Solarpunk
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Green capitalism is the hottest new thing. A sunny valley with advanced technology, a robot farmer picking strawberries with grandpa and grandma, a floating vehicle in a lush and verdant natural landscape…
This is the green imagery of the 90-second animation Dear Alice, an advertisement produced for the American food company Chobani with a soundtrack by Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi. In the words of the animators, Dear Alice is "an optimistic vision of the future of farming. It’s a nostalgic look towards a new era of agriculture."
A cow bellows in front of a solar panel while you eat your favorite yogurt and drink your non-dairy milk. "How we eat [and consume] today feeds tomorrow." Again, another ad produced by the animation company The Line for Chobani: "Growing oats uses less water today so we can enjoy the future tomorrow. Delicious. Creamy. Chobani Zero Sugar Oatmilk." Green capitalism never tasted sourer.
Three months later, on the 19th of October 2021, a new "decommodified" solarpunk animation of Chobani’s Dear Alice advertisement was uploaded on YouTube. No more product placement: Chobani® Coffee Creamer and Chobani® Coffee Cold Brew bottles are just monochrome containers with no brand name. The soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi is replaced by environmental sounds. Nonetheless, the master’s garden tools will never poison the master’s garden.
Similar to the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero nineteen centuries ago, whose names, effigies, and portraits were erased or removed from public view after their death, Chobani’s name is canceled by the minor history of the future. In analogy with the denarii coins with the faces of the two Roman emperors, which were later either melted down or countermarked (the archaic mark of "decommodification"), the industry of signs as such is liquefied into a brand-new cultural economy.
What is solarpunk? The Solarpunk Manifesto from 2019 reads: "Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question ‘what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?’ […] Solarpunk can be utopian, just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world, but never dystopian. As our world roils with calamity, we need solutions, not only warnings."
In twenty-first-century literature, Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (whose subtitle, most significantly, is An Ambiguous Utopia) is an oft-cited pioneer of the genre, alongside other works such as the manga series Nausiccaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki. Furthermore, the films produced by Hayao Miyazaki’s animation company Studio Ghibli represented another popular example of the genre. In architecture, Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore and the city of Almere in the Netherlands are two examples of solarpunk aesthetics in which nature, technology, and human life are designed and integrated together. The non-place of Jewel Changi Airport is no longer just a place of transit but also wonder. According to Matt Bluemink, Changi’s airport "might be one of the only airports in the world that could be considered a tourist attraction in its own right." On the other hand, the green urban design of Almere, as Jens Branum pointed out, represents the imagination of another future, reproduced by means of forward-thinking architecture and ecological urbanism, that cannot yet exist without capitalism: the logos of Samsung, Toshiba, and Sony are plastered on the facade of solarpunk buildings. Solarpunk aesthetics is the high noon of capitalism. The Sun is at its zenith but the shadows have never been longer. In the end, "midnight is also noon – […] night is also a sun," as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Today, the green models of Singapore and Almere are contrasted by the greenwashing models of cities like The Line (ironically, the homonym of the animation company cited above) in Saudi Arabia. Founded by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, The Line is a linear smart city in the desert: a 170-kilometers-long line without cars and carbon emissions, powered by green energy. The eleventh thesis of the Solarpunk Manifesto: "Imagine ‘smart cities’ being junked in favor of smart citizenry." The Line, in this regard, is nothing but the antithesis of solarpunk.
Let us read the second thesis of the Solarpunk Manifesto: "We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair." Contra the cyberpunk philosophy of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and the Wachowski twins’ The Matrix, solarpunk is the representation of hope and optimism. In the words of Matt Bluemink and Jens Branum, solarpunk is an "antidote" to the hopelessness and pessimism of cyberpunk. Nevertheless, the "antidote" of solarpunk is also somewhat toxic. It is a pharmakon, at the same time remedy and poison.
As Mark Fisher already noted in Capitalist Realism, "What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture." In other words, Dear Alice is the precommodification of its ad-free remake. The revolution has already ended. It is already the antithesis to another thesis of the Solarpunk Manifesto: "The ‘punk’ in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction." Capitalism is the end of the world.
But solarpunk aesthetics is also about the development of an economy of contribution, to use a phrase made popular by Bernard Stiegler, which is from and against the capitalist economy. It is about building a new world from the ruins of an older one. Furthermore, it is about the imagination of another future that may be already here and now. The pessimism of capitalist realism must be countered by the optimism of post-capitalism. Solarpunk is a fiction, a fever dream, a fantasy. But so is the future.
In an essay for the second annual Mark Fisher memorial lecture at Goldsmiths University in 2019, Jodi Dean writes: "It’s easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism because capitalism is the end of the world." She further added in an untranscribed section of the lecture that "The ravages of capitalism — enclosure, debt, stress — are deadly and world-ending," as cited by Matt Colquhoun, the editor of Mark Fisher’s posthumous book Postcapitalist Desire, who was present at Goldsmiths University that day. The question is not what but how is it to be done? The answer according to Jodi Dean is a form of political relation: comradeship.
One hundred years after socialism or barbarism, the choice is between communism or capitalism. But according to Byung-Chul Han, community is already another commodity. "Capitalism reaches fulfillment when it sells communism as a commodity." And so, "Communism as a commodity spells the end of revolution." Is there a third way?
References
Bluemink, M. (2022, 10 January). From Cyberpunk to Solarpunk: Technics and the Cities of the Future. Blue Labyrinths.
Branum, J. (2023, 13 February). Almere: The First Solarpunk City? Blue Labyrinths.
Colquhoun, M. (2019, 19 January). Comrades. Xenogothic.
Dean, J. (2019). Capitalism Is the End of the World. Mediations: Journal of Marxist Literary Group, 33(1-2), Realism Revaluated.
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, Washington: Zer0 Books.
Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. New York: Ace.
Han, B.-C. (2015, 23 October). Why Revolution Is No Longer Possible (Trans. E. Butler). openDemocrary. (Original work published 2014).
Le Guin, U. K. (1974). The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. New York: Harper & Row.
Miyazaki, H. (1988-1996). Nausiccaä of the Valley of the Wind (Trans. T. Smith & D. Lewis). San Francisco: Viz Media. (Original work published 1982-1984).
Regenerative Design (2019). A Solarpunk Manifesto. ReDes.
Wachowski, L. & Wachowski, L. (1999). The Matrix. Warner Bros.
The original version of this article was published in Berliner Gazette as part of the dossier Politics of Apocalypse.
Alessandro Sbordoni was born in Cagliari in 1995. He is the author of Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023) and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (2nd edition, Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He lives in London and works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.
Credit for cover: © NEOM