Why Solarpunk Needs To Abandon Miyazaki

and other principles towards an ecotechnic aesthetic

All Emilie Carrière’s posts about it that triggered the original idea for this post months ago are gone, but every few months that solarpunk yogurt commercial goes around and a bunch of people on the left with completely different climate politics - ecomodernists and degrowth hardliners, war communists and doomers alike - make a big song and dance of denouncing solarpunk as fascist. As an aspiring solarpunk writer (who admittedly cannot get published in any of the few recognizable genre vehicles) I find this kind of annoying, especially as solarpunk seems to be singled out for having precisely what most of the left’s climate politics don’t - a curiosity about the complex, practical tradeoffs between human and ecological flourishing in unprecedented conditions, a willingness to plan and model ahead without prescribing, and a conviction that individuals and local communities can and must have agency in the coming ecological crisis beyond acts of symbolic virtue permitted by the current system or making nebulous demands of governments and authorities. My post about what that could actually look like in lived praxis is still in the works.

But the cringe associations of solarpunk are undeniable and function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, driving away anyone smart and literate enough to do this ambitious set of premises justice, leaving a stagnant morass of treacly greenwashed YA and carbon offset NFT grifts. So I have to defend it from a point of understanding why these associations have become so widespread. After all, most people’s first reference for it is a yogurt ad. Their second, if they have one, is Hayao Miyazaki.

It’s rarely clear which specific Miyazaki movie. I suspect in some cases it might just be the viral food gifs, whose hyperdetailed cornucopian brightness is clearly a reference for Chobani. Very few of Miyazaki’s works are set in a future, much less an optimistic one. Ecological conflict is a constant, but it is rarely specifically ours, and rarely improving. The clearest solarpunk parallel to me would be his breakthrough Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind, but it doesn’t quite seem to match what people mean. There’s no lush foliage and delicious food - the nonhuman world has been largely colonized by toxic fungi and giant insects, more Southern Reach than cottagecore. There is, at least, an elegant harmony of agrarian production and pre-industrial craftsmanship with cool tech like Nausicäa’s glider (launched in the trailer from a wooden catapult). The other movie that could make a direct claim of precedent to the genre is Castle In The Sky, with the sprawling vistas of Laputa, a floating citadel with rings of gardens around a giant tree, an obvious influence on the dense interplay architecture and greenery in the broadest, lushest scales of solarpunk cityscape art. But the narrative fit here is even more awkward - the landbound world of Castle In The Sky is an ordinary, industrializing 19th century analogue under tyrannical military rule, while Laputa was all that and worse before it destroyed itself, leaving its airborne ecology to recover in the care of its melancholy, placid robots. What little remains of it must be destroyed again to survive.

Miyazaki has become an obvious inspiration for ecotechnical imaginaries like solarpunk, I think, because he is simply equally concerned about ecology and fascinated with technology. His legendary animation studio, Studio Ghibli, is named after an Italian WWII airfield that despite being an example of 20th century technology at its most brutally extractive and militaristic, inspired the detailed aircraft he squeezes into every movie he can. Between these two preoccupations, Miyazaki’s stories that explicitly develop the confrontation, like Castle In The Sky or Nausicäa, pose “the opportunity to develop a better, nondestructive relation to technology” according to Thomas Lamarre in The Anime Machine. But crucially, this relation is never really represented in his films. Lamarre compares Miyazaki’s desire to establish a new relation to technology, in which his fascination with the pure form of technologies like flying machines need not be implicated (as in The Wind Rises) in mass destruction, with the “question concerning technology” in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Here the alarms of solarpunk’s critics should be blaring. Heidegger was himself complicit in the atrocities of the midcentury as much as Jiro Horikoshi, from a more distant philosophical standpoint, but also one that endorsed them more uncritically, as a card-carrying member of the Nazi party. He would later critique the Nazis’ totalizing technological worldview, but not renounce their anti-Semitism, which continued to colour his theory of a universally quantifying, deterritorializing nihilism encroaching on Europe from both the American and Soviet spheres, and embodied in world Jewry. His influence on ecological thought in general, not just solarpunk, is oversized and far too rarely interrogated in light of these facts.

