Month: March 2025

Review: Zero Point by Slavoj Žižek 2025

Žižek is my favorite socio-cultural-political critic! This short book does not disappoint (Amazon link).

Žižek gave a speech at a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2023. The significance of books was a theme, but so was the war between Ukraine and Russia and the slaughter in Palestine—topics he says he was asked to address by the fair’s organizers.

The ‘zero point’ is some nadir in the economic, cultural, political, or social sphere from which no tinkering with the situation through conventional mechanisms will fix things in the sense of making everybody (or at least most) better off. Only the destruction and rebuilding of what exists can help, a process, he admits, that is usually “violent and bloody.” Žižek comes from the political left. In my humble opinion, he is correct in that, besides the sexual divide (male and female), the class divide (capitalist one percent vs. everyone else) is still the world’s most significant economic and political fault line, but the modern left has abandoned it. I am personally somewhere down in the ninety-nine percent and have watched “progressive identity politics” eviscerate the Democratic Party in the United States.  

The book begins with a half dozen short essays addressing the global situation in broad strokes. The upshot of all this is that we—that is, Western society—lie to ourselves. The international situation is growing worse rapidly now. We cannot “fix” climate change. Wars and economic exploitation around the world (Žižek here covers not only Palestine and Ukraine but also Sudan, Yemen, and the Eastern Congo) have gone beyond the capacity of any power to resolve. Things got this bad because the powers themselves benefited economically from the conflict.

The book’s second half is a series of essays responding to various criticisms of his Frankfurt speech (reproduced in the book’s appendix). Žižek is, of course, attacked from both the left and the right. As he says (taken from Hegel), this is a sign that he is on the right track. 

I’m not going to comment on Žižek’s take on Palestine. He goes out of his way to nuance what he says. I believe he is right about the entire situation going back to before Israel’s founding and now accelerated to a substantial degree by its political turn to the right. Both sides are to blame (and this goes back a long way). Neither side wants peace other than with the annihilation of the other side. That makes the present situation a zero point.

As for Ukraine, Žižek lays the entire blame on Russia, and he is undoubtedly correct as concerns the utterly unprovoked—in a military sense—present war. But Žižek does miss something concerning Ukraine. He fails to account for a Russian strategic military problem. If my reader will permit me I will use a few sentences to explain.

Between Napoleon and Hitler, Russia was invaded three times—always through Ukraine. Russia does not need Ukraine to be a formal part of a union. Still, like Belarus, Russia does need a Ukraine that is not politically and economically in a formal alliance with Western Europe. 

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton promised Russia (Yeltsin) that NATO would not move east—not incorporate countries of the former Warsaw Pact (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania), Russia’s second-layer buffer beyond Ukraine and Belarus. Yet a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this is precisely what happened (the Baltic nations—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—hard up against the Russian border, are now also NATO nations).

Some might object that, with or without Ukraine, Europe has no intention of invading Russia. That is true now, but what about fifty years from now? From a strategic military viewpoint, a country with Russia’s geographic vulnerability (shorn of an eastward-oriented Ukraine) cannot ignore this calculation. That is the threat Ukraine’s decisive turn towards the West poses for Russia. Does this excuse Russia’s present invasion? No, but Žižek does miss this point.

Žižek must feel like he’s been banging his head against a wall for decades. I’m not a big fan of his psychiatric (Lacanian) and metaphysical turns of phrase—the ‘Other,’ the ‘Real,’ ‘surplus pleasure,’ and so on. Such things might belong to relations between individuals, but they are, at best, metaphors when applied to geopolitics. Metaphor or not, they are in Žižek’s blood. In this little book, Žižek’s grasp of the world’s desperate plight reflects—it seems to me—a personal resignation. In his earlier books, he exhibits hope that things can get better. I sense little hope here.

Review: The Gutenberg Parentheses

Amazon link: The Gutenberg Parentheses by Jeff Jarvis, 2023

This book is a history of mechanical printing from the original Gutenberg invention in 1450 through all the various forms of printing and the institutions to which it gave rise — mass market books, newspapers, pamphlets (political, religious, and otherwise), business forms, not to mention more—if not entirely—standardized written languages, and so on. All of this took time. We became fully emersed in the parentheses when print entirely supplanted scribes—by around 1550—the first institution to be wiped out by the new technology. 

In Mr. Jarvis’ opinion, we are now leaving Gutenberg behind. The parentheses are closing. Why? What has changed? Two things. First, what characterized the Gutenberg era was that word impressions were transferred to paper using ink in one way or another. Second, while there came to be many printers, not everybody could become a printer, and eventually, most (never all) printing became consolidated behind large corporate entities that ultimately controlled content.  Even where electronics became part of the process (sending photos and text stories by telephone, telegraph, and so on), at the end of the line, again, ink met paper. Mr. Jarvis claims that with the invention of the Web (1992-4), we entered a new era in which communication, text or otherwise, is no longer conveyed by ink on paper. Also, everyone (those with Internet connections) can be a producer in the new era. The mass conveyance of authorial output is no longer dependent on controlling institutions like publishers. 

