EXCERPT (Page 96-97)

"If we were to draw out a diagram of (pan)Acousticism, or to articulate its place within the designs of revisionary Panopticism, then its various apparatuses of capture would have to be placed alongside every other model of surveillance aimed at cataloging the body and its movements. Perhaps best thought of as various levels of strata, the least of these, or at least the furthest removed, would be satellite surveillance. Next would be eye-in-the-sky drones, which would then be followed by all forms of ground surveillance, and finally, by the addition of every type of handheld audio-visual device. While each of these stratospheric, geographic, local and personal surveillance devices has an audio-visual capacity particular to its own constitution, it is helpful to think of this dynamic cartography in relation to the fourfold diagram of Panoptic power and its concentrated effects.

In this way, not only have Bentham’s late designs been realized in a manner that exceeds the piped rigging of two-way echo cambers, but the electronic Acousticon returns us to the absolutist imaginary of seventeenth century power by merging the ‘all hearing machine’ with the ‘all seeing apparatus’. By any measure, the techno-Acousticon is an unparalleled vision, realized through the disciplinary power of teleographic infomatics and cartographic triangulation. It is a power of electromagnetic interlocution unmatched in both its speed and observational efficacy."