Introduction: Braking the Carousel
In March of 2020, with very little warning, the consumer economy abruptly slowed to a near-stop. Have you ever been sitting in a quiet room when a breaker is tripped and, suddenly, the room becomes somehow even more silent? The background hum of machines all around you, so familiar that it has become effectively imperceptible, vanishes, and its absence is experienced as something new—a denser, more profound kind of quiet. In those early months of the SARS- CoV-2 pandemic, something like this seemed to happen on a grand scale in urban spaces around the globe. In West Oakland, California, the ever present rumbling of the freeway ceased. I stepped into my back yard one morning in early April and heard nothing but birds singing; inhaling deeply I was unironically, without exaggeration, stunned by the freshness of the air. Rather than car and ship exhaust, I could detect pine sap, budding flowers, and a hint of cool moisture on the bay breeze. There was something both uncanny and delightful about standing in a starkly urban landscape, while sensing aromas associated with wilderness.
Incidentally—accidentally—the economic slowdown initiated in California by the stay- at-home order issued on March 19, 2020 served as a microcosm of ‘degrowth’–a process of of careful economic contraction recommended by a growing group of economists and ecologists. The forced reduction in economic activity, especially in the early months of the pandemic, provided a sense of how a less intensely consumptive economy might be experienced from within. It gave us hard proof that it was even possible to stop the machine, so to speak—to take a break—and taking a break showed us something about how the world might function, how we might consume less while still doing plenty, how we might shrink the economy without sacrificing human well-being; it provided a direct demonstration that we could and would survive without selling non-essential consumer products back and forth to one another, and that there would be no immediate collapse if white collar workers stopped senselessly commuting into and out of the cities to perform the mind-numbing duties demanded by their bullshit jobs.
Though many of its core concepts had been in discussion for decades, the modern degrowth movement began to expand after its founding document, 1972’s alarmingly and extensively titled, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind was published. Later economists, ecologists, anthropologists, and philosophers, mostly working in Europe, have significantly expanded the set of concepts and goals relevant to the project. Notably among such efforts, the collection of essays Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, is a comprehensive introduction to the topic, discussing the necessity and practicality of reducing economic growth as a response to global environmental crises and social inequalities. The book presents degrowth not just as an economic alternative but as a shift towards a new value system that prioritizes well-being, ecological sustainability, and social equity over the conventional pursuit of economic expansion (D’Alisa et al). Through its collection of terms and concepts it helps inform the discourse around surviving and even flourishing without the myth of endless economic growth. Exploding that myth is vital; after all, degrowth is “first and foremost, a critique of growth” (4).
Advocates of degrowth call for reducing consumption and production as a deliberate economic strategy. This differs from economic recession in that it is intentional, strategic, and ideally beneficial. Unlike a recession, which is an involuntary contraction of the economy, often resulting in widespread hardship, degrowth is a planned process aimed at reducing reliance on consumption-driven growth, in favor of long-term sustainability and well-being over short-term economic indicators. The primary objectives of degrowth advocates are to use and distribute resources more equitably, substantially reduce the overall environmental impact of human activity, and realign social values and practices towards a sustainable balance with the environment and each other.
Though we all shared a brief moment of degrowth when COVID initially struck, in the following months the story we were telling each other about the pandemic—the shared public narrative—bifurcated, and then further splintered by faction, becoming a political and ideological football. But before that happened, when we were all united in our apprehension and confusion, glued to the news, trying to get used to physical isolation, telecommuting, and navigating the utterly transformed public spaces that remained to us, odd manifestations of solidarity began to appear on social media; we created impromptu performances, songs, DIY short films, music videos, and skits as we tried to keep ourselves busy and to cheer each other up. We started talking to one another about what it meant that ‘the world’ (the consumer economy) had ended. There were extensive popular debates over whether or not experiencing the pandemic would or could permanently “remake society” (Illing).
It was an opportunity to observe the extent to which our constructed environment is founded on arbitrary conventions. Through perceptual fissures, we glimpsed the underlying reality obscured by the neoliberal phantasmagoria—a reality that is vital and complex, yet less encumbered by the myriad influences, demands, and the so-called 'choices' presented by consumer capitalism. Such choices increasingly appeared as mere absurdities. The necessity of venues such as restaurants and bars, where individuals, couples, and groups often congregate without meaningful interaction between parties, was called into question. The arbitrariness of numerous conventional interactions was starkly highlighted, particularly after an extended period devoid of typical engagements in roles such as customer or service provider. For some, the formulaic conversations and common, repetitive interactions of the marketplace began to feel intolerably vacuous. The instantaneous obsolescence of so many conventions, from meeting for lunch to shaking hands, underscored the extent to which we had been adhering to a set of social scripts. Scripts without authors, internalized distractedly (Baker).
If the scripts didn’t have writers, the production itself nevertheless had beneficiaries. Before the solidarity inspired by common experiences of the pandemic-transformed world was obliterated by the specious simplicity of picturesque narratives offered by materially and ideological motivated actors, other relationships, class relationships, became radicalizingly clear. The term “essential worker” entered everyone’s vocabulary, and for months the activities serving the base of Maslow's pyramid—those that feed, heal, house, and clothe us—became impossible to ignore or take for granted. Not only the activities themselves, but the politics behind the manner in which they are carried out, the assumptions and distortions obscuring their function, and the prerogatives determining how they are compensated, became our (all day) everyday concerns.
Then, as the stark realities of the pandemic settled in, and as April's rent, then May’s came due, another aspect of injustice (or absurdity), normally taken for granted, came into focus: landlords continued to collect rent despite the near-total halt of the economy. This situation underscored a profound disconnect; economic activities had largely ceased, no goods were being exchanged, and yet property owners still expected to receive income for essentially providing nothing. It was an undeniable demonstration of a condition accepted as a law of nature, a fact that had become invisible: owners (as such, i.e. owners in the role of owner) collect money without doing anything.
Whether or not it was recognized as such, this demonstration—not designed by activists or artists, but provided by a global disaster—highlighted a central tenet of the degrowth movement: the urgent need to address economic injustices that both drive and result from the relentless pursuit of wealth through unceasing 'growth.' Can intentionally designed interventions harness the power of demonstration? Could such interventions, in works of art or curated experiences, function even more powerfully (and with less risk) than the accidental effects of increasingly common large-scale disasters?
Shifting to a degrowth economic paradigm rooted in sustainability rather than continuous economic expansion could result in the redirection of significant resources toward supporting universal social support systems. By curbing the production and consumption of non-essential or minimally useful consumer products, and by extending the lifespan of truly useful goods through better recycling and reuse practices, we could drastically reduce resource waste. This reduction would not only alleviate environmental pressure but also free up material resources to provide for sustenance and enrichment all. Such a shift would enable individuals to work fewer hours, in essential roles, maintaining a good standard of living while granting more free time. This extra time could be devoted to community-building activities, arts, and cultural production, enriching society not only in terms of its survival facing looming climate catastrophes, but also socially and culturally. In essence, by prioritizing efficiency and sustainability, we could foster an environment where economic security and personal fulfillment coexist, supported by a more equitable distribution of wealth and resources.
Studies and analytic scrutiny indicate that grinding away our lives to buy and sell products in a marketplace is not in our best interests as mammals. In particular, Tim Kasser's research on materialism and well-being offers insights that recommend the objectives and methods of the degrowth movement. Kasser has extensively studied how high levels of materialistic values correlate negatively with life satisfaction and positively with ecological damage. His findings suggest that a societal shift towards intrinsic goals such as community building, personal growth, and ecological responsibility, as opposed to extrinsic goals like material wealth, can lead to higher levels of well-being (97). These principles align closely with the degrowth movement's objectives to promote a cultural and economic transition towards less material-intensive ways of life. Reducing consumption does not necessarily mean reducing quality of life; rather, it could enhance human well-being by nurturing community, sense of purpose, and environmental harmony, which are crucial for long-term ecological and social health.
Opposition to degrowth, especially interventions targeting climate change, takes many forms; some are quite explicit, such as warnings that “the liberals want us to eat bugs,” or that plans to design more livable cities are actually a plot to confine and enslave us (Jingnan; Shapiro). But the most powerful forms of opposition are also the most subtle. In his book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher argues that capitalism, particularly in its neoliberal form, has become so normalized that it is almost invisible as an ideology, yet it is omnipresent in shaping our worldview, thus limiting the scope of political and economic possibilities to those that align with its intrinsic demands. Economist and degrowth advocate Hubert Buch-Hansen agrees:
In the second “constructive” phase of neoliberalism, its proponents succeeded, to a considerable extent, in elevating neoliberal discourses to the status of being the only credible and legitimate ideas around. In this phase, neoliberal discourses thus informed a series of reforms of existing institutional arrangements. (“Prerequisites,” 6)
Adopting any policy that threatens the established norms of economic growth and wealth production presents significant challenges. The dominance of neoliberal ideology, as described by Fisher and Buch-Hansen, has not only normalized but also deeply embedded capitalist values within the societal fabric (including creative cultural practices like visual art, storytelling, and performance), making any deviation from these principles appear both radical and impractical. This entrenchment is particularly obstructive when introducing concepts like degrowth, which fundamentally challenge the status quo by prioritizing ecological sustainability and social equity over traditional economic indicators. Such proposals confront a hegemonic worldview that equates success with expansion and profit, complicating their acceptance and implementation. As neoliberalism has reshaped public expectations and institutional frameworks to align with its own criteria, any policy that diverges from this path faces heightened scrutiny and resistance, rendering even nominally transformative change both a conceptual and practical challenge.
Policy proposals and their underlying objectives inevitably undergo scrutiny. In a democracy, this scrutiny is ostensibly distributed evenly and executed by voters. The level of interrogation voters or stakeholders subject a given policy proposal to is influenced by the potential difficulty and disruptiveness likely to attend its implementation. Each individual instinctively and immediately assesses the plausibility and desirability of any suggested action. This assessment is guided by a set of implicit and explicit assumptions, understandings, and values that constitute the social imaginary.
In his work analyzing the impact of modernity on the formation of self and society through historical forces such as market economics and mass media, Modern Social Imaginaries, originally published in 2004, Charles Taylor defines the social imaginary as, “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy" (23). One of Taylor’s conclusions is that modernity has allowed for multiple imaginaries to exist and operate in society simultaneously, coexisting and competing for legitimacy.
More fundamentally, imaginaries can be understood as comprising interrelated networks of symbolic constructions through which societies create and reproduce norms, institutions, and identities, fundamentally shaping what individuals within them see as possible or impossible, permissible or impermissible (Castoriadis). Arguably, many symbols related to degrowth, and even entire categories of symbolism essential to communicating the ideals and objectives of the degrowth movement are already present in the social imaginary, ready to be strengthened and reified by usage.
Following Taylor's analysis of the modern social imaginary's openness and its somewhat incoherent field of competing imaginaries, the concept of degrowth presents a particularly intriguing case. Degrowth advocates envision a shift away from society's prevailing growth- oriented economic and cultural paradigms, proposing instead a model that prioritizes ecological sustainability, reduced consumption, and a reorientation of human values towards community and well-being rather than material wealth. This vision challenges the dominant capitalist narrative by rejecting its fundamental premise of perpetual growth, and attempting to manifest a radical shift in the social imaginary.
However, the promotion and communication of degrowth ideals within the broader societal context are fraught with challenges, especially when conveyed through metaphors and terminologies steeped in the very neoliberal/capitalist logic they seek to critique. For instance, the notion of a "marketplace of ideas" implies a competitive arena governed by the same principles of supply and demand that degrowth aims to transcend, or, at least, leave behind.
This metaphor, while legible as the illustration of a processes of deliberation, inadvertently reinforces the same capitalist framework that degrowth seeks to dismantle. Hence, there is a significant tension in using existing symbolic constructions which may inadvertently uphold the status quo. To effectively compete in Taylor’s described field of modern imaginaries, degrowth advocates must cultivate new symbols and narratives that resonate with the public while carefully avoiding entanglement with the existing symbolic milieu of neoliberalism. This project is not merely about changing economic behaviors but transforming or significantly supplementing the foundational narratives through which societies conceive of progress and prosperity.
The Role of Aesthetics
Used as a noun in the singular, an “aesthetic” is a proposed system of beauty, a recognized modality or style of goodness. Each “aesthetic” is its own kind of argument that a “good life” might be made with ingredients symbolized by its set of sensory and conceptual elements. The term ‘social imaginary’ doesn’t appear often in the following pages, but it should be understood that the objective of identifying an aesthetic of degrowth is to use it in developing a taste, in humanity at large, for degrowth. The objective of developing such a taste, or desire, is to impact the material choices and institutional policies of individuals and groups by impacting worldview on as large a scale as possible.
The role of aesthetics in shaping collective worldviews and driving the formulation of new social imaginaries that influence policy objectives is critical. It shapes how societies conceptualize possibilities and pathways for their future development. This can be observed in several contemporary movements and narratives that deploy aesthetics strategically to advocate for transformative societal change.
In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, the aesthetic values of the anarchist society of Anarres are depicted through the ways in which people find pleasure, entertainment, and "culture" in their interactions with each other rather than through products of the culture industry. Art in this society is portrayed as an inherent aspect of human existence, something that every individual naturally produces as a byproduct of living, rather than an activity reserved for a specialized class of artists. This concept parallels Antonio Gramsci's notion, expressed in his Prison Notebooks, that philosophy should be (and, in fact, always is) an activity undertaken by all humans as a natural outcome of reasoning and using language, rather than being confined to a select group of philosophers (323). This understanding of art helps form an aesthetic centered around the pleasure derived from interpersonal relationships—a celebration of communal creativity and intellectual engagement—and on the understanding that, through our work and our artistic expression, we make the world for one another.
Adjacent to this, the solarpunk genre offers a vivid aesthetic imbued with optimism, plausibility, and a visionary approach to the future. It integrates elements of sustainable design, sensually presented greenery, and ecological integration into visual and narrative arts. Solarpunk presents a world where technology and nature coexist harmoniously within vibrant, sustainable communities, emphasizing efficient, innovative solutions to environmental challenges. This genre's aesthetic employs a 'desire over dread' strategy, using visually appealing and optimistic portrayals to motivate proactive engagement with ecological issues, as opposed to leveraging fear and dystopian visions.
Furthermore, the practice of direct demonstration at the Occupy Wall Street encampments illustrates the tactic of demonstration or 'direct action' for deploying a given aesthetic. Activists created operational models of mutual aid by setting up essential community services like kitchens, clinics, and libraries for free public use. This not only presented the feasibility of these models but also allowed people to directly experience and participate in an alternative, cooperative social structure.
Synthesizing these three aesthetic strains could strengthen and better establish the nascent degrowth imaginaries already operating on the collective consciousness of humanity, suggesting new approaches to reforming growth- and profit-driven economic and social systems. By integrating the interpersonal joy and cultural engagement from Anarres, the attractive, optimistic, and practical visions of solarpunk, and the hands-on demonstrations of the Occupy movement, a compelling and holistic vision of degrowth can be articulated. The aesthetics of degrowth could then be mobilized to attract people by presenting not only the feasibility but also the desirability —the beauty and justice—of alternative ways of living.
This blend of aesthetic elements, delivered in a bodily experienced form, could show that reducing consumption and fostering sustainability are not only necessary but also enriching and fulfilling, aligning the well-being of individuals and communities with the health of the planet. Through such a synthesis, the aesthetics of degrowth become a powerful tool for those advocating a shift in values and practices, making the case for a balanced, equitable, and sustainable future that is also deeply satisfying to the human need for beauty that we’ve grown accustomed to serving by buying and selling commodities produced in unjust, destructive, and unsustainable ways.
As of now, the thought of living in such a future still reads to many of us, from within our growth economies, as living with “less.” But we’ve already seen that when the carousel slows, the world keeps turning; we will keep feeding each other, taking care of each other, and even creating beauty and meaning for each other without the invisibly waste and injustice underlying so much of the contemporary day-to-day grind demanded by perpetual growth. Another world is not only possible, but it’s already here, waiting for us under and behind the unceasing hum of our machines, that incessant buzz masquerading as quiet.
Desire Over Dread: Solarpunk
Carrots, sticks, incentives; consequences, threats, and promises—impulses. Which of them moves us most effectively through challenges? The answer will depend on the specific challenges in question. What kind of impulse would be most effective in compelling a movement toward degrowth? Advocates will tell you that solarpunk is a ‘movement.’ It is also commonly described as a literary genre, visual/artistic style, or all three. Its primary concern is transforming society on a technological level into a form less damaging to the environment, the climate, and human life. The impulses motivating solar punks are optimism regarding the future, enthusiasm regarding even challenging social and technological transformations, and the initiative to get to work, today. The desire for a better world, rather than the dread of a worse one, could draw people, especially young people, toward degrowth with the sense that this is going to be fun.
Despite being in use for over a decade, the term 'solarpunk' is still relatively unfamiliar as of Spring 2024, though consumers are certainly more likely than ever to encounter images and themes that draw on its associated aesthetics. The name derives from antecedent visual and literary genres such as cyberpunk and steampunk—dystopian and whimsical in character, respectively. In contrast to the gloomy dystopias of the former, solarpunk offers optimism; as a rejection of the anachronistic escapism that characterizes the latter, solarpunk insists on presenting at least theoretically plausible solutions to social and ecological crises—something to work toward, rather than against, something to do, rather than to merely dream. It promises that the future is going to be good, as long as we are willing to do the work of getting ourselves there through a damaged and reactionary present.
