Exhaustive Review of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
FOIA Requests and the Surveillance of Frantz Fanon
Initial Inquiry (Spring 2011): The author wrote to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) requesting documents on Frantz Fanon under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Specific Interest: Fanon’s 1961 travels to the United States for myeloid leukemia treatment, potentially under the alias Ibrahim Fanon.
Timeline and Locations: * Arrival: October 3, 1961. * Washington, DC: Stayed at a hotel where Simone de Beauvoir claimed he was "left to rot," "alone and without medical attention." * Medical Care: Patient at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, from October 10, 1961. * Death: Died of pneumonia on December 6, 1961, at the age of .
CIA Response: Issued a standard "Glomar" response via Executive Order 13526, stating the agency "can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request." * Justification: The fact of the existence or nonexistence is "currently and properly classified" and constitutes "intelligence sources and methods information."
FBI Response: Released three declassified documents: * Document #105-96959-A: A 1971 clipping from the Washington Post-Times Herald regarding Fanon’s "Black Power Message" and influence in Martinique. * Document #105-96959-1: A March 9, 1961, once "secret" memo naming Fanon as the Algerian representative for the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Ghana. * Document #105-96959-2: A book review of David Caute’s 1970 biography Frantz Fanon, filed under "extremist matters."
FBI’s Analytical Framing of Fanon: * Described as a "black intellectual," "radical revolutionary," and "philosophical disciple of Karl Marx and Jean Paul Sartre." * Accused of preaching "global revolt of the blacks against white colonial rule." * Claims his book The Wretched of the Earth is frequently quoted/misquoted by "Stokely Carmichael and other black power advocates." * Asserts Fanon’s importance is "inflated into exaggerated dimensions" due to the needs of black revolutionaries.
Redaction and Security Theater
Redaction Methods in Document #105-96959-1: The FBI memo utilized "whiteout" (white blocks) instead of traditional opaque black blocks to censor text.
Theories of Redaction: * Can be viewed as a "willful absenting of the record." * Represents a state disavowal of Fanon’s bureaucratic traces. * Renders Fanon a "nonnameable matter."
Security Theater: The use of Executive Order 13526 suggests that certain intelligence methods, even if historical, are treated as potentially operational and thus protected from disclosure.
Broad Surveillance Context: Fanon is part of a long list of monitored black figures, including: Assata Shakur, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Stokely Carmichael, SNCC, Freedom Riders, Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad, Nation of Islam, Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, W. E. B. DuBois, Fannie Lou Hamer, C. L. R. James, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Josephine Baker, Billie Holiday, the Black Panther Party, Kathleen Cleaver, Muhammad Ali, Jimi Hendrix, and Russell Jones (Ol’ Dirty Bastard).
Fanon’s Philosophy of Modern Surveillance
Deathbed Reflections: In the foreword to The Wretched of the Earth (2005), Homi Bhabha notes Fanon’s delirium and resistance to death. Fanon expressed rage at dying in Washington, DC, rather than in battle, stating: "We are nothing on earth if we are not, first of all, slaves of a cause."
Exile in Tunisia: Fanon was expelled from Algeria by French authorities in January 1957. In Tunisia, he served multiple roles: staff at El Moudjahid newspaper, worker in FLN refugee camps, and chef de service at the psychiatric hospital of Manouba.
University of Tunis Lectures: Fanon lectured on surveillance, colonial psychic effects, and US racism (later canceled by the Tunisian government).
Key Concept - "Mise en fiches de l’homme": The systematic reduction of the modern subject into records, files, time sheets, and identity documents—an "unauthorized biography."
Social Diagnoses of Surveillance: * Workforce Automation: Use of punch clocks and time sheets for factory workers. * Audio Monitoring: Telephone switchboard supervisors eavesdropping on operators. * CCTV in Retail: Department store cameras used not just for thieves, but to signal "perpetual" observation to employees.
