Recently, I wrote about solarpunk, a futurist fiction sub-genre and ‘Internet aesthetic’ whose actual output generally disappoints, failing to synthesize its purported artistic sources of inspiration (studio Ghibli, Art Nouveau, etc.) and falling short of its stated political aim of providing implementable projects for reducing greenhouse gasses and replacing existing economic systems.
One definition of the genre justifies the use of the word ‘solar’ because it is a “prime source and symbol of life … alternative to fossil fuels” and in terms of “the utopic [sic] will … the light of the day.” “Utopic” is not necessarily meant to denote a belief in absolute social perfectibility, however: In the most-cited solarpunk manifesto, we read that “Solarpunk can be utopian, [or] just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian.”
The Tyrant Sun
In any case, references to utopia are interesting because the sun has, indeed, historically been linked to utopian thought-experiments in fiction. We may think of the Dominican Tommaso Campanella’s 17th century The City of the Sun. Like the modern solar punks, Campanella was a kind of communist, greatly interested in technological innovation, and an appreciator of different cultures.
Alas, Campanella’s ideal takes more from Plato’s Republic than from the Athenian’s final work, The Laws. Campanella presents breeding and child-rearing as a prerogative of the state, such that the family is abolished (contrastingly, Plato’s Laws make the household the very basis of his polity).
Although the denizens of the City of the Sun reckon months by the phases of the moon, and years by the cycles of the sun, we may describe their state as excessively ‘solar,’ by which I mean that it takes a transcendent good (analogous to the sun) and misapplies it by not showing due regard for lower, ‘atmospheric’ realities (like the organic bonds of family):
We are all one in our human condition and ability to reason, therefore we ought to be one in our household—the state—rather than being divided up by family relation.
Put differently: if there is one sun above, there should be one state below; if there is one universal human condition, there should be one uniform human culture. Such seems to be its rationale. We may describe this as a confusion of planes.
Of course, the conclusion here is as absurd as our having to sleep on one continuous mat rather than separate beds, or share a common bloodstream by way of a monstrous medical contrivance, or all eat the same diet, allergies be damned, by virtue of our all belonging to one species.
The Rebel Moon
Form needs balancing with flux, and too much formal centralization will lead, by way of reaction, to an eruption of homogenizing ‘freedom.’
When this happens, we risk entering the psychological and imaginative realm of anti-solar rebellion, the war on Apollo and his mythical homeland, Hyperborea (the ‘far north’), and therefore on the north star, on centers and orientation, on order, all of which are represented by traditional solar imagery.
One of the best modern portrayals of this archetypical fantasy of rebellion may be the heavy metal band Cradle of Filth’s Queen of Winter Throned, in which the lunar overthrows the solar.
The song describes a “winter moon,” dragged across the sky by “foam-flecked nightmares.” She is a “lurid moon” that “looms phosphorescent evil,” exciting her wolves and armies of demons, representing a queen, “Faustina,” whose onslaught rages until:
Desert claims Eden
And Hyperborean
Visions of Utopia are driven from the sun
Iconoclast
Before thee Angels clasped
In nakedness their ochre flesh
Shall yield to thy advance
It is interesting that in a song titled “Queen of Winter Throned,” it is the desert (evoking heat) that advances upon Eden. On one level, the south, heat, and femininity are triumphing over the north, cold, and masculinity, just as the moon is replacing the sun.
In terms of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we have here an artistic depiction of ‘energy’ overcoming ‘reason;’ ‘hell’ overcoming ‘heaven.’ And as all excess of revelry leads back to rigidity, the result will be its opposite: a new Hyperborea, albeit dark, a new winter, Heaven as Satanic tyranny, not freedom:
I rise before thee Queen
…
To rule Heaven and worlds crawling beneath
Satanic Tyranny.
This “dark Hyperborea” is reason at the service of lower appetites (energy, emotion). It is like the Roman empire as “Apollyon” in John’s Apocalypse—a parodic Apollo appearing after the sun is darkened (conquered?) by smoke from the Abyss (9:2).
The emergence of a bastardized reason clouded by ‘smoke from the abyss’ after chaotic energy has conquered it describes the archetype behind much of the Metal subculture’s artistic expressions. The ‘metal’ in ‘metal head’ is not usually the ‘solar gold’ by which alchemists symbolized spiritual victory, but a heavy, post-industrial iron.