The ‘punk’ element of each aesthetic refers to the anti-establishment orientation, or the aggressively contrary point of view, of either a given artwork itself, or of the characters and themes it includes. Of the three ‘punk’ styles noted, ‘steampunk’ (really a glorified party theme for wealthy ravers), characterized by an anachronistic fusion of 19th-century industrial steam- powered machinery and modern or imagined innovations, is the least hostile to the status quo. While both cyberpunk and solarpunk engage with concepts of future societies shaped by technology, their aesthetic expressions are fundamentally divergent. Cyberpunk presents a vision of a future dominated by corporate interests and technological exploitation, where unfettered capitalism has already won, creating visual landscapes marked by neon-lit urban decay and a sharp division between the technological haves and have-nots. This grim vision emphasizes conflict and decay; its anti-establishment elements usually manifest as violent or technological resistance to inexorable corporate power, or ironic defiance straining against a tide of resignation. In cyberpunk illustrations and cinema, stark lighting and reflective surfaces symbolize stark social, economic, and technological disparities within the genre’s worlds. A key aspect of cyberpunk aesthetics are ‘transhuman’ visual and narrative elements, merging technology with human biology, often through cybernetic enhancements and digital interfaces, invoking both the potential and peril of such intimate technological integration.
In contrast, solarpunk offers a utopian or at least hopeful alternative, still hostile to the status quo (i.e. consumerism), but focusing on sustainability, community, and harmony between technology and nature. Its aesthetics favor bright, natural colors and designs that incorporate elements of the natural world into urban settings (hanging food gardens on high-tech tenement rooftops, benign dirigibles weaving tranquilly between silent windmills, etc), suggesting a future where technology enhances human and ecological well-being rather than exploiting it. Solarpunk's aesthetic is deeply intertwined with its ethical imperative to envision and strive toward plausible, sustainable futures that we can begin working towards in the present. Architectures and technologies in solarpunk are not just visually appealing but are designed to be functional models of sustainable living, proposing (and attempting to demonstrate) the use of renewable energy sources, the integration of local food production with residential infrastructure, and the adoption of communal living spaces as integral components of urban design.
The jaded characters in cyberpunk stories seem to assume the battle for a better world is already lost; in the cyberpunk classic novel Snow Crash, the best anyone can do is choose which brands or corporations to pledge fealty to, like vassals to feudal lords—the novel’s main character starts the story as a delivery driver for a pizzeria chain that is really a Mafia cartel (Stephenson). Citizens of cyberpunk dystopias have given up (or never taken up) the pursuit of systemic change, instead, confronting a society in which hyper-capitalism is a fait accompli, they choose a form of defiance resembling the caricature of ‘anarchism’ presented by the punk rock aesthetic of the late 1970s and early ‘80s.
A more historically and politically accurate form of anarchism is central to the ethos of solarpunk. The anarchism of a solar punk is not about the chaotic pseudo-resistance of dressing and acting provocatively to draw attention to social decay, but rather about structuring society around decentralized, non-hierarchical systems that value autonomy and cooperation. This approach differs significantly from cyberpunk's corporate feudalism, seeking instead to proactively reclaim agency and collective stewardship of both environment and technology. It’s not an expression of nihilistic resignation, but an ideal of liberation and community, fueled by desire rather than dread.
Solar punks have produced art in nearly every medium. There are musicians aligning their work with the solarpunk ethos, video game designers, graphic novelists, and even fashion designers producing cultural material to represent the ideals and ideas that are central to its goals. In literature, Solarpunk is still an “emerging” genre. That is to say, it barely exists. There are so-called precursor novels, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (discussed at length below), a few anthologies such as Shine: An Anthology of near-Future, Optimistic Science Fiction (Rebellion Publishing, 2010), Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press, 2015), and the first non-English compilation of short stories in the genre, the Portuguese anthology, Solarpunk: histórias ecológicas e fantásticas em um mundo sustentável (2012), which was funded through Kickstarter and published in Brazil. Looking for solarpunk literature one will also come across a handful of contemporary novels serving a small audience of readers, and a host of manifestos, blog posts, quizzical articles, poems, and calls to action. Most popular articles on solarpunk include at least a few paragraphs dedicated to trying to settle on a final definition for the term.
As a visual art movement, solarpunk is becoming more well established every year. There’s been a bit more development in cinema and illustration since 2020, including several web-based animated shorts, and one gesture by Disney toward the imagery and visual style of solarpunk, if not its revolutionary ideals, in 2022’s Strange World. Additionally, the video game industry has seen titles such as Terra Nil that embody solarpunk themes by focusing on ecosystem reconstruction and green technology. Independent graphic novels and comics (Bicyclopolis, by Ken Avidor; No One’s Rose, by Emily Horn and Zac Thompson) have also embraced solarpunk aesthetics, presenting vibrant, green-infused worlds where characters develop integrative solutions to meet challenges in ways that contrast sharply with those commonly depicted in the more dystopian narratives of cyberpunk. These expansions into various media underscore the growing influence and visual appeal of solarpunk as both a cultural and artistic phenomenon.
Appearing on the internet circa 2010, the most common version of A Solarpunk Manifesto (in the spirit of non-hierarchical collaboration, never claiming to be the solarpunk manifesto) is hosted online in many locations, but only rarely is it attributed to a specific author or group; bits of the document can be found elsewhere on the web attributed to Adam Flynn, Missy Sturges (who is also sometimes credited with coining the term itself in 2008), or to both.
Along with Flynn’s Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto, and Jay Springett’s ‘Reference Guide,’ hosted on Medium, A Solarpunk Manifesto provides initial philosophical and aesthetic grounding for the movement. It explicitly states that what is being proposed and nurtured by solar punks is a possible future, as opposed to an alternative one (see Appendix: A Solarpunk Manifesto); the distinction is worth noting, but that this particular tic is a reaction to the popular understanding of sci-fi, or speculative fiction, as presenting alternatives to ‘real’ history. Solarpunk is meant to be taken as “a set of achievable proposals,” and as reflecting contemporary effort toward improving humanity’s relationship with our environment. In that way, its subject may not be alternative futures, but one of its objectives is creating an alternative present.
The choice to publish a politically charged ‘manifesto’ makes plain the activist nature of the project and the ambition of its authors to mobilize significant human engagement. The solar punk authors are attempting a “thoughtful provocation;” this is, again, can be contrasted with the defiant but aimless provocations of the late 20th century punk rock aesthetic that gives the movement half of its name.
Solarpunk is a form of rebellion: it is about “going in a different direction than the mainstream,” but it is more aligned with the aims and tactics of decolonialism and post- or anti- capitalism than with, say, American pop culture notions of ‘teenage rebellion’ going back to the 1950s. Vitally, the rebellion of solarpunk lacks angst and indecisiveness. Solarpunk is not confused, it is enthusiastic, and it looks forward.
Mark Fisher’s 2014 book, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (republished posthumously by Zero Books in 2022) develops the ideas of Franco Berardi and Jacques Derrida to describe and critique the notion of ‘canceled futures.’ In this collection of essays, Fisher explores how contemporary culture is perpetually looking backward, haunted by the lost futures that were promised but never materialized, largely due to neoliberal economic and political regimes that prioritize short-term gain over long-term progress and cultural development. Always looking for certain success, profit-motivated cultural production is caught in a loop, constantly rehashing, rebooting, or repackaging whatever has made money in the past. He delves into the way this affects music, film, and other cultural forms, creating a sense of stagnation and nostalgia for a future that never arrives.
In science fiction, fashion, or architecture, this can manifest, aesthetically, as 'retrofuturism.' With its anachronistic blend of fin de siècle technology and late 20th-century sci- fi concepts, steampunk not only falls into this pit of atavism, but indulgently wallows in it. According to A Manifesto, solarpunk pointedly rejects retro-futurist aesthetics, instead opting to craft narratives and visions of the future without sentimental or nostalgic references to familiar stories set in the dead tomorrows of yesterday. This refusal to simply 'replay the hits' in terms of story structure and imagery signifies integrity to the precise degree it eschews conventional marketability. While in terms of sci-fi art and genre literature solar punks dream of something truly new, they remain respectfully receptive to generating that novelty using lessons and practices drawn from traditional lifeways maintained in various ecosystems by indigenous communities. The authors of A Solarpunk Manifesto also make it clear that solarpunk is diverse in the sense that it depicts possible futures that include everyone—the entire global community in our infinite variety. Pointedly, the solarpunk imagination does not reject or dismiss spirituality, preferring instead to let faith, wonder, and all manner of metaphysically enriching conceptions exist as complements and collaborators to science.
At the writing of the present document, the SP24 Solarpunk Conference is about to begin; the organization is regularly posting talks and video essays to their YouTube channel. Judging by the topics covered in the greatest depth by speakers and presenters at this and other solarpunk symposia, practicality and applicability are a binary lodestar, at least for the movement participants organizing and gathering for formal conclaves. For all the attention drawn to solarpunk through its growing art and media presence, the a significant amount of work being done by self-described solar punks is in the areas of permaculture and sustainable living practices. Most articles on solarpunk are about art, but the growing number of papers and articles by solar punks are about small-scale renewable energy or agriculture projects in the real world. Unlike the spectacle of comic book, video game, or production studio conventions, annual solarpunk convocations and symposia (regional, national, online, global), provide venues for discussion of objectives and radical tactics. Mostly, however, they seem to be about growing food.
The practical focus of solarpunk gatherings, where discussions often center around those tangible methods of sustainable living—permaculture, vertical farming, renewable energy— underpins the community's commitment to enacting the change they envision. This hands-on approach not only addresses immediate ecological and social needs but also serves as a physical manifestation of the movement's core philosophies. By attempting to implement these technologies and practices, even on a small scale, solar punks not only advocate for a sustainable future but also actively construct it, embodying the principles they write about in their stories, creating the landscapes artists are drawing. This direct engagement with technology and nature transforms these practical endeavors into powerful symbols of hope and renewal. These symbols are vividly reflected in solarpunk art, where the lush greenery and sunlit renewable energy installations are not just background settings but are central to the narrative, embodying optimism and the allure of a sustainable lifestyle. Thus, the solarpunk's dedication to developing sustainable technologies is seamlessly linked to their artistic expressions, highlighting that the beauty of their world is not only in its appearance but also in its functionality and sustainability.
Resilience.org describes the solarpunk attitude as “radical hope.” Abstract ‘optimism’ is specifically and repeatedly highlighted in any discussion of solarpunk as an essential element of its aesthetic. Rejecting the passivity that attends extreme pessimism is a central pillar of the movement. Not all solarpunk stories have perfectly happy endings, or show fully realized utopias, but they always at least depict attempts at solving problems caused by post-industrial consumption patterns, rather than merely condemning them or letting irony and defiance soothe the ache of resignation.
Offering optimistic stories and images, showing characters who tirelessly seek and apply promising solutions to enormous challenges, is important not only for inspiring groups and individuals already convinced that significant policy changes are needed, but also for confronting the newest forms of resistance to the actions required avert the looming climate cataclysm. Resistance such as is manifest in “doomism,” for example, which resembles nothing so much as that cynical cyberpunk attitude, marketed as cool to sell movies and videogames, in spite of the implicit warnings against over-consumption and the dehumanizing potential of certain technologies embedded in cyberpunk texts by their authors.
Problems & Warnings
Because it seems to have appeared almost fully developed, there’s a sense of artificiality—or, rather, hastiness—to the solarpunk concept in gestalt, in spite of (or maybe because of) its earnestness. One suspects its specific contours have been carefully shaped by activists trying to guess what kinds of art might inspire more popular interest in sustainability and energy reform. The stylistic and narrative elements of solarpunk read like a bulleted list of strategic interventions, carefully workshopped, for promoting environmentalism. It gives the impression of having been manufactured to function as propaganda.
Though the term and related concepts have been spreading since at least 2008, there remains less a solarpunk genre than there is the sense among activists and climate action advocates that we need something like a solarpunk genre. Again, when searching for examples of solarpunk writing on the web, one is still more likely to come across manifestos and calls to action than novels, films, or videogames. But something about the visual style of solarpunk illustration, drawing explicitly from sources such as the gently mysterious and atmospheric animated films of Hayao Miyazaki, has undeniable appeal.
Perhaps I’m paranoid, but the suspiciously intentional nature of solarpunk’s emergence, combined with its simple visual attractiveness, raises certain red flags. One example in the genre, Dear Alice, a short film from production company The Line, directed by Bjørn-Erik Aschim, with music by Studio Ghibli composer (and long-time Miyazaki collaborator) Joe Hisaishi has been viewed over six-hundred thousand times on YouTube. The film is an explicitly solarpunk visual tone poem depicting bucolic but futuristic scenes of productive land, tended by tranquil robots under mini rainclouds conjured by emission-free machines. Beautiful bugs and animals flourish under a bright dawn. Glowing displays show hydroelectric output from a charming wooden waterwheel. Voiceover from a grandmother recites a loving letter while her granddaughter makes tea in a sun-drenched, plant-filled kitchen space. It is quite jarring when the first single-use plastic cup of Chobani yogurt appears. And then another, and another. The same appeal to beauty, fun, and optimism that gives the solarpunk aesthetic its power to pull us toward a desirable future rather than repel us from a disastrous one, could also make it a highly marketable element of brand identity.
Since the solarpunk aesthetic does have the appeal to tackle important tasks like selling yogurt, it is reasonable to remain alert for attempts at its cooption by marketers and for-profit enterprises. One of the more insidious challenges to degrowth is the comforting illusion of positive change offered by the specious notion that a solution to the problems of climate change is to be found in producing more ‘eco-friendly’ products rather than simply reducing overall consumer production. The objectives of the degrowth movement should be seen as distinct from and, frankly, opposed to those of others advocating for more modest changes like adopting ‘greener’ energy, manufacturing, and consumption patterns. Such proposals, which allow for continued economic growth as long as it is ‘green growth,’ do not go far enough to address the underlying issues of over consumption, resource depletion, and climate change (Hickel and Kallis).
We can see the green growth pitch in the pivot automakers are already broadcasting from pushing gas guzzlers to selling us all shiny new electric cars, rather than drastically reducing the number of cars we produce in favor of expanded public transit and urban design. Similarly, having drawn billions in profits by making a mess, fossil fuel giants are hungrily waiting to seize publicly developed ‘green’ carbon capture technologies to make billions more by cleaning it up and selling us back their pollution as industrial products, pigments, cosmetics, flouropolymers, and refreshing seltzer (Hunt et al; Gunderson et al). This kind of carbon recycling technology may be a good idea in principle, but it galls in the hands of the same profiteers who brought us to the brink of catastrophe.
Recent exposés published by Frontline and NPR, and backed by data from the Center for Climate Integrity, have exposed the popularization of plastic recycling as an industry scam to sell more plastic. As noted above, most schemes to mainstream electric cars are a profit- motivated distraction—though EV (electric vehicles) and FCEV (hydrogen fuel cell vehicles) both reduce “air acidification, photochemical oxidant formation, [and] greenhouse gases,” their manufacturing processes require significant fossil fuel consumption and their end-of-life/disposal demands put a huge strain on the environment (Girardi et al). Green growth proponents whisper gently in our ears, “oh no, my darling, the carousel doesn’t have to stop or even slow down; you see, we can simply switch to hydrogen power, we can use batteries, we can build windmills,” etc, “and aren’t you in luck!? I happen to have some hydrogen for sale that’s just perfect for powering your FCEV!” Never mind that a vast majority of hydrogen is produced by burning enormous amounts of fossil fuels (Armaroli and Balzani).
A simple illustration of the conflict, of the difference in aesthetics, between the approaches of green growth and degrowth can be found by opposing two methods for reducing plastic water bottle waste; after all, access to small portable containers of clean water is one of the amenities future societies might wish to maintain. Imagine:
Someone with a green growth mindset might decide to start a company that sells water in paper/cardboard containers that are far easier to recycle than plastic. Good idea, right? ‘Eco-conscious’ consumers might even be willing to pay a premium for a greener product. If adopted more widely, such a change could reduce the plastic waste filling our oceans (and bodies) with microplastics—of course, another result of more widespread adoption of this change would be the loss of that added value to those eco-conscious consumers. The truth is, such a shift has other drawbacks and complications, even leaving aside cynical concerns like profitability. Aspects of the manufacturing process for cardboard are more harmful than those for producing plastics, and the added weight of thicker cardboard or paper containers increases the carbon footprint of their distribution.
On the other hand, someone with a degrowth mindset might propose a project that initially appears more costly but offers a long-term sustainable solution. They might suggest distributing fully reusable glass or metal water bottles to a community. While the upfront cost of these bottles would be higher than producing cardboard containers, this approach would dramatically reduce waste over time. To complement this, the proposal could include setting up refill stations that offer filtered water at a minimal cost—perhaps for pennies or even free. This not only encourages repeated use of durable, sustainable materials but also significantly cuts down on the environmental impact associated with manufacturing new containers, whether plastic or cardboard. Moreover, this method could foster a community-oriented approach to resource management, where access to clean water isn't commodified but treated as a communal right. This shift away from consumable products to durable solutions aligns closely with the principles of degrowth, which emphasize robustness, community engagement, and long term reductions in environmental impact.
The temptations of green growth pose a real threat to the potential of solarpunk. Even the discreet banks of solar panels that dot the tranquil, techno-bucolic imagery of solarpunk media, suggested by the name of the genre itself, are, to a minimal extent, part of the green growth grift. While recent improvements make it seem like I’m splitting hairs, current solar power generation technology still relies on fossil fuels to produce the photovoltaic cells required to turn sunlight into electricity (Fthenakis et al). Fans of Solarpunk imagery and fiction can perhaps be forgiven for glossing over this, and other snags, in the spirit of optimism—it is a subgenre of science fiction, after all, and if the United Federation of Planets can manage teleportation, a high tech apple orchard in 2056 might be using recyclable solar panels made from hemp-plastic.