Embodied Psychic Effects: Insomnia, fatigue, nervous tension, lightheadedness, and reduced reflex control.
Microresistances: Strategies to contest surveillance, such as sick leave, arriving late, or expressing boredom.
Defining Racializing Surveillance and Dark Sousveillance
Sociogeny: Defined by Sylvia Wynter as the organizational framework fixing blackness as an object of surveillance.
Epidermalization: The imposition of race on the body (Fanon’s "Look, a Negro!" passage). The white gaze "dissects" the black subject, leaving no "ontological resistance."
Racializing Surveillance: A technology of social control where surveillance practices reify boundaries along racial lines, often resulting in discriminatory and violent outcomes. It is not static but changes with space and time.
Intersectional Paradigms: Patricia Hill Collins’s term for how multiple oppressions (race, class, gender) work together; the author uses "intersecting surveillances" to describe interdependent monitoring policies.
Dark Matter (Cosmological Metaphor): Used to describe race as an invisible yet structuring substance of modernity. Like astrophysical dark matter, it is unperceived by many but produces a "productive disruption."
Sousveillance (Steve Mann): Acts of "undersight" where entities not in power observe those in power (e.g., George Holliday’s 1991 recording of Rodney King).
Dark Sousveillance: A term coined by the author to describe tactics used to render one’s self out of sight or the flight from slavery. It involves black epistemologies challenging social control (e.g., coded spirituals, forging slave passes).
Historical Foundations: Slavery and the Archive
Sociology of Slavery: Avery Gordon suggests slave narratives reveal the everyday violence of power.
Specific Historical Objects studied in "Dark Matters": * The Brooks Slave Ship Plan (1789): A diagram of human stowage and inventory. * The Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham, 1786): A architectural model for total visibility. * Lantern Laws: 18th-century NYC ordinances requiring black and indigenous slaves to carry lit candles after dark if unescorted by whites. * Book of Negroes: An 18th-century ledger of self-emancipating slaves; the first government-issued document linking corporeal markers (biometrics) to the right to travel. * Branding: A measure of making the body legible as property/commodity; an antecedent to modern biometric identification.
Theoretical Frameworks in Surveillance Studies
David Lyon’s Common Threads of Surveillance: 1. Rationalization (justification by reason/standardization). 2. Technology (use of high-tech applications). 3. Sorting (social sorting for differential treatment). 4. Knowledgeability (levels of participant awareness). 5. Urgency (risk and threat assessment logic).
Gary T. Marx’s "New Surveillance" Characteristics: * Data sharing/aggregation across distances. * Often undetected (hidden cameras, snooping). * Lack of target consent. * Categorical suspicion (presumption of guilt based on group membership). * "Electronic leashes" (wearable trackers/fitness devices).
Maximum-Security Society: Extension of prison-style surveillance (spotlights, computerized dossiers) into general society.
The Surveillant Assemblage: Concept by Haggerty and Ericson where the body is abstracted into "data doubles" for comparison (e.g., credit scores, DNA testing).
Case Studies and Chapter Overviews
Chapter 1: Comparison of the Brooks slave ship and the Panopticon as modern power operations.
Chapter 2: Analysis of Lantern Laws and the Book of Negroes as precursors to biometric migration control.
Chapter 3: Branding as "digital epidermalization." Analysis of contemporary biometrics (Will Smith vs. Tom Cruise R&D reports) and the branding of blackness in capitalism (Michael Vick, Hank Willis Thomas).
Chapter 4 - Security Theater at the Airport: * History of hijackings (e.g., Garrett Brock Trapnell in 1972, Samuel J. Byck in 1974). * Introduction of magnetometers and sky marshals under Nixon. * "Racial baggage": The specific burden race places on travelers (e.g., invasive pat-downs for black women).
Dialogue & Interaction (Reference to Rodney King Trial): Judith Butler defines the "racially saturated field of visibility" where police violence against Rodney King was read by the court as the police protecting themselves from a "danger," rather than as an assault on a citizen.