Response 1: What Is Solarpunk? From Desire to Blueprint (and Utopian Literacy)

Solarpunk fiction is speculative. But it is speculative in a double sense. It is speculative, of course, because it speculates about the future. Bracketing the status quo, it conjures up scenarios of habitable worlds in an effort to image a future beyond our current socioecological disasters. But solarpunk fiction is also speculative because the genre itself primarily exists as an object of speculation in the solarpunk community.1 As a genre label, “solarpunk” emerged not to name an existing body of fiction, but to describe a certain type of fiction that would hopefully at some point be written.This was the case, at least, when the concept took off on tumblr.com and reddit.com in the first half of the 2010s. Here, a swarm of profiles, tired of our current dystopian mediascape, started to think about what solarpunk fiction would look like, how it might be cultivated, and why it would matter.2 Wouldn’t it be awesome, they wondered, if there existed a sci-fi genre that didn’t succumb to the format of Hollywood apocalypses, but offered hopeful visions of worlds worthy of pursuit? United by this longing, these profiles slowly grew into an outright community dedicated to make their wishes come true. They not only established a complete publishing infrastructure, putting together anthologies and setting up magazines, while calling for anyone with the means to submit solarpunk fiction.3 They also laid the ideational groundwork for the genre’s content and aesthetics, inviting budding writers to explore a plethora of online scribbles about its characteristics. And yet, to this day solarpunk fiction remains a genre in the making.For something that barely exists, however, solarpunk is currently making a surprising amount of noise in academia, the environmental humanities in particular. Accompanied by the aura of cultural ingenuity and intellectual radicality, the concept of “solarpunk” is slowly seeping into academic conferences, essays, handbooks, even special sections of influential journals.4 This gradual arrival, though, also means that the genre’s academic reception has yet to be settled. At this point, it’s still up for grabs how to conceptualize solarpunk and its cultural function. What is this new phenomenon, really? And what should we, as scholars, do with it?In her illuminating essay “Wish We Were There: Hope, Desire, and Utopian Community in Contemporary Solarpunk,” Alexa Weik von Mossner takes an initial stab at these tricky questions. Weaving together key solarpunk texts and concepts, Weik von Mossner sketches the founding ideology of this movement, framing solarpunk as a specific type of environmental fiction that trails a larger utopian tradition yet avoids naïve optimism. At work in this movement, she writes, is an intricate mixture of “realist audacity” and “radical hope,” a yearning for a better future that nevertheless reminds us to stay with the trouble.5 And yet, to really understand the nature of solarpunk, Weik von Mossner adds, we need to bring in another affective concept. Weik von Mossner is thinking here specifically about the concept of desire, that “motivating force that makes us strive for the things we are hoping for.”6 While this concept is only “rarely mentioned explicitly” by solarpunks themselves, it nevertheless, she claims, helps us pin down this new genre’s political scope. Solarpunk, we’re told, is not only suffused and propelled by a desire for different ways of living and being; it also strives to cultivate the desires of its readers, shaping how we feel about the future and, by negation, also about the present. In Weik von Mossner’s account, then, solarpunk appears to be a genre that first and foremost aims to ignite the libidinal fuel needed for environmental transformation.7As much as I sympathize with the attempt to pin down solarpunk’s affective dimension, Weik von Mossner’s invocation of desire nevertheless made me pause.8 After all, this concept also links up with intellectual traditions that are quite far from solarpunk’s genuine effort to conjure up detailed visions of more sustainable societies. I’m not thinking, here, of its tricky entanglement with Freudian and Lacanian discourses. I’m thinking of the long-standing tradition in critical theory for conceptualizing utopia as a libidinal impulse rather than an actual model for a better future. Writing under the title “The Desire Called Utopia,” Fredric Jameson, for instance, refrains from taking utopia “as some conceptual nugget we can extract and store away, with a view towards using it as the building block of some future system.”9 Utopian thinking is not about a systematic “plan,” Miguel Abensour claims, but about the “education of desire.”10 Even Ruth Levitas, who critiques both these scholars for overemphasizing desire and for forgetting “the potential institutional structure