Brexit: Slavoj Žižek explains how opera helps us think about power and politics

Ahead of his key-note address at the Southbank Centre this weekend, the Slovenian philosopher talks about what opera can teach us

Jessie Thompson

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/arts/slavoj-zizek-explains-how-opera-helps-us-think-about-power-in-a-world-facing-brexit-a3285921.html

What does modern-day power have to do with opera? Philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek will address this question when he delivers a key-note speech on power and betrayal in the wake of Brexit, as part of the Southbank Centre’s Power of Power Festival.

The Festival, which includes Opera North’s production of Richard Wagner’s iconic Ring cycle, asks what power means today in our rapidly changing world. A number of talks and performances will tackle a vast range of topics from activism in the digital age to the price of education.

Giving an insight into the topic he will discuss further at the weekend, Žižek said that opera is vital tool for thinking about power, “because it deals with power from its very beginnings.”

The operatic aria has traditionally been the hero’s plea to a figure of power to show mercy, break their own law, and offer their hand to the hero, from Monteverdi’s Orpheus onwards, he explained. “Perhaps we need a new opera that will show us how to act when the big Other, the figure of Power, shows no mercy, but just pursues its path in blessed indifference."

Žižek, who has written a number of books include Living in the End Times, said that these aren’t the end times 2.0 – “it’s just the same old times raging on.”

The emotional turmoil that has followed Brexit “is a mask concealing the fact that nothing will really change,” he added, suggesting that UK and Europe will remain caught in inertia. The vote to leave the EU was “for a psycho-change, against the change we really need.”

He continued that, in the face of Brexit, our culture must reach beyond its national limits in order to contribute to a new universal culture. “This is needed if we are to confront the new challenges – from ecological dangers, to refugees.” 

Slavoj Žižek delivers a keynote address on Power, Betrayal and Brexit at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 2 July as part of Southbank Centre's Power of Power festival.

Visit southbankcentre.co.uk for more information.

Slavoj Žižek on Brexit, the crisis of the Left, and the future of Europe

Slavoj Zizek and Benjamin Ramm 1 July 2016

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/slavoj-zizek-benjamin-ramm/slavoj-i-ek-on-brexit-crisis-of-left-and-future-of-eur

Slavoj Žižek is animated about Brexit. “You know, popular opinion is not always right”, he insists. “Sometimes I think one has to violate the will of the majority”. This sentiment may surprise some of his admirers, but our discussion highlights his long-standing ambivalence about democracy. The despair and confusion of the past week has only reinforced his outlook. Reflecting on the Leave voters who were alarmed to learn that their side had actually won, Žižek quips: “The worst surprise is to get what you want!”

I ask whether the referendum posed a false choice, offering a nation state solution to transnational problems. “Precisely. The EU is in a state of inertia, and I share this rage of the people. But what will be the result? Britain will lose months, years in protracted negotiations with a shitty compromise at the end – during which time the space for real change will have diminished. The British attitude, of leaving the EU to its fate, is the logic of the wrong era in an age of global problems: ecology, biotechnology, intellectual property. Britain all alone will be even more vulnerable, exposed to the pressure of international capital without any of the protections. I don’t see any strength gained in standing alone”.

The final weeks of the referendum campaign were characterized by strong criticism of direct democracy, elements of which have been revived by progressives in recent years (citizens juries, participatory budgeting, etc). What of the Marxist tradition of celebrating this model, as espoused by CLR James? “Direct democracy is the last Leftist myth”, Žižek tells me. “When there is a genuine democratic moment – when you really have to decide – it’s because there is a crisis”. He says referendums are impractical for resolving transnational challenges, and would prefer “the appearance of a free decision, discretely guided” by a discerning elite.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised by these remarks: Žižek has frequently defended the Leninist idea of a ‘vanguard’, and has witnessed firsthand the dangers of populism in eastern Europe. (Walter Benjamin, surveying the surge of nationalism in the early 1930s, came to a similar conclusion). Žižek’s prescription is an intriguing riff on Marx: “good alienation”, in which “power is anonymous and functioning in an efficient way”. He imagines an “invisible state, whose mechanisms work in the background” – a sort of “bureaucratic socialism, but not in the Stalinist sense”. (The problem, he tells me, was that “Stalin’s bureaucracy didn’t function, lurching from one emergency state to another” – a debatable assertion).

This appetite for technocracy ought to make Žižek an enthusiastic supporter of the EU, an institution that reflects Saint-Simon’s aim of replacing “the government of persons by the administration of things”. Žižek says that “the future of Europe is an open question: the disorientation of the crisis offers an opportunity for revival”. He has endorsed Yanis Varoufakis’ DiEM25, aimed at forging an alternative ‘social Europe’, and says “the most precious part of Europe – our contribution to civilization – is the social protections”. Like Varoufakis, he argues that continental solidarity is the only way to deal with cross-border challenges, from the environment to the refugee crisis. Žižek admires how the EU has “imposed standards on anti-racism and women’s rights” across the board, but laments its handling of the Eurozone crisis. He suggests the problem with the EU is not its lack of accountability, but its lack of ability. If only the elite were competent, they could administer to our needs!