It is in the aesthetics of Miyazaki’s visuals that Lamarre locates an alternative relation to technology never literalized in the narrative - both in his preference of the low-tech sliding layers of animation cels over the “ballistic” cinematic gaze, and in the whimsical design of his flying machines: “there are the aircraft that seem to combine dirigibles, bicycles, and propellers, and one has to wonder how they could get off the ground; like the castles in the sky, they appear to hover or float rather than fly in the sense of speeding through the skies.” Miyazaki’s aircraft are animalistic, “large and many-limbed, yet swift”, compared by Lamarre to the catbus in Totoro, the mobile castle in Howl’s Moving Castle and the insects in Nausicäa. As anachronistic, crossing historical periods and abandoned experiments, they resist a teleology of linear progress, and as picturesque, emphasizing mechanical form over function, they resist optimization and subsist in a free (aesthetic) relation to their own Being.

Lamarre describes Castle In The Sky as a critique of the boys’ adventure genre which “operates by presenting a technological problem and finding a technological solution”. His example of this would be “the hero seizing the weapons of mass destruction and placing them under the direction of other, apparently trustworthy authorities” (like in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy), which notably is not a technological solution but a political one presuming the existence of trustworthy authorities, of the type non-solarpunk ecopolitics - both ecomodernist and degrowth - resorts to in demanding government regulation as a solution separate from the technical and productive specifics of implementation. It is technological only in the sense of a Heideggerian definition of “an understanding of existence in terms of optimization”. This total a critique of “goal-oriented actions” exemplifies the bait-and-switch by which Heidegger has maintained such a lasting appeal to eco-wordcels. The romantic relation to nature as “purposeless purposiveness”, paving the way for the modernist aesthetic of art for art’s sake, is precisely what climate change renders problematic if not impossible. (And the revolt against climate politics as a final attack on the aesthetic independence of nature is increasingly heard from various sectors of the monocult, from Cory Morningstar’s paranoia of ecological management as enclosure to the pastoral-colonialist permaculture of Ashly Colby and William Wheelwright! If these are unfamiliar names, look no further than the boomer mobilization against windmills - Miyazaki’s energy source of choice throughout Castle In The Sky, which scales in the opening into the military-industrial terror of the flying cities anyway.) While I understand the liberation of existence for its own sake as the telos of any anti-Moloch politics, the delusion that this condition is “natural” is the seed of reaction. Rather, purposive systems can appear purposeless to us because they are naturalized - and when they are challenged in the name of entities whose right to exist as such has been excluded or subordinated by their naturalized teleology, like ethnic or religious minorities to the “worlding” of the Nation or queer people to the “natural” imperative of reproduction, it is those revolutionary elements that are mistaken for optimization intruding on beauty.

Emilie’s accusation of solarpunk, as I recall it, rested on the claim that it aestheticizes politics, as in Benjamin’s famous formulation of fascism, and presumably as opposed to her own criterion of politicized aesthetics in “woke brutalism”. Indeed, Carrière made her debut as a serious philosopher with “Technically Man Dwells Upon This Earth”, a Benjaminian critique of Heideggerian authenticity in defense of AI art. While I think this is an incorrect assessment of the broader possibilities of the concept, it rests on its very definition as an “aesthetic”, with recognizable tropes and imagery. Miyazaki also resolves the “problem concerning technology” on an aesthetic level, not a political or material one - an aesthetic solution that appears to involve making the technologies dubiously possible. Lamarre cites first gen anime pseud Helen McCarthy claiming that “despite their extravagant appearance, all are workable according to the technology on which they are based”. But the image of Laputa itself is a dreamlike chimera that juxtaposes all its contradictions in a merely formal unity - a castle, built to the aesthetics of medieval domination, built around a giant tree, the purity of the nonhuman, on a black dome that suspends it against gravity through an unexplained, magical high technology. As a solution to the material problem of climate change, which challenges the very stabilities of the “natural” world that allow us to encode it as an aesthetic, such a solution is inadequate. Miyazaki thematizes it as such - it is a “castle in the sky”, a child’s dream, the representation of fantasy itself, and its material realization can only spell the tragedy Pazu and Sheeta avert at the end of the movie by destroying its controls and letting it float away. It is this very inadequacy, already present in the aesthetics of ecopolitics more generally, I believe solarpunk should be defined around the attempt to resolve.

