Iain Sinclair's excremental narratives

Abstract

This consideration of British poet, novelist, and critic Iain Sinclair’s ‘bad’ writing begins at the summit of Beckton Alp, a pile of waste in London’s east that has been reconstituted as recreational space. For Sinclair, Beckton Alp functions as a totem signifying the pervasive regulatory influence of Panopticism in contemporary urban culture. It shares the Panopticon’s ‘see/being seen dyad’, which is delineated thus by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish