The human Graham Harman travels the surface of the earth, inspired by encounters with other cosmopolitan intellectuals to create parables to retell and occasionally incrementally develop the insights of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. The conceit of cosmopolitan humans talking to other cosmopolitan humans--particularly the embarrassing conversation with the justly named love-object, Olympia (meant to be an automaton?)--fails the weirdness of speculative realism, while doing nothing to numb my sense of the political and ethical vacuity of at least Harman's branch of OOO. For starters, look at this: "I made the quarter-hour walk to Marina Beach, briefly saddened by memories of those who had perished there in the great tsunami." Oh. Boo. Hoo. Perished, thinks the briefly saddened liberal flâneur. Perished.

If I want to read about fabulous people having fabulous times, I'll stick to in-flight magazines.

If I want references to "purely Asian phenomen[a]"...well, I can't see myself wanting this. I'll just pass.

If I want to read humanist philosophy, I'll seek it out. I don't want to see my OOO gummed up with anything like this: "And given longstanding tradition that ghosts are generated by sudden or violent deaths, no one could doubt that Hiroshima might be enveloped in a haze of phantoms, however happy the city may be today." I have a friend who believes in ghosts, but only, for some reason, human ghosts. Whatever this person's faith, this prejudice is humanism. If we have ghosts, actual ghosts, why shouldn't the ghosts be the ghosts of chickens, trilobites, ferns, viruses, dust? Why should a human catastrophe be extended a superstition (or a hope of persistence) and not anything else? Why doesn't Harman allow himself to go further?

Remember too that Plato at least had the good sense to give his victories to Socrates. No matter who he talks to, no matter what he looks at, Mary Sue Harman always comes out on top.

Instead of sticking to humans thinking about objects, instead of sticking to the surface of the earth, Harman might have taken a page from Calvino or perhaps from some of the weirder medieval texts. He might have turned his attention to his own body (and mind).

As compared to other Harman I've read, Circus Philosophicus: inefficient and not useless. He continues his assault on humanist epistemological loneliness, preserves real objects from relations, finds sentience in every relation, argues that causation is always direct, and further describes his version of the 'fourfold' character of objects. Very good. If this were all CP had, I'd be fine with it; but if this were all it had, CP wouldn't have needed to exist, because all of this is elsewhere in Harman's ouevre.

Highlights:
"We cannot use physical duration as a standard of what is real and what is accidental."
AGAINST 'POTENTIAL'
"twentieth-century theories invoke potentiality in order to shut substance out of relations, since if the hammer is defined by its totality of relations, to speak of its unactualized future states as “potentials” frees us from having to determine where these potentials are located, thereby denying any actuality outside of explicit current relations."
"To define a thing as potential is to view it solely from the outside, in terms of the effects it might one day have on other things, and this avoids the question under dispute."

"Whatever Leibniz’s reputation for personal cheerfulness, his vision of trillions of entities cut off one from one another, each lodged in a private vacuum accessible only to God, could inspire nothing but horror."

"The Empiricists were misled to hold that we encounter individual qualities and then link them together through the gullible myth of an underlying thing. Instead, Husserl and his heirs were more on the mark in saying that we first confront the calliope as a whole, so that the eerie underlying style of the object imbues all of the isolated songs and notes that emanate from it."

"Just as the calliope was independent of the specific notes it played at each moment, and separate as well from its shifting effects on me and the sixty or seventy other listeners on the beach, so too it achieved an autonomous life over and above its component pieces."

"The calliope was no less unified than the simplest hydrogen atom, yet this fact did not entail an absence of tinier components."

"“We have seen that causation is vicarious. Like oil rigs reducing all other entities to fuel, each object reduces every other to a hazy caricature of its deeper plenitude. But now I want to show why causation must also be asymmetrical."

"Real objects, no less than sensual ones, are torn between their unified reality and their plurality of specific traits. They are not empty poles of unity, but have distinct qualities without being mere bundles. And thus we have the fourth tension in things."
TIME AND SPACE
"This tension in which a unified thing of the senses emits a sandstorm of shifting facades is what we mean by time. The time we experience involves precisely this landscape of constantly swirling accidents atop some minimally enduring core: the sensual objects."
"space is the name for the fact that things fail to be in direct contact without being outside all contact entirely."
ON INTERNET TROLLS
"My thesis was that the troll is the new successor to past figures of anti-philosophy: the sophist, the pedant, and the Inquisitor, among others. I argued that the troll is the degenerate form of the critic, untethered from any commitment of his own, and unleashed on the world to doubt and critique whatever one might doubt and critique rather than what truly deserves refutation."

"panpsychism holds that everything perceives as soon as it exists. I counter that everything perceives only insofar as it relates."

"The encounter between zebra and fire is not just two things, but also one: the experience as a whole. And when something is one, it instantly acquires the status of 'object.'"

"While the fashionable doctrine today is that things are real only by virtue of having effects, in fact the reverse is true: they can have effects only because they are real."

"free will does not exist for objects, but only for pieces of those objects."

"by being withdrawn from the world as sleeping objects, we are unfree rather than free; being just what we are, we are incapable of anything else. Yet in a sense we are always inside the world through the fact that we are made of pieces— and only //therefore //are we free, with our components doing the work of liberty on our behalf. For there is an excess in our pieces beyond what is needed to create us, and this excess allows new and unexpected things to happen." ( )