The solarpunk canonization of Miyazaki almost certainly has to do with a couple of other popular mythologies about him, as radical political artist and as patron saint of the wholesome weeb. The reduction of Miyazaki to a “cozy” and “nonthreatening aesthetic” is already critiqued from the former perspective in a currently viral post by Erika Chappell, a perspective already echoed in the standard apologetics of solarpunk and defensible, as Chappell claims, simply on the grounds of “the basic beats of the story” - which can be “radical” by American pop culture standards in even depicting the costs and reality of war and ecological destruction. This gets inflated into identifying Miyazaki as a socialist, which he was in his youth like many of his generation of Japanese artists - ignoring the fact that like many of the same, he abandoned socialism and active politics in general. In 1994, two years after Fukuyama’s End of History (and admittedly after many of his most visibly political films), Miyazaki conceded that “leaving decisions up to the collective just results in collective foolishness”. “Anime was a mistake” is an infamous fake quote, but ironically, Miyazaki actually did say that “Marxism was a mistake”. The hypocrisy of the crotchety old patriarch who dismisses otaku as “nothing but trash” helping define their tastes with the iconic princess Clarisse and a bevy of other “beautiful fighting girls” need not be relitigated here. I don’t even particularly begrudge him this - as an aspiring erotic aesthete myself, I can only imagine the pain of seeing your formative love for a fictional anima chewed up and spat out in a degenerative engine of overdesigned gacha games, and then wiseasses on the internet go and pretend that just because you were horny you didn’t actually care about the rest of it. The interesting part is the multilayered relation between reality and fiction it indexes. On one hand, Yoshiyuki Tomino (of Mobile Suit Gundam) critiques Miyazaki’s eroticism as unrealized and sentimental: “[When I see Hayao Miyazaki's panty shots,] it makes me wonder if he actually wants to rip it off or not. If he doesn't want to but still shows such pretentious lolicon manga stuff, I want him to stop.” On the other, Mamoru Oshii (whose bishoujo cred includes Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer) describes his desires as alarmingly more realized than many of his otaku contemporaries: “When he got terribly drunk, he shouted ‘What’s wrong with marrying a 12-year-old girl?’” Miyazaki’s erotic aesthetics require the attention to physical reality that had him famously watching women’s (let’s be real: girls’) skirts for hours to study for Kiki’s Delivery Service. But by taking it as an aesthetic given and neither passing it through the mediation of critique or fantasy, it can only be held at an abstract distance constantly threatening to overflow into real violence.

The otaku aesthetic, for what it’s worth, possesses a number of real assets for solarpunk. Solarpunk aspires, if anything, to the divide the Grand Narrative of technological modernist progress into a Grand Database of possible ecotechnic arrangements which can be studied ecologically in terms of their sustainability and optimized teleologically towards the common good of the greatest diversity, a universalism from the bottom up. The slice of life genre, developed by and for the most rigorously sentimental and abstract otaku, opened new narrative and expressive possibilities for representing worlds without the conflict ours necessitates through antagonistic class, military and ecological relations. The slice of life tribute to Miyazaki’s influence, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! demonstrates in many cases a better model for solarpunk than Miyazaki in its in-show director’s obsessive worldbuilding, working out the specific offscreen material relations of Miyazaki-esque worlds from the ground up in a rhizomatic process not defined by the need to represent an archetypal story.

