Doel and Clarke on Post-Modern Fatigue Syndrome

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 generalized, '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-scene 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.

Marcus A. Doel and David B. Clarke. 1999. Dark panopticon, or, attack of the killer tomatoes. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 17:427-450.