Climate change, chaosmosis, and the ecosophic object in Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer

Abstract

At the end of Expressionism in philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze promulgates a new materialism as a form of expressionism. What Deleuze means by this new materialism has a strong bearing on the most recent literary trend under the rubric of speculative realism, meaning that there is a possibility to think about objects without having recourse to human consciousness. Albeit divergent in practices, they share one thing: they aim at going beyond this “human access” to embrace a democracy of objects which are vibrant, agential, and, perhaps, mind-independent. In this analysis of Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer, I follow Guattari’s definitions of an ecosophic object characterized by (1) material, energetic and semiotic Fluxes, (2) concrete and abstract machinic Phylums, (3) virtual Universes of values, and (4) finite existential Territories. From this global warming narrative, such concepts as the crisis of reason, end-time apocalypticism, and the epistemo-ontological binaries between mind and matter, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and personal and collective will be discussed in the light of an object-oriented chaosmosis. In this way, the Guattarian ecosophic object, its affect and processual reality is to be looked at as an anecdote to the political economy of capitalism as represented by the Big Blue Machine.