Discussion
#Solarpunk is not enough.
The problem I see is not that solarpunk is a wholly empty signifier. It’s that the concept principally convenes what I would think of as a “genre public” – and a genre public is by no means automatically a political subject. And while conflating these two very different kinds of collectivities is a recipe for failure, disappointment and disillusionment, I think there’s still room for us to do the work of transforming the former into the latter.
@adamgreenfield it's the classic trap of becoming an aesthetic of change rather than a vehicle of change ... something contemporary communication structures and culture is very good at, and conflates almost entirely with actual politics unfortunately.
@emenel 👆 👆 👆
Nevertheless: dig we must.
I need some clarification... when you say "conflating these two very different kinds of collectivities"... are the "two", specifically ,"genre public" and "political subject"?
@CynthesisToday Yes, sorry: just that.
@adamgreenfield Can you define "genre public" there? The only definition I can find there doesn't really match the idea of SP.
@urwumpe Sure: an audience. An affinity group bound (more or less solely) by the appeal a particular aesthetic holds for it. A fandom.
@adamgreenfield oh, ok. In that case I might disagree on that aspect, because it feels a bit too superficial or generic too me.
But I still agree that solarpunk is poorly suited to be realized as in the real world. Its a collection of (maybe unreachable) utopias too me, that share only some common ideas, but disagree on the others. Aesthetics-wise, there are huge differences. Much bigger than in the Gothic subculture, for example.
The solarpunk artifacts I’ve come across already display a commitment to ecology, local autonomy, postcapitalism and appropriate technology, which are all wonderful values (and ones I wholeheartedly endorse). What they generally supply their audience with is what we might think of as a *horizon of desire*: an account of how life might look and feel that’s meant to be both credible and aspirational, when so much thought that holds itself up as “realist” otherwise skews strongly grimdark.
What they *don’t* generally supply, though, is any connection to a situated IRL constituency, an organizational form, an analysis of ownership, a target, access to a resource base, or the capacity for adherents to define a local agenda (let alone force a decision).
I think "Half Built Garden" by Ruthanna Emrys does that (where "that" identifies "several constituencies, describes the form" and etc. of your 2nd paragraph) and does it very well including an important element described in Ostrom's work about The Commons-- monitoring agreed behaviors and graduated responses to helpful or unhelpful behaviors (through reputation measure). Emrys' work on the elements to maintain The Commons is important to prevent backsliding. The aliens are a counterpoint through most of the book, and, yeah, the alien tech helps, in the end, to offload the work to prevent backsliding. It's fiction, after all.
On the leading-to-transition side, Ernest Callenbach's 2nd Ecotopia book, Emerging Ecotopia (1981, re-issued in The Complete Ecotopia in 2021) spends most of the book on exactly these (your 2nd para) aspects of the path to the "horizon of desire".
@CynthesisToday HAHAHAHAHAHA i’m not sure you could mention a book of the last fifteen years I’ve liked *less* than “A Half-Built Garden”! Haven’t read Callenbach since the very early ‘90s – ought to look into him again.
But in any event, I’m talking about actual concrete organizing, amid the social and material conditions of contemporary society. I’m not sure fiction’s the most useful guide in such moments, other than furnishing motivation somewhere in the psychic hinterland of the things we do day-to-day.
What’s important here isn’t urging the entire community of folks gathered under this banner to become “more militant” somehow. I would like, though, to humbly suggest that solarpunk affinity is missing an organizing layer: something to run within and alongside it that converts an aesthetic and a visual imaginary into organization, leverage and meaningful change.
I get that this sounds a whole lot less fun than illustrations of vine-draped rapid-fab communities covered in photovoltaics, with neighbors preparing local-grown meals and human-powered vehicles zipping through the lanes. But if we ever want to live together in the kind of verdant, regenerative communities we imagine, I don’t think there’s any way around it.
Any politically consequential, puissant formation must eventually be able to do at least four things:
It has to _build_, which is to say, create infrastructure and (counter)institutions that people can materially depend upon. It needs to be able to _govern_ those infrastructures and counterinstitutions once built — in other words, make binding, dispositive decisions about assets, land, services and common resources. It needs to be able to _bargain_: to compel an adversary power (e.g. authority, landlord, utility, employer, developer, other faction) to negotiate with it, on terms it sets. And it needs to be able to _block_, or prevent an unwanted project, sale, closure, eviction or extraction from taking place.
It feels to me like the thing that gets called solarpunk is already reasonably good at imagining the first of these aims...but, so far as I can tell, anyway, not actually doing it anywhere on Earth. And it’s nowhere to be found so far as any of the other three tasks are concerned. Worse, genre artifacts often imagine building without asking who owns the result, who maintains it, what body of agreement protects it, who can withdraw or otherwise imperil the necessary supports it relies upon, and whose unpaid labor keeps it alive.
A community garden is not power. A community garden held in perpetuity by a land trust, defended by an organized constituency, and used as a base from which to contest planning decisions and other allocations of spatial resource, though? That may *begin* to be power. And I’ll share some more thoughts on how to get there from where we are now over the days ahead. Thanks for reading and thinking with me. 👊
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