Žižek and…er… wage transparency…

Good review of Slavoj Žižek’s latest works in the Guardian recently from Terry Eagleton. I like Žižek if only because his instincts appear spot on, but it’s hard work given the noise to signal ratio. Let’s just say that wading through to find useful messages can be heavy going, and there’s no shortage of unusual messages. But this I think is spot on, not so much the political correctness bit (of which more again) but the last part:

Stentorian, faintly manic and almost impossible to shut up, Žižek is a man who gets out of bed talking about psychoanalysis and steps back into it holding forth on Zionism. As a frenetic intellectual activist, he always seems to be in six places on the planet at once, like Socrates on steroids. His day may begin with a visit to Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy and end with writing supportive letters to one of the imprisoned Pussy Riot performers. In between, he passes his time antagonising a sizeable chunk of the world’s population. If he is a scourge of neo-capitalism, he is also a sworn foe of liberal pluralism and political correctness. He tells the story of how at an impeccably enlightened US seminar he attended, the chairperson began by asking each participant to state their name along with their sexual preference. Žižek throttled back the urge to announce that he enjoyed bedding young boys and drinking their blood. He also points out how much less forthcoming the participants would have been if asked to state their salaries.

I’m never that convinced that political correctness is half as problematic as some seem to think. Far too often the complaints seem to amount to ‘I want the ‘right’ to be as obnoxious and discourteous to others as I see fit with no regard to their feelings’. It’s difficult to ascertain the loss to society or human life in general that results from misogynistic, homophobic and/or other comments being considered obnoxious, discourteous and not being appropriate.

That said, the example given seems absurdly self-conscious on the part of those who would who ask questions about participants sexual preferences. None of their business is the response that springs to mind.

But, whatever about ‘political correctness’ more broadly Žižek is onto something in relation to his point about salaries and, presumably, consciously cuts through what is most likely an irrelevance (the sexual preference of participants) to get to the centrality of economic issues in shaping our lives. For discussing wages is, usually, a complete taboo in our societies. In the US discussing ones salary with other workers in a workplace can be a dismissible offence. It’s a means of differentiation within companies and between them.

As it happens in Sweden one can – I think for a small fee – access tax returns of any citizen, though an reason for the request is necessary. And most intriguingly the European Commission earlier this year had a number of recommendations on pay transparency which though not apparently going to quite the same degree strike off in that direction. Polly Toynbee some time ago discussed similar moves in the UK, and here is a US view from the Atlantic from a few years back.