Fumbling toward Solarity

Solarity is neither utopian nor dystopian, neither bright nor bleak, but a mixture of the two tendencies. If we take solarity in its utopian aspect, it becomes a horizon against which we can measure the present, evaluate our own actions. None of us are bright (utopian) solar subjects. Solarity is not an achieved state but a potential horizon against which we might evaluate the present, and evaluate ourselves.

The only relationship to solarity of which we are capable is one of imperfection and insecurity against an ideal horizon. The achievement of solarity demands radical changes to infrastructures, social relations, values, habits—to the human-made world in which we live, the ways in which we live in it, and the relations between the two. As such, we are thrown into a position of uncertainty, attempting to act, speak, make, live, against the grain of our own experience and learned behavior. In attempting to make a different world, we are thrown into the position of inexperience.

We don’t know yet how to live in solarity; we are not, and don’t know how to be, solar subjects. The world that would produce such a subject has not (yet) come into being. That leaves us in a position of radical insecurity, where our knowledges, embedded in practice and habit and tradition, concretized in our infrastructures, articulated in our politics, are insufficient, improper, polluted, and polluting. Solarity confronts us with the challenge of learning to live and do and think and love again, to hold ourselves askance to the world we knew, to estrange ourselves from both the world we know and ourselves, to begin to be differently and to build differently.

A key difficulty here is the willed relinquishing of expertise. We have learned how to successfully be in the world. But this experience is unfit for solarity, and the latter will not come into being if the former is not relinquished. We are thus faced with the demand to become children again, stripped of the limiting confidence of habit. The proper attitude toward solarity in the present is insecurity—to acknowledge that we lack expertise, that we do not know how or what to do. And yet we have to do something, so we act insecurely, we act precisely against what we know, to create space for new and other knowledges. Solarity recasts fossil-fueled adulthood as a mistake, as a foolish and dangerous mode of being and set of knowledges, despite its great confidence in itself. The proper attitude of insecurity is difficult to dwell in as an adult, but we might turn to the toddler as an emblem for proper solar subjectivity in the present—to try and fail and try again with no failure of confidence but rather a joy in the simple fact of doing better, bit by bit.

There is no place in the present for a finished statement of solarity, only provisional and imperfect gestures and efforts and figures. This holds for any and all areas of practice: What might solar art look like? Solar politics? Solar community? Solar education? We strive to estrange the present in new practices, and what we produce now from our fossil-saturated circumstances is to the horizon of bright solarity as the crude but joyful scrawl of a child is to a masterpiece. Or to be more exact, within the most sophisticated and radical products of the present, we will discern, at best, crude traces of that alternative future. It is possible that this crudeness is also a necessary quality of solarity, a quality of imperfection, of openness to revision.

Solarity in the present is taking pride in a shitty first attempt, and the commitment of the second attempt, in contrast to the practiced motions through which flows the status quo. Solarity is fumbling toward something that we don’t know and can’t quite figure. Solarity is discomfort and insecurity, because only then do we know that we are on unfamiliar ground. Solar community is shared frustration. It’s the difficulty of acting together when the rules need making up as we go along, when goals and aims are unclear, when failure is encoded into success. None of us is an expert solar subject; we are all amateurs.

Solar panels have an efficiency of, at best, around 25 percent. The light strikes the panel, and excited electrons begin to bounce and jostle inside the material, but only some 25 percent of that activity finds its outlet. A quarter of the electrons initiate the wave of motion through the metal wires that is the electrical current; the rest simply don’t connect. The path to solarity is difficult to find, and we have to accept a much lower rate of “production” than we are perhaps used to, and a much higher rate of play, of excitation that goes nowhere, the joy of bouncing around in the hope of striking the path.

Can we think of solarity as a somatic recognition, which is to say, you know it when you feel it? Like sunshine on skin, is it a condition that surrounds us? But can it also damage us should it be too intense?

We can only make the just solar future with compromised present materials. The process of transition is necessarily troubled, and the foundations of a solar future—the panels themselves—are a document of a utopian future that is also a document of barbarism. The question of urgency is here paramount. The globalized, fossil-fueled, capitalist mode of production stands ready as a coiled spring to produce a solar future, and the brief time frame provided by the shrinking carbon budget for 2C or 1.5C necessitates its deployment. Even if there were the will, there is not the time for the means of producing the solar future to be made commensurate to its utopian figure. Which is to ask—can we build a just future with compromised materials? Can solar technology, produced through the exploitation of labor and nature, power a utopia?

Infrastructure embodies and extends the relations that produce it, concretizing values, making durable desires, and facilitating certain ways of being while impeding others. The challenge of just solarity under conditions of climate urgency is to somehow develop within, through, and on top of that which it seeks to negate.

In finance, speculation is the practice of engaging in short-term, risky financial transactions. In workshops, movement building, and youth organizing, speculation is something different. It’s a process, even a method, that taps in to the power of our collective imagination. Both imply risk, but one has the power to subvert the other. Speculative methods have the potential to breathe life into a conference, a classroom, even a movement. Making speculative art together offers an intimate way of building community, discovering shared affinities, permitting conversations about tough issues to unfold, slowly. Futurist speculative methods can help to reverse fear and anxiety and ultimately challenge paranoid capitalist logics that permeate disaster scenarios. And disaster and fear are rising with temperature records, raging wildfires, cities short of water, historic floods, and more. Fear is abundant, but so is our imagination. The possibilities of solarity find form through collective futurist imagining—when we begin to rethink how we grow our food, how we travel, how we work, how we communicate with each other, how we conceive of time, how we interact with the species and ecosystems on which we rely for survival, and how we build the trust, the participatory values, and the skills necessary to overcome tremendous odds.

The difficulty of just solarity, as with any utopian horizon, is the difficulty of its translation into positive images, words, representations. The utopian process is one of continual failure, and not so much moving toward as away from. This is the necessity of a confident yet insecure subject, and community. Of acting in the unknown. Of a leap of faith, of the negation of what is and the affirmation of what is not, of what cannot be known but only intuited from its universal quality—that which unites rather than divides. Conditions of climate emergency and climate urgency provide a new and difficult context for utopian thought, as it demands positive and manifest action. How to act in uncertainty, yet also act positively? How to aim at utopia, but also knowingly deploy and draw on and so propagate the productive capacities of the present to maintain the boundary conditions of the planet such that utopia may be possible within it?

The climate emergency situates utopianism with a new problem—the need to maintain the conditions of its own possibility not only within human thought and practice but in terms of a livable ecosystem.

There is a lot of concern at present to imagine alternative futures, to produce radical imaginaries that critique the present and figure alternative ways of living. The effort to grapple with solarities is one example of this. But there is now a concern with overproduction of futures, too many futures created, consumed, and discarded, going nowhere. The future not as colonized by the present but as negated through becoming transformed into futures as commodities. This overproduction is antagonistic to solarity. Solarity requires, instead, stories that take root. Stories that are not statements but essays, tries, gestures, that are returned to and elaborated, time and again. Stories that try and fail and try again. Stories to which we commit and which we allow to change the way we live now, which in turn reveals the limitations and failures of the stories and gives us the means to rework them.