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Nowadays, in the productions of popular culture, you don't get to win "spot the Baddie" merely by looking for the black hat. Evil, like the Roman god Proteus, has become less tangibly identifiable, evading a locatable source via a series of continuous transmutations.
"The centre", in popular theoretical parlance, wears the black hat. "The centre" has bad habits: it seeks to control all systems autocratically, it is obsessively self-reflexive, and it re-translates all ideas and forms in its own terms. It is continually referred to as a kind of "given" in much the same way that a whole range of critical discourses have been subsumed under the one category of "other"-ness.
Yet despite the thoroughly theorised descriptions of centrist structures of power, there appears, outwardly at least, to have been a failure of challenge in real terms; the various promised "new orders" of power systems all seem to have been erected on the template of the old inequities. The centre, therefore, has retained its place as the subject of the sentence in much theoretical writing.
However, it is possible that beneath the surface of the common language of authority, there are other forms of practice emerging that use the structures of control to fit their own critical agendas. A growing familiarity with the process of recognition, followed by appropriation and abnegation by the centre, has lead to a healthy skepticism by any who value the critical engagement of cultural practice over its status as a faddish, short lived recreation on the part of the structures of authority. This scepticism, in turn, has often resulted in more covert strategies of critique.
It is therefore understandable that some of the more self-congratulatory