Miyazaki is not the only pitfall within solarpunk. As I recently joked about, Singapore, which William Gibson famously called “Disneyland with the death penalty”, is another ubiquitous reference point when casuals ask what solarpunk is. The double bind of Miyazaki and Singapore could be mapped to the ecomodernist/degrowth binary within broader ecopolitics, and even the monocult/monoculture convergences in culture as a whole, though paradoxical alliances emerge at this distance. That solarpunk is mistaken for both in itself signals why I see in it a way out. Its perpetual aesthetic misidentification, from cottagecore to Miyazaki to canonical New Wave eco-utopianism to NGO and community centre activism to greenwashed neoliberal Patchwork, which seems inseparable from the lack of actual production within it compared to other online curatorial aesthetics like Vaporwave or Dark Academia, points to why Carrière is mistaken in reducing it to an aesthetic in the first place. The definition of “aesthetics” as database hashes, or Peli Grietzer’s “autoencoders”, is in itself unproblematic on the terms of woke brutalism: the problem especially in terms of an ecopolitics is that they curate only cultural givens, rather than producing novelty. Solarpunk assembles a constellation of incompatible givens - Miyazaki, art nouveau, Asian urbanism, Afrofuturism - to gesture towards something that can only be materially new, a sustainable, equitable and scientific ecotechnics. Solarpunk’s aesthetic signifiers index merely what that material novelty must be adequate to within the infinite field of difference - our planet, our Sun, our damaged and healing biosphere. It aims to coexist with and not rule out others, within the inner space of pure aesthetics or the outer space between the stars.

But solarpunk does aestheticize politics in one admitted way - it applies an aesthetic criterion to its political and technical truth-claims. This aesthetic criterion, and this I think is crucial, is not the same as the database criteria of genre or “aesthetic” inclusion. Solarpunk attempts to intervene artistically in a domain where political and technical arrangements have not yet succeeded, and in doing so claims that an arrangement is possible - not necessary or even good - if a coherent and compelling story can be written in it. It is better than this one - not necessarily the best - if the story feels “hopeful”. Such an epistemic, rather than regulative, integration of the aesthetic in the political seems analogous to Carrière’s own use of “sensitive reason”. This use-case, however, requires higher aesthetic standards than solarpunk has been subjected to in the current paradigm of speculative fiction as entertainment. The task is no less than to combine the anticipatory function of socialist realism - in the absence of an actually existing socialism - with the rigorous, interrogatory one of critical realism. In the interests of this, I have jotted down a few suggestions for additional aesthetic criteria to avoid crashing on the reef of failed utopias:

1. SOLARPUNK SHOULD BE TECHNICAL

I’m not enough of a shape rotator to live up to this fully in my own work, but I like to think of solarpunk as ideally a branch (or sublation) of hard sci-fi. Hard sci-fi (and now, rationalfic) are where the boys’ adventure tradition Lamarre identifies with “technical problems with technical solutions” went, and while they betray it to reaction by taking these as separate from political, ecological and economic ones, solarpunk aims to reconcile this split. This can already be seen in published solarpunk fiction, where patching localized holes in systems symbiosis with scientific judgment and technical ingenuity has replaced military conflict and extractive-colonial exploration as the source of narrative tension. It is a type of story structure rarely seen outside the systemically devalued experiments of socialist realism - experiments that coincided, like solarpunk yet could, with real experiments in lived production. But hard sci-fi’s criteria of technical plausibility (which can include plausible breakthroughs in areas of ongoing research or gaps in theory, something ecofiction too often avoids) are relevant even if this kind of literal technical problem-solving isn’t the narrative objective of fiction, which it shouldn’t always be. Science fiction in general still needs to decouple itself from the formal restrictions of genre storytelling to fulfill its possibilities as a laboratory of possible social life in its richest and most expansive sense. Solarpunk in particular seems well positioned to realize the ideal of science fiction as scientifically informed (that is, materialist), experimental social realism - allied with the experimental social reality of radical lifestyles - advocated by Samuel Delany. In this logic, sublating hard sf would mean applying “hard” epistemic standards to social and economic relations as scientific ones - if Chobani wants to show fruit-picking robots, it has to be willing to answer how these robots are produced, in what numbers, with what resources and what organization of labour. Are the happy agrarians shown in the commercial a privileged class supported in their wholesome Miyazaki LARP by an oppressed urban proletariat? But if political superstructures are informed by bases (such as robots more efficiently meeting the harvesting needs currently met by legions of migrant slaves), the political accuracy of social realism requires the technical accuracy of hard sci-fi. This also requires a break from technophobic epistemologies if not teleologies, which does not have to mean an acceptance of industrial modernity as organized extraction, but does require convincingly attempting to meet the same material needs of a diverse population. Over the coming century oppressive relations will likely again come to be inscribed in terms of who can afford to be supported by collapsing infrastructure and shrinking surplus. Projects to meet those needs through entirely new, non-petrocapitalist productive infrastructure, not simply redistributing or regulating its excess, will need to be at the forefront of all anti-oppressive politics.

