Ernst Bloch and the Utopian Responsibilities of Solarpunk By Emily Goniea As public and academic discourses increasingly address systemic economic and environmental issues, the anxieties embedded within projections of climate futures have begun to reveal themselves through various methods of cultural expression. Solarpunk, a burgeoning genre of speculative fiction and artistry, presents reactions to the climate crisis grounded in principles of hope, regeneration, and anti-capitalism. As the genre and its associated ideology continue to develop and shape perspectives on current sociopolitical discourse, it becomes increasingly useful to examine solarpunk through the lens of traditional utopian theory to better understand its potential as a new way of envisioning utopia that is appropriate for the current moment. Specifically, the solarpunk movement, through its emphasis on hope and praxis in the imagination and implementation of climate futures, exhibits a modern embodiment of Ernst Bloch’s concept of concrete utopia. With roots reaching back as far as 2008, the literary and artistic genre labeled solarpunk developed largely on the social media website Tumblr as a movement of speculative fiction and illustration in the early-2010s. A derivative of the more well-known genre steampunk, solarpunk reimagines a fictive future through lenses of sustainability and ecology rather than the Victorian era technologies of its popular sibling. The result is a literary and artistic aesthetic that craftily combines the visual intrigue of green spaces, shiny futuristic technologies, and repurposed infrastructure somewhat reminiscent of a zombie film set post-apocalypse—but without the blood. Solarpunk, however, is far from apocalyptic. In fact, whatever the opposite of the apocalypse may be, that is precisely what solarpunk seeks out and transfers onto the page. Solarpunk’s “solar” elements can be related to the genre’s bright utopian optimism as well as its environmentalist persuasions. Like similar genres of steampunk and cyberpunk before it, the “punk” element of the movement’s name evokes a sense of self-taught existence and counter-hegemonic distance from established systems and structures in capitalist culture. A common trope of solarpunk involves the repurposing of crumbling human infrastructures, evoking the concept of jugaad, a method of creatively based problem solving using limited resources in unexpected ways. In this sense, solarpunk takes the classic punk trope of self-mended clothes—think safety pins, messy stitch work, or repurposed materials—and applies it on an infrastructural level. By diverging from the doomsday narrative of climate collapse, solarpunk appeals to the hope found in human nature without dismissing the presence of a looming crisis. It provides a fictive space in which to test the boundaries between realism in the present and hope for the future. At the foundations of the genre lies the acknowledgement that we cannot achieve a better future without first imagining one. Solarpunk does not dismiss the severity of the climate crisis, nor does it take the easy route of shrugging one’s shoulders and predicting a fiery explosion will end us all. Instead, it imagines an optimistic outcome in which humans survive and thrive, but by a different definition than that established by current capitalistic standards of living. The 1 

ernst-block-and-the-utopian-responsibilities-of-solarpunk

Ernst Block and the Utopian Responsibilities of Solarpunk

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Emily Goniea

https://emily-goniea.celero.site/s/c8a606d5/ernst-block-and-the-utopian-responsibilities-of-solarpunk/