Nevertheless, the centrality of plausibility to the optimism of solarpunk aesthetics is precisely what aligns it more with the principles of degrowth than with the dubious promise of green growth; namely, the hollow assurance that we can keep eating our cake without emptying the pantry. The optimism of solarpunk must be realistic, and green growth is not. Only the policy changes planned degrowth demands can achieve the significant reductions in consumption that are, according to experts, the only way to avoid climate-driven instability and mass death (Hickel and Kallis). No magical new technology is going to arrive just in time to suck all the carbon from the atmosphere to make building materials, or food, out of it.
It's imperative for solarpunk artists to remain vigilant against cooption by for-profit entities within the culture industry trying to sell cute movies or advertise expensive ‘eco- friendly’ products. Similarly, degrowth advocates must maintain a critical stance towards the influence of ‘green growth’ proponents seeking to capitalize on environmental crises with superficial solutions. The infiltration of solarpunk or degrowth ideologies by profit-driven actors may lead to the commodification and watering down of their core principles. Collaboration with external entities like Chobani brand yogurt might offer opportunities for amplifying the impact or expanding the reach of emerging social imaginaries, but it's essential for advocates of solarpunk and degrowth to uphold their autonomy, challenge commodification, and remain steadfast in their commitment to systemic transformation and genuine sustainability.
There are several distinct literary subgenres, or broad styles, of science fiction. These include ‘hard sci-fi’ which prioritizes the use of real scientific principles in its narratives, ‘space opera’ which is marked by elaborate and fantastical romance, high-stakes adventure on a grand scale, and usually involves melodramatic conflict or epic outer space battles between opposing forces using advanced technologies and abilities; then there is ‘science fantasy’ which tends to blend elements of science fiction and fantasy, incorporating scientific concepts alongside magical or supernatural elements, and, finally, the somewhat vague genre of ‘speculative fiction,’ a broad category including narratives with just about any major elements, social, technical, or metaphysical, not found in the real world. Solarpunks have already produced examples from each, but most of the stories seem to fit best in that latter category of speculative fiction (Joung).
Critics might complain that for science fiction to have much of a direct impact on policy (and degrowth is, ultimately, a matter of policy) it must be set, along the lines of ‘hard sci-fi,’ in a relatively near future and use understandable or at least imaginable technologies. Accepting this, it is fair to ask even our most ‘speculative’ solarpunk stories to acknowledge the limits of green growth and to nurture an imaginary landscape unburdened by the almost magically complex technological advancement depicted in other sci-fi subgenres, where science and technology are used to reduce humankind’s impact on, rather than solidify its control of, the environment.
That constraint, however, if accepted, need not interfere with the incredible beauty solarpunk themes can conjure, nor the longing for something else to come—to come—even if its coming is in part a return of things past, or a consummation of things present.
Drawn Toward Dawn: the Pull of Beauty
The work of Japanese illustrator Tokyo Genso consistently revisits the theme of urban decay. Cityscapes, empty of human figures, dissolve into the return of a stunning wilderness. The breakdown of the post-industrial built world, presumably by neglect, which is not an inherent element of solarpunk as outlined in A Solarpunk Manifesto, is the most central, unifying theme of his oeuvre; in terms of genre purity, his illustrations aren’t a perfect fit. Perhaps it is that awkward fit that makes the solarpunk elements of his drawings even more striking and attractive. In print media, Genso does not provide titles for any of his illustrations. The titles I’ve given to Figures 1 and 3 are taken from Tweets the author published including the images.
An image like A Place Once Called New York contains an entire implied history. What happened to all the people? There are obvious signs of habitation—well-tended fields and grazing animals. Broad bladed windmills are mounted high up on vine-covered skyscrapers to make use of the strong breezes coursing through Manhattan’s overgrown canyons of glass, concrete, and steel. On the sunlit valley floor a cottage is flanked by an oddly placed waterwheel, somehow making use of the clear stream running through what used to be Times Square. Though we don’t see them, people have survived whatever disaster or decline emptied the city.
There are many examples in popular media of stories involving mass depopulation events. Stories of survivors roaming the emptiness left by disasters, disease, or decline. They include films like Children of Men, set in a grim dystopia of infertility, or the implausibly timely miniseries Station Eleven, released in 2021 and set in its own perilous, but achingly lovely post- pandemic world of motley and creative survivors. It seems we sometimes like to imagine a world where almost everyone is gone from the planet, and we have the place all to ourselves for once. Topics in apocalyptic fiction such as the queer coziness of catastrophe, or the thrilling potential for exploration offered by human-built environments that have been emptied of other people, are covered in great detail by writers like Pieter Vermeulen and Nick Yablon. Again, these are feelings similar to those many of us were able to experience firsthand in the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, when circumstances forced us to defy stay-at-home orders and brave the disorienting emptiness of our transformed cities.
Perhaps Genso’s empty scenes are partly inspired by that recent historical moment. In any case, there’s something somewhat contrary to solarpunk’s optimistic spirit implied by the decay, if one takes it to signify a mass casualty event of some kind. Of course, with a little imagination, one might come up with a tale wherein much of humanity has migrated to another world, or to large centralized arcologies, leaving the rest of the Earth to return to wilderness where only a few curmudgeons or caretakers remain.
Many of Genso’s cityscapes do contain hints that some of the anticipated effects of climate change, such as greatly elevated sea levels, have come to pass. Waterfalls and lagoons laden with aquatic life sparkle in green paradises that used to be the neighborhoods of Tokyo. In an image published by the website Your Japan, water buffalo tread tidily maintained rice patties like symbols of connection with life and the earth itself reborn in the middle of an ancient, crumbling shopping district, and Genso manages to visually convey a kind of sunlit quiet in vivid blues and greens under white clouds.
The embrace of ruin and impermanence apparent in these images suggests a connection to the concept of wabi-sabi, a Japanese aesthetic philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection, transience, and the natural cycle of growth and decay. It urges us to appreciate the simple, the incomplete, and the modest, to embrace the rustic, the aged, or the weathered. Combining wabi- sabi aesthetics with elements of solarpunk transforms visible decay from a symbol of death to a necessary component of rebirth. As nature reclaims spaces once dominated by concrete and steel, the union of rust and vine, of crumbling concrete and flourishing greenery, becomes an image of resilience and hope. The beauty of the edifice in decline allows survivors to retain an unsentimental respect for the textures and stories embedded in old structures, which might contribute something mysterious to their repurposed forms. By incorporating hints of sustainable technology into his scenes of flourishing life, Genso produces a sense that the creations of humanity need not disrupt the ecological balance of the world around us.
Somehow, it is thrilling to see a tree triumph over a skyscraper in Genso’s You Won't Come to Sakuragicho Anymore by managing to take root in its disintegrating shell. The combination of the obvious neglect indicated by the condition of the buildings, with the obvious care discernible in the condition of the agricultural fields makes the scene a statement about values. The aesthetic impact of the illustration functions to make the values it implies take on some aspect of its beauty. It awakens or encourages the desire to inhabit a world where beauty is an essential element of survival, to adopt a way of life that is sustainable because it is lovely, etc.
While solarpunk works typically depict a future of harmonious integration between human habitats and the natural world, characterized by innovative, sustainable technologies and green architecture, Genso's work diverges by presenting a world where the human presence is minimal. Yet, the solarpunk elements—such as windmills atop skyscrapers and urban agriculture —embed a narrative of adaptation and resilience. These features propose a symbiosis between the remnants of human infrastructure and the encroaching natural world, suggesting a future where nature is not just a substrate onto which cities are overlaid but is, conversely, the active element shaping the underlying urban base.
Genso's illustrations, through their silent, vivid storytelling, propose a form of solarpunk that does not shy away from the realities of abandonment and decay, but manages to capture a hopeful undercurrent in the inevitability of loss. The reclaimed landscapes imply not just survival but a redefinition of living spaces, where the natural and the human-made coexist and co-mingle to create new ecosystems. This layered portrayal offers a unique lens through which to interpret solarpunk, one that incorporates the principles of wabi-sabi: finding a profound beauty in imperfection and transience, and a gentle acceptance of the natural progression of time and change. Such a perspective not only enriches the solarpunk aesthetic but also broadens its appeal, providing a contemplative space to reflect on our future relationship with the environment.
Less angst and stress are delivered by an aesthetic strategy that uses hope and beauty to draw us toward positive actions rather than driving us with fear away from negative actions. The simple visual attractiveness of solarpunk illustrations like those of Tokyo Genso can help make degrowth a more desirable course of action, in spite of the challenges it entails.
Against Our Doom
Since at least 2023, journalists and commentators have noted a shift, in the rhetorical tactics deployed by the opponents of both degrowth and remedial climate action at large, from outright denial to a grim and fatalistic defeatism referred to by the BBC as climate “doomism” (Silva). Often enough, some incoherent mixture of both are used.
The fossil fuel lobby in particular has been accused of using a two-pronged approach to slow policy changes by funding denial narratives in conservative media, and doomer pessimism elsewhere. For example, the term ‘carbon footprint,’ which focuses pessimistic attention and judgment on the personal choices of individuals’ rather than the huge relative impact of corporate and government policies on the climate, was created for British Petroleum by the public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather (Schendler).
Doomism has serious emotional consequences for those who succumb to its dark persuasion; as predictions become more dire and timelines grow ever shorter, the gloom is more difficult to resist. Yet, from young people citing the looming shadow of environmental cataclysm as their reason for refusing to have children, to middle-aged climate scientists giving up and suggesting we prepare for the worst (near extinction) rather than attempt to intervene, doomers are not only, or even primarily a group of cynical profiteers looking to delay impacts to their own wealth (Osaka). When a clear-eyed look at the actual potential to avert catastrophe while maintaining current consumption levels reveals that without other, massive changes, simply switching to renewable energy sources physically will not work, pessimism is precisely what we should expect (Cordroch et al).
Countering doomism with hope and getting to work on establishing policies of degrowth requires an aesthetically targeted strategy; it demands a concrete, practically applied combination of optimism and initiative. It requires both the belief that a more beautiful and humane world is possible, and the tools to bring that world into being. Optimism alone might be dismissed as naive, but when paired with the proactive ethos of the solarpunk movement, it becomes a formidable tool against defeatism and a potent antidote to the fatalistic attitude of doomism. The rhetoric of climate doom not only paralyzes motivation but also perpetuates a narrative of inevitability that can stifle the creativity of possible interventions. Solarpunk, with its method of initiating radical transformation through both visual aesthetics and practical action, challenges this narrative directly. By mobilizing solarpunk aesthetics to inspire desire through beauty and hope, instead of resorting to fear brought on by shrill warnings and condemnation, the impulse motivating movement toward degrowth can remain unmarred by malice.
The aesthetic strategy of using desire rather than dread can serve more than one purpose: it develops a popular vision of a more equitable and harmonious future, and it mobilizes both individuals and communities to take action to realize this vision within a degrowth framework. The discussions and material produced by the solarpunk movement underscore the need for action and commitment, stressing the urgency of transforming both infrastructure and societal norms toward sustainable and equitable models now, not later. By presenting a desirable alternative—cities intertwined with nature, communities thriving in harmony with their environment—solarpunk attracts adherents not through fear of apocalyptic outcomes but through the allure of a sustainable world, rich with pleasure. In this way, solarpunk effectively counters doomism not by denying the severity of the challenges ahead but by demonstrating that through collective effort and creative innovation, these challenges can be met.
Only One Another: Art Without Money in Le Guin’s Dispossessed
The transition to a degrowth economic paradigm will require reevaluation of resource allocation in the realm of cultural production. Industrial-scale generation and distribution of cultural materials, characterized by high resource consumption/material throughput and environmental impact, cannot be sustained in a degrown economy. In place of mass-produced entertainment, a degrowth strategy would entail cultural shifts to modes where public entertainment and enrichment derive primarily from creative interactions among individuals and communities. Such modes would strengthen community connections through shared experiences while burning through fewer resources, and keeping the focus on the function of cultural materials and on the quality of engagement rather than the shear number of passive consumers a film or pop album might attract.
Of course degrowing current consumer economies will require enormous physical/infrastructural transformations. Simply giving up the overtly cultural elements of consumer culture would not achieve the objectives of the degrowth movement. A full shift to a degrowth mode requires rethinking the broader paradigms under which economic activities like energy production, manufacturing, and transportation operate—sectors where reform is crucial for addressing climate change. While changes in poetry, painting, or even the larger film and music industries might seem peripheral, they play a pivotal role in building a popular consensus towards degrowth.
Considering aesthetics is essential, not just to understand its role in building and mobilizing consensus (in the present case toward changes in economic policy), but also to explore the extent to which ideas about beauty, justice, and ‘the good’ have any capacity to initiate a large-scale recalibration of cultural values.
Shifting to degrowth modes will demand that we drastically reduce or even dismantle the existing culture industry—encompassing art, music, literature, and other forms of enrichment. Although reorienting entertainment sectors might seem less critical compared to the massive physical overhaul required to reform energy or transportation infrastructure, it's important to recognize that the production of cultural goods itself involves significant consumption of energy and resources and necessitates extensive logistical networks. Therefore, part of the degrowth strategy involves not only eliminating arguably frivolous consumption but also transforming the mechanisms through which cultural content is produced and distributed.
Ultimately, establishing a societal paradigm where culture arises naturally from community interactions, rather than being manufactured as a product, could refocus the objectives of artistic enrichment and cultural fulfillment, from profit to humanity, in a post- degrowth society.
Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018) was an American author known for her works of speculative fiction, including novels, short stories, and essays. Born in Berkeley, California, she was the daughter of author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber, a pioneering figure in the field. Le Guin's upbringing in a highly literate, academic household deeply influenced her perspective and writing style, instilling in her an instinctive awareness of cultural diversity and variation in human societies.
Throughout her career, Le Guin explored themes and concerns relevant to anthropology in her work. Her novels often featured intricate societies and cultures, which she used to examine concepts such as gender, politics, religion, and ecological balance. Le Guin's anthropological background is evident in her meticulous world-building and the nuanced portrayal of social structures and customs in her fictional worlds.
One of her most famous works, The Left Hand of Darkness, is a prime example of her anthropological approach to storytelling. The novel takes place on a planet called Gethen, where the inhabitants can choose and change their gender. Through this premise, Le Guin delves into themes of gender and identity, revealing arbitrary limitations on subjectivity imposed by the uncritical reproduction of conventional ideas about sexuality.
Modeling Post-Degrowth Aesthetics in Fiction
Dense with critique and rich in ideas, Le Guin's 1974 science fiction masterpiece The Dispossessed does many things very well, from presenting perhaps the most plausible depiction of a well-developed anarchist society in all of literature, genre or otherwise, to insightfully exploring forms of human relationships—community solidarity, cross-generational mentorship, etc—typically ignored by genre literature. Primarily, it tells the story of Shevek, a mathematician and physicist born into an anarchist social system that he loves, but, due to challenges embedded in its culture, he must leave for a while in order to achieve his purpose within it. As the story unfolds, Shevek visits the world, the people, and the system that his society's founders had intentionally turned away from, and finds an entirely different set of challenges there.
Ultimately, the book functions most remarkably as a portrait of the values and practices of the anarchist society at its heart. Le Guin gives us a warts-and-all look at the pleasures and the problems that emerge in a society that has done its best to eliminate social hierarchy and the use of force to manage human behavior foremost and, almost incidentally, the very concepts of money and private property.
Others have written about The Dispossessed: the anarchist politics of Annares, the fictional nations of Urras—Thu, A-Io, and Benbili—as allegories for the USSR, USA, and the Third world, respectively, and even about the role of ecology in le Guin's vision (Burns). Some solarpunk thinkers consider The Dispossessed a precursor or foundational text for the genre. My specific interest, however, is in the attractiveness of the possession-free Odonian society Le Guin depicts, in spite of its hardships and even considering the cracks and flaws that begin to emerge in the system after several generations of cultural drift, and most especially in the consolation, enrichment, education, delight, and grief the people of Annares provide for one another through their community bonds.
Odonians & Anarres
The anarchists Le Guin depicts are called Odonians, after the founder of their form of social organization, a woman known as Odo. The writings of Odo, as well as certain specific central concepts (e.g., 'The Analogy,' of society as a body with individuals as cells) are referenced often by Odonian characters in the novel. For two centuries, the descendants of Odo's followers have lived in willing exile, and near total isolation, on a barely habitable moon (really a sister planet), called Annares, which orbits the much more hospitable planet from which they fled, or were driven (depending on who you ask), called Urras. The truth is, the Odonian movement had grown too large for the ruling classes of Urras to ignore, and they had been 'given' the moon by the nations of Urras in order to forestall their impending revolution.
On Anarres there are no laws of any kind. All organization is spontaneous and at-will. There are no prisons, no crimes, and "nobody [is] ever punished for anything" (124). Cooperation and solidarity are maintained through cultural reinforcement and by the unmistakable condition of interdependence ensured by existence in a truly inhospitable environment. Rare wrongdoing is deterred by social pressure; an individual who repeatedly violates others or disturbs the peace intolerably may flee to an asylum, more for protection from the retaliation of his neighbors than for correction or confinement. All goods and infrastructure, even when built by an individual, are used and maintained in common. They have thoroughly abolished the ownership of private property, indeed Odonian society doesn't really recognize the private ownership of anything; education, work, and housing are distributed universally by various schema and organizational strategies.
