Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

9-2026

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

Political Science

Advisor

Leonard C. Feldman

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | Philosophy | Political Science | Political Theory

Keywords

politics of sound, sonic ecologies, affect, biopower, ontopower

Abstract

From Muzak to long range acoustic devices (LRADs), the contemporary proliferation of sonic technologies for governing moods, behaviors, and potentialities complicates the virtual absence of sound within Michel Foucault's primarily visual modality of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish, exemplified by his central conceptual model of the panopticon. This thesis develops the corollary concept of pan-oticism to theorize the transformation of sound-power and its political function within administered sonic ecologies from Foucault's disciplinary societies to Gilles Deleuze's societies of control. Within the enclosed spaces constitutive of disciplinary societies, sound-power remains subordinated to Foucault's visual logic of panopticism, extending the reach of surveillant observation through punctuating sonic cues, such as institutional bells and alarms, that synchronize bodies to rigid time-tables. However, this ocularcentric overcoding of sound-power breaks down alongside the broader dissolution of institutional enclosures identified by Deleuze in his essay "Postscript on the Societies of Control." The organization of sound-power within control societies moves beyond its function as an extension of the gaze within panoptic sites and increasingly emerges as a dynamic ambient force capable of continuously modulating the affective and corporeal capacities of inhabitants across open environments. The sonic conceptuality developed by Deleuze in his collaborative work with Felix Guattari elucidates the proliferation of sound-power techniques within control societies while Brian Massumi's concept of ontopower provides an analytic framework through which to examine the operationalization of sound for orienting affective experience and potential emergence, exceeding its disciplinary function of biopolitical regulation. The development of pan-oticism in this project lends a critical ear to administered sonic ecologies as an evolving apparatus of power that shifts from an extension of panopticism within Foucauldian disciplinarity toward a flexible and dispersed mechanism for modulating affective and corporeal potentiality within Deleuzian societies of control.

Download

Share

COinS