Žižek’s growing scepticism of democracy reflects his frustration with radical politics. “It’s a very strange situation: this crisis should be ideal for the Left, but it doesn’t have any answers”. He is tired of the mass rallies without a plan, whether in Syntagma or Tahrir. “I am fed up of these demonstrations of one million people – they are bullshit. A short period of enthusiasm, where we are all together crying and bonding – and then? Ordinary people see no change”. Žižek feels that the Left’s tepid varieties of social democracy are impotent in the current climate, having failed to address the challenges of globalization. This is no more evident than in Greece: “Syriza exemplified this true tragedy: one day they win, and the next day they surrender. It is not a ‘betrayal’, but a genuine tragedy – a radical dead end”.

It’s tempting to speculate that Žižek has not only broken with democracy, but with the Left itself. After all, the state provision of goods and services is not exclusively a Leftist project – many patrician pre-democratic cultures performed it, often with a degree of consent. “Less and less I trust the Left”, he says; “what was said of Yasser Arafat is true of the Left – it never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.

There are various contradictions here: Žižek acknowledges that traditional statist models are redundant, but waxes lyrical about “bureaucratic socialism”; he desires “an authentic revolution”, but isn’t so keen on taking to the streets; he laments “Asian values capitalism” (more truthfully termed ‘authoritarian capitalism’), but downplays democratic mandates; he decries “totally impenetrable institutions” but says “I want efficiency, not transparency”; and so on and so on. But even with these paradoxes (as he would term them), he offers illumination about the challenges ahead. 

What struck me most about our conversation is not Žižek’s disillusionment with the Left or his aversion to democracy. Instead, it is what he calls his “secret dream”, of a settlement that transcends political activity. I sense his “emancipatory vision” is no longer about liberation from oppression, but about liberation from politics itself. If Europe does have a “unique contribution”, as Žižek terms it, maybe it is this “sense of an ending” described by Hegel (his favourite philosopher); of the longed-for deliverance from the weight of history, to a realm beyond the burden of ideology.

Slavoj Žižek delivers a keynote address on Power, Betrayal and Brexit at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 2 July as part of Southbank Centre's Power of Power festival. More information on the event is available here

Why New Humanities Ph.D.s Should Leave the Country

 Scott Gibson

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1425-why-new-humanities-ph-d-s-should-leave-the-country

In December 2014, my wife and I took a fairly routine trip to visit her parents in Quito, Ecuador, for the winter holidays. It was our first trip back since I had finished my Ph.D. the previous summer. December, of course, is prime time in the academic hiring season, and my job search was already yielding better results than the previous year when I was still A.B.D. I had strong interest from a few colleges and hoped I might get at least one campus visit that spring. My plan was to return to the United States, prepare for my interviews, and hope to become one of the lucky few to land a tenure-track job.

Today, I am writing from Ecuador to offer this advice to new Ph.D.s in the humanities: Pack your bags.

When I learned that a university in Quito was in the midst of a hiring spree, I spent the first few days of winter vacation preparing my application, just to see what would happen. Two days later, I received a response from the university’s chancellor asking me to come in for an interview at noon on December 24. That’s right — Christmas Eve. My three-hour interview included everything from standard job-talk fare about my research agenda and teaching philosophy, to discussions about the Higgs boson and the Tao Te Ching (the chancellor is a physicist and studies Eastern philosophy). In the end, we shook hands and agreed to communicate by email about possible next steps, which included follow-up video interviews with a vice chancellor and a dean at the university.

If that sounds like a pleasantly unconventional experience for a faculty interview, that’s because it was. Even though my U.S. job search looked promising, I was also frustrated with some of its inherent absurdities: compiling bloated dossiers; being required to spend several hundred dollars (if not $1,000 or more) to attend a major convention just for a preliminary interview; and enduring the mutually uncomfortable campus-interview experience in which some departments seem to spend more time airing their dirty laundry than objectively evaluating job candidates.

In contrast, the application process in Ecuador was clean, simple, and direct. The university knew what it wanted from a new English professor, and I knew that I had what it wanted. So what if the chancellor wants to interview me on Christmas Eve and give me a personal tour of the campus? Great. I’ll bring the eggnog.

Less than a month later, I was offered the job. My new employer gave me another month’s time to decide if I really wanted to uproot my life to move to South America. By then, I’d already completed a second campus interview in the United States, and had my visiting assistant professorship (or VAP, as it is widely known) renewed for another year, too. I was fortunate to have several options and a window of time to decide. Ultimately, though, I would have been a fool to stay in the United States.