of the future,” at times reiterates their very same terminology.11 “The core of utopia is the desire for being otherwise,” she writes in Utopia as Method (2013), adding with evident skepticism: it “is not and cannot be blueprint.”12Now, while Weik von Mossner does cite these thinkers, she does not follow them step by step. In fact, Weik von Mossner is more indebted to scholars of cognitive narratology, an intellectual tradition that she herself has advanced significantly within the field of ecocriticism.13 Even so, her essay at times repeats the habit of emphasizing utopia as an affective impulse while dismissing it as a genre for “blueprints,” thereby framing solarpunk’s imaginary efforts as a means to shape our desires.14For me, this move came as a surprise. As solarpunks seem to think deeply about their own creative practices, there might be good reasons why they rarely talk of desire. My own sense is that the absence of this concept links to an effort to re-legitimize utopia precisely as a type of blueprint, however miniscule and tentative. It’s hardly a coincidence that many solarpunk publications—for instance, Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher’s Almanac for the Anthropocene (2022) (a key reference in Weik von Mossner’s essay)—brand themselves as a medium for, yes, “blueprints.”15 Even on solarpunks’ online platforms, the concept frequently guides debates about the validity of specific utopian models. Here, you’ll not only find profiles concerned with artistic topics, explaining why the techno-optimist ending of a sci-fi plot is “very solarpunk” or discussions about the relation between “the solarpunk aesthetic” and the pastoral setting in a novel.16 Responding to such writing, more solarpunks also chip in with elaborate arguments about the potentially unsustainable natures of these speculative scenarios, twisting and turning them to thoroughly assess their risks and potentials. What would happen, they ask, if this was actually our future? How would we get there? Which obstacles would block its realization? Does this specific pastoral setting align with a globalized food supply chain? Doesn’t that techno-optimism conflate with the libertarian individualism of transhumanism?17 And how, finally, might we creatively modify these projected scenarios to make them work better? Solarpunks are indeed very occupied with utopia as real programs for more habitable worlds. And for good reason, we might add. As Antonis Balasopoulos notes in a recent essay, “Without the laborious cognitive mapping of both existing and alternative social orders involved in at least the more powerful examples of ‘blueprint utopias,’ we become increasingly impotent to imagine historical change itself.”18 While Balasopoulos doesn’t address solarpunk specifically, most members of this community, I wager, would agree. We need not only to desire a better future. As Wagner and Wieland argue, solarpunk rests on “the belief that before that future could exist, we had to imagine it.”19So far, I’ve argued that solarpunk offers a corrective to well-established ideas about utopia as a desire or an affective impulse. It does so by emphasizing detailed visions of better societies as a means to help us overcome our current imaginary crises.20 Yes, indeed, we need to be motivated, affectively as well as libidinally, but we also need to be able to envision what kinds of societies we want to pursue. Solarpunks strive to help us do just that.And yet, it remains to be answered what we, as scholars, should do with this project? Advocate its importance and wish for a mainstream breakthrough of solarpunk fiction? We should definitely do that, I agree, no doubt about it. At present, however, I’m also thinking about how solarpunk might enrich the way we as environmental humanists teach our courses.21 In contrast to good colleagues, I’m not referring here to the potential of including more solarpunk fiction in our syllabi, although that’s of course a great idea.22 I’m wondering, rather, what would happen to our pedagogical practices if we took solarpunk as a pedagogy for environmental education? Would we gain more affirmative ways of selecting material, framing topics, and designing assignments? What would a solarpunk pedagogy look like, and what good would it do?Having explored these questions for some time now, I’m currently working on the idea of utopian literacy, defined here as the ability to imagine a habitable world beyond our current socioecological disasters as well as the routes to get there. If we took this idea as a guiding learning goal, we’d be prompted, I believe, to reorganize our programs to better meet solarpunk’s ultimate aim: carving out imaginary space in an increasingly closed and dystopian cultural imaginary. To do this, humanities scholars might have to overcome their intellectual fascination for critique and pessimism and remember to specify what actually