The Miyazakian misconception of solarpunk, in which Carrière saw the likeness of fascist kitsch, is its identification with the agrarian utopianism that is already the default mode of environmentalism, and explicitly nostalgic aesthetics like cottagecore. In genre terms, this can be understood as fantasy, not science fiction. It suspends its disbelief about the unconscious, magical cover of material conditions (and does not on the other hand seriously investigate magic) in order to express a psychological truth of subjectivity under them. The bases for this association are the solarpunk aesthetic’s indexing of local productive infrastructure, tight-knit community and intimate proximity with nonhuman life. Neither of these need to be equated with agrarianism (or even primitive communism) as a set of productive relations. Rather, solarpunk can be defined as trying to decouple the elements of agrarian society fantasy preserves in nostalgia and sublate them in a new set of productive relations. As technology is a determining element of these relations, however (and even the “agrarian mode of production” differs across different agricultural technologies), this almost inevitably requires new technologies (including social ones). It’s unclear how many of these elements can be decoupled even then, which also remains to be determined by solarpunk’s aesthetic epistemology. The otaku imaginary’s roots in pulp science fiction fandom, including the “"fanatics" of guns and fighter aircraft” (and robots, and trains, and powerlines, and other peacetime machinery) Miyazaki also indulges his narcissism of small differences against are another reason anime’s “trash” might ironically be compost the solarpunk ecosystem could grow in.

2. SOLARPUNK SHOULD BE PUNK

This is a funny one because a lot of the time I think the cargo cult of “punk” is a dead weight on radical aesthetics. The representative of vague rebellious politics in Across The Spider-verse is “Spider-punk”. Sim Kern leans hard on that in their breakthrough entry The Free People’s Village, with the opening act set in a punk venue, and the book playlist featuring classics like the Pixies’ Debaser, although more of it is Starbucks-friendly indie pop and a selection of the most heavy-handed, obvious political songs imaginable (“This Is America”, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”). At this point I like to think about my own favourite punk reference point, The Pogues. They can play pretty much straight Irish folk music and have it aesthetically recognizable as “punk” without adding any of the distorted guitars and bro growls of “Celtic punk” successors like the Dropkick Murphys. They play hard, rough and reckless - something today’s hyper-professionalized writing landscape could use more of - but not necessarily angry, although when they are they are, on white-hot political tracks like “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six” or “Young Ned of the Hill”. Probably the aspect of “punk” that most explains its continuing salience as a signifier in an artistic landscape otherwise terrified of transgression and desensitized to cooptation is its association with a nebulous politics of anger, a mythology of the affect as an inherently liberating force I also often find unhealthy, unable to distinguish the rage that powers revolutionaries from the stimulus-loop of feeding trolls on Twitter all day or middle class yelling at the manager. On “The Sickbed of Cuchullain”, the narrator “[decks] some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the yids”, but most of the song is about drinking, partying and accepting death. What’s punk isn’t just the anger but the unapologetic lumpen messiness and squalor - not the kind that’s become just a positive valence for “problematic” in queer discourse, but where pain and excessive, libidinous joy can rub shoulders - even mosh - while neither contradicting nor necessitating each other. Adapting to climate change, especially in a liberatory, bottom-up way, is going to be a chaotic process, that isn’t going to look like the carefully produced campaigns of professional activism or perfectly formed perpetual-motion eco-villages. Everyone’s aware of this, and as established existing solarpunk is very focused on problem-solving, but I don’t feel like much of it is enjoying or aestheticizing the problems outside of the formalism of solving them, which in turn makes it difficult to make the stories feel “optimistic” without making them too easy.