The same “dark Hyperborea,” or impure reason, manifests in the cyberpunk genre the very dystopianism which solarpunk is reacting against. We may think of renditions of Mozart’s Magic Flute in which the Queen of the Night’s reign is ushered in by lumbering machines.
If cyberpunk depicts reason under the sway of disordered emotion—an instrumental, technocratic reason deployed by greedy corporate and governing interests—solarpunk tends to give voice to emotion at the service of disordered reason: in the above terms, the former is the lunar archetype replacing the solar, and the latter is the solar replacing the lunar.
Solarpunks and lunar waves
In this sense, solarpunk and the environmentalist movement in general, are in danger of repeating Campanella’s mistake. Talk of self-determination and localism aside (which always risks functioning as an atomizing discourse to break nations down into more easily controlled components) the genre generally conforms to UN’s climate change predictions and the ethos of the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) recommendations.
In solarpunk fiction, deus ex machina devices in the form of well-funded science projects—solving the problems caused by global warming, requiring government or military know-how to implement, and the breakdown of the ‘bigotry’ of patriarchal societies that led to the ecological crisis in the first place—are all grist for the mill. As I’ve written elsewhere,
Destabilization of a culture is the hallmark of colonialism and renders communities less resilient in the face of challenges. To the degree that fiction teaches people to expect catastrophe, and to defer to authority for salvation, they are being conditioned for tyranny, not liberation.
If they are to avoid becoming procrustean beds for human nature, as well as eliciting violent, visceral reactions, our solar utopias, that is, our optimistic invocations of reason, will need to be more “lunar,” more oriented towards particular, grounded realities; more “green” (green is actually a good symbolic color for the successful interplay of sun and moon allowing for a healthy natural environment). ‘Lunar’ here means hearth, nature, family, organic structure.
Solarpunk’s lack of balance on this point corresponds to its manifesto’s failure to emphasize sources of energy partly determined by the moon, such as wind and water, and lacks reference to such tangible affronts to nature as plastic waste. Other than this, we have already noted its lack of engagement with past history, and a somewhat untethered, naive approach to progress.
The genre should be careful that, in reacting against the chaotic every man for himself corporate-dominated city of cyberpunk, it does not contribute to visions of a well-ordered one for all neo-feudal countryside.
Solar Utopias and Heavy Metal
Recently, I wrote about solarpunk, a futurist fiction sub-genre and ‘Internet aesthetic’ whose actual output generally disappoints, failing to synthesize its purported artistic sources of inspiration (studio Ghibli, Art Nouveau, etc.) and falling short of its stated political aim of providing implementable projects for reducing greenhouse gasses and replacing existing economic systems.
One definition of the genre justifies the use of the word ‘solar’ because it is a “prime source and symbol of life … alternative to fossil fuels” and in terms of “the utopic [sic] will … the light of the day.” “Utopic” is not necessarily meant to denote a belief in absolute social perfectibility, however: In the most-cited solarpunk manifesto, we read that “Solarpunk can be utopian, [or] just optimistic, or concerned with the struggles en route to a better world , but never dystopian.”
The Tyrant Sun
In any case, references to utopia are interesting because the sun has, indeed, historically been linked to utopian thought-experiments in fiction. We may think of the Dominican Tommaso Campanella’s 17th century The City of the Sun. Like the modern solar punks, Campanella was a kind of communist, greatly interested in technological innovation, and an appreciator of different cultures.
Alas, Campanella’s ideal takes more from Plato’s Republic than from the Athenian’s final work, The Laws. Campanella presents breeding and child-rearing as a prerogative of the state, such that the family is abolished (contrastingly, Plato’s Laws make the household the very basis of his polity).
Although the denizens of the City of the Sun reckon months by the phases of the moon, and years by the cycles of the sun, we may describe their state as excessively ‘solar,’ by which I mean that it takes a transcendent good (analogous to the sun) and misapplies it by not showing due regard for lower, ‘atmospheric’ realities (like the organic bonds of family):
Put differently: if there is one sun above, there should be one state below; if there is one universal human condition, there should be one uniform human culture. Such seems to be its rationale. We may describe this as a confusion of planes.
