Harman claims that the bedrock of OOO, and indeed of all philosophy, is aesthetic. That’s why a book directly addressing issues of art and art criticism is so fundamental to the OOO project. As he writes in a preliminary note in Art and Objects, what Harman means by aesthetics is “namely, the study of the surprisingly loose relationship between objects and their own qualities.… By art I mean the construction of entities or situations reliably equipped to produce beauty, meaning an explicit tension between hidden real objects and their palpable sensual qualities.”
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This tension arises from the fundamental autonomy of objects. I’m reminded of the Simone Weil quote about an ugly girl looking in the mirror and realizing instantly that she’s more than she sees. Or the Pound quote that nothing suggests itself. Objects, according to OOO, are always “absent,” and we approach them only obliquely and with the knowledge of the tension that arises between them and their qualities. So what Harman’s latest book is, in fact, is a premodern (his phrase, via Bruno Latour) reclamation of aesthetic formalism. It’s an argument that art exists and engages in relationships with other objects, but that what makes those relationships possible is the fundamental autonomy of the art itself.

Retired Army officer and Boston University history professor Andrew Bacevich has a dual identity. Most obviously, he’s a semirenowned writer who commands bipartisan respect for speaking frank truths to an aloof political establishment. He critiques the military without slandering it, and he questions the wisdom of liberal culture without demeaning anyone. This generosity of spirit has given Bacevich access to media outlets across the ideological spectrum. He’s written for both the New Republic and the American Conservative. He’s also a small-c conservative Catholic whose name has been mentioned as a potential secretary of defense nominee in a Bernie Sanders administration, a suggestion Bacevich himself humbly brushed off with, “I doubt that. ... I’m 72 and have other things on my plate.”
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But there’s another aspect to Bacevich’s public persona: He is our most insightful commentator on the American character. Past books, such as The New American Militarism and America’s War for the Greater Middle East, are simultaneously policy critiques and dissections of the failures of American culture more broadly. In this sense, Bacevich has more in common with the historian and critic Christopher Lasch than with other military commentators; his ambitions are merely concealed behind the approachability of his subject matter. And his latest book, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, is no exception.

​This emerging world is far removed from the democratic capitalism that dominated the era after World War II. Rather than encouraging and accommodating families, today’s oligarchs promote a largely childless college campus environment, where they even pay female workers to freeze their eggs. Traditionally companies liked employees with families. Not so much in the brave new tech world, which demands long hours and little time off for such things as raising children.
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As for the rest of the population, the prospects are even bleaker. In the tech hub of San Francisco, the middle-class family is almost extinct. The city has lost thirty-one thousand home-owning families over the past decade. It leads the state in economic inequality. The evidence of massive inequality, pervasive homelessness, and social dysfunction fills the streets.
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Silicon Valley, located in the suburbs south of the city, has also become profoundly less egalitarian. It is increasingly divided between an entrenched ultra-wealthy class and a dependent poor class, work­ing largely in the service industries. By 2015, some seventy-six thou­sand millionaires and billionaires called Santa Clara and San Mateo coun­ties home, while many in the area struggle to feed their families and pay their bills each month. Nearly 30 percent of Silicon Valley’s residents rely on public or private assistance.

Wired magazine’s Antonio García Martínez describes the contemporary Valley as “feudalism with better marketing.” In Martínez’s view, a plutocratic elite of venture capitalists and company founders sit above the still-affluent cadre of skilled professionals—well paid, but living only ordinary middle-class lives, given taxes and high pri­ces. Below them lies a vast population of gig workers, whom Martínez compares with sharecroppers in the South. And at the very bottom lies an untouchable class of homeless, those addicted to drugs, and criminals.

Martínez describes a society that, as in the Middle Ages, is “highly stratified, with little social mobility.” High prices make it all but impossible for anyone except the very affluent to own their homes. Workers in the gig economy, much less the “untouchables,” have little chance to improve their lot but struggle to barely pay their rent, or are forced to sleep in their cars, on friend’s couches, or commute long distances from the outlying periphery.

I know Sam Kriss was cancelled or whatever, but this is fantastic: 

"The most advanced digital technologies are used to keep culture in a permanent stasis.

​It’s the end of anything resembling dignity. Look how Star Wars wheels out dead Carrie Fisher for one last sappy CGI-assisted waltz. She deserved better, but there’s no hope now. They’ll resurrect you, spin you backwards through time; they’ll crap in and through your mouth. You can live forever, but the price is a total passivity. Living forever is so much like being dead."

Ben Sixsmith on M.H.  in The Agonist: 

​Atomised and Submission were bricks hurled through the windows of the cultural establishment: damaging its optimistic pieties about the promise of the sexual revolution, mass immigration, and technological progress. Now, though, Houellebecq is not outside throwing bricks through the windows but inside throwing food at the walls. He has been assimilated into the establishment: a Prix Goncourt winner and a recipient of Légion d’honneur. Why has this anti-modern writer been so heartily embraced by the modern world? Perhaps it is because the depths of his pessimism make him perversely unthreatening. Houllebecq is not an angry man in search of change but a cynical man who revels in mischief and mockery. This has been to his advantage artistically as he has maintained his sharp sense of ironic observation. Here, though, it seems to have made him listless. How many times can you tell the same jokes, regardless of their power, without them growing weak? Atomised, Platform and Submission were no less grim but had a freshness of theme, while The Impossibility of an Island and The Map and the Territory had structural playfulness and ingenuity. Here, Houellebecq is less exploring gloom than wallowing in it. Dull-minded critics, knowing only the environs, will not tell the difference.

If Serotonin underwhelms on the macro level, it still has elements that will endure. Houellebecq’s portrait of decline, though overegged in the beginning, becomes more perversely impressive as Florent-Claude limps towards the end of the book, deciding against suicide only because he cannot bear to leave his savings unspent.
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Houellebecq’s charmless, gluttonous protagonist is a challenge to the reader; a challenge made explicit in the religiously-inflected final paragraphs.