics could occur flawlessly. William Gibson’s Object-Worlds manifested in Neuromancer and Burning Chrome are the most obvious examples of that tendency. It’s important to note that the problem these new waves had was not simply with the world at large but with the very definite publishing world of america, a revolt of creative-workers against the editorial mainstream.
At that point the term “cyberpunks” was gaining traction against other cheeky namesakes (neuromantics sounds really cool too, we should revive that one), and nowadays, Neonliberal powerfantasies or miseryporn with a sci-fi filter are the two main strands of mainstream cyberpunk.
In the end cyberpunk sold out, and how could it have been otherwise ?
Cyberpunk was both a revolt against the cybernetic condition but also a revolt of the cybernetic condition, where cyber(netic) didn’t just stand for general prosthestics but also for the ways in which information and feedback technologies have become so ubiquitous that new (kind of) spaces are created that erase or greatly reduce the distance between other spaces at ever faster rate and thus also generate new, destabilising, temporalities : Cyberpunk was about the birth of the internet, the advent of the cybernetic condition, and it was about it being both a horrifying and a very potent moment, generating the weird, the wondrous, the terrifying all at the same time.
obligatory repost of this drawing I can’t find the author of, please help me find them so i can tell them thank you ———
Never just a critique, the mo(ve)ment always also incorporated the possibility for an appreciation of the same technologies it showed as oppressive, the stories and artworks opened the door for fetishisation and the urge to merge into the cyber; I’m not just talking about poe’s law either, more the fact that all these stories about how cybercapital is fucked up and creates new realms of alienation also depicted fucking cool ass tech. Who wouldn’t want to be a razorgirl ? Who wouldn’t want to live in the same world as autonomously generated artificial consciousnesses? Who wouldn’t want to explore the metaverse ?
The aestheticization of one own’s suffering is generally a big part of coping with a traumatic process that just won’t stop, we don’t just get used to what we can’t change, we try and integrate it into our lives in a way that shifts it away from being a burden into being a part of “us”.
Joanna Russ: “ [Science fiction, was poised to] “provide myths for dealing with kinds of experiences we are actually having now, instead of the literary myths we have inherited, which only tell us about the kinds of experiences we think we ought to be having.”
On that part : I don’t think we should try and be collectively “purposefully” positive in our art.
I don’t even think the point of fiction is to show the right way forward and to try and influence fiction-makers towards that is a bad idea i feel, you’ll probably make it contrived. There is no “should” in Art but I feel like the point of fiction is the rearrangement of information so as to communicate more complex data-formations : ”the message”, to carry meanings as Leguin said.
The point of art is to create simulations we can safely go through so as to experience different lives, different moments and succession of moments which, being (mostly) purposefully and carefully planned by an author, create a specific sense, a meaning.
To go back to movement, cyberpunk had a transcendental motion to its simulations: there was a common-place expectaction of some singularity that would be reached by artists, techies, druggies, dancers, countercultural folks, society in general, something was pushing all that good world towards some final destination. It didn’t happen, or if it did it wasn’t what they expected.
And, to be honest, there’s always been this childish idea that sci-fi can “predict” the future when all its ever done was dramatizing the present through an aesthetic of futurity ; focusing on America : 50s sci-fi about alien colonization of america was about red-menace fears as well as coloniser/settler internalised guilt ; 60s psychonautical tales of otherworlds and otherlives were dramatized descriptions of the effusion of weirdness as New Left political movements intersected with the New Age zeitgeist ; 70s and 80s sci-fi military fiction was largely about the specter of vietnam ; 80s and 90s cyberpunk was about japan’s rise as a technological and manufacturing superpower as well as the general feeling that WorldWideWeb was gaining momentum, etc… 2000s end of the world scenarios gain potency as climate change enters the political mainstream again ; 2010s surveillance-heavy context emerges in public consciousness at about the same time as cyberpunk is accepted by the mainstream as the new now. Young-Adult-futuristic-dystopian fiction gains traction.
