Dark Matters (Across the Sundering Seas 2020 #25)
Hello readers,
I’m Chris Krycho, and this is Across the Sundering Seas, my mostly-weekly newsletter on what I’ve been studying, reading, and generally thinking about. Feel free to unsubscribe—or to forward it to a friend who could use something more like this in her reading life! (I hope at least someone out there could use something more like this in her reading life!)
This week, I’m mostly sharing a few quotes from Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. The book seems extremely timely in light of the nation-wide protests in response to George Floyd’s brutal, unjust death—but I did not pick it for that reason. Indeed, my friend and Winning Slowly cohost Stephen and I picked this as one of the key books we needed to read and talk about on this season of the podcast some six months ago. The book sits squarely in the center of our current focus on the intersection of epistemology and technology.
More than that, though, it points directly at a critical reality: while this round of protests has (rightly!) pushed all of these issues to the fore again, and even seems to have started making a dent, these issues are not new. To the contrary, they have been a part of American history from very nearly its beginning. Racism is not the whole of America’s story, but its vile stain has, wretchedly, always been a central part of her story. So we’re reading Browne’s book, which sits squarely
I’m not yet finished with the book, and I’m still mulling on the things I’m reading. So instead of offering a lot of commentary, I’m going to share a few of the things that have stuck out to me in the book—selections that are part of her thesis, or which are otherwise particularly notable.
From pp. 8–9:
Put another way, rather than seeing surveillance as something inaugurated by new technologies, such as automated facial recognition or unmanned autonomous vehicles (or drones), to see it as ongoing is to insist that we factor in how racism and antiblackness undergird and sustain the intersecting surveillances of our present order.
From p. 13:
In the sense that blackness is often absented from what is theorized and who is cited, it is ever present in the subjection of black motorists to a disproportionate number of traffic stops (driving while black), stop-and-frisk policing practices that subject black and Latino pedestrians in New York City and other urban spaces to just that, CCTV and urban renewal projects that displace those living in black city spaces, and mass incarceration in the United States where, for example, black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four are imprisoned at a rate seven times higher than white men of that age group, and the various exclusions and other matters where blackness meets surveillance and then reveals the ongoing racisms of unfinished emancipation. Unfinished emancipation suggests that slavery matters and the archive of transatlantic slavery must be engaged if we are to create a surveillance studies that grapples with its constitutive genealogies, where the archive of slavery is taken up in a way that does not replicate the racial schema that spawned it and that it reproduced, but at the same time does not erase its violence.
From p. 16:
Racializing surveillance is a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a “power to define what is in or out of place.” Being mindful here of David Theo Goldberg’s caution that the term “racialization,” if applied, should be done with a certain precision and not merely called upon to uncritically signal “race-inflected social situations,” my use of the term “racializing surveillance” signals those moments when enactments of surveillance reify boundaries, borders, and bodies along racial lines, and where the outcome is often discriminatory treatment of those who are negatively racialized by such surveillance.
From p. 39:
John Gilliom and Torin Monahan, in their analysis of social media sites such as Facebook, argue that “rather than being a prisonlike panopticon where trapped people follow the rules because they’re afraid someone is watching, with Facebook and similar sites people are probably more afraid that no one is watching, that no one cares what they're up to.” With this apparent fear of not being noticed, Gilliom and Monahan say that social media users “discipline themselves in a different way by divulging as much as possible about their lives and thoughts.”
From p. 42 (let the horror here sink in):
Prefiguring Bentham’s design of the Panopticon and the seventeenth. and eighteenth-century disciplinary institutions that Foucault lays out in Discipline and Punish, the architectural design, registration, documentation, and examination at slave trafficking forts and ports, through the Door of No Return, and on slave ships during the Middle Passage voyage from Africa to the auction blocks and plantations of the New World were subject defining, but always violent. The violent regulation of blackness as spectacle and as disciplinary combined in the racializing surveillance of the slave system. On this point, Robyn Wiegman states that “the disciplinary power of race, in short, must be read as implicated in both specular and panoptic regimes.” Here, black children, women, and men were subject to these “simple” but violent instruments—branding irons fashioned out of silver wire, ships’ registers in which African lives were recorded as units of cargo, or listed alongside livestock on slave auction notices, and census categories, estate records, and plantation inventories that catalogued enslaved people as merchandise. The branding of enslaved people as a means of accounting for a particular ship's carga, for example, was not only individualizing but also a “massifying” practice that constituted a new category of subject, blackness as saleable commodity in the Western Hemisphere. Plantation rules laid out for overseers the prescribed measures for regulating plantation life and “social death.”
It is good that America is starting to see these truths more clearly—and to grasp that we are not yet done working toward the ideals our founding documents proclaim and which we have so often failed so utterly to live up to. It is not enough that we are starting to see them more clearly: still it waits for us to make it right, to live up to those ideals. But it is a(nother) start, and I am glad of it.