Dark Panopticon. Or, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes

• Published in: Environment and planning. D, Society & space Vol. 17; no. 4; pp. 427 - 450
• Main Authors: Doel, Marcus A, Clarke, David B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.08.1999; Pion; Pion Ltd
• Subjects: Bgi / Prodig; Consumer society; Critical theory; Ecology; Human geography; Information society; Modernity; Population geography and social geography; Postmodernism; Social geography; Violence; Post-modernism; Society; Poststructuralism; Sociology; Philosophy
• ISSN: 0263-7758; 1472-3433
• DOI: 10.1068/d170427

In the wake of claims that much of critical human geography has succumbed to the dreaded postmodern fatigue syndrome—symptoms include unrelenting tiredness, uncritical social somnambulance, spectral hallucinations, an unnatural preoccupation with the dead, and a tendency to submit to passive and reactive forces—the authors offer a paper that came to them during a dream dreamt alongside insomnia. Borne of exhaustion rather than tiredness, the dream-work lends consistency to a host of fragments drawn from the milieux of spatial science, political economy, poststructuralist philosophy, postmodern sociology, twentieth-century literature, and popular culture. As a work composed in the dead of night, the authors follow Deleuze and Foucault in affirming not the omniscient light of Bentham's generalised, ‘all-seeing’ Panopticon, but the ‘dark light’ of the blind power lurking in the shadowy world of the Dark Panopticon. Surprisingly, the exemplary mise-en-scéne for the resulting foray into the Heart of Darkness turns out to be the greengrocery that is invariably situated at the gateway to every supermarket and hypermarket. It is here that the authors sense the unbearable violence perpetrated against the flesh of the world—the flesh of soft fruit and animals, no less than the flesh of ourselves and the earth—and it is from here that the revenge of the zombie flesh takes hold (fetishistic depersonalisation and deindividuation), The authors argue that the human being is suspended, undone, and disseminated between the information society and the consumer society. Only our ‘en-trails’ are left amidst the flesh of the world. This undead dreamworld is less Orwellian than Kafkaesque: infinite suspense and perpetual regret.