How much grimdark can one hopepunk make?
A problem with “realism”: Salvagepunk and hopepunk share an antipathy for many of the so-called “realisms” that have come to dominate our culture. It is important here to note that our relationship to cultural artifacts, and their political meaning, is one that shifts over time. As Alexandra Rowland, who coined the term “hopepunk” notes, “when we’re in a period of more stability, where things are more okay, then the literature and the stories we tell remind us that things are not okay… When the society around us is crumbling, when it seems like climate change is very real and the apocalypse is coming any day now… the response is to tell stories that go against what is currently happening.” The punk response to the faux utopia of the 1980s was to throw shit in its face. The punk response to the current culture must be different, because having shit thrown in our faces is now an everyday occurrence.
Origins of hopepunk: Hopepunk is now a minor craze in speculative fiction circles and on the margins of the internet. The BBC has put down 150,000 pounds for a new hopepunk podcast. As the story goes, this all started when the author Alexandra Rowland posted on her Tumblr in July, 2017, “The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk. Pass it on.” As interest quickly grew, Rowland, and others, set out to elaborate on the meaning of term. Rowland situated hopepunk in opposition to grimdark (a narrative and aesthetic approach to speculative fiction that emphasizes darkness, the negative aspects of “human nature,” dystopia, etc.) and noblebright (the more classical tradition in which the noble hero overcomes evil because they are, in an essentialist fashion, noble). Crudely, hopepunk is described in existentialist terms. The heroes fight, often in grim circumstances, because there is nothing else to do if one wants to retain humanity.
“Compassion and empathy are weapons in the eternal fight between good and evil within the human heart, Miles Schneiderman argues, “Hopepunk acknowledges that the fight will never be won, but insists on fighting anyway, because, as Rowland wrote, “the fight itself is the point.”
There is much to criticize here – the abstraction of human nature and an ultimately defeatist approach to social movements. However, it is important to note two things. Firstly, Rowland has been involved in a real cultural struggle. In 2015 a right-wing campaign calling itself “Sad Puppies” and “Rabid Puppies” hijacked the nomination process for the Hugo Awards. Rowland was part of the push back against the far-right. Secondly, it is important to note (as above), while hopepunk must be criticized, its starting point, the problem with so-called contemporary “realism” and “grimdark” is largely valid.
Salvage vs. hope: Salvagepunk roots the possibility of “hope” in making manifest, in our art and creative narratives, the class and social relations of capitalism. We do this by going through the debris, stories, and artifacts of society and reconstituting them in a way that highlights the relationship of the individual to the social. Salvagepunk is rooted in the material. Hopepunk, by contrast, is based on an abstract philosophical idealism. As one writer put it, “the idea of choosing hope becomes both an existential act that affirms your humanity, and a form of resistance against cynical worldviews that dismiss hope as a powerful force for change.”
In this formulation, hope is an abstraction, a thing to pick up and put down, a “choice” to be made by a seemingly autonomous individual. For the socialist hope lies not in abstract choices but in the material interests of the exploited and oppressed. Salvagepunk is a critical irrealism that identifies with these material interests and their actualization through struggle. Hopepunk, while rightly condemning the cynicism of what we call capitalist realism, and rightly emphasizing struggle, by its abstraction from the material, loses its critical thread.
Losing the critical thread: While Rowland’s conception of hopepunk is somewhat more nuanced and complex than her imitators, the propagation of the idea has, unintentionally or intentionally, underlined its weaknesses. The sheer volume of things described as hopepunk are so vast and varied as to be meaningless. In that vastness, #hope becomes, as it was in the 2008 presidential campaign, an empty signifier. Take this exposition of hopepunk by Roberta Florito: “A literary movement coined on Tumblr in 2017, Hopepunk is a genre of creative works that arose from a societal atmosphere of resistance against the current authority or regime. Think #MeToo and #TimesUp movements, #BlackLivesMatter, the March for Our Lives… even donating toilet paper to national parks during the government shutdown.”
The attenuation of criticality should be clear here… Fighting generations of sexual harassment, assault, rape and abuse? Fighting systematic racist police terror? Taking a shit on Mount Charleston? It is all the same. #hope.
Don’t forget to wipe, it’s political.
Florito describes hopepunk as “anything that depicts unfailing optimism in the face of impending doom” citing Parks and Recreation as an example. Putting aside what the “impending doom” of Parks and Recreation was exactly, this show was a fairly clear, occasionally humorous, manifestation of traditional liberal bourgeois feminist thought. There was nothing particularly oppositional about it.
This image, from a hopepunk blog, illustrates the problem with the idea as an oppositional cultural framework.
If everything is hopepunk (almost) then what’s the point of hopepunk? As Aja Romano notes (in the Vox article that most popularized hopepunk), “If you’re thinking, ‘Okay, but if hopepunk is about fighting back against an oppressive force, wouldn’t that just make just about everything hopepunk?’ then you’re not alone! The broad strokes of Rowland’s definition mean that a lot of things can feel hopepunk, just as long as they contain a character who’s resisting something.”