works in addition to explaining what doesn’t.23 The gains, however, would be significant. Developing a solarpunk pedagogy would not only impact how our students feel (an increasingly pressing topic, especially considering the number of reports about climate anxiety in our classrooms).24 It would also help students’ capacity to imagine, refine, and pursue sustainable blueprints, a crucial skill almost no matter what industries our students end up in.What makes solarpunk so attractive for that endeavor is not so much its fictional works. In this context, I’m more inspired by its innovative promotion of vernacular forms of speculation, a DIY utopianism of sorts. In contrast to deep-rooted ideas about creativity in literary studies, solarpunk doesn’t reserve the ability to imagine habitable futures to the happy few, authors or artists with special talents or creative gifts. As Gregory Lynall notes, “the readers of solarpunk are encouraged to become its writers too, with every story itself seen as a valuable intervention that adds to the collective imagining of sustainable futures.”25 Notwithstanding your background or position, it’s all about cultivating our collective ability to conjure up better worlds. For that reason, the solarpunk movement offers a range of speculative techniques available for anyone willing to try them out. These techniques include creative writing exercises with premade story prompts that nudge us to think future scenarios without succumbing to dystopian thinking.26 They also count creative board games that encourage us to “backtrack” utopian scenarios by reverse engineering an appealing future, carving out imaginary routes by which to get there.27 By bringing these techniques in dialogue with environmental education scholarship, I think we’d be well equipped to renew curricula and learning activities to better help students identify and creatively extrapolate utopian elements from their objects of study. Solarpunk, in other words, offers us concrete ways to cultivate utopian literacy.To be sure, I’m not the first to argue for more utopian approaches in our classrooms. In fact, there’s already a big body of work on how to do that. Even so, in environmental education scholarship, utopian pedagogies mostly abide by the exact same tradition of desire sketched by Weik von Mossner, repeating its distaste for “blueprints,” while emphasizing dissonance and vagueness, affective impulses, and imaginary failures.28 As I take it, though, such adaptions are not unproblematic. They often end up overemphasizing the value of pedagogical open-endedness, while evading predefined learning goals and specific didactic designs. In doing so, they also encourage educators to sidestep the difficult job of guiding students toward tangible solutions. With their emphasis on blueprints, solarpunks suggest a different route.Education, of course, is not Weik von Mossner’s agenda. It’s mine. I’m writing this nonetheless to suggest a promising avenue that solarpunks allow us to pursue. Like Weik von Mossner, I’m also interested in jumping from “idea to action”; yet by reinterpreting solarpunk as a pedagogy, we’d gain a way of doing so that doesn’t rely on a mainstream breakthrough of a genre that hardly exists. By contrast, it would allow us to wield the powers bestowed upon us as educators. While many of us often feel powerless, we’re actually in charge of significant transformative devices. In the busy schedules of academic life, it’s all too easy to forget the intellectual, affective, and existential force of coming together to discuss, explicate, read, and write on a regular basis. It’s also easy to forget that our students carry these educational experiences with them into numerous different sectors of our societies, including other parts of our educational systems. And few of us pause to think about the magnitude of students we engage with over the course of a career, a number that surpasses the academic readership of many scholars. Teaching, in other words, is not only one of our mandatory tasks; it also serves as a juncture where academic scholarship meets a larger audience. Education, then, offers a clear route through which the solarpunk project—cultivating utopian literacy in the broader public—might actually be realized.I hope other scholars will join me in that endeavor. In my current book project, I’m trying to think through its wider pedagogical implications and develop specific principles for more affirmative curricula.29 I also hope that Weik von Mossner will continue her work on solarpunk fiction, perhaps even explore its affective impact empirically, as hinted by the end of her essay. To be sure, solarpunk offers an exciting new intellectual avenue for those of us who are concerned about the imaginary capacities needed to tackle climate change.30 There are lots of new impulses to explore here. And I’m happy to be a part of the conversation.