People volunteer for the kinds of jobs they are suited to, joining (or forming) voluntary syndicates and federations in their chosen fields; as Shevek tries to explain to the very first person from Urras, the first Urrasti person, he meets, "A person chooses work according to interest, talent, strength" (17). Le Guin shows how this arrangement functions thanks to the highly organized nature of the (technically) voluntary work postings system, which is managed by the closest thing to a government on Anarres: Divlab (the Division of Labor Office) and PDC (Production, Distribution, Coordination). If all else fails, social pressure from the community motivates the less willing to at least participate in the ten-day rotation set up to get the most undesirable work done—e.g., sanitation, sewage, grave digging, etc. One who regularly shirks tenthday duties or evades work postings is likely to be labeled 'nuchnib.'
Nuchnibi are rare as shirkers are left with few friends and few choices in Odonian society. Later in the story, when Shevek has been living on Urras for a while, he faces questions about his culture from the wife of a fellow physicist who wants to know what happens to a man (she can't even imagine a woman in the labor force) who refuses to cooperate with the work posting system,
Well, he moves on. The others get tired of him, you know. They make fun of him, or they get rough with him, beat him up; in a small community they might agree to take his name off the meals listing, so he has to cook and eat all by himself; that is humiliating. (126)
To adapt Churchill's famous comment on democracy: the 'social conscience,' is the worst behavioral enforcement mechanism besides all the others that have been tried from time to time. There are other incentives, however, motivating people to take on difficult or 'dirty' work. Not all social pressure is negative; Le Guin tells us through Shevek's more complete explanation to his Urrasti hosts that tenthday labor, and the longer six month postings for certain other difficult, unpleasant, or outright dangerous jobs (e.g., mercury mining, large-scale milling) are opportunities to do new things, see new places, and meet new people, while building a reputation for oneself. Why do these 'dirty' jobs? Because
they are done together. . . . And other reasons. You know, life on Anarres isn't rich, as it is here. In the little communities there isn't very much entertainment, and there is a lot of work to be done. So, if you work at a mechanical loom mostly, every tenthday it's pleasant to go outside and lay a pipe or plow a field, with a different group of people. . . . And then there is challenge. Here you think that the incentive to work is finances, need for money or desire for profit, but where there's no money the real motives are clearer, maybe. People like to do things. They like to do them well. People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them, they can—egoise, we call it—show off?—to the weaker ones. Hey, look, little boys, see how strong I am! You know? A person likes to do what he is good at doing. . . . But really, it is the question of ends and means. After all, work is done for the work's sake. It is the lasting pleasure of life. The private conscience knows that. And also the social conscience, the opinion of one's neighbors. There is no other reward, on Anarres, no other law. One's own pleasure, and the respect of one's fellows. That is all. When that is so, then you see the opinion of the neighbors becomes a very mighty force. (125)
One way or another, the answer is humanity. The reason one works is to serve one's own humanity or that of others. On Annares, the people's greatest resources are each other.
Odonians distrust what they consider 'propertarian' impulses, especially those living in more densely populated settlements where the 'social conscience' is strong (267). They are in fact so suspicious of ownership itself that even the 'possession' of highly personal things like given names, or intimate effects, is handled with care and surrounded by hedges and mental angst; for example, all individuals are assigned random five- or six-letter names at birth by a computer, unique to them while they are living (164). This is done in part to eliminate the need for any identification numbers or documents besides one's name itself. It also removes the element of 'bestowing,' with its suggestion of ownership, from the naming process. Then, since eventually, like everything else, it will be recycled, any permanent stamp or claim placed upon a given name by an individual carrier with a strong personality is also stripped away.
Claims of possession are absent from the family, as well. Parents on Anarres are referred to as 'the mother,' or 'the father,' rather than my mother, my father. After nursing and spending their tenderest years with their birth families, children live together in common nurseries, and, when they get a little older, dormitories. They are able to spend as much time as they wish with their families before, generally, returning to their dorm to sleep, though forming strong attachments in either direction—lingering by children, or clinging by parents—is considered perverse, or 'propertarian.'
For Odonians, the term 'propertarian' is second only to 'profiteer' as an insult, and it is how Shevek's partner Takver is labeled by some of her neighbors when, during a famine that has considerably reduced rations, she decides to nurse the daughter (her daughter) Sadik until the age of three (263). The 'social conscience,' amounting, essentially, to peer pressure, is, again, maybe the harshest, worst behavioral enforcement mechanism—besides all the others.
The people of Anarres, the Annaresti, speak a 'rationally' constructed language, Pravic, that has been deliberately stripped of euphemism, interestingly (toilets are 'shit-stools'), and of words and grammar that could be useful in any way for reproducing or enforcing social inequalities and hierarchy, broadly; in Shevek's first in-person conversation in the Urrasti language of Iotic, for example, he notes that Iotic speakers, "often used the word 'higher' as a synonym for 'better' in their writings, where an Anarresti would use 'more central'" (16). Le Guin may have been influenced in this choice by the Sapir-Whorf/linguistic relativity hypothesis. It was already in decline at the time of the novel's publication, but the notion that the contours of a given language could make certain actions more or less imaginable to individuals within its speaker population seems plausible to this day (Lupyan).
Odonians lead difficult lives on Annares. It is hard work growing enough food to survive, and the moon they inhabit is dusty and uncomfortable—potable water is scarce and distances between settlements are long and barren. Everyone must volunteer time toward maintaining common infrastructure and other life supporting tasks. They are not, however, without the consolation of instinctive, culturally supported generosity.
Examples from traditional hunting and gathering societies here on planet Earth suggest that living and surviving in harsher environments requires social systems with greater openness to "non-exclusive" land and water use practices leading to more resource-sharing, even between individuals and groups with few discernible kinship connections (Diamond 42-43). Openness to non-exclusivity in resource use can also be described simply as relative 'generosity.'
Kinship isn't always so important, of course. When Shevek tells the flirtatious sister of one of his Urrasti hosts that no one will share his name while he is alive, but the computer had assigned it to others before his birth, she assumes that the previous Sheveks had been his relatives. He corrects her right away, saying, "We don't count relatives much; we are all relatives, you see" (165). Since society itself is considered an organism in Odo's 'Analogy,' biological relationships between individuals are given less importance; the steps taken by Odonians to de-emphasize biological connections are not intended to destroy the family, however, but rather to expand the notion of family to include the entire collective. Though connections to their 'nuclear' family seem relatively important to both Shevek and the partner (his partner) Takver, it is suggested that they are outliers, and that such an orientation is considered a bit perverse on Anarres.
Functional anarchy is not easy. Ideally, leadership makes things run more smoothly; ideally, leaders, even formal leaders or rulers (the archons from whom in anarchism the privative prefix "an-" removes power), make life better for the ruled. Anarchists must organize themselves without the benefit of either charisma or obedience. Rejecting hierarchy means everyone works. In more isolated settlements on Anarres, with more work to be done than people to do it, education tends toward teaching whatever skills are most needed by the local community (153). Even so, when the characters recount the hours they have to work, even during challenging periods, it comes as a surprise that they work fewer hours per week than the average contemporary American. In times of crisis, everyone older than ten and younger than sixty works, but even under the pressure of drought and famine (until late in the book when things get truly dire), Le Guin tells us their workdays average about six hours long. This is not a random number. Le Guin is a lifelong student of anthropology. She was well aware that research of her day had indicated, as new investigations continue to indicate, that the shift from hunting and gathering to sedentary agriculture led to an increase in labor and physical hardship (Dyble et. al). Both contemporary and prehistoric, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies spend/spent an average of 15-20 hours per week working for sustenance, leaving individuals with much more free time (if, potentially, less stability) than labor demands permit those in farming and herding communities (Sahlins; Graeber). One of the objectives of the degrowth movement is to improve human well-being by reducing the demand for less satisfying labor. It happens that six hour days are also often cited as all that would be required for subsistence in an ideal post-degrowth society, just as they are all that is required in many communities where people still follow traditional/hunter gatherer lifeways.
There's something poetic about a post-industrial anarchist society aspiring to restore to humanity the free time for personal and social activities that our ancestors enjoyed for tens of thousands of years, but combined with the stability, predictability, and productivity provided by modern technologies. The siphoning of profit from human enterprise wastes resources that could go towards freeing all of us from drudgery.
Even with more free time for individuals, life in a lawless, leaderless society requires intricate cooperation and planning; it also basically guarantees that on Annares, from the perspective of, say, a contemporary Californian, there will seem to be gaps and lacunae in the availability of amenities and in the social fabric itself.
What fills those gaps for the Annaresti as Le Guin depicts them, is humanity—and a vital thread in the 'aesthetic' tapestry of their culture is their collective cultural self-sufficiency; that is, their art and culture-producing practices, which allow them to express their unmediated humanity to one another, without interference or distortion from profit-seeking gatekeepers.
What solar punks sometimes call the library economy is in full flower on Annares. Things like work, housing, tools, and clothing aren't won by competition or bought; instead, they are registered for, or queued for, checked out, used, and then returned. Nothing is owned; instead, objects are used. Indeed in Pravic no usage of the term 'have,' as it refers to possession, is made. Rather than telling a friend, "I have a winter coat," an Odonian would say, "I use the winter coat." Distinct from consumption, this "use" is wholesome and reversible; when clothes are worn threadbare they aren't thrown away, but meticulously recycled. This habit of returning things to their source (or to a distribution center) reflects the importance of return and returning, in many senses of the term, as an element of Odo's thought. Tool libraries are an existing analogue in contemporary society for the Odonian system of goods distribution.
Tool libraries are community-based lending facilities that offer tools for loan to the public the way book libraries lend books. These libraries provide access to a wide array of tools, from hand tools and power tools to garden implements and sometimes even larger equipment like ladders and generators.
Unlike Odonian distribution centers on the world of Annares, which entirely take the place of consumer markets/stores, the purpose of these contemporary tool libraries is to reduce (rather than replace) the need for individual ownership of infrequently used (rather than all) items, thereby saving resources, reducing clutter, and, incidentally, nurturing a practice of communal sharing.
In the end it isn't the loss of Urras' abundance, but rather it is the freedom from possession (not just possessions, but possession itself) that gives us the book's title. The Odonians of Annares have been dis-possessed—that is, relieved of the burdens and responsibilities of owning and thus guarding or maintaining control over virtually anything, and it is beautiful. By not possessing things, by not possessing even one another exclusively, in a romantic or even storgic sense, they somehow gain the even greater access to one another, and to other phenomena, attending the condition of freedom.
It's important to note that many elements of Le Guin's fictional anarchist society align with aspects of and prerequisites for degrowth. There is no militarism, for example, on Anarres—no standing armies and no large scale armed conflict of the sort which both drives and results from the post industrial consumption patterns pushing the earth toward a climate cataclysm. The only 'weapons' taken up by Odonians against one another are the stones sometimes thrown at social outcasts or molesters (7; 203). Especially useful, however, are the elements that might be applied by contemporary artists and organic intellectuals seeking to achieve one of the major prerequisites for a large scale shift to degrowth economies: consent (Buch-Hansen, 18-19).
Even if the population could be convinced that a variety of nutritious food, reliable transportation, sufficient energy, and other material needs could be met in a post-degrowth society, mere sentimental attachment to the familiar forms of culture industry products such as films, video games, and music produced for profit would remain a barrier to the consent required to change. The example depicted in The Dispossessed demonstrates the feasibility of local communal cultural reliance—the collective cultural self-sufficiency the Anarresti rely on to enrich their lives; it suggests that there isn't anything the culture industry is selling to us that we couldn't make for each other on our own.
Sexuality & Sexual Morality
In "The Dispossessed," the Odonian society takes a frank and demystified approach to sexuality and sexual morality, reflecting its broader ideological and philosophical principles. For example, just as there are no 'polite terms' for bodily functions, there are no euphemisms or profane terms for sex acts. The Pravic verb used to describe coitus is rendered in English by Le Guin as to 'copulate,' suggesting a mutual act undertaken by both (or all) parties, rather than something done by one party to another. The society is rooted in anarchism and a commitment to non-hierarchical structures, which extends into the realm of personal relationships and sexual ethics.
Sexuality in Odonian society is further characterized by a freedom from possessiveness and jealousy, which are viewed as remnants of propertarian (capitalist) and authoritarian systems. This is embodied in their sexual openness and the lack of strict monogamous commitments, which contrasts sharply with the norms of Urras, the more traditional and capitalist neighboring planet. Odonians generally regard both homosexual and heterosexual interactions as natural and uncomplicated parts of human relations, free from the proprietary attitudes often seen in other societies.
The moral framework of Odonian society emphasizes mutuality, respect, and consent in all relationships, including sexual ones. There is an ingrained care and regard for the personal autonomy of oneself and others, including, of course, the right to say no to both sex acts and entanglement in intimate relationships, which is critical in a society that values individual freedom so highly. The absence of formal marriage and the fluidity of relationships emerges from a broader rejection of all binding institutional structures.
Monogamous partnerships, though not the norm in the society of Anarres, are neither prohibited nor frowned upon. The relationship between Shevek and Takver (the partner, not his partner) is founded on a bond that, despite the prevailing social ethos of non-possessiveness, reveals a deep, personal commitment to one another that withstands time, distance, and societal expectations. Their partnership is built on a profound intellectual and emotional connection, and their mutual commitment is voluntarily chosen rather than socially enforced. This relationship contrasts with the broader Odonian practice of open and fluid relationships, showing how individual preferences can vary within a culture that champions personal freedom and autonomy, but also serving later in the story as one mark among several that set Shevek, Takver, and their peers (the Syndicate of Initiative) apart from more complacent Odonians, content to let their revolutionary ethos ossify into a thinly veiled bureaucracy. Their union serves as a narrative tool invoking the diversity of human relationships and the capacity of love to manifest in disruptive forms, even within a society that explicitly seeks to radically redefine social norms.
Again, though, while monogamous dyadic partnerships like that of Takver and Shevek do exist on Annares, the sexual practices of Odonian society at large allows for a more universal access to certain intimate aspects of human experience by giving up individual claims to one another as exclusive sex partners, by even giving up exclusive claims to one's children as belongings, and instead, in a sense, sharing access to oneself and one another at-will, rather than by contract. Partnerships on Annares dissolve automatically as soon as they stop working or are no longer mutually desired, monogamy in Odonian society was "not an institution, but a function. It had no sanction but private conscience"—but according to Odo, to be truly free, one had to be free to bind oneself with a promise (203).
By contrast, sexuality on Urras is a pathological mess of innuendo, secrets, lies, and general obfuscation, out of which a profound hostility emerges between the sexes. One of the most shocking and baffling aspects of Urrasti society that Shevek must grapple with is a deep-seated sexism that differs from that of, say, the American milieu of Le Guin's day in specific and instructive ways—i.e. the expectations (in terms of bodily grooming, behavior, social status, etc) placed on Urrasti women are so specific and arbitrary that they remind readers with humiliating clarity of the ultimate arbitrariness of our own gender conventions.
Propertarianism
The novel's analogue for neoliberalism, 'propertarianism,' shares the former's mysterious superpower: the ability to normalize—to establish normatives that seem to bear the authority of natural law. The mechanisms by which this is achieved are covered closely in Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, and in the work of both Castoriadis and Taylor on the institution of social realities, but the power of capitalism to co-opt everything from religion to storge, by selling tickets the The Passion of the Christ or Mother's Day cards, is undeniable. Neoliberal logic is so persuasive in a world where money is the only lever of influence, that even books critical of capitalism are judged by how well they are selling.
Money is disbursed in quanta—easily represented by numbers. Various "things" are necessary for human existence, and money buys things. More money? More access to things. More things? More survival. Sources of money are therefore good. People with money are, conceivably, sources of money. Therefore people with money are good. Does this really amount to 'reason?' Is the quantum of money our best metric for determining the success of human enterprise? Can 'reality' really be so shallow? There's something ugly about this. An ugliness so stultifying and hollow, that even true horror might seem beautiful by comparison. Surrounded by meaningless, abstract profit motivation, a grim admission is wrenched from Shevek, that even "[in] human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal" (109). But when money is, apparently, the only avenue to the goods and experiences more genuinely valuable to human beings, it is hard to turn away from it, even toward beauty.
The work of American social theorist, historian, and political philosopher Murray Bookchin, best known for his pioneering role in the ecology movement and as the founder of the social ecology and libertarian municipalism theories, had a notable influenced the real-world movement perhaps most similar to Odonianism: eco-anarchism. According to Bookchin biographer Janet Biehl, letters exchanged by Bookchin and Le Guin indicate that his 1971 collection of essays, Post-Scarcity Anarchism was also an influence on The Dispossessed.
Bookchin's description of the impact of market logic on everything from aesthetics to mental perception and processing, but especially on social relations, is particularly relevant to the stark difference between the way Odonians conceptualize the exchange of goods vs. the propertarian mode Shevek encounters on Urras,
By the middle of the present century, large-scale market operations had colonized every aspect of social and personal life. The buyer-seller relationship—a relationship that lies at the very core of the market—became the all-pervasive substitute for human relationships at the most molecular level of social, indeed personal life. To "buy cheaply" and "sell dearly" places the parties involved in the exchange process in an inherently antagonistic posture: they are potential rivals for each other's goods. The commodity—as distinguished from the gift, which is meant to create alliances, foster association, and consolidate sociality—leads to rivalry, dissociation, and asociality. (Bookchin 209)
Le Guin's depiction of Shevek's reaction to resource exchange and consumption under capitalism, as someone completely new to its assumptions and demands, exposes both as part of a cruel and absurd carceral structure that seems, to him, to interfere significantly with the organic functions of human beings, including cognition itself. The first Urrasti he meets in person, the doctor who clears him, physically, to land on Urras, comes across as intellectually hobbled by the mental convolutions required to maintain compliance with the basic notion of hierarchy.
