The resonate prison: Earwitnessing the panacoustic affect

Abstract

Panacoustic surveillance can be low-intensity and mundane, but when taken to its extreme, it is coordinated with physical violence to create an atmosphere of hallucinatory fear. Our entry point into this problem is through a case study of the Saydnaya torture prison in Syria, a terrifying and opaque architecture of power. This short paper draws from the earwitness art and human rights activism of Lawrence Abu Hamdan concerning Saydnaya in collaboration with Amnesty International: from our analysis of the prison, we extrapolate lessons of panacoustic technologies more broadly, which are not necessarily or immediately violent but nonetheless disempower subjects by constraining their behaviors and rendering walls indefensibly porous. In developing a nascent theory of panacoustic surveillance, this paper makes two distinct contributions to surveillance studies. First, it puts sound and surveillance studies scholars into dialogue to echo Hamdam’s argument that walls do not represent an absolute barrier but a corporeal medium by which power and knowledge can permeate and reflect as vibration. Second, our discussion articulates a politics of transparency and accountability that helps rethink notions of actuarial surveillance as not only a form of top-down statistical and biopolitical monitoring and governance but also as a means of developing panacoustic audits that seek to hold governments and other human rights abusers to account.