Where a lot of previous centuries’ fictional endeavors took to the past as a way of understanding the present, the gradual rise of sci-fi as an “ok, maybe this is not just pulp trash” genre in the mainstream sphere brought with it a shift in perspective, recollection on the past and comparisons with the past replaced with speculative simulations of potential futures, prediction over recollection.
To paraphrase Warren Ellis: science-fiction is the process of forecasting futures by using elements of the past as a means of interrogating the present.
What you should seek is to accentuate certain aspects of Now and understand what they mean and how they could evolve, not project what you wish to bring about, that’s magick, not art.
Which is were solarpunk seduces me somewhat, instead of expecting again and again there’s this idea of thinking laterally; the future is already distributed around in pockets and these are just waiting to be held up and affixed to one another to bring about bigger pockets of futurity into Now. Nice thought.
As “cyber-punk” is a better descriptor of the creative attitude/endeavor that generated the stories rather than the internal world of the stories in question, it certainly makes sense that solarpunk would pick up after it, aiming at pulling away from the depressed quality of a lot of these works. My question is more why solar ?
“ “solar” punk ” sounds so strange at first glance : the sun, father-deity/papa-provider, God-the-ray, the big center that shines its energy towards the periphery, superman, etc. associated to punk? Punk the filth, punk the face that spits back at the boot that splits its back, punk the carefully unfocused ? punk that means anything and everything depending on who you ask, is it UK’s Streetpunk ? Is it the American declensions? Is it any of the commercial variations ? (the ones that generally translate as “rude and loud and smelly but make it acceptable to a customer’s gaze”?). And obviously this is not all on solarpunks either, steampunk is a worse offender for that matter: what’s so punk about fetishizing a grotesque exaggeration of colonial-era technological “progress” ?
No point in screaming after these but I do think that if you’re going to set a name before a movement, you have to be careful because you might be letting things in that aren’t what you intend for. The solar in solarpunk evokes energy-use before aesthetics (because aesthetics derive from value, which derives from material use), the fact that the sun is the great expenditor as Bataille would say, it is what gives and generates most things we have, even wind-power is technically solar-power, it’s bright and powerful and as one of the biggest, most obvious cosmic presences in our lives its connexion to post-scarcity is easy to make ; a society that has easy access to vast amounts of energy, at the same level as the sun’s amounts for example, could generate the same kind of grandeur as the one the celestial corpse evokes.
On that note, Post-scarcity is frightening because it reveals to us that, past the problems of human meddling, lies fields of possibilities for how society could generate its future shape, in other words we have devastatingly huge responsibilities awaiting us, past current crises. And these are not responsibilities just to each others but to those who’ll come after us and through us. Infinite possibilities means infinite potential failure(s).
Solarpunk wants to be generative and joyful, I argue it should be recuperative and careful, it should be dirty and hard to look at(aesthetically), grimy.
The sun might be providing us a lot of energy but we’re damned if we can get all of it, the sun expunges vast amounts of energy and sometimes damages our infrastructure but we have to try and build it back better again, don’t we ?
Maybe solarpunk is a revolt against the sun, then? Or maybe it is a revolt on the material conditions manifested by the sun, the solar system ? Solarpunk as a revolt on carbon-based existence ? Solarpunk as the quest for molecular exit ?
New foorage of the sun, each spots are the size of texas
Shouldn’t solarpunk embrace all aspects of its strange moniker ? Being both a revolt and an embrace of its prefix? Stardust children up against the Tyrant red sun, the provider who could one day decides to ration or shut its supply down.
What I’m looking for is not a destruction of previous aspects of the movement or the rejection of the name itself (I’m trying to give up on “-punk discourse”) but I feel like there’s a lack of viscerality to the aesthetic lexicon of something called solar-punk, so far.
(what about Solargoth ? : mourning the solar condition, accepting the sun’s presence as a fact. infinite energy, infinite production, means infinite waste, infinite consumption, infinite deaths, infinite grief for the celestial body.)
I swear I’m not trying to be depressing again, just stating what should be obvious and internalized if one wants to get down and create : “things don’t have to hurt” is a lie.