Here’s why.

First, I had to ask myself: Would moving to Ecuador pay off — literally? I wasn’t going to move to a new continent just to stay broke. I could do that at home.

In my case, the starting salary in Ecuador was actually a few thousand dollars higher than my VAP salary, and not much lower than I could have expected as a new assistant professor at many U.S. colleges. (Ecuador has used U.S. dollars since 2000, so currency conversion and exchange rates weren’t an issue.)

Raw salary, however, was only a starting point. Several other financial factors contributed to my decision to move abroad:

It was clear from cost-of-living differentials that even a comparatively modest salary in Ecuador would be worth more than a better-paying job in the United States. For my circumstances, I used several cost-of-living calculators and found that life in Quito costs roughly 60 percent to 70 percent of what it costs to live in Greensboro, N.C., where I had been living for the previous eight years. In short, I could earn a lower salary and still fare much better financially in Ecuador than at home.

Taxes in Ecuador and many other countries are much lower than in the States. The IRS requires U.S. citizens to file a federal tax return no matter where you live, but the tax code includes provisions that diminish the effects of double-taxation on foreign wage earners. For example, the "Foreign Earned Income Exclusion" exempts your salary up to a certain amount (currently set at $100,800) after you live abroad for a full tax year. You will pay taxes both here and in the country where you live during the first partial year, but your income will be exempt in the United States afterward. (Unless, of course, you earn more than $100,800. In that case, don’t complain. You’re doing fine.)

Student-loan repayment terms can also change when living overseas. Under the standard repayment plan, for example, I was paying around $980 a month. Once I adjusted to the "income-based repayment" plan on my VAP salary, my monthly payment dropped to around $480. However, my current repayment is $0, and will likely stay that way for up to three years because of a provision in the income-based repayment plan for situations in which your calculated monthly repayment amount is not enough to cover interest. Moving overseas maximizes the benefit because my taxable income in the United States will be virtually zero, even if I earn a substantial raise. In the meantime, I can take the money that would have been used on student loans to build financial assets.

Of course, I also worried about how taking an overseas job would affect the direction of my academic career. What happens to my research agenda? What if I ever decide to re-enter academe back home? The university does not have a tenure system akin to the U.S. version; the majority of faculty here are under permanent contract in one of two categories as either "professor docente" (teaching professor) or "professor investigador" (research professor). I hold the latter title. How would that lack of tenure affect my candidacy at a U.S. college? I do not yet have clear answers to these questions. But I realize now that those concerns were largely defined by my narrow vision of what an academic career should be.

As a scholar of African-American and U.S. multiethnic literature, I knew that I would have limited resources for my research if I moved overseas. How could I possibly be a productive scholar without instant access to the MLA database or a research library’s special collections?

The truth is: Aside from presenting papers at a few conferences, I hadn’t been all that productive anyway, research wise, since writing my dissertation. I was spending most of my time and energy trying to get a job rather than doing my job.

Even though I now teach a heavy load of four courses a semester, somehow I have found the time to write more than I have since completing my Ph.D. In just seven months, I have submitted a new article manuscript to a selective journal, I am drafting a second article, and I’ve started work on expanding my dissertation into a book manuscript. Any research I cannot do overseas can be done during trips home during the summer — the time when most of us get our research done, anyway.

I’ve also regained a sense of purpose in my teaching and research. In U.S. higher education, the job market for humanities Ph.D.s can feel demoralizing, and with good reason. It’s no secret that the humanities have been facing a deteriorating job market for decades and that the market in English and foreign languages, in particular, has been especially grim. Furthermore, humanities professors consistently get paid much less than faculty in other fields such as business and the hard sciences. It’s no wonder that many of us are so willing to accept lower salaries than our academic peers. The implicit message is that we should just be grateful to have jobs at all.

Don’t get me wrong: Competition for international jobs is stiff, too. But in my case, at least, it was a relief to feel that the job didn’t come served with a side of indebtedness. It also saved me from the possibility of facing years of rejection on the tenure-track market. Yes, rejection is an inevitable part of the job search, publishing, and life in general. But many young academics would do well to remember the lesson most teenagers learn in high school: You shouldn’t base your self-worth on whether the prom king or queen will go out with you. The same goes for hiring committees.

For too long, the academic job market has compelled new humanities Ph.D.s to see our careers in black and white — either "make it" into a tenure line at a U.S. institution, or leave academe. But there are more options beyond our borders. Ph.D.s in the sciences figured that out years ago, and humanities Ph.D.s are just now learning to follow that lead.

So is it time for you to apply for a visa, too? That all depends on what kinds of challenges you are willing to face.