Fusing Race: The Phobogenics of Racializing Surveillance

Abstract

This paper sets up a framework to assess how purportedly passive state surveillance comprises an infrastructure of active racialization. Frantz Fanon’s concept of “racial phobogenics,” or the process of making a raced body into an object of anxiety, can be useful for scholarship at the intersection of communication, race, data, security, policing, affect, and biopolitics. To read how local state surveillance justifies the aggregation of data by means of phobogenics, I analyzed 120 hours of field observations and conducted fourteen interviews from June 2017 to March 2018 in one US Homeland Security Fusion Center, part of the integrated intelligence system and national security strategy after 9/11. I argue that Fusion Centers’ use of “situational awareness,” the trained ability to know what is deemed “suspicious” in everyday life, fuses race or taxonomizes what is out of place and what is inflammatory according to nonconscious racializing affects. I therefore urge for a critical scholarship that attends to “prelogical rationality and affectivity” (Fanon 1986: 133) as exercises of power.