Some things will hurt, we’ve been built for suffering, we’ve also been built for habituation, healing, connection, but we’ve been built to withstand existence, not glide through it without friction. That’s why a lot of Fiction centers (certain forms of) conflict, sometimes to its own detriment.
I’ve also seen discussions on how to build stories that have conflict in post-scarcity settings (thought as post-trouble settings), the answer feels extremely simple and even obvious when one sees the lineage of solarpunk stories through sci-fi’s creative history.
Ursula K. Leguin: “One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier-bag/belly/box/house/medicine/bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process”
Interpersonal conflicts, the dealing of boundaries, the certainty that humans and folks are not perfect and self-contained enough to assuage any suffering that might come. Once the problem of how to find food and shelter has disappeared from ordinary life’s concerns then we can begin the exploration of problems generally only allowed to bourgeois society. The new dilemnas would be about the coming together of different me-s and us-s into wildly complex social formations, no longer linear-stories of conquest and defeating localised-individualised adversity in a simple straightforward motion but cycles and processual stories, stories that are dialogues rather than statements.
The dilemna will no longer be “how can i kill the evil beast” or “how can i feed my family and my neighbors family with the crop of one field?” or “how can I reveal to this unreachable person that my lowly person has feelings for them when I can’t even find value in my own self?” but rather “How do we create new ways of being out of the wreckage of the past?”, “how do we deal with the weight of complexity when different ways of existence try and merge and can’t seem to fuse. ”, “how do we function in a world that doesn’t require us to be survivors anymore?”, how do we buld that future ?”.
All of this feels too vague now, everything seems ready for the undertaking, everything has to be built and there’s already past mistakes and attempts around us lying in the landscape : crashed jetpacks, fluorescent oil dripping from their pierced container, low-battery ray-guns glowing in the dark, crushed mirrorshades, 404ed grey goo splattered in the bay. Empty office buildings filled with droning screens.
Solarpunk needs to be weirder. Than itself, than its predecessors.
If utopia (and even not-utopia, optimistic fiction in general) is the landscape our story is built to explore then we should get more than just communal gardens, we should get fungiharvesters flirting with their contractual-collective-consciousness-polycule neighbor, we should get bicycle artisanry as a workshop aiming at bridging together generations of ex-freedom fighters with their kids/kins as they try to live with the past and construct the future, we should get permaculture and sylviculture framed as tools for dialogue between willing human subjects and plant-kins, the terrain where interspecies diplomacy occurs as human nature and non-human nature negotiate the boundaries of their respective and concomitant existences, we should get neo-griots-facticity-containers of Alterfrica trying to recollect stories of lateral futures to share them onto the continent for others to have, exchanging bits of (hi)stories for food and shelter ; we should get wild and crazy, unrestrained with fabulations both lateral and forward-looking. Not to content ourselves with the few scraps of sunshine that pass through but to actively harvest solar radiation as it wastes itself in the infinite void.
There’s more to this life than hero-with-a-thousand-faces rehashes.
In that optic, the fictional branch of Solarpunk needs to veer away from traditional heroic fiction story structure, if written word is the medium: no more individualistic protagonists, which is not to say no more single perspective characters but rather no more single-protagonist as motion-engine for either the story or the world of the story. No more messiahs or hunter-kings.
Here comes Ursula Leguin again with her carrier-bag :
“If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one. It is a strange realism but it is a strange reality“
Outgrowths:
what’s up with lunarpunk? isn’t it just goth-solarpunk? as a derivation of a derivation it feels a bit weird, all that comes off of it is self-described introverted witchy sci fi with a very tumblr flavor, why ? What? why?
I don’t feel like I’ve interacted enough with what’s generally thought of as “afrofuturism” to talk about its potential intersections with solarpunk. (I do intend on talking a bit about speculative blackness/blackfuturity later on)
the future of sci-fi lies in philosophy and vice-versa. no i won’t elaborate.
ultimately the name for what you create is kinda moot, just do your best and be kind, bud.
Love is a really abundant resource, but it needs some guidelines often.
Send potted plants to ospare@substack.com / Welcome to all the new readers, I promise to let you down in an interesting manne