Shevek's first experience of an actual marketplace is nightmarishly disorienting. Le Guin manages to take concepts laid out dryly and methodically by Karl Marx (forms of alienation and commodity fetishism), and turn them into sensuous and terrifying spectacle. For months after his first shopping trip, Shevek had nightmares. The street in Nio Esseia's shopping district
was a solid mass of people, traffic, and things: things to buy, things for sale. Coats, dresses, gowns, robes, trousers, breeches, shuts, blouses, hats, shoes, stockings, scarves, shawls, vests, capes, umbrellas, clothes to wear while sleeping, while swimming, while playing games, while at an afternoon party, while at an evening party, while at a party in the country, while traveling, while at the theater, while riding horses, gardening, receiving guests, boating, dining, hunting — all different, all in hundreds of different cuts, styles, colors, textures, materials. Perfumes, clocks, lamps, statues, cosmetics, candles, pictures, cameras, games, vases, sofas, kettles, puzzles, pillows, dolls, colanders, hassocks, jewels, carpets, toothpicks, calendars, a baby's teething rattle of platinum with a handle of rock crystal, an electrical machine to sharpen pencils, a wristwatch with diamond numerals; figurines and souvenirs and kickshaws and mementos and gewgaws and bric-a-brac, everything either useless to begin with or ornamented so as to disguise its use; acres of luxuries, acres of excrement. In the first block Shevek had stopped to look at a shaggy, spotted coat, the central display in a glittering window of clothes and jewelry. "The coat costs 8,400 units?" he asked in disbelief, for he had recently read in a newspaper that a "living wage" was about 2,000 units a year. "Oh, yes, that's real fur, quite rare now that the animals are protected," Pae had said. "Pretty thing, isn't it? Women love furs." And they went on. After one more block Shevek had felt utterly exhausted. He could not look any more. He wanted to hide his eyes. (110-111)
What seems to baffle and offend Shevek most is the sheer uselessness of most of the objects for sale. Later, his lived experiences, literally on a different world, provide him instantly with an insight American teenagers or young adults might recognize from when it struck them like thunder in their first encounter with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 or Das Kapital, that
the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession. (111)
In a 'marketplace,' the products of human creativity and labor, including art and other cultural materials, are only experienced by people from within the roles of buyer, seller, consumer, etc. According to the logic of neoliberalism, the entire world is a marketplace. Near the novel's climax, Shevek makes his most stark condemnation of profit, of propertarianism, and of Urras itself, perceiving, finally, that
There is no way to act rightly, with a clear heart, on Urras. There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and the wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is 'superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. (285)
Art Without Money
Late in the novel, Shevek is finally able to escape the university campus where his chaperons have him sequestered to explore the propertarian landscape of Nio Esseia, the largest city in on Urras. In a brilliant scene that satirizes the 'fine art world' on several levels, Le Guin has her anarchist physicist duck into an art gallery to escape the carnival of consumerism outside,
Passing a ground-floor window marked Art Gallery, he turned in, thinking to escape the moral claustrophobia of the streets and find the beauty of Urras again in a museum. But all the pictures in the museum had price tickets attached to their frames. He stared at a skillfully painted nude. Her ticket read 4,000 IMU. "That's a Fei Peite," said a dark man appearing noiselessly at his elbow. "We had five a week ago. Biggest thing on the art market before long. A Feite is a sure investment, sir."
"Four thousand units is the money it costs to keep two families alive for a year in this city," Shevek said.
The man inspected him and said drawling, "Yes, well, you see, sir, that happens to be a work of art."
"Art? A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?"
"You're an artist, I take it," the man said, now with open insolence.
"No, I am a man who knows shit when he sees it!" The dealer shrank back. When he was out of Shevek's reach, he began to say something about the police.
The gallery owner's derisive assumption that Shevek is 'an artist,' based wholly on the earnestness of his assertion regarding the purpose of artmaking, and the implicit critique of selling art for profit embedded in it, is perfect satire. It skewers the snobbery of art dealers while also highlighting one of the processes by which art as a category of human activity is co-opted and claimed as the territory of profiteers, in spite of the clear identification of artists as harsh critics of art markets.
Who better than an artist to understand just how worthless, as a commodity, art should be? There's something pathological about the preciousness with which 'art' and artworks are treated by society. Shevek, like all Odonians, understands that art is something human individuals spontaneously produce as a byproduct of living and human groups produce as a byproduct of history—the same way coral produces a reef, sharks shed teeth, or snails make shells. We wouldn't stop doing it if no one paid for it; we can't stop doing it. There will always be more, and anyone can produce it. Somehow, art is simultaneously one of the most special things a person can produce, and one of the most ordinary, common practices on Earth.
When climate activists began throwing soup at famous paintings, a part of me was at first appalled, but after consideration it occurred to me that it could all burn, in fact it will all burn, and we will make more. Everything will be lost, and yet nothing is lost because the people alive today and the people who will be alive tomorrow are the same kind of thing as the people who made all the art in all the museums. The artists yet to be born are no less capable than the artists long gone. The world is dying—if young people want to destroy old paintings to spark discussion and vital action, so be it: we will make more paintings.
Drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno in his unfinished Aesthetic Theory and elsewhere, the term "spontaneous" with regard to art refers to works that are created with a degree of artistic autonomy and are imbued with the personal, innovative, or experimental visions of the artists in the context of and response to traditions or historical circumstances. These works are considered spontaneous because they originate from, in a sense, 'genuine' impulses (as opposed, for example, to profit motivation) and may aim to resist or critique, expose, comment on, or respond to existing social conditions and cultural norms within history. They are often complex, challenging, and encourage reflective and critical engagement from their audience. This type of art is seen as having the potential to foster individuality and to question or subvert coercive ideological entanglements.
Furthermore, it's important to consider that spontaneous art can also include expressions that emerge naturally from everyday human activities and community practices, including cultural material often characterized as 'folk' art. This kind of art, though perhaps not always groundbreaking in the avant-garde sense, is rooted in the deep rhythms and basic routines of daily human life and reflects the experiences, emotions, and traditions of specific communities. Such expressions are 'authentic' in the sense that they emerge from an impulse to express or communicate insights or observations processed from lived experience, rather than a desire to impress or profit from an audience, and can carry significant, useful cultural and social resonance, helping to form and strengthen collective identity within cultures, and to express something important about the shared experiences of the people within them.
This sense of the term spontaneous can apply to social and economic phenomena besides art. For example, used to the utilitarian, but spontaneous nature of radio broadcasting at home, Shevek is bored and stultified by Urrasti radio broadcasts, switching them off after realizing their main purpose is advertising products for sale (168).
Odonian society has managed to reduce mediation between the humans producing goods and those using them to the minimum demanded by physical necessity, thereby reducing alienation. This applies, also, to cultural materials—to art.
When Shevek begins to attend concerts as an adult, he notes that, like all Odonians, his relationship to music has always been that of a doer rather than a receiver—a singer or instrumentalist in a choir or an ensemble rather than a passive listener or an audience member.
On Annares, the space between a song and its listeners, when it isn't merely the vibrating air between singer and audience, is covered entirely by human beings who have learned it, carried it in themselves, and reproduced it for human purposes like entertainment or communication or education or catharsis. This isn't to say that all music is memorized and transmitted orally or through demonstration, but that even written or archived songs are never bought and sold—therefore one's relationship to a piece of music is never merely an alienated one such as that of an owner, a seller, a buyer, etc; it is always a spontaneous one such as that of a performer, a creator, a teacher, a listener, a preserver, or even a reviser/modifier.
The only Annaresti artworks that appear directly in the narrative are the mobile hanging sculptures created by Takver and hung over the bed in the domicile she and Shevek share. When an ecological crisis abruptly separates the partners, Shevek lovingly carries her piece, called The Occupation of Uninhabited Space, everywhere his urgent job postings take him. As noted above, Shevek understands that art is valueless as a commodity, while at the same time holding onto a given work of art might be worth a tremendous amount of effort to carry it back and forth across the choking dust of a drought-stricken planet for years while one is separated from the artist who made it (267).
Odonians make art for each other, and they give art to each other. They don't sell it, nor does anything in the text indicate that they trade it. If a person wants a piece like the one her neighbor has, she can ask for one, or make one herself. There doesn't seem to be any recorded music on Annares either. In a post-degrowth society, there might be a truly astonishing renaissance of live musical performance at all scales, from individuals playing and singing in their family homes, to enormous self-organized orchestras filling halls or natural hollows and clearings, in gardens and in forests.
Bodies are the Medium
It's no accident that theatrical production holds a very special place in the cultural life of Le Guin's anarchists. Shevek himself, a physicist studying the nature of time, favors pure music, yet he acknowledges the special function that drama serves on Annares:
Learning centres taught all the skills that prepare for the practice of art: training in singing, metrics, dance, the use of brush, chisel, knife, lathe, and so on. It was all pragmatic: the children learned to see, speak, hear, move, handle. No distinction was drawn between the arts and the crafts; art was not considered as having a place in life, but as being a basic technique of life, like speech. Thus architecture had developed, early and freely, a consistent style, pure and plain, subtle in proportion. Painting and sculpture served largely as elements of architecture and town planning. As for the arts of words, poetry and story-telling tended to be ephemeral, to be linked with song and dancing; only the theatre stood wholly alone, and only the theatre was ever called "the Art"—a thing complete in itself. There were many regional and traveling troupes of actors and dancers, repertory companies, very often with playwright attached. They performed tragedies, semi-improvised comedies, mimes. They were as welcome as rain in the lonely desert towns, they were the glory of the year wherever they came. Rising out of and embodying the isolation and communality of the Anarresti spirit, the drama had attained extraordinary power and brilliance. (131)
Le Guin tells us directly: artistic performance was as welcome as rain. Like weather, human expression emerges from the so-called natural world; we are a resource—a natural resource—to one another, as necessary as food or water or fuel.
The special embodied way the theater communicates—the use in theatrical production, skits, dance, and all physical performance, of human bodies as the instrument, the medium with which and in/on which a message or artwork is made. The most important raw materials of dramatic productions are people.
Other, more recent works of science fiction also address this phenomenon. The profound social value of theater and artistic performance is explored in an even more focused way in the COVID pandemic era miniseries Station Eleven, another work of speculative storytelling. Developed for television by Patrick Somerville, and based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel, the story follows a troupe of actors and musicians called The Traveling Symphony as they travel in their caravan around a post-apocalyptic lake Michigan, bringing joy and culture to isolated communities on their annual route, referred to as "the Wheel." The production makes some use of solarpunk aesthetics; costumes are all made of recycled clothing and materials, transportation is all by horse and cart, the actors' food is grown locally by the communities they visit. The Traveling Symphony, as depicted in the series, demonstrate the possibility of a new world in much the same way the Occupy Wall Street encampments, examined in the next part of the present document, demonstrated such possibility to the real world in 2011.
The specialness of theater to the fictional society on Le Guin's lawless moon derives in part from the dearth of other consolations present in the harsh environment, but a work of theater also might represent what, in 1827, the German philosopher Carl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff called, in his essay Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst (English Aesthetics or Doctrine of Worldview and Art), a gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art—utilizing and synthesizing many or all forms of art into one (putatively) universal expression (Sampson 168). This not only gives the theater enormous power to impact all the senses while engaging the same cognitive processes by which we narrativize our own experiences into a life, a story.
This sensory and cognitive engulfment provided by theater makes it an exemplary medium for enculturating and reproducing cultural norms and values. The immersive nature of theater, where live actors share a physical space with the audience, creates a communal experience that is more visceral and immediate than other forms of cultural transmission. This immediacy can engender a profound sense of shared identity and collective memory, reinforcing social cohesion through a shared interpretive practice. Every performance, by virtue of its live interaction, demands a kind of existential acknowledgment from its audience, a recognition of the themes and moral quandaries presented as not merely artistic but also as embodied experiences.
Theatrical production has the potential to ritualize narratives, transforming abstract concepts into concrete cultural experiences. Through the dramatization of social rituals, historical events, or communal myths, theater does not just represent reality; it enacts it. This enactment allows cultural values to be experienced and internalized, bringing the metaphysical into material space.
In its most elevated forms, theater transcends entertainment, becoming a vehicle for both formation and transformation, subtly reinforcing or challenging worldviews within or across cultures. Given its capacity to mobilize emotions and provoke reflection, theater can also be a site of resistance or critique, using narrative to question or undermine official accounts or dominant ideologies.
For the Annaresti, it seems theater functions mostly as a social and expressive outlet. Though skits put on by the character Tirin are so provocative they ultimately contribute to his ostracization, ruining his life and radicalizing his friends against some of the negative trends appearing in Odonian society. Drama and performance that includes elements of penetrating satire or biting critique are considered a threat by the powerful (even the petty bureaucrats of Annares' capital Abbenay) for good reason.
The centrality of playwriting and drama classes to education in Shevek's recollections reminded me of the Black Panther Party's drama program. Why do revolutions make time and space for theater? For performance? At least in part it is so they can get better at entertaining one another, thereby breaking their reliance on the dominant culture for diversion and enrichment through art. This break has the further effect of disentangling revolutionaries from all the ideological baggage or environmental harm that is sold along with the latest culture industry production. For the Odonians of Anarres, pleasure and culture are not derived from culture industry products like films or plays put on by money-making companies, but through interpersonal relationships and communal engagement.
Bertolt Brecht famously rejected catharsis, in part because, for those experiencing its comfort, the catharsis provided by a play or a piece of music justified and reified the social system within which it was produced. Instead he offered an aesthetic of stifled release—ruined orgasm, haunting disappointment, bewildering dissatisfaction. There is another and more hopeful way, the democratization and distribution of the tools and time to make art throughout an entire population. This is what the Odonians of Annares have achieved in Le Guin's novel, it's what the solar punks, striving for a future to thrive in, might wish to achieve, and it's what the activists, organizers, anarchists, and weirdos who participated in the wave of global occupations of public space in the Fall and Winter of 2011-12 were demonstrating. Not only can we feed, clothe, and house one another: we can also make the world for one another—we can make beautiful things for one another, without profit-motivated intermediaries. But first we'll have to turn away from the culture industry and our fascination with the celebrities and spectacles it churns out for us.
It's very easy for the forces of consumerism (namely: the specific entities trying to sell you more stuff) to obscure the interconnectedness of life on earth, and even to conceal the role of human beings, as resources, from one another. Kant's 'Formula for Humanity' reminds us that people are always, of course, to be treated as ends in themselves rather than means to some end, but that doesn't mean we aren't sources, to one another, for everything from meeting material needs like those for food, shelter, and clothing, to meeting emotional, intellectual, and cultural needs like education, inspiration, transcendence, and even mere entertainment, both as individuals and when acting collectively. It's certainly true that the culture industry products that tend to entertain and inspire us since the mass media revolution have their origins in human individuals and collectives, but it is also true that they are transformed and alienated from those origins by their mediation through the standardized, mechanized, algorithmized processes that reproduce and distribute them at scale. By the time a piece of music reaches the bedroom or dance club where it is experienced by human listeners, the material connection between artist and audience is completely hidden, if not lost, except as a conceptual factor—as a parasocial, putative relationship: the feeling that "these lyrics were written for me," or that "Lady Gaga is singing to us," standing in lieu of any real, spontaneous connection.
Cracks, Flaws, & Challenges
Le Guin tries to thoroughly imagine some of the negative trends that might emerge in an anarchist society. Among these internalized tyranny of the social conscience, actual ostracization, intellectual rigidity, and the smug hubris of some of its more intolerable functionaries, as they exert their (emphatically non-hierarchical) authority over others. Aside from just acknowledging the cracks that have formed in the fabric of fictional Odonian society, it's important to remember that the success of Annares is a flawed model for political action in the real world.
While we analyze how the novel's aesthetics, its sense of beauty and appropriateness, can demonstrate part of the potential reward of shifting to a less 'propertarian' economy, it's worthwhile to consider the plausibility of rapidly producing cultural changes as enormous as those depicted by Le Guin. Is there any way something similar could be established here and now? Do the social practices in the story meet the solarpunk test of plausibility as elements of a possible future? There is no extra planet nearby to give to degrowth advocates who want to get off the carousel if they can't stop it. The Earth is full of hundreds of diverse cultures, languages, and environments, each with different desires, parameters, and demands. Large scale infrastructure projects are challenging on Annares—the economy is less dynamic. It takes a year's planning to build a single ship (73). Markets do make certain kinds of coordination easier, if not less costly.
One might hope Le Guin in her wisdom has given us a clue—a map drawn by her creation, Odo to guide us in her footsteps, but no; perhaps the most mysterious aspect of the story is the initial establishment of the Odonians on Annares. Who were the original revolutionaries? What kind of people were they? Born and encultured on a world of hierarchies and laws, markets and commodities, they somehow made a fresh start, raised their children while speaking a new and unfamiliar language with no words for concepts they took for granted; they raised their children with values they had adopted, but which had never before been taught to a new generation.
Le Guin touches on this mystery in another short story, The Day Before the Revolution, which follows Odo herself on the eve of the uprising that eventually resulted in the "Terms of Settlement" that established Annares as a free world. That story includes the character's musings on the new morality emerging among her youngest followers, on how different their instincts and aesthetics were from those of her generation, especially those relating to sexuality.
The Odonian rejection of shame and embrace of both freedom and frankness with regard to sexual desire had rendered many taboos meaningless, thus stripping them of interest; Odo reflects that her own relationships, indeed the entire set of sexual symbols and gestures the older generation found meaningful, could only seem obscene and foolish to the children they were raising.
Something like this reflection might occur to anyone who attempts to break a problematic cycle by shielding the young from the errors that marred their own lives. It should be possible, and tolerable, as long as the elders can keep from resentment in moments when 'progress' reflects back on them as judgment, or when the condemnation of the young seems to lack 'nuance' or context—that is, the context of a less ethical social edifice.
