Response 3: “Unshakeable Want”: Solarpunk, Petromodernity, and the Death Drive

Dex escapes the city: “Sometimes, a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.” They change careers, become a tea monk, a vocation blending botanical remedy with therapeutic conversation. Dex embraces a new form of life; they learn to occupy time and attune to nature in a different way. They also repeat the foundational reconciliation between civilization and nature that is the signature of solarpunk and of Becky Chambers’s “Monk and Robot” novellas, exemplars of that sci-fi subgenre:The aesthetic, here, is not the sublime but the beautiful—harmonious accord that softens the edges of things. The passage describes this aesthetic disposition as “ease.” It’s the “humming mildly” that comes from the minimal friction between machine and nature. It’s the sunlight that lubricates the landscape, that coats the surface of every object with evidence of their solar origins. This ease is only possible because the sun donates its energy to the solar panels that recharge the motor of Dex’s ox-bike, to the plants that constitute Dex’s diet, to the myriad forms of life that make the moon Panga their home. At the same time, this reconciliation between civilization and nature bears the historical trace of crisis in “[t]he infrastructural delineation between human space and everything-else space.” This line does more than signify; it effects the “crazy split” (“the Transition”) through which humanity subtracted itself from planetary mastery—it marks the negation of the Anthropocene.Chambers never describes the Transition in detail, but she alludes to it as the resolution of something akin to Earth’s contemporary climate crisis. It names the exodus from a time of heavy industry, polluted rivers, carbon emissions, and general ecosystem disruption. The coziness of Chambers’s prose presupposes its inverse, a period of discord and dissonance, a moment when machines overwhelmed and consumed nature. In other words, the positivity of solarpunk—its optimism, its utopianism—maintains a connection to its opposite, to the negativity that defines our present-day relationship between civilization and nature (what some Marxists term the metabolic rift).1 It’s the line between positivity and negativity, between ease and crisis, that enables solarpunk to constitute, in Phoebe Wagner’s words, “a narrative method for survival and thriving,” “a response to the climate crisis and its attendant social justice issues” (“An Introduction”). Without this coupling of ease and crisis, solarpunk would be what Ernst Bloch criticizes as abstract utopianism: a too easy sort of wish fulfillment that sidesteps social problems instead of responding to them (223). Solarpunk’s critical utopianism—its “punk” quality—lies in “infrastructure as a form of resistance” (Flynn). Infrastructural delineation constitutes resistance, because the halving of human influence (“half the land for a single species, half for the hundreds of thousands of others”) doesn’t just achieve balance or equilibrium (a restoration of natural homeostasis), it invents novel forms of human life, new ways of negotiating the fact of being in and of nature, while at the same being able to throw the world out of whack. Infrastructure signifies the historical present of fossil fuel-driven capitalism and climate crisis (even clean energy infrastructure requires carbon-intensive materials like steel and concrete), but infrastructure might also be something like Dex’s ox-bike: “double-decked, chunky-wheeled, ready for adventure”—an imaginative means of cruising into sustainable futures (Chambers, Psalm 10). Solarpunk is a rich fantasy. Its visions of sustainable worlds interrupt the dominant dystopian imaginary of the present—Anthropocene history as slide into extinction: ecopessimism, climate anxiety, apocalypse fetishism—generating the hope that a different relation to nature remains possible. In this CRITICAL FORUM’S central article, Alexa Weik von Mossner explains that “the task that solarpunk has set itself as both movement and speculative fiction genre is nothing less than bringing about attainable, sustainable, and equitable futures worth living in.” Weik von Mossner reframes solarpunk in utopian terms, supplementing solarpunk’s “realist audacity” and “radical hope” with the “education of desire.” “The question that poses itself,” Weik von Mossner writes, “is how exactly do we get from hopeful imagining to the courage and determination to act, and what role does desire play in this process as the motivating force that makes us strive for the things we are hoping for?” This is the question of praxis, of the circuit between theory and practice. It’s the question of how the imagination actualizes itself in and as material reality. Weik von Mossner pursues this question through cognitive narratology. Bracketing off psychoanalytic approaches to desire, she sketches a mimetic itinerary of utopia through solarpunk. Character desire and narrative desire model possibilities that constitute alternatives to present-day habits. They don’t close the gap between imagination and historical reality, but they educate desire by attuning it to other objects of care and to different ways of pursuing those objects. This education in desire keys itself to three central values: care, cooperation, and attachment to place. Solarpunk leavens utopian desire with the knowledge that “[f]eeling at home . . . is a willingness to care for one another” and that this care not only traverses species (“embodied interaction with a multispecies community”) but also encompasses the natural environment. Solarpunk sustains readers with demonstrations that a sustainable world is not just desirable but feasible. It lets us desire utopia again by detaching futurity from the ongoing disaster that is capitalist progress, petromodernity, human dominion.But desire isn’t so simple and its logic isn’t solely mimetic. It is constituted by the obstacles it encounters as much as the object it pursues. Desire frustrates emulation not because