Of course, the conclusion here is as absurd as our having to sleep on one continuous mat rather than separate beds, or share a common bloodstream by way of a monstrous medical contrivance, or all eat the same diet, allergies be damned, by virtue of our all belonging to one species.
The Rebel Moon
Form needs balancing with flux, and too much formal centralization will lead, by way of reaction, to an eruption of homogenizing ‘freedom.’
When this happens, we risk entering the psychological and imaginative realm of anti-solar rebellion, the war on Apollo and his mythical homeland, Hyperborea (the ‘far north’), and therefore on the north star, on centers and orientation, on order, all of which are represented by traditional solar imagery.
One of the best modern portrayals of this archetypical fantasy of rebellion may be the heavy metal band Cradle of Filth’s Queen of Winter Throned, in which the lunar overthrows the solar.
The song describes a “winter moon,” dragged across the sky by “foam-flecked nightmares.” She is a “lurid moon” that “looms phosphorescent evil,” exciting her wolves and armies of demons, representing a queen, “Faustina,” whose onslaught rages until:
It is interesting that in a song titled “Queen of Winter Throned,” it is the desert (evoking heat) that advances upon Eden. On one level, the south, heat, and femininity are triumphing over the north, cold, and masculinity, just as the moon is replacing the sun.
In terms of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, we have here an artistic depiction of ‘energy’ overcoming ‘reason;’ ‘hell’ overcoming ‘heaven.’ And as all excess of revelry leads back to rigidity, the result will be its opposite: a new Hyperborea, albeit dark, a new winter, Heaven as Satanic tyranny, not freedom:
…
This “dark Hyperborea” is reason at the service of lower appetites (energy, emotion). It is like the Roman empire as “Apollyon” in John’s Apocalypse—a parodic Apollo appearing after the sun is darkened (conquered?) by smoke from the Abyss (9:2).
The emergence of a bastardized reason clouded by ‘smoke from the abyss’ after chaotic energy has conquered it describes the archetype behind much of the Metal subculture’s artistic expressions. The ‘metal’ in ‘metal head’ is not usually the ‘solar gold’ by which alchemists symbolized spiritual victory, but a heavy, post-industrial iron.
The same “dark Hyperborea,” or impure reason, manifests in the cyberpunk genre the very dystopianism which solarpunk is reacting against. We may think of renditions of Mozart’s Magic Flute in which the Queen of the Night’s reign is ushered in by lumbering machines.
If cyberpunk depicts reason under the sway of disordered emotion—an instrumental, technocratic reason deployed by greedy corporate and governing interests—solarpunk tends to give voice to emotion at the service of disordered reason: in the above terms, the former is the lunar archetype replacing the solar, and the latter is the solar replacing the lunar.
Solarpunks and lunar waves
In this sense, solarpunk and the environmentalist movement in general, are in danger of repeating Campanella’s mistake. Talk of self-determination and localism aside (which always risks functioning as an atomizing discourse to break nations down into more easily controlled components) the genre generally conforms to UN’s climate change predictions and the ethos of the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) recommendations.
In solarpunk fiction, deus ex machina devices in the form of well-funded science projects—solving the problems caused by global warming, requiring government or military know-how to implement, and the breakdown of the ‘bigotry’ of patriarchal societies that led to the ecological crisis in the first place—are all grist for the mill. As I’ve written elsewhere,
If they are to avoid becoming procrustean beds for human nature, as well as eliciting violent, visceral reactions, our solar utopias, that is, our optimistic invocations of reason, will need to be more “lunar,” more oriented towards particular, grounded realities; more “green” (green is actually a good symbolic color for the successful interplay of sun and moon allowing for a healthy natural environment). ‘Lunar’ here means hearth, nature, family, organic structure.
Solarpunk’s lack of balance on this point corresponds to its manifesto’s failure to emphasize sources of energy partly determined by the moon, such as wind and water, and lacks reference to such tangible affronts to nature as plastic waste. Other than this, we have already noted its lack of engagement with past history, and a somewhat untethered, naive approach to progress.
The genre should be careful that, in reacting against the chaotic every man for himself corporate-dominated city of cyberpunk, it does not contribute to visions of a well-ordered one for all neo-feudal countryside.
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