Beyond the challenges of raising a new generation that might not understand or sympathize with its parents, there are major material obstacles to applying the legendary character's Plan (with a capital 'P'). These obstacles are pretty well illustrated by listing some of the advantages held by the revolutionaries in the story.
One is Annares itself: again, conveniently, in Le Guin's story there was another habitable planet nearby, with no indigenous land animals at all let alone a sentient one living there. The second major advantage is Odonian monoculture itself: besides a few mining colonists, Annares is entirely populated by true believers. Here on Earth, opponents of adopting Scandinavian style social policies often point to the US' diversity as a barrier to collective action, or collectively funded/resourced enterprise of any kind. To the extent that they are correct, diversity also remains a challenge to establishing a global degrowth paradigm. Challenges, of course, can be overcome. There are also some similarities between the Urrasti context our Odonians fled and the economies of the so-called developed world here on Earth.
Opponents of the kind of consumer capitalism that drives and is driven by the perpetual growth model are often ridiculed for making use of amenities available in the 'Global North,' or branded hypocrites for enjoying standards of living putatively provided by capitalism, but demands and plans for a new system do not represent an effort to turn back the clock or to abandon all modern technologies. Odo, the founder of Annares system of anarchism, also understood that the capacity to choose a better way relied on the developments made under the prior system. She "knew that their anarchism was the product of a very high civilization, of a complex diversified culture, of a stable economy and a highly industrialized technology that could maintain high production and rapid transportation of goods" (81).
Even if degrowth demands that we "cut back very hard" when it comes to certain choices and conditions, referred to misleadingly as our 'standard of living,' there is no reason to believe that shifting from a perpetual growth economy to a sustainable, cyclical paradigm will require society to "regress to pre-urban, pre-technological" conditions (81).
There are major points against Anarres as a metaphor or example for anything possible on Earth—we have no alternative planet, furthermore there is no chance nor desire on Earth to adopt a global monoculture, and these are perhaps the two most important elements of Annares' success—but the aesthetic still holds clues if not keys for unlocking the capacity it indicates: to find everything we need, culturally, in ourselves and each other alone, without the limits and distortions introduced by abstract profit-motivation.
An Aesthetic of Degrowth
When confronted by a proud profiteer, at an upper class social gathering on Urras, who insists that the law of evolution demands "strength!" Shevek replies that, "the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical. You see, we have neither prey nor enemy, on Anarres. We have only one another. There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness" (183). Again it is in part their culturally reproduced commitment to solidarity, and in part the profound interdependence required by the harshness of their environment, that remind the Annaresti to treasure one another, and to act in ways that strengthen, rather than weaken others. This habit is the core of the most valuable and effective aesthetic strand, for nurturing degrowth imaginaries, presented in The Dispossessed.
Modern methods for measuring the success of human enterprise, and for measuring the well-being of human individuals and groups, have focused on economically quantifiable factors (Savini et al). The quantum of money. By so constraining analysis, social phenomena of all kinds are stripped of value that is no less material and physical (in terms of its impact on human well-being) than increasing GDP or rising rental incomes, though it is so often referred to dismissively as "intangible." Generations of mainstream economists, drawing on the methods of Chicago School figures like Milton Friedman and George Stigler, have preferred to focus on the quantifiable, ignoring value that can only be expressed in terms of subjective experience while nevertheless appealing to their own set of vague and arbitrary abstractions including concepts like "consumer choice," "individual freedom," and "market wisdom," which are, in practice, especially compared to the consequences and impact on human bodies that they obscure, hollow, thought-ending cliches. Our so-called leaders are so focused on profit that they ignore human costs; meanwhile, they've got us all so focused on survival that we've lost sight of our salvation, we've forgotten how it will come, and who will bring it: we will. We will rescue one another.
If we are to reduce our costly consumption of the mass produced media currently standing in for spontaneous cultural materials, then we are going to need to remember how to be satisfied by each other. The ultimate impulse behind consuming for-profit culture, mass produced media, etc, is a social one; we crave connection and communication with others through their artistic expressions. That impulse for human connection is diverted into environmentally costly and socially alienated consumer silos by the flash and crackle of media sold to us using sophisticated advertising and marketing techniques designed to hijack our brains and our biology, to monopolize our attention, keeping it focused on the global cultural marketplace rather than our local or regional cultural environment. Let's escape together.
Demonstrated to the Senses: Occupy Wall Street
Beautiful stories, images, and concepts are, in a sense, self-contained arguments for the ideals that motivate or inform them. They also tend to justify the underlying systems and structures from which they emerge, which has been famously 'problematized' by Brecht's critique of catharsis as a reifying force. Part of what it means to identify with, be moved by, or to hold an aesthetic is to experience material aligning with that aesthetic as obviously appropriate, or even just. Brecht says, "When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world' it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up" (71). Whether or how to apply this critique to beauty that emerges from resistance or opposition to a given system is unclear; tension here raises the question of how the choice of medium or tactics used to deploy a given aesthetic argument might impact its function in practice. Are there ways to frame a message advocating for change that make it not only more effective, but also less vulnerable to cooption by the systems it seeks to challenge?
The brief but influential Occupy Wall Street movement, born in lower Manhattan on September 17, 2011, became more than a series of protests, developing into a global demonstration of the power of mutual aid practices and consensus-based organization. Direct actions conceived and executed from within the camps shut down globally significant ports, popularized radical concepts, and helped reawaken a form of class consciousness via the 99% vs. 1% framework. Importantly, it altered the function of public spaces within the conceptual framework of 21st century society.
In its typical usage, the term 'demonstration' as applied to an assembly, march, vigil, or protest, refers to the demonstration of public feeling or opinion regarding a given issue, policy, situation, action, etc. Such demonstrations often include performances or other creative methods for showing why (and how strongly) the assembled participants feel the way they do. The kind of demonstration OWS produced was more like a proof of concept. Something like the model villages of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—the microcosm of a possible world, with radically different organizing principles, resulting in meaningful gains toward a positive transformation of social relations.
New York Times journalist Ginia Bellafante once remarked somewhat disparagingly that the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park was like a carnival, but perhaps not enough has been said about the explicitly performative and spectacular aspects of the movement, and of the demonstrative function the camps and their ad hoc mutual aid infrastructure served.
Protest encampments are not new. Indeed, "the largest and most sustained public demonstration of the Great Depression," the march of the Bonus Army, culminated in the destruction by burning of the enormous, tidy, and well-ordered protest encampment set up in Washington DC by veterans of the First World War, who had come together from all over the country to demand the early redemption of their service bonus certificates (Dickson 6). The present moment, Spring of 2024, is marked by a new wave of protest encampments (these demanding an end to the genocide in Gaza), sometimes calling themselves 'occupations' as have many encampment protests since the Wall Street occupation of late 2011. The main feature, the primary function that distinguishes Occupy Wall Street camps from both their antecedents and descendants alike, is that of presenting to both participants and visitors, critics and the curious, a vision of peaceful anarchy brought to life.
Origins
When a growing crowd of motley protesters began erecting tents and building ramshackle structures in Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park (also called Liberty Plaza), a privately owned public space controlled by the companies Goldman Sachs and Brookfield Properties, there was little to indicate that the birth of a global movement for economic and social reform had just taken place—by physically taking a place, that is: commandeering private property for an eminently public purpose. The motley crowd had responded to a call.
Commenting on the events of the Arab spring and the huge public demonstrations occurring in Egypt, a tweet from the account of the Canada-based culture jamming magazine Adbusters, posted on June 9, 2011 posited that, "America needs its own Tahrir acampada. Imagine 20,000 people taking over Wall Street indefinitely" (Komlik). The initial call to actually "occupy Wall Street" followed, first in an email to subscribers from Adbusters' editors on July 13, and then on August 2 in the physical issue Adbusters #97: Post Anarchism (see Appendix B).
The institution of Adbusters magazine and the individual editors who instigated the occupation quickly faded from view, and though their activism continues to this day, their personalities and biographies are not important to the lessons degrowth proponents can take from the practice that developed, in Zuccotti park and other occupations around the world, of demonstrating the world they wanted.
I visited the camp in late September. Entering the park, there was the sense of crossing an invisible boundary into a ritual space or another energetic dimension. Smiling people in deep discussions were perched on concrete steps or huddled together in tents; groups of people young and old prepared large meals under colorful canopies. An enormous library of varied books and other strange objects filled one corner of a plaza that seemed to breathe to the pulse of spontaneous human interactions. I saw a white canopy with a big red cross painted on it where it looked like people were being given bottles of water. I asked if they had any allergy medicine and was handed a packet of Benadryl that I stuffed in a pocket for later.
Continuing to explore the funky avenues between tents, I definitely heard the sounds of people making love; it made me grin. It felt like coming home. Under the trees of the park it almost felt like Sherwood forest, or some magical glen. It also had the feeling of the forts I used to construct out of bedsheets and couch cushions with my brothers: places more real while we believed in them than the living room where they were built. I was dirty from traveling, but I found a shirt in a pile of clean laundry where someone told me to take what I needed. I left my own dirty shirt in a pile waiting to be laundered and never saw it again.
It was beautiful. At the time I wouldn't have thought to use the word 'community,' but that's what it was. What I thought to myself at the time was that it seemed like its own little world. I couldn't imagine anyone who would want to destroy it.
The arrests started almost immediately (Bellafante).
The Ideals
Consensus
The self-governing practices adopted by OWS organizers/participants, for determining demands to make and actions to take, sought to transcend traditional democracy through their emphasis on full participation and consensus, embodied by the General Assembly and the People's Mic. General Assemblies cropped up at most occupy encampments around the world, functioning as grassroots decision-making bodies where individuals could propose ideas, discuss issues, and deliberate collectively. These forums were designed to allow every participant a voice and to reach decisions based on full consensus rather than simple majority rule.
The People's Mic, a method of public speaking developed in response to legal restrictions on electronic amplification, involved the crowd repeating the speaker's words to amplify them throughout the gathering. Initiated—at any time by anyone—calling out, "Mic check!," this practice not only reinforced the message but also fostered a profound sense of community and collective purpose.
Achieving full consensus was challenging and often slowed the decision-making process, as aligning diverse viewpoints (sometimes including those of wingnuts and tourists) into a unanimous agreement is inherently complex. However, the commitment to inclusive, participatory engagement allowed for a deeper exploration of alternatives and demonstrated a model of governance that prioritizes every individual's input, suggesting potential for more equitable forms of social organization beyond conventional democratic structures. When a decision-making body must satisfy all stakeholders, it tends to take action in more modest, sustainable ways (Ostrom 184; 243).
Recently there's been a return of the People's Mic at contemporary encampments of protesters opposed to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza strip. Once again, one can hear in the square one voice, followed by many, calling, "Mic check!"
Economic Equality
Another objective of Occupy organizers was achieving economic equality. Much of the rhetoric coming out of the general assemblies drew attention the clear disparities in general well-being and in life outcomes between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. OWS activists demonstrated a possible path to a more equitable economic order through the creation of communal spaces that modeled the principles of fair resource distribution. These included free kitchens, libraries, and medical clinics within the encampments, where services and resources were provided to all at no cost. By implementing systems based on cooperation and mutual aid rather than profit, OWS offered a glimpse of what a society centered on economic equality might look like—where access to essential services and opportunities is not governed by financial capability, but is available to everyone, contributing to a more inclusive and fair community. This approach challenged neoliberal norms and proposed a transformative shift towards a system that values human welfare over capital accumulation.
Corporate Accountability
A core element of the critique of the global financial system OWS popularized is the lack of accountability for the actions of large corporations. In 2011, the impact of the financial collapse of 2007-2008 was still reverberating throughout the entire global economy and the lack of accountability for major financial institutions, which were deemed "too big to fail" stood in stark contrast to the treatment of working class people who were losing their homes due to foreclosures and struggling to find employment. During this crisis, massive bailouts were allocated to banks and other financial entities under the pretext of preventing a broader economic meltdown, encapsulating the quintessentially neoliberal idea that some institutions were so integral to the financial system that their failure was unthinkable—impermissible. These bailout policies (including the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP) led to substantial public discontent, expressed in the Occupy Wall Street chant, "They got bailed out, we got sold out." This sentiment reflected a profound frustration with the apparent immunity of large corporations from the consequences of their practices; critics argued that it bailed out the very institutions responsible for the crisis, perpetuating a moral hazard by encouraging systemically dangerous behaviors by neutralizing any negative consequences, which contrasted sharply with the severe repercussions felt by ordinary citizens. The episode was a clear demonstration of a systemic bias favoring corporate interests over those of the general public, and informed OWS participants pushing for greater corporate transparency and fairness.
Demonstrators in the global occupy movement did this through direct actions, such as occupying spaces near financial institutions, organizing sit-ins, and marching almost daily in the financial districts of cities around the world. These actions were designed to publicly challenge the disproportionate influence of large corporations on government and economic policies, advocating for a regulatory environment that is both transparent and equitable. Additionally, activists, including the online hacker collective Anonymous, used leaks and info dumps, digital campaigns and social media, to expose corporate misconduct and mobilize support for reforms, including fair corporate taxation and stricter regulations. The future demanded by OWS involved corporations operating with full transparency, contributing equitably to taxes, and adhering to regulations that protect the environment and promote economic justice.
Popular Justice
From the start the movement centered ideals of social justice and police accountability, aspects that foreshadowed later movements such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Defund the Police campaigns. OWS actions and demands regularly drew attention to issues of systemic inequality and the disproportionate impact of economic and social policies on marginalized communities, including excessive and often militarized police presence in these communities. The movement's confrontations with law enforcement, particularly its critique of police tactics and the broader criminal justice system, presaged a growing public discourse on police reform. This discourse eventually evolved into more focused movements demanding comprehensive reviews and restructuring of law enforcement agencies to address systemic racial biases and reduce reliance on policing as a primary solution to social issues. OWS's emphasis on these issues helped lay the groundwork for subsequent, more targeted advocacy efforts centered around justice, equity, and the reimagining of community safety and support systems.
The movement faced specific challenges related to maintaining order and addressing misconduct within its encampments. Participants generally adopted community-based approaches to handle issues of crime and misconduct, relying on non-hierarchical, consensus-driven processes reflective of its broader ideological principles.
In many OWS sites, participants organized "safety committees" or similar groups tasked with monitoring behavior and resolving conflicts within the camp. These groups aimed to manage problems through mediation and restorative justice practices rather than punitive measures, attempting to uphold the movement's commitment to non-violence and mutual respect.
However, these self-policing efforts sometimes struggled with effectiveness and consistency, as the open and inclusive nature of the camps made it difficult to enforce rules or norms. The lack of formal authority and the diverse makeup of participants, including some vulnerable to or experiencing mental health issues and homelessness, added complexity to maintaining order and safety.
Despite these challenges, the approach taken by OWS was in line with its critique of traditional law enforcement and its emphasis on community-led governance and solutions. This experience contributed to ongoing discussions about alternative models of community safety and conflict resolution beyond conventional policing methods.
Environmental Sustainability
Many of the very first activists to arrive at OWS encampments primarily or at least theoretically considered themselves environmentalists, so ideals related to environmental sustainability were incorporated into broader critiques of economic and social systems. Advocating for practices that reduce environmental impact and promote ecological balance, OWS highlighted the interconnections between unsustainable economic growth, corporate greed, and environmental degradation. The encampments themselves often featured initiatives like recycling programs, sustainable living workshops, and discussions on the ecological footprints of corporate practices, serving as microcosms of environmentally conscious communities. Through these actions, OWS brought attention to the necessity of integrating sustainability into economic and social policymaking. The movement posited that a just society must not only address inequality and corporate influence but also steward the environment responsibly to ensure the longevity and health of both the planet and its inhabitants.
International/Global Solidarity
Organizers and activists influencing the general assemblies deeply valued the goal of strengthening international working class solidarity, viewing it as essential to addressing the interconnected challenges posed by global capitalism, inequality, and climate change. OWS, as a movement, recognized that the economic and social issues it protested were not confined to the United States but were global phenomena affecting disparate populations across the world.
This acknowledgment led to active efforts to forge alliances and share strategies with similar movements abroad, such as the Indignados in Spain and anti-austerity protests in Greece. Demonstrating this solidarity, OWS often coordinated global days of action and utilized digital platforms to connect with and support international activists. This global perspective reinforced the movement's conviction that substantial change necessitated a collaborative effort that went beyond national borders, focusing on taking a unified approach to combating systemic injustices worldwide. By promoting international solidarity, OWS aimed to strengthen the global resistance against corrupt plutocracy for a universally equitable and sustainable future.
Local Solidarity
The practice employed by OWS organizers of partnering with long-term homeless individuals for advice and leadership in constructing the ad hoc infrastructure of the camp using tents, tarps, and other found materials was part of the movement's strategy of engaging local community support toward the goal of self-sufficiency. By recognizing and valuing the expertise and experience of homeless individuals, the movement not only rejected the stigma and stereotypes commonly applied in discourse around the issue of homelessness, but also encouraged the development of mutual respect and collaboration between homeless and non-homeless participants. Additionally, the approach of seeking no-cost or found materials and sometimes, essentially, using trash to construct dwellings and common areas ensured that the camp's infrastructure was built with an eye to creative reuse, conservation, and environmental impact, as well as concern for the diverse, but sometimes limited resources and abilities of its occupants.
