White space is rendered by the systemic erasure of colonized terrain and existing social relations in that space. Whiteness is the apex, the place of organizing, and the vanishing point to and from which “seeing” is directed under racial surveillance capitalism. The operations of white space precede what is conventionally thought of as “seeing,” a look directed by a person at an object or other person that necessarily takes place in space. What’s different today is that this artificial vision is now being automated and distributed, creating spaces of disappearance. Together, the combination of erasure, extraction and surveillance has enabled racial surveillance capitalism to survive in that white space from the overseer on the plantation to neocolonial domination by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Deployed first from infrastructure platforms like ships or trains, these processes are now being distributed into a network of machines that form artificial life systems. In the space of erasure, artificial vision and artificial surveillance are enabled. Coloniality is the time–space since 1492 when “America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power” (Quijano 2000: 533). This white space is the product of coloniality, a space formed by the erasure of existing human and other-than-human relations. The formation of white space in which to see, by people and machines, is my subject here.
This seeing-in-space is the sensing of how to place people in relations of hierarchy to extract value. The way of “seeing” that arises in the space in which to see erases so as to produce white space, which can then be claimed for absolute ownership. Before seeing comes “the space in which to see,” to borrow a phrase from Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier ( 2017: 8). Did the conquered actually think of themselves as less than human? Or were they confirmed in seeing that the conqueror saw them that way? “Seeing comes before words,” as Berger had famously begun his book. Two pairs of diagonals go from eyes to feet and eyes to the top of the facing figure’s head, perhaps evoking Hegel or Lacan. The one on the right was captioned “omnipotent” and the one to the left “less than human.” Berger noted: “the way each sees the other confirms his own view of himself” ( 1972: 96). In discussing “relations between the conqueror and the colonized” in his Ways of Seeing, John Berger made a line drawing depicting in barest outline two figures.
“This is how to place you in the space in which to see.”