it belongs to the inner truth of individuals but, to the contrary, because its social dimensions—its constitutive mediation by social and symbolic orders—are inextricable from antagonism and contradiction. Even the most normative desires don’t follow a straight line; they zig, they zag, they swerve in response to obstacles and conditions. Weik von Mossner worries that solarpunk stories are “also an expression of desire in that they omit—deliberately, perhaps—any kind of friction or competing interests within the communities they portray.” Solarpunk’s omission of friction is not synonymous with the bracketing off of psychoanalysis, but it’s related insofar as psychoanalysis takes the friction of desire as its object. The richness of solarpunk fantasy lies in the ways that the omission of friction rebounds, that the complications of community haunt the cozy landscapes of solarpunk, like so many rusted relics of petroleum-powered modernity.Solarpunk fantasizes sustainable futures. Fantasy, in this context, doesn’t mean the opposite of reality, nor does it imply the elimination of desire’s obstacles in some smooth scene of fulfillment. Instead, fantasy names the scene of desire playing out in encounters with obstacles. It also names a kind of imaginative work that retroactively constitutes subjects as beings that desire, with and alongside others, in a certain way. “Fantasy,” Lauren Berlant clarifies, “is the place where the subject encounters herself already negotiating the social. The origin of fantasy may still be the trauma of infantile separation—that’s one theory. However we account for its origins, though, it’s clear that the subjectivity desire makes is fundamentally incited by external stimuli that make a dent on the subject” (Desire/Love 75). In the case of solarpunk, the fantasy of sustainability reconstitutes reading subjects not just through imaginary scenes of fulfillment—sun-soaked dreamscapes of civilization cozy with nature—but through encounters with the repressed materials of petromodernity: the creative destruction of capitalism and its libidinal economy, the drive to mass extinction in the name of endless growth, the compulsion to consume the planet for the sake of luxury.2 If solarpunk offers more than relief, it’s because it reckons with the bad attachments and social limits that fuel the ecological pathologies of the present. “All attachments are optimistic,” Berlant reminds. “When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us” (Cruel Optimism 23). And not all objects are good for us: “[S]ome scenes of optimism are clearly crueler than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place” (Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 24–25). What is petromodernity but a cruel object? What does it name but an attachment to endless growth, to capitalist futurity, that wears us down by destroying the planet on which we depend and of which we are an element?The sustainability fantasies of solarpunk remain tethered to the material realities of the present by staging human attachments to petromodernity. Solarpunk invites readers into a cozy scene, but there’s a scene behind the scene, a shadow scene: historical objects that endure in, but are not of, solarpunk’s future present. In Cory Doctorow’s short story “Materiality,” for instance, recycling, composting, and multi-use design are the orders of the day, but the tale Doctorow tells is one of a school class visiting a model “Twenty-First Century Town,” a field trip to reenact our Anthropocene present in all of its overbuilt and ill-considered material weight. On the way to the town, the protagonist (Artemio) notes that, for all its virtues, solarpunk futurity doesn’t vanish the fossils of historical folly:The instinctive revulsion Artemio feels toward these historical remainders, his repulsion from the odds and ends that “refused to break down,” suggest an estranging rather than imitative aesthetic logic: what’s utopian in this example of the solarpunk imaginary is not Artemio as model of the post-Anthropocene citizen, living in a post-material world, but rather the gap, the impasse, that makes it difficult to put ourselves in his shoes. We’re not only surrounded by the “insoluble, terrible objects.” We are those objects, “too badly made to love, but too overbuilt to fall apart gracefully,” because for all our dreams of sustainability, we remain the subjects of petromodernity, our futures still powered by combustion, solar panels and composting, still ornaments of green capitalism instead of the principles of a different social world.3The value of solarpunk fantasy is twofold. It consists not only in its staging of scenes in which technology and nature reconcile (call it the solar, or speculative, element) but also in the interruption of these scenes by the stubborn remainders of capitalist modernity (the historical element, the obstacle to futurity, the junk moment). Desire traverses and connects these elements. To be precise, the narrativization of desire sequences these elements such that history not only precedes but follows speculation, consecrating solarity through its interruption. The future composts the past, yes, but something in the past is insoluble, resists incorporation into solar ease. Conversely, solarity only appears, becomes something concrete—an object of desire—against a background of historical remnants. In short, what makes solarpunk utopian, what gives it more than ideological appeal as yet another solution to the present’s social pathologies, is that it tarries with historical negativity, with obstacles to desire.In psychoanalytic terms, what’s at stake here is less pleasure than the extremes of desire limned by the death drive. For Freud, the pleasure principle (Lustprinzip) involves detours through, not to mention compromises with, social reality; you can’t always get what you want, but, as he writes in Civilization and Its Discontents, “The programme of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not—indeed, we cannot—give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment by some means or other” (34). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud wonders whether the pleasure principle might not be aligned with the death drive (Todestrieb), an instinct for life to return to an inanimate state. After all, happiness implies not only intensities of pleasure but also the avoidance of pain, and what purer absence of pain is there than death? Freud’s emphasis, however, is not so much on the return to inanimacy—happiness as still life—but on the tension between the life and death instincts, the push and pull between creation and destruction: “It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm. One group of instincts rushes forward so as to reach the final aim of life [death] as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 49).Jacques Lacan pushes Freud’s speculations to their logical, linguistic, and historical endpoint. The death drive, he explains, should be distinguished from “the Nirvana or annihilation principle,” for it is “situated in the historical domain; it is articulated at a level that can only be defined as a function of the signifying chain, that is to say, insofar as a reference point, that is a reference point of order, can be situated relative to the functioning of nature” (211). The death drive doesn’t return human beings to the cyclical time of primordial nature, rather it recalls and replays the emergence of culture (the social and symbolic order; the domain of language) as the advent of history. The death drive doesn’t put to rest, it erupts and interrupts, it breaks (with) nature: “The drive as such, insofar as it is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be but a direct will to destruction, if I may put it like that by way of illustration? [. . .] Will to destruction. Will to make a fresh start. Will for an Other-thing, given that everything can be challenged from the function of the signifier [‘the historical chain’]” (Lacan 212). Lacan’s emphasis on destruction doesn’t simply represent human aggression, even if petromodernity, with its hunger for natural resources, testifies so well to that aggression. Instead, it speaks to the will to overturn the order of things in the name of a “fresh start,” an “Other-thing,” that transgressive pleasure that Lacan calls jouissance (184). In sum, the death drive describes how the pursuit of pleasure defines itself not by its object or aim but by the detours of its obstacles, the friction of historical encounters.There is something utopian in the psychoanalytic meditation on the death drive. It implies that desire need not be reduced to the terms of the social and symbolic order, that desire may yet turn into disruption of the status quo, “disruption as Novum, as restructuration and the unexpected blasting open of habits, as that lateral side-door which suddenly opens onto a new world of transformed human beings” (Jameson, Archaeologies 232 n. 23). At the same time, even though this disruptive desire conjures the beyond, that which lies beyond the present order of things, it nevertheless remains grounded in historical conditions, inserted into the social and symbolic order. It’s a concrete utopianism, working through history instead of wishing it away.What makes solarpunk valuable for the social and political imagination—what makes it properly utopian—is its commitment to working through history. “History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its turn into and of their (Jameson, The requires the pain of it friction and as much as there’s of pleasure in coziness of a the in social cooperation, the ease of this pleasure only itself in or Solarpunk’s isn’t It doesn’t of a future as of remains by the of petromodernity, and this constitutes its Phoebe Wagner’s of this between history and utopia through the a that one of “a to land or a but both been in the the [. . .] as the some to be some might been that from or appears, or in these not opposite of nature but in its Wagner’s narrative doesn’t on in the but on a with It’s a story of to of social forms in response to the and of historical It’s not The death of a of and the becomes an of a and into a is a form of a of Its in Wagner’s story testifies to the fact that solarpunk a working through of petromodernity, that the of the genre isn’t but its Solarpunk reckons with the “insoluble, terrible that to in solar but it does so with At the of Wagner’s the of the community the in the edges to from bad or They not just history but they the of the Anthropocene into the wonders of a future present. in this context, isn’t the resolution of history but the of historical as a that some new way of in the world might yet if the a new In Psalm for the Dex the fuck out of the but they don’t Instead, they a do The on Chambers’s at the of human They their the their human the to not just their but their to as they Dex’s with is a swerve Dex’s as a tea question about what need implies a more general question about what a post-Anthropocene civilization and feels Dex’s a good world, a It’s not but so We made a good a good And yet every in the I up and . . . and . . . just I something [. . .] And I do do it good at what I I make I make And yet I still up like . . . like In Psalm and its for the narrative the of this the pursuit of some that would this that would still Dex’s desire, but it is the the that gives these their to should be an are not or an And has a The world simply [. . .] work is not and I don’t how to that, because it is to in the world and at [. . .] are to just Dex doesn’t their with the of nature, but they do object to the of the of isn’t for most We’re more than We’re We care of and the world takes care of us, and we care of and it And clearly not [. . .] We and beyond human nature as much as This marks the of solarpunk The that exodus from petromodernity, doesn’t reconcile civilization and nature as if the their It how in, with, and as of nature, but it cannot human social and symbolic the simple of in the of solar it the death drive with it “the same sort of that made them turn off the into the (Chambers,