Moreover, by engaging the long-term homeless population as partners, OWS sought to address certain root causes of homelessness related to alienation and ostracization. Rather than viewing the homeless themselves as a problem to be solved or a population to be managed, the movement recognized the inherent worth and agency of homeless individuals, as well as their unique skills and abilities, inviting them to actively participate in the construction and maintenance of the camp's infrastructure. By explicitly seeking out and including the homeless community, OWS not only provided practical support and resources to those in need but also encouraged a sense of solidarity between the homeless and non-homeless members of the encampments, shedding the habit of exclusion while offering a glimpse of the transformative potential of collective action and consensus-based decision making processes.
The Demonstrations
Generally, our only significant access to wholly unrealized imaginaries, or to the unrealized elements, whether dreaded or longed for, of partially realized imaginaries, is through art. Rarely have political movements been able to seize enough space and time to create fully inhabitable demonstrations of the worlds they propose.
Within OWS camps around the world, of which I was able to visit three (in Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Oakland) mutual aid resources played a pivotal role in embodying the principles of anarchism and local self-sufficiency. They served the vital and unique function of illustrating the potential for a more equitable and community-oriented world. These resources, including free libraries, legal aid, laundry services, food preparation and distribution, and medical clinics, were not only practical necessities but also tangible manifestations of solidarity and collective care. By offering essential services without reliance on centralized authorities or profit-driven institutions, the Occupy camps demonstrated the effectiveness of decentralized organizing and direct local action. Through mutual aid, participants showed their capacity to address each other's needs directly, challenging traditional notions of dependency and instead focusing on interdependence and self-empowerment within the community. The committed practice of mutual aid manifest in the specific free service tents in the OWS encampments used the principles of cooperation, mutual support, and shared responsibility to build a functional microcosm of the better world its participants imagined.
Knowledge production and distribution are a vital element of social change; OWS free libraries emerged as vibrant hubs of intellectual exchange and communal solidarity within the movement's encampments. These libraries, stocked with donated books spanning genres from political theory to fiction, served as symbols of resistance against corporate hegemony over information and culture. By providing access to knowledge and literature without cost or restriction, the libraries demonstrated not only the ethos of inclusivity and self-empowerment central to the Occupy movement's principles, but also the potential to manifest a "library economy" in the real world. Moreover, they demonstrated, to participants and curious visitors alike, the practical feasibility of decentralized, community-driven initiatives in fostering education and intellectual enrichment. In a society where access to education and literature is often commodified and restricted, the OWS free libraries functioned as examples in practice of the values of sustainability, non-hierarchical organization, and local community support, offering the tangible experience of a more equitable and participatory world.
Of course, public libraries maintained by the state are also free and ostensibly accessible to all; a few important elements distinguish the OWS model libraries from the general concept of a library. One is that they are collectively and collaboratively curated. The mother library of them all, "Fort Patti," aka The People's Library, aka the OWSL held "books, zines, newspapers, media, computers, and other materials" (Boyer). Not only could one donate a book by any author, one could submit a manuscript of one's own. While inter-library loan systems make it possible to acquire nearly any book one might desire, cardholders at a city library have little say in the local selection of titles that might be found serendipitously in the stacks, and, aside from occasional unsanctioned acts of guerrilla librarianism, little ability to add their own work to the catalog. Of course questions remain about the scalability of the OWSL system, especially considering recent attacks made by ideologically motivated groups around the US seeking to censor materials offered in local branches or to defund (and therefore eliminate) public libraries altogether. Nevertheless, as Micah White, one of the initiators of the encampment said ten years after the library was torn down and the occupiers evicted, "We showed people that it was possible to create something like a social movement with so few resources," (Anthony). The experience of entering Fort Patti remains as an example of demonstration in that it showed how quickly a small group of motivated people could establish a relatively functional, non-hierarchical institution outdoors, under a tarp, against the will of the ruling class.
The for-profit healthcare system is broken; OWS free health clinics emerged as vital lifelines within the Occupy encampments, again emerging from the movement's focus on mutual aid practices and the widely shared view of participants that healthcare is a fundamental human right. In the form of tents or pop-up canopies staffed by volunteer medical professionals and equipped with donated supplies, these clinics provided a limited range of essential healthcare services to both demonstration participants and nearby residents (including the homeless) at no cost. By operating outside traditional structures, the clinics rejected the implicit neoliberal assumption that access to healthcare should be tied to wealth or privilege, and instead demonstrated the feasibility of decentralized, grassroots approaches to healthcare delivery. Further, by prioritizing the well-being of all individuals within the community and operating outside of traditional hierarchical structures, the OWS health clinics exemplified the principles of sustainability and self-sufficiency, offering a concrete example of how local communities can come together to address pressing social needs. Moreover, the health tents served as symbols of resistance against the commodification of healthcare and the profit-driven motives of the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, not only illustrating the potential for, but also demonstrating the effectiveness of collective action to effect meaningful change in the realm of public health.
The provision of free laundry services and clothing swaps within the OWS encampments served as a tangible manifestation of movement ideals like sustainability, non-hierarchical organization, self-sufficiency, reciprocity, and local community support. These initiatives addressed a basic yet often overlooked need for cleanliness and clothing within the camps, demonstrating that mutual aid extends beyond immediate survival to encompass dignity and well-being. Volunteers contributed their time, resources, and expertise collecting clothing donations as well as soiled laundry, then washing and organized them before returning them to the community. By offering free access to laundry services and facilitating clothing exchanges, the Occupy movement rejected prevailing norms of consumerism and waste, demonstrating the present capacity, central to the project of degrowth, to find meaning and effective solutions in each other through resource-sharing and collective responsibility. The laundry tents also hinted at the capacity of small-scale local initiatives to address other systemic issues such as poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation without relying on top-down structures or institutionalized authority. By fostering a culture of reciprocity and mutual support, local initiatives can not only meet practical needs but also strengthen social bonds within communities, initiating a broader sense solidarity and further application of collective action.
The OWS free kitchen tents (mentioned in the initial blog post calling for the protest, see Appendix B) were also central to the movement's tactic of modeling its ideals. These kitchens served as gathering points where individuals could not only access nutritious meals at no cost but also participate in the preparation and distribution process, fostering a sense of collective ownership and solidarity. By sourcing ingredients locally and relying on donations, the free kitchens exemplified sustainable food practices, rejecting conventional modes of consumption and distribution that prioritize profit over people and planet. Moreover, the decentralized and participatory nature of the kitchens underscored the movement's commitment to non-hierarchical organization, with decision-making processes characterized by inclusivity, consensus-building, and mutual respect quite different from what many participants had experienced as restaurant workers in the food service industry or in corporate grocery stores.
In addition to meeting basic nutritional needs, the OWS free kitchens functioned as sites of community building and empowerment, providing spaces for dialogue, education, and cultural exchange. Through the act of sharing meals, participants were able to forge connections across diverse backgrounds and identities, transcending traditional divides and generating a sense of belonging and interconnectedness. Furthermore, by offering food assistance to both occupiers and local residents, the kitchens functioned as a public demonstration of what the world could be like if food was produced socially and collectively, and provided to all at no cost and without conditions. In this way, the OWS free kitchens served not only as practical resources for sustenance but also as symbols of hope for a kinder and more humane—more beautiful—food system.
Knowing the Imaginable
When I first experienced the General Assembly in Liberty Plaza I was moved to tears by the direct experience of solidarity—by witnessing and participating in a large, consequential, good faith effort to build meaningful consensus in a group. At another gathering in the plaza that day, philosopher and current presidential candidate Cornel West was present, as was Pulitzer-winning journalist (and accused plagiarist) Chris Hedges. Both men were arrested later that day while demonstrating outside the lobby of a downtown bank branch.
The faces of notable intellectuals weren't the ones that impressed me, however. I stood in the circle of humanity; looking around me there were so many people. While nothing could be assumed about the background of any individuals, the group of several hundred was as diverse as NYC in terms of physical and cultural variation. The expressions on their faces were all so serious and alert—clearly legible as love. People of all ages were present; notably I saw four or five sets of young parents with children and babies among the assembly. One mother used the People's Mic to raise concerns about a proposed march (to the bank where West and Hedges were arrested) with a bright-eyed baby on her hip. I am a sentimental kind of beast, so this is when the hot tears started to come for me. By then I had read a little about anarchism, but there was nothing in my social frame of reference or my emotional/bodily lexicon to compare with what I was witnessing and feeling in that moment. Oddly, considering all the world-historical events that have followed since that day, it remains the moment in my life that felt the most consequential in a publicly relevant, historical sense. Until then, until it was demonstrated to me by the entire social and physical environment I was inhabiting, not only did I not 'believe' in human solidarity as I do now, but I was unable to even imagine it. I was like one of those unsuspecting little babies whose cochlear implants are about to be activated in videos shared on the web, about to hear my mother's voice for the first time.
The field of epistemology is broad and deep, and much has been written about the origin, nature, and limitations of knowledge, but a simple and practical way to determine whether one truly knows something, as opposed to merely believing it or 'thinking' it is likely true, is whether or not one has the choice to reject it. One might convince oneself of the tripartite godhead proposed by Catholicism on Monday, then convert to Islam on Wednesday, but once you've put your hand in a fire, barring amnesia, you can't stop knowing that it burns. The physical senses and the somatic experience of embodiment are essential to the kind of knowledge I mean. Those same physical senses and embodied experience are the arena of aesthetics.
To engage the senses with a message, to reach an audience or any intended recipient of communication through the body, is to demonstrate. Demonstration—this aesthetic, or perhaps rather this tactic for deploying aesthetics—will be especially useful to degrowth advocates in transforming the social imaginary. Using it will mean building functional models, small enough for organizations with limited resources to manage, but large enough to be experienced fully from within. Such sensually targeted models can reveal to the public degrowth's potential to enrich human life, in a way that can't be unseen.
Developing Dioramas
To demonstrate to the public that a future of degrowth is both beautiful and desirable (in large part because what we have to offer one another via spontaneous art and culture is more fulfilling and nourishing than products bought and sold in the neoliberal marketplace) we should make temporary worlds–dioramas–where the future is present, not just as a concept, but as an instantiation that can be actively experienced and inhabited. Such microcosms, installed or set up in reclaimed or repurposed urban spaces, could serve as tangible examples of a degrowth future, allowing people direct access to physically, sensually engage with its potential.
There’s no real discourse around the aesthetics of degrowth, even among people who sense that transforming the economy, reducing consumption and production, designing resource distribution infrastructure (social and physical) for durability and sustainability—rather than abstract ‘growth’ as measured by profit or market share—is the only hope for stability in a rapidly changing world, and who sense that nobody is going to voluntarily accept the vast, challenging, hegemonically impossible, ideologically unthinkable, social transformations degrowth entails. But how else besides discussion can a consensus be formed? Force? That’s not consensus—it’s unacceptable. The coming instability will be bloody enough. The interventions I propose cannot on their own ‘move the dial,’ regarding the adoption of degrowth policies by individuals and institutions. However, there are good reasons to hope they might change a few minds, introduce people and ideas to one another, plant seeds of inspiration, and encourage the proliferation and flourishing of degrowth aesthetics in the social imaginary.
Involuntary Demonstrations
Both the COVID pandemic that opened the 2020s and the financial crisis of 2007 (which led to the Occupy Movement) gave people around the world the involuntary experience of an abruptly different world, for better and worse. In one case the disaster was (probably, mostly) natural—a global disease, spread through respiratory droplets, deadly to the vulnerable and life- changing for anyone who contracts a serious case. In the other case the disaster was economic— the result of greed and mismanagement by ruling class gamblers and profiteers in the financial sector.
Public and private institutional responses to both emergencies managed to benefit the rich, impose austerity (though, in the case of the pandemic, austerity followed an unexpected but inadequate initial wave of public investment in social stability), and to use state intervention to redistribute resources to the wealthy rather than to stabilize society. The book The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (2007) details how various organized interests use crises to institute neoliberal policies in their wakes.
There are better and worse ways to respond to such involuntary demonstrations of possible worlds (i.e. crises). After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost its primary international benefactor and trading partner, leading to a near-collapse of the Cuban economy. This period was marked by extreme scarcity of resources due to the loss of Soviet subsidies and the continuing US trade embargo. To address the crisis, the Castro government declared a ‘Special Period in Time of Peace’ and implemented several policies that can be seen as anticipatory or analogous to degrowth strategies, focusing on sustainability, reduced reliance on imports, local
production, and community resilience. The emergency inspired radical action. Foreign currency and import shortages,spurred experimentation along "small is beautiful" lines. For several years bicycles largely replace automobiles on Havana's streets. International experts have hailed the "green experiment" in Cuban agriculture, a sector once highly dependent on imported fuel and pesticides, where now oxen are replacing tractors. City residents are planting backyard gardens and raising their own chickens and pigs. Doctors are experimenting with herbal medicines. (Chomsky et al. 596)
The policies of the Special Period were a pragmatic response to a present and immediate threat, and they weren’t always ideal or easy to live with, but they had several collateral benefits that suggest some of the benefits to well-being that would result from shifting to a degrowth economic program.
One of the most notable responses was the development of urban agriculture. Faced with a severe food shortage, vacant lots, rooftops, and even balconies were transformed into productive agricultural spaces using organic methods, like something out of a Tokyo Genso illustration. This not only reduced dependency on imported food and fertilizers but also contributed to local food security and employment. It also had a measurable positive impact on the health of the Cuban population (Schiffman).
With fuel in extremely short supply, Cuba promoted the use of bicycles and animal-drawn carts. Hundreds of thousands of bicycles were imported from China, and bike lanes were added to roads. This shift not only reduced fuel consumption but also contributed to lower carbon emissions. Energy conservation became a national priority. The government launched campaigns encouraging citizens to reduce energy use and implemented energy-saving measures across industries. These were not always comfortable, and included scheduled blackouts and the adaptation of machinery and processes to lower energy use. Whole industries were adapted to focus on local resources and needs rather than export-oriented production. This shift was essential in reducing the island's dependency on foreign trade and in stabilizing local economies.
The crisis led to increased social cohesion and community organizing. In spite of effective cuts in both areas, Cuba maintained strong commitments to education and healthcare. These sectors adapted to scarce resources by focusing on preventive care and community-based educational initiatives.
The measures adopted during Cuba’s Special Period reflect an adaptive response to economic contraction that prioritized sustainability, local self-reliance, and community resilience. While not initially intended as a degrowth strategy, Cuba's experience during the Special Period provides valuable insights into the ways societies might adapt to reduced resource availability and economic constraints, voluntary or involuntary.
The Cuban response is certainly a better model for responding to a real economic crisis than the 2008 TARP debacle in the US, and degrowth aesthetics communicated by demonstration through projects like interactive performances in site-specific built environments might make taking a path like the one taken by Cuba in 1990s more imaginable.
The ideal cultural/artistic medium for preparing people for substantial social change combines elements of physical engagement and immersive construction, similar to both theater and the spontaneous, participatory nature of Occupy camps. Here I am proposing large, living scenarios, free and open to the public, where infrastructure inspired by solarpunk is actually built
on a small scale, and where solarpunk aesthetics are enacted in performances and workships. I’m calling these "dioramas," derived from the Greek dia ("through") and orama ("that which is seen"). The etymology suggests using that which is seen: demonstrations, as a key way to develop ideas of degrowth. There may be a tendency sometimes in humanities writing to make elaborate linguistic connections, but the connection does give the term diorama a particular relevance to the objectives of the project itself.
Emergencies and disasters, whether natural or human-made: pandemics, rising seas, storms, drought, unsurvivable heat, financial collapse due to mismanagement; these all make it clear that the world can change suddenly. But they are by nature unpredictable and costly. Building microcosms, dioramas of sudden change, is a safer and less costly way to activate and impact the public imagination.
Degrowth dioramas are ideally unsanctioned by authorities—visibly janky and handbuilt —like the non-commercial Rainbow Gatherings that have spontaneously assembled as temporary communities in natural settings since 1972, organized by the loose international affiliation of individuals seeking to live momentarily outside conventional social structures and in closer harmony with nature (Niman). Participation should be free and open to the curious public, construction agile and temporary.
The feelings degrowth dioramas are intended to provoke are curiosity, optimism, and solidarity, including enough appreciation for decay to sanction the re-purposing of existing spaces and materials. The dioramas themselves should function as a direct demonstration that (local and global) community itself is a much more interesting and rewarding source for cultural and artistic enrichment than the pop culture marketplace.
What, specifically, is to be done with these elements? How can the desirability of a post- growth world be demonstrated and made real, the same way the dread of climate change or economic injustice is made real by natural or human-made disasters and acute crises? How can the sources of pleasure, enrichment, and connection we offer to one another be demonstrated and made as real to us as the culture industry material currently crowding the marketplace with the products of alienation?
Integrating theories of embodiment into a project to create inhabitable art installations (especially on the scale of ‘Renaissance Faire’ festivals, or large outdoor aesthetic environments like the collection of monumental sculptures at the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York), can enhance the experiential and transformative impact of these interventions. Theories of embodiment can be woven into the conceptualization and execution of such projects. Performance—specifically interactive performance—should be incorporated one way or another into degrowth dioramas. Local performance by community-members aligns with the values and goals of degrowth by locating the site of cultural production within a spontaneous manifestation of community. Couched within an inhabitable environment like a microcosmic diorama, it also makes use of the unique power of interactive performance to influence and transform the worldviews of audiences and participants. Imagine something like a solarpunk ren fair with the commitment and ephemeral autonomy of a protest encampment.
In The Transformative Power of Performance, Erika Fischer-Lichte argues that the reciprocal interaction between performers and the audience is crucial. This interaction creates a feedback loop where each influences and transforms the other, leading to a shared experience that can alter perceptions and attitudes. The physical co-presence of actors and spectators in the same space is vital. It emphasizes the immediacy and physicality of the performance, making the experience more intense and potentially transformative.