The author believes and advances the argument that the internet age is already eroding what went before (newspapers are being wiped out, for example) while new, emerging institutions—NextDooor?—are beginning to replace it. The reason for replacement is not the same. Printing was much faster than scribes. Except for the loss of some artistic merit to transcribing by hand, Print’s efficiency was what mattered. In the Internet age, newspapers are being wiped out not because the Internet is more efficient but because advertising—which did not exist until 150 years after Gutenberg—has moved over to the Internet, depriving the papers of the income needed to print.

Jarvis believes we are roughly where Guttenberg was thirty years after his invention. He fails to account for technology’s accelerated timelines. We are more like 100 or even 150 years on compared to Gutenberg. That still leaves a long way to go. The institutions that printing spawned did not fully emerge until some 400 years after Gutenberg. New institutions will undoubtedly emerge from the Internet. Some have already been tried and found wanting. The hypertext novel doesn’t work because it is too distracting. The Internet suffers from a problem inverse to the limitations of print: trading limited access to publishing technology for such easy access that the sheer number of voices drowns any one of them out.

Surely, Jarvis is right that there is still more change to come, and we cannot anticipate its details. Printing wiped out the scribe. The Internet will not wipe out the printing business, though it will (and has already) skewed its economics. Ebooks on backlit devices tire the eye faster than paper and ink. Kindles are exceptions, but they also require electricity. Jarvis thinks (implicitly) that electricity will be around forever. Pages printed on cotton rag paper can be read for hundreds (and more) of years. Even quality (wood-based) “acid paper” (not newsprint) will last one hundred years or more. If electricity disappears with modern civilization’s climatological, ecological, and economic unraveling, the Internet and everything written upon it will disappear. More than half of what has been written on the net since 1994 is already gone forever. Technology will not be of much help. Bits can be “permanently” stored on tape or other technologies for ten or even a hundred years. There will soon be “glass storage” technologies that will hold terabytes of data for thousands of years on something about the size of a credit card. Still, access will require electricity (not to mention other advanced technology). Contrastingly, printing the old mechanical way (a la Gutenberg) requires no electricity and only fifteenth-century technology.

Jarvis’ book is a well-written history of printing, often reminding us that books were and are only a part—relatively small—of printing’s products. He is also undoubtedly right that the net will engender new institutions even if it doesn’t entirely eclipse the old, as Gutenberg’s invention did the scribes. Alas, that evolution depends on sustaining our present, highly technological (and for many reasons unsustainable) civilization long enough to serve that gestation.

Review: The Glamor of Grammar by Roy Peter Clark

Amazon link to The Glamor of Grammar

I write this little review for the sake of my #writer friends on X (formerly Twitter) and because it was a nice book pointing to many helpful writing notions. There are a lot of chapters, but they are all brief. The author’s aim seems to be a general overview of the writing forest, beginning with its soil and nutrients (letters and words), progressing to its more significant structures, tree types, and forest ecology (sentences, paragraphs, dialog, metaphor, and theme). How do you like my forest metaphor?

Clark literally begins with the letters A, B, C, etc. In particular, how some letters have come to function in English. He moves to words: simple words, more complex words, some history, and some observations of their impact, hard, soft, ambivalent, etc. He admonishes writers to watch their spelling. From words, we move to punctuation and sentences. Punctuation books are mostly dull, but not this one. Clark taught me nuances in using commas versus semi-colons or M-dash versus parentheses, which I hadn’t considered before. It turns out that setting off an independent clause is not the only possibility for the lowly semi-colon!

Sentences and paragraphs are the center of the business. Many forms serve particular purposes… Chains of short words are dramatic and hurried. Longer words strung together suggest slower moods. He addresses consistent usage of active and passive voice, present and past tense, uses and abuses of alliteration, and a little about authorial point of view. I like his attitude. Rules are general principles of good usage, but when you show that you know them, you can break them when there is a literary purpose for the exception.

Finally, moving from the soil to the treetops, he looks at the forest from the sky and comments on thematic consistency, metaphor, and the application of all that has gone before to a thread that ties the writing together. 

There are a lot of chapters, but as noted above, they are all short, two or three pages. All of Clark’s many subjects are presented on a high level. There are interesting acorns—using my forest metaphor to tie my theme together—everywhere. Whether a writer or an inveterate reader, this little book has insights to be found.

Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT

I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.

In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways: 

First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do. 

Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.

The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.

There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.

As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.

Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working. 

Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.

I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.

There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms! 

In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.

Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.

Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point. 

Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!