Dissenting crockery. posted by Richard Seymour

I profoundly resent these smart guys who read Science Fiction and talk all wordy like :

At a very simple level, genre has 'radical potential' in the same way a hammer has radical potential - it depends what you want to do with it. But of course it's not that simple... Because the cultural baggage of genre is so strong that I'd say *any* even remotely thoughtful, let alone critical, work within a generic tradition, cannot fail to have a self-consciousness of its relationship to that tradition, in some sense, however mediated. In terms of embedded politics, what that means is that *any* examination of/shenanigans with 'traditional' genre gives you this kind of immediate revisionist cred, and as I say, so far as it goes, there's nothing wrong with that. However all these counterclichés cliché very fast. Is it, to take one example, *really* doing a very radical job to point out the brutality and unromanticness of the old west any more? In the era where 'Unforgiven' wins 4 oscars, and Cormac McCarthy is feted as one of the all-time great American novelists, surely you could make a case that it would be far more countercultural these days to have a hero with a straightforward white hat[.]

White hat cowboyism.

Yes, there's a bit of what Slavoj Zizek refers to as kynicism in the heroic idealisation of 'dishcloth-grey' morality. It valorises conduct which happens to be perfectly normal, invites a subtle complicity and enjoyment in spectacular cruelty. The ultimate ethical horizon in Tarantinoite amoralism is "how fucking cool was that?" It arises from an acceptance of the 'lessons' of the 20th Century, foremost among which is the notion that Evil somehow emerges from a supererogatory insistence on Good. This is what bewildered me when Brother K-punk said that:

So it is gratifying that Batman Begins is not about 'shades of grey' at all, but rather shades of white. It is a film not about amorality and Evil, but Good. In many ways, it is the film that Zizek wanted Revenge of the Sith to be: a film, that is to say, which dares to hypothesize that Evil might result from an excess of Good. [Emphasis added]

Dares? How ubiquitous is the notion that behind every goody-goody is a 'totalitarian'? From happy-clappers to paper sellers to the invisible but omnipresent arbiters of political-correctness, it is the do-gooders and would-be do-gooders who cause all the trouble. Why, Genghis Khan probably thought he was a paragon of virtue. Of course, there are good reasons to be suspicious of anyone who treats an insistence on the Good as one of a long list of credentials. The hand of history that occasionally grips the Prime Minister's shoulder disturbs a countenance effusive with passion, belief and vision, and knocks askance a golden gloriole of goodness. Yet Blair's regime relies upon an unstated complicity, an agreement that cynicism, manipulation, sell-out, hypocrisy, crookedness and mendacity are simply among the tools of modern political conduct: one bashes asylum seekers, because it satisfies the right-wing press and takes the sting out of Tory attacks. In other words, Blair, although he evinces all the public signs of decency, rectitude and the rest, is a precise example of the hegemony of neither/nor amorality, of the way in which authoritarianism is sustained by cynical collusion. It is all there in his equivocations: rights, but also responsibilities; firm, but fair; tough, yet tender; butch, but also effete; a pretty straight guy, yet wonderfully twisted...

No, the subversive gesture is sometimes to treat principle as if it was worth more than a few glib platitudinous tributes, to act as if it really mattered.