Simone Browne - Dark Matters
The work Dark Matters, published by Simone Browne in 2015, quickly became one of the most important and influential studies on Surveillance Studies. By involving a comprehensive review of the seminal texts in the field with her racial perspective, the author restructures the discussions surrounding panoptic and post-panoptic models in a way that revolutionizes their meanings and potential for understanding. Once revealed, the power exerted by racial control mechanisms over surveillance mechanisms can no longer be ignored, which is why this text, though recent, already becomes essential reading that should influence all surveillance studies published after it.
Browne uses various educational mechanisms to demonstrate how modern surveillance devices are inseparable from the policing and persecution of Black populations during and after slavery. Based on the concepts of Frantz Fanon, the author develops her main concept of digital epidermalization, which encapsulates the experience of race being inserted into the body of the subject through the insertion of race into their data, which are then racialized.
One example of how the insertion of this key of understanding modifies our comprehension of these devices and exposes the incompleteness of any analysis of surveillance devices that does not consider the dimension of racism in the formulation and implementation of surveillance is the case of Bentham’s Panopticon.
In academic circles, it is attributed to Foucault’s reinterpretation of Bentham’s Panopticon the emergence of what is called “Surveillance Studies” as an autonomous discipline. However, Browne shows us that even before the emergence of the Panopticon or the modern prison on European soil, surveillance technologies structured in a modern way and seeking ubiquity were already being imposed on the enslaved Black bodies. This fact is exacerbated by comparing the layout of the slave ship Brooks with the layout of the Panopticon-style prisons developed by Bentham, or by the realization that the English utilitarian had spent the years prior to developing the Panopticon studying and commenting on the methods of torture, punishment, and surveillance imposed on the enslaved in his diaries and letters to his brother.
Here, I present some relevant quotes from Browne’s work that I find important:
“Fanon put forth the idea that modernity can be characterized by the “mise en fiches de l’homme.” These are the records, files, time sheets, and identity documents that together form a biography, and sometimes an unauthorized one, of the modern subject.”
“Although Fanon’s remarks on cctv surveillance are short, they are revealing as he suggests that these cameras are trained not only on the potential thief, but also on the employee working on the shop floor who is put on notice that the video surveillance is perpetual. He also noted that workers displayed microresistances to managerial control in the way of sick leave, expressing boredom on the job, arriving late, and sometimes not arriving at work at all. Rather than being thought of as unproductive, such acts must be understood as disalienating, as they are strategic means of contesting surveillance in the workplace.”
“Lyon has argued that the “surveillance society” as a concept might be misleading, for it suggests “a total, homogeneous situation of being under surveillance” rather than a more nuanced understanding of the sometimes discreet and varying ways that surveillance operates.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Talking back is, as hooks puts it, “the expression of our movement from object to subject” and a “gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.” Talking back, then, is one way of challenging surveillance and its imposition of norms.”
“Biometric information technology, or biometrics, in its simplest form, is a means of body measurement that is put to use to allow the body, or parts and pieces and performances of the human body, to function as identification” “Epidermalization, Paul Gilroy tells us, stems from “a historically specific system for making bodies meaningful by endowing in them qualities of ‘colour.’” “Epidermalization, Stuart Hall writes, is “literally the inscription of race on the skin.” “I am taking epidermalization here as the moment of fracture of the body from its humanness, refracted into a new subject position (“Look, a Negro!” or “Look, an illegal alien!” or some other negatively racialized subject position). In other words, it is the moment of contact with the white gaze — a moment where, as Fanon describes, “all this whiteness burns me to a cinder” — that produces these moments of fracture for the racial Other, indeed making and marking one as racial Other, experiencing its “being for others.” “with biometrics it is the moments of observation, calibration, and application that sometimes reveal themselves as racializing.” If, as Gilroy suggests, the pseudoscientific enterprise of truth seeking in racial difference can be more fully comprehended through the Fanonian concept of epidermalization, how can epidermalization, as a concept, be made useful at a scale of the body made biometric? I suggest here that we come to think of the concept of digital epidermalization when we consider what happens when certain bodies are rendered as digitized code, or at least when attempts are made to render some bodies as digitized code.”
“In Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Orlando Patterson explains that slave branding “backfired” in Brazil, where the letter F that branded a recaptured runaway was “proudly displayed” to the “more cautious but admiring fellow sufferers,” marking its resignification as a mark of honor, not of capture.”
“What Gordon insightfully calls the “notion of white prototypicality” is the enabling condition of the structured violence of “the dialectics of recognition.”
“The absence of a nuanced discussion of how such racial thinking shapes the research and development of contemporary biometric information technology is itself constitutive of power relations existing in that very technology, where the idea of blackness is invoked (think actor Will Smith) to reproduce power relations, even sometimes in the physical absence of actual black people.”