Here is a partial list of shows, books, films, music, that have been called, by various commentators, “hopepunk”:
The Handmaid’s Tale, Parks and Recreation, Pacific Rim, Lord of the Rings, Independence Day, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Angels in America, Discworld (Terry Pratchett), The Expanse (James S.A. Corey), Watership Down (Richard Adams), the music of Billy Bragg, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Star Trek, Supergirl, The Flash, The Good Place, The Great British Bake Off, Queer Eye, Santa Clarita Diet, Rouge One, Children of Men…
The aesthetic and political chaos of the cited examples should be clear. Rogue One politically re-roots the politically contradictory Star Wars metanarrative in a story of sacrifice against a specific social evil; fascism. It makes this clear both in its narrative and the signification of visual and formal elements. Independence Day is a ridiculous monument to Hollywood explosions designed to sublate human survival with banal American patriotism. Lord of the Rings is the model of speculative world-building, but its core narrative, racially, socially, is often quite reactionary. Meanwhile, Star Trek can be considered very utopian and hopeful but there is nothing punk about it whatsoever. Indeed, some of the better material cited, like the film Children of Men, is better described as salvagepunk.
Hopepunk, class, politics: Part of the problem of hopepunk is its class blindness. This is related to its philosophical idealism. Rowland argues, “All throughout history you find examples of people standing up to terrifying regimes and holding the line against them, and surviving against all odds just by force of sheer, bloody-minded obstinacy.”
The problem, of course, is that this is already daily life for most working-class people, most people of color, most immigrants, most gender non-conforming folks. An appeal to eternal struggle, is, by definition, a privileged middle-class appeal. The working-class dream is abolishing the condition of “surviving against all odds.” As another commentator writes, “The battle to make the world a better place is always a constant in the eyes of hopepunk.” But, a truly oppositional art cannot tell already struggling workers that the best on offer is eternal never-ending-hardship.
Alexandra Rowland and Eduard Bernstein
The partisans of hopepunk argue that “the fight itself is the point.” In this way hopepunk is an irrealist echo of Eduard Bernstein’s “evolutionary socialism,” arguing, against socialist revolution, the goal is nothing, “the movement is everything.” But, in fairness to Bernstein, at least his “movement is everything” included universal health care, growing trade unions, widespread mutual-aid, and working-class cultural and sports facilities.
In a sometimes-problematic post criticizing hopepunk, an author named “bettertowns” writes of Rowland, “There is something wrong, I think, with her curious silence regarding exactly what we should be fighting for, and how.”
Perhaps thinking of the false hope promised by the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, bettertowns writes
“It seems to be that the neoliberal capitalist machine in the United States has spent a lot of time and money on its attempts to brainwash us into voting for politicians based on personality, identity, and party affiliation rather that things like ‘actual policy positions’ and ‘whether they will enact any positive and concrete changes.’ Politics has become about what certain election results symbolize more than what they literally mean. To me, hopepunk is ultimately an extension of that machine rather than a divergence from it, because it traffics in the same currency.”
It is this abstraction that allows hopepunk to be easily manipulated. “The fact that hopepunk isn’t associated with any potentially controversial calls for action is what makes it so vulnerable to manipulation and utilization as a product,” bettertowns writes.
Kindness for who(m)? Rowland and other promoters of hopepunk emphasize, in contrast to the meanness of contemporary life, the importance of kindness. We, of course, are also opposed to the crude meanness of contemporary life. Nor are we against kindness in narratives and “real life.” We are not against aesthetic strategies that challenge normative assumptions by employing the “soft” to radical ends. However, kindness, like hope, is an abstraction. This abstraction from the actual social relationships of race, class, gender, nation, is not an accident but central to the logic of the hopepunk. As Rowland argues, “Hopepunk says that people have… an essential core of being capable of malice, but we also contain a huge capacity for goodness and for caring about each other and for rebuilding our communities in intentional and positive ways.”
“Hopepunk is about fighting for a better future,” Rowland continues, “and taking action and doing radical kindness”
Rowland frequently cites Gandhi, along with Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., John Lennon, and Robin Hood, as a model for her idea of hopepunk. But, just as in the cited cultural and narrative examples of hopepunk, Rowland’s examples of (mostly) real people are highly mixed in terms of their actual political content. The mythological Gandhi may represent Rowland’s idealized concept of hopepunk. The actual Gandhi, however, was a racist who actively held back the struggles of working-class and lower caste Indians struggling against the British Raj.
This begs the question, kindness to who? When? How? Rowland gives good examples of what could be called militant kindness, standing up to bigots, protesting ICE, and so on. As a generalized rubric for political action, however, kindness is not particularly useful. Being kind to the class enemy may very likely enable oppression. Being kind to fellow workers often enables solidarity. Moreover, at the core of Rowland’s conception of hopepunk is a liberal circumspection to revolutionary change. She argues:
“[Utopia is] something that you can achieve for five moments or an hour, but utopia as it’s classically understood requires humans to give up being fully human. It requires us to give up being selfish and greedy, and that’s something that I think we can choose to do consciously, but it is baked into our bones and we’re never going to fully escape it.”
Greed and selfishness are not “baked into the bones” of the human-species. In fact, there is ample evidence to show that our evolution depended on egalitarianism and cooperation, and that we lived in that state for hundreds of thousands of years before dividing into social classes.
Optimism vs. pessimism: “The essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going. ‘The glass is half empty.’ Hopepunk says, ‘No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.’” – Alexandra Rowland.
Whether the glass is half-full or half-empty is not the most relevant question. The most relevant question is: who owns the glass?
Both optimism and pessimism are internalizations of bourgeois time. Unable to control the past or future, we are thrown backwards and forwards, where progress meets regress. When the majority of the human race answers (in a radical fashion) the question “who owns the glass?” optimism and pessimism will cease to be so important; because the majority will cease to be passive in the face of history.
This is not to say the gothic-futurist way in which the exploited and oppressed experience time is unimportant. It is central to how working-class subjects experience history under capitalism. Nor is it to say the arguments of radical pessimism against crude “Marxist” optimism are not valid. It is to say that “picking” between optimism or pessimism offers, in the end, some sort of capitulation to capital.
“Is hope here yet?” (Beckett’s Waiting for Godot)
Notes on hope, the narrative subject, and socialism: Hope for genuine emancipation, from a revolutionary Marxist perspective, comes from the reconciliation of individual human subjectivity with class-consciousness. In other words, hope comes from the existential condition of the worker aligning with the collective social reality, conditions, and interests of the class. When you stop being only you and become you+.
This occurs in a contradictory and overdetermined manner in the individual, crystalizing in a feedback between the deformed subjectivity of the exploited and oppressed subject, deformed by capitalism, racism, sexism, and so on, as well as crystalizing in the perception of social relationships. For example, a small pain reminding you of your mortality moments after being chewed out by your boss. This happens in dozens of ways every day, big and small, for every worker. This process is accelerated by crisis (war, economic crisis, immiseration).
It is in this process that the fascists steal our working-class siblings from us and recruit them. Of course the majority of fascists are middle-class. But the working-class recruits they do have are often recruited in the gap between individual pain and collective understanding. The individual has recognized their pain, recognized that it is in large part alien to themselves, but they have only glimpsed a fragment of the true social structure. They are provided a fool’s socialism, of one kind or the other, because we failed to provide the real thing. They adopt a false you+.
At Locust Review is our goal to make artwork, in part, that facilitates the socialist recognition of self with other, without sacrificing either side of its positive development. 1) Without sacrificing the proletarian’s interior world, their existential uniqueness and psychological reality; 2) And seeing it through, and only fully actualized in, collective class consciousness.
This is where salvagepunk clearly diverges from hopepunk. It is not within the invocation of a universal humanity that hope lies, but in the realization that there can be no universal humanity under prevailing social relations, and that those relations are changeable. In terms of art and narrative it is in the salvaging, remixing, and organizing of signs, stories, images, objects, in an irrealist manner. By this we attempt to re-emphasize the truth of the social relations, including the relative weakness of the ruling-class (concealed or explained away by capitalist realism).
Videos expose police racism but also conceal police weakness.
A purpose of socialist critical irrealism: A key point of alterity in critical irrealism – in speculative and absurd world-building and practice – is not to “forget” a world of crises with appeals to humanity and hope, or to counterpose good and evil in a childish morality tale. The point is to create estrangement, in the Brechtian sense, to create critical distance. This is done by putting the interior life first (where the worker, as an individual, has the MOST control) and using it as a means to dissect / attack / understand / feel the social life (where the worker, as an individual, has the LEAST control).
Neoliberal capitalist realism has made the images and stories of its barbarism part of its logic of apologetics and discipline. The power of these images conceal the reality of class relations by emphasizing a decontextualized and partial truth. The viral images of police violence, on the one hand, expose a truth. But that truth is now largely known. The viral images of police violence also conceal that the police are the real minority, outnumbered by the individual groups they oppress, and outnumbered greatly by the working-class as a whole. They conceal the weakness of the police under conditions of class consciousness.
It is necessary to create distance from those images and narratives of barbarism, so the proletarian viewer, reader, art patron, can reflect on social relationships outside the cultural matrix of apologetics and discipline. Here’s a world where a robot starts the human working-class revolution. Here’s a world in which our broken tools can heal us; but where it takes riots to keep them. Here’s a world in which the class remembers.
Whistle in the wasteland: The above may seem to have some superficial similarity with hopepunk. But our goal is not to create a vague sense of hope, but rather resituate and valorize working-class subjectivity (the poetry and genius of working-class lives) in relationship to actually existing social relationships (labor vs. capital) with an irrealist lens. Hopepunk, in its binary against grimdark, against hopelessness, against a superficial understanding of realism, is generally abstracted from social relationships. But the artifacts of hopepunk live in this world and not some fantasy world; a world in which the sky itself might fall. In this way hopepunk risks becoming a further apologetics; a whistling in the wasteland.
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