“Solarpunk” appeared well into the dilution of “-punk”, like “-wave”, into a suffix merely standing for a suffix, and given the nostalgic art nouveau emphasis in the OG Tumblr post was probably coined more in reference to steampunk, which may have initiated this process by becoming the prime vessel of unironic industrial modernist nostalgia. Yet it is arguably from cyberpunk as much as steampunk that solarpunk derives some of the salient political and aesthetic commitments that make it a target of suspicion from state socialists and high ecomodernists - its emphasis on small, hands-on solutions, hacking and tinkering. Thus rather than Singapore, in which the authoritarian cleanness of high modernist utopia is identified with a conservationist aesthetic of purity and wholesomeness, solarpunk urban visions could (and already do, at least in the wallpaper zone) draw from the ecological density of Gibson’s opposite Sinofuturist pole, Kowloon Walled City. Meeting the material needs of a diverse working class, and even applying an aesthetic criterion to their standard of living, does not have to mean meeting the standards of a middle-class “cozy" aesthetic defined by the exclusion of a growing number of people anyway. It requires meeting some aesthetic standard - and allocating some surplus to aesthetic purposes - to distinguish itself from the capitalist optimization of ant farms. But this aesthetic can be ramshackle, garish and contradictory. The varied and creative efforts of existing working class and racialized hoods to beautify themselves already provide a wealth of inspiration.

3. HOPE SHOULD MAKE YOU CRY

My most stereotypically male trait is that I have a really fucked relation to crying. I do it like once every two years. This is in spite of constantly being constantly in crisis and feeling like shit, because if at least one system isn’t telling me that I have the situation under control in the last instance, the most violently decisive system will shut down all the others, and if no other option is available punish myself. I can only break down enough to cry either in the heat of a confrontation with an equally immovable will or in a moment where hope breaks through, and I can accept the weight of suffering without fearing it will collapse the roof on everything I love.

The other, less sympathetic but deeper critique of solarpunk that crops up whenever people get mad at it, is simply of the audacity of hope (and the Obama echo should indicate why it’s a genuine problem). Hope seems insulting to the fuckedness of our condition, like poetry after Auschwitz or wrong life lived rightly. What right do we have to hope when so many species and ecosystems are already extinct? The defences of Miyazaki already jump to point out that hope does not mean ignoring the bare facts of oppressive systems and coming catastrophes. But this defense does not go far enough. Hope in the sense that allows me to cry happens in the moment when the relation of ethically mandated despair (cope) is inverted, when the whole of grief is accepted and negated in its acceptance, by the mere fact that our continued ability to grieve means regardless of any positive outcome it cannot possibly win, nor indeed constrain our ability and duty to change its course. In this moment it contains all the catharsis of tragedy.

Where Miyazaki in his post-socialist despair believes the criterion of realism that distinguishes him from lesser fantasists is melancholy, anime/manga and their associated media mix have been developing the aesthetics of tragedy-inverting hope with a focus almost unprecedented in mass culture. From the Gnostic choices of Madoka and Utena, to the hard-won triumph of activism in Higurashi, to the communal ties of grief in nakige like Air and Clannad, to the unflinching existential affirmation of Subarashiki Hibi, to the preservation of girlhood bonds and ideals across time and space in Simoun and Dead Dead Demon’s Dedededestruction, to the dialectics of mutual self-sacrifice in Fate and Raildex (the ingenious emotional and technical formalism of Touma and Misaka’s first defeat of Accelerator, a fight hinging on wind power, is an example of what I mean I could still write a whole post about). This probably has something to do with the sense in which the pulp sf tradition it draws from preserved, according to Delany in an interview with Black Clock magazine (preserved in his collection About Writing), not just the impersonal logic of technical materialism but a romantic aesthetics of expressive affect that was suppressed from literary fiction by the buttoned-up minimalism of Hemingway and Carver - and today is suppressed from genre fiction by the dominant style of quippy self-awareness. Both of these are dimensions of an autistic subjectivity - too emotionless in some settings, too emotional in others - that resists the “fascist current” of “aestheticized living” in which “No matter what happens to you, don’t worry: You’ll look okay. Nobody’s going to laugh at you in the street.” This emotionality, for what it’s worth, isn’t lacking in Miyazaki - his fixation on adolescent girlhood is to some extent an excuse to allow himself to represent it. But it’s often overlooked in his reduction to a vibe, where the elements of grief and hope are approached as separate, side-by-side facts, balancing or trading off with each other, rather than moments of a single process. It is in this process that the relation between hope as the soul’s ecological mechanism of recovery from catastrophe, and hope as the principle of differential utopia unlimited by any local or historical “nature” - or between Heidegger’s “danger” and “the saving power” - can be revealed.