Fischer-Lichte introduces the idea of interactive/participatory performance as an ‘autopoietic’ “feedback loop,” where the boundaries between performers and audience blur, generating a communal and transformative experience. This dissolution of boundaries can lead to a deeper engagement and potentially a shift in worldview as participants see themselves as part of a collective narrative or experience—questions remain regarding the function of social vs aesthetic influence on individuals who are “transformed” by the process of a feedback loops generated by interactive performances (40). This leads me back to questions about my own transformative experiences in Zuccotti park, which I have characterized as ‘aesthetic,’ but which certainly involved social elements such as witnessing agapē and storge love co-mingling in the crowd—a crowd which I recognized as a body of humanity, gathered there to change the world, that is: as a social movement.
Was my sensual taste moved by the experience of the moment as a politically conscious moment of class and human solidarity, or was my political consciousness moved by my sensual taste for the beauty and balance and propriety I experienced in the moment? Was it the loveliness of the little families in the plaza, or was it my intellectual understanding of the social implications of the actions people were taking? What’s the difference, or, rather, is there any exclusive distinction between these possibilities? Can’t a social process be experienced aesthetically? Can’t an aesthetic process have profound social effects?
Fischer-Lichte also focuses us on the importance of performances that transgress and disrupt norms and expectations. This is why it is better for degrowth dioramas to remain unsanctioned by authorities. By transgressing (rather, transcending) the normative, performances can open new spaces for thinking and provoke audiences to reconsider public values and personal beliefs. People simply behaving like true anarchists (as though driven by secular agapē, that is) will still, always, transgress and interrupt the function of neoliberal norms.
Diana Taylor's work complements Fischer-Lichte by focusing on how performances, especially in non-Western contexts, act as vital methods of knowledge transmission and cultural expression.
Taylor distinguishes between the "archive" of written texts and the "repertoire" of embodied practice. The repertoire, involving performance, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing, etc, transmits knowledge through active practice rather than passive absorption. This can deeply influence personal and collective worldviews of participants—designers, performers, artists, carpenters, technicians, botanists and more—by embedding knowledge in physical and communal experiences rather than isolated intellectual engagement. Inhabiting the worlds of the dioramas they manifest, even temporarily/ephemerally, participants will embody hopes and intentions as well as knowledge, passing all of it to those engaging as audiences or seekers.
Taylor emphasizes the role of performance as a method of transferring cultural memory, identity, and resistance narratives. These performative acts allow audiences to witness and participate in the re-enactment of historical narratives; they could also allow for the initial enactment of new cultural narratives, which can impact worldview by connecting immediate experience to possible futures, the same way historical narratives impact identity by connecting immediate experience to one’s heritage or group political struggles.
The bodily engagement and mimicry involved in performance allow participants to 'embody' roles, scenarios, or emotions that they would not otherwise experience, fostering empathy and a deeper understanding of different perspectives.
In her analysis, Taylor often discusses the role of visibility in performance—how it makes certain narratives, bodies, or truths visible and unavoidable. Though more political, and with a metaphorical and radical element missing from my construction, there are some parallels between this idea of making something previously invisible become unavoidable, and my use of aesthetic demonstration to make something real in an undeniable, ‘epistemological’ way. ‘Making visible’ can be a powerful driver of social and political change, as it confronts audiences with realities that are often ignored or marginalized. Demonstration might inspire social, political, or economic change by presenting audiences with realities as yet unimagined or unimaginable.
Something else I’d apply to conceiving and designing degrowth dioramas, pulled from Adorno’s thought, is the rich and profound concept of ‘non-identity thinking’ (first hinted at in 1951’s Minima Moralia, and later expanded and refined in 1966’s Negative Dialectics) which is a critique of and alternative to the tendency of thought to categorize, simplify, and subsume individual phenomena under general concepts or labels. Identity thinking, according to Adorno, seeks to eliminate the particularities and differences of objects, in order to fit them within pre- existing frameworks and categories.
Non-identity thinking, in contrast, emphasizes the importance of recognizing the unique, particular elements of objects and concepts that cannot be fully captured by universal or generalized categories. It argues for the primacy of the object, its irreducibility to mere concepts, and the idea that no concept can fully encapsulate the entirety of any object. This form of thinking insists on the non-reducible, non-conformable aspects of reality that escape conceptual grasp.
Adorno posits that non-identity thinking is crucial for a critical theory that seeks to resist the reifying effects of capitalist/neoliberal/propertarian society, which often reduces complex individuals and relationships to simplistic categories and quantitative exchange values. By focusing on the discrepancies and contradictions between concepts and reality, non-identity thinking aims to reveal the inadequacies of our conceptual frameworks and to encourage a more reflexive, critical understanding of society.
In practical terms, non-identity thinking involves a constant questioning and revisiting of our assumptions and categories, a vigilance against the tendency to overlook the unique in favor of the general, and an ethical commitment to the particularity of individual experience. This approach avoids some of the epistemological shortcomings of traditional philosophy and acknowledges a moral dimension in formal philosophy's engagement with the world.
While protracted meditation on non-identity thinking and its critical practice is outside the scope of this investigation, we might make vital use of the understanding that an artwork’s autonomy and its tension with reality empower it to challenge the status quo. As an entity that stands on its own rather than as an imitation, asserting its difference from the empirical world, a work of art can transcend and overwhelm the material phenomena it depicts or critiques.
Consider for example a sculpture of a shattered mirror. This sculpture would be a work of art to the extent that it is not an actual shattered mirror. Here, the artwork transcends its materiality—instead of merely representing reality, it disrupts and challenges the viewer's perception and expectations. The shattered pieces, rather than simply being broken glass, evoke themes of fragmentation, perception, or perhaps the brokenness of postmodern life.
Applying Adorno’s notions of art’s critical, negating function against society’s status quo to the demonstration of post-degrowth physical and social environments is an exciting prospect. This approach challenges degrowth advocates to move beyond their current comfortable stasis. Typically, their focus has been on creating functional, long-term utopian communities, which sometimes possess an off-putting aesthetic of 'cultiness', or on 'hand-built,' off-grid homestead projects that usually serve the independently wealthy. Such projects often consume wilderness areas to maintain a bourgeois sense of privacy, rather than repurpose urban or already developed spaces. Additionally, employing Adorno’s framework allows for the development of a more elaborate symbolic vocabulary in degrowth dioramas, enhancing their potential to communicate and inspire.
Focusing excessively on critiquing the existing perpetual growth model may shift the project from a forward-looking solarpunk ethos toward a more cyberpunk stance marked by pessimism. However, while maintaining a commitment to presenting positive, hopeful aesthetic images and experiences, the use of non-identity thinking can lead to the creation of richly particular works. Works with the potential to subvert even some of our self-imposed categories —most notably, perhaps, the categories of plausibility and practicality. Remaining critical of these categories can prevent the premature stifling of other creative aspects of the project.
So what might these environments look like? A diorama could be installed within a substantial indoor environment like a shuttered factory, or outdoors on a large enough vacant lot. The configuration of rooms or areas might range from highly detailed to broadly aspirational, depending on the project's resources and needs. Limited funding might come from various ethical sources, but ideally no money would be involved in any way. It's important to stay alert to the possibility of excluding people who can't afford to do things like this for free; this means real solidarity is absolutely necessary. Participation in projects like degrowth dioramas might only result from inspiration amounting to a vocational calling.
Creating multimedia living dioramas will demand a large and diverse collaboration. We might start with some simple images and concepts.
Scene 1: Returning (to) the Garden
Upon entering the diorama, participants pass through an archway adorned with living vines and solar-powered fairy lights (made from reused tech), leading into a bustling communal space. This area features a variety of funky greenhouses made from upcycled materials like old windows and repurposed plastic. Each greenhouse hosts workshops on different aspects of permaculture and urban agriculture, teaching participants how to cultivate food even in limited spaces. The air is rich with the scent of fresh herbs and the sound of a nearby water-recycling fountain, which uses rainwater collected from greenhouse roofs.
Adjacent to the greenhouses, there’s a free kitchen where volunteers serve meals prepared from locally grown ingredients. The kitchen not only provides free food but also demonstrates cooking techniques that maximize nutritional value while minimizing waste. Tables are communal, encouraging diners to share stories and ideas.
Scene 2: The Commons: Reuse and Engage
Further into the diorama, the space opens into an open area known as "The Commons," characterized by a pile of musical instruments—guitars, drums, flutes—all available for anyone to use. Impromptu jam sessions erupt as newcomers and regulars, visitors and residents, pick up instruments and begin to play together, creating a lively, collaborative atmosphere that breaks down barriers and encourages free expression.
Surrounding The Commons are several ad hoc structures resembling a blend of playground and public square. These include seating areas made from repurposed materials, swings hanging from sturdy frames of bamboo, and interactive art installations that use solar panels and wind elements to power dynamic light displays. Each piece is designed to be both functional and educational, demonstrating how renewable energy can be integrated into everyday life.
Scene 3: Backwoods Cybernetics
As participants wander further, they encounter a zone dedicated to showcasing sustainable technologies in action. Here, people can interact with installations like a bicycle-powered washing machine, a DIY solar dehydrator, and a small-scale bio-digester turning kitchen scraps into biogas. Workshops are regularly held to teach attendees how to build and maintain these systems in their own communities.
This part of the diorama also houses a tool library where participants can borrow tools and receive guidance on repairing items rather than replacing them. Here, the ethos of reuse and repair, critical components of a degrowth lifestyle, are embodied.
Throughout the diorama, powered by sun or wind or human motion, simple, elegant, but technologically advanced information panels provide context about each installation's relevance to degrowth and solarpunk principles. Inhabitants, identifiable by colorful, patchwork garments made from recycled fabrics, roam the area, ready to engage with anyone. In addition to presenting sustainable practices in use, the diorama also functions as an interactive, participatory festival celebrating the potential for a community-driven, ecologically balanced future.
Each element of the diorama—from the greenhouses to the creative play installations— serves to demonstrate that a sustainable, enriching lifestyle is not only possible but also preferable. Participants leave with a vision of what could be and with some practical knowledge and inspiration to implement that vision in their own communities.
Rooms or spaces within the diorama could also be sites where the performative and transformative aspects of embodiment and aesthetics could further enrich the experience:
In a softly lit corner, a ritual space, an archive of movements, provides participants with a chance to explore embodied memory and performance. This area features a stage where community members perform a series of movements that tell the story of the local environment’s transformations. Each movement phrase might represent a different aspect of local ecology from plant cycles to wind patterns. Visitors are encouraged to learn or adapt the movements and the stories they represent, receiving, producing, and embodying knowledge which they may then pass on to others, developing a repertoire as a way of transmitting social knowledge and memory.
There could also be more agile dioramas, designed to travel like a circus, carnival, or troupe of actors; a caravan of traveling artists and technologists who embody and promote sustainable living through performance, art, and innovative technology. This mobile community, with a vocational calling to bring the principles of degrowth and solarpunk aesthetics out on the road, would follow nomadic lifeways and demonstrate the beauty and utility of sustainable practices to the various communities they visit.
The caravan, composed of retrofitted vehicles and bicycles, could be powered by renewable energy sources such as solar panels and small wind turbines. Each vehicle a functional piece of art, decorated with reclaimed materials and solarpunk motifs, serving both as living spaces and mobile performance stages or workshops.
The caravan would bring workshops on building and maintaining small-scale renewable energy systems to places without easy access to such knowledge. Interested participants could learn how to construct solar heaters or DIY wind/hydro turbines from upcycled materials, bringing the practical application of renewable technologies to everyday life.
Along with creative energy systems, caravan vehicles could include integrated planting systems, demonstrating vertical gardening and permaculture techniques. Workshops on sustainable agriculture practices and seed swapping would encourage local communities to start their own gardens, supplementing food security while improving ecological awareness.
Utilizing the exterior spaces of the vehicles and open spaces at stops, the caravan might present performances that blend music, dance, and theater. These performances could focus on themes of ecological sustainability, community, and futuristic narratives inspired by solarpunk visions, giving audiences new myths to dwell on.
Daily routines of the caravan would be open for observation. Visitors will see how the community manages waste, produces food, and conserves water, providing a transparent look at sustainable living in a compact, mobile setup.
By traveling and interacting with various communities, such a caravan would act as a dynamic extension of the diorama concept, making the principles of sustainable and communal living accessible and attractive. This kind of project could show the feasibility of an eco-friendly nomadic lifestyle to curiosity seekers, but it would also nurture solidarity among networks of like-minded individuals and communities, strengthening the broader movement towards sustainability and creative resilience.
In contrast to the involuntary upheavals caused by crises like pandemics and global recessions, which thrust people into alternate modes of living often characterized by uncertainty and hardship, voluntary demonstrations like our proposed dioramas and caravans are deliberately crafted environments. These proposed interventions are not designed in reaction to external pressures but as proactive, creative expressions of possible futures. By embodying the principles of degrowth through intentional community building, sustainable living, and a focus on interpersonal and artistic enrichment, these dioramas offer an optimistic glimpse (rather than a terrifying revelation) into a world that prioritizes ecological balance and human connection over consumerist drives. Such voluntary, constructive demonstrations would be an effective method for nurturing degrowth imaginaries, presenting a transformed carousel—no less exciting than it was before, but, rather, relieved of the burden of its relentless yet stationary motion, and now full of people talking and dancing, become the garden of humanity promised by hope.
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Appendices
Appendix A: A Solarpunk Manifesto
This appendix includes the full text of A Solarpunk Manifesto, originally published circa 2010 and free to reproduce under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. It is included here for its central relevance to part one, Solarpunk: Desire Over Dread.
A Solarpunk Manifesto 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?” The aesthetics of solarpunk merge the practical with the beautiful, the well-designed with the green and lush, the bright and colorful with the earthy and solid. 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. Solutions to thrive without fossil fuels, to equitably manage real scarcity and share in abundance instead of supporting false scarcity and false abundance, to be kinder to each other and to the planet we share. Solarpunk is at once a vision of the future, a thoughtful provocation, a way of living and a set of achievable proposals to get there.
1. We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.
2. We are solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.
3. At its core, Solarpunk is a vision of a future that embodies the best of what humanity can achieve: a post-scarcity, post-hierarchy, post-capitalistic world where humanity sees itself as part of nature and clean energy replaces fossil fuels.
4. 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.
5. Solarpunk is a movement as much as it is a genre: it is not just about the stories, it is also about how we can get there.
6. Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk.
Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution.
7. Solarpunk provides a valuable new perspective, a paradigm and a vocabulary through which to describe one possible future. Instead of embracing retrofuturism, solarpunk looks completely to the future. Not an alternative future, but a possible future.
8. Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.
9. Solarpunk emphasizes environmental sustainability and social justice.
10.Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and also for the generations that follow us.
11.Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have.
Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.
12.Solarpunk recognizes the historical influence politics and science fiction have had on each other.
13.Solarpunk recognizes science fiction as not just entertainment but as a form of activism.
14.Solarpunk wants to counter the scenarios of a dying earth, an insuperable gap between rich and poor, and a society controlled by corporations. Not in hundreds of years, but within reach.
15.Solarpunk is about youth maker culture, local solutions, local energy grids, ways of creating autonomous functioning systems. It is about loving the world.
16.Solarpunk culture includes all cultures, religions, abilities, sexes, genders and sexual identities.
17.Solarpunk is the idea of humanity achieving a social evolution that embraces not just mere tolerance, but a more expansive compassion and acceptance.
18.The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it is a mash-up of the following:
1. 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
2. Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
3. Appropriate technology
4. Art Nouveau
5. Hayao Miyazaki
6. Jugaad-style innovation from the non-Western world
7. High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs
19.Solarpunk is set in a future built according to principles of New Urbanism or New Pedestrianism and environmental sustainability.
20.Solarpunk envisions a built environment creatively adapted for solar gain, amongst other things, using different technologies. The objective is to promote self sufficiency and living within natural limits.
21.In Solarpunk we’ve pulled back just in time to stop the slow destruction of our planet.
We’ve learned to use science wisely, for the betterment of our life conditions as part of our planet. We’re no longer overlords. We’re caretakers. We’re gardeners.
22.Solarpunk:
1. is diverse
2. has room for spirituality and science to coexist
3. is beautiful
4. can happen. Now The Solarpunk Community
Appendix B: Adbusters Call to Occupy Wall Street
This appendix includes the full text of the email initially calling for the “Occupy Wall Street” encampment protest at Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, as originally published to the Adbusters blog and currently archived by Webcitation.org. Additionally, following the email is a reproduction of the original centerfold poster published in Adbusters #97: Post Anarchism urging readers to bring a tent to the financial district on September 17, 2011. These are included here for their relevance to part three, Occupy Wall Street: Demonstrated to the Senses.
Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there, A worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:
"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model
was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who
led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we
are one big swarm of people."
— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University
Barcelona, Spain The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen. The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America. On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices. Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?
The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it. This demand seems to capture the current national mood because cleaning up corruption in Washington is something all Americans, right and left, yearn for and can stand behind. If we hang in there, 20,000-strong, week after week against every police and National Guard effort to expel us from Wall Street, it would be impossible for Obama to ignore us. Our government would be forced to choose publicly between the will of the people and the lucre of the corporations. This could be the beginning of a whole new social dynamic in America, a step beyond the Tea Party movement, where, instead of being caught helpless by the current power structure, we the people start getting what we want whether it be the dismantling of half the 1,000 military bases America has around the world to the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act or a three strikes and you're out law for corporate criminals. Beginning from one simple demand – a presidential commission to separate money from politics – we start setting the agenda for a new America. Post a comment and help each other zero in on what our one demand will be. And then let's screw up our courage, pack our tents and head to Wall Street with a vengeance September 17. for the wild, Culture Jammers HQ
