Doom is a sentiment that glides over individuals to create immovable bodies. Doom is a “judicial condemnation or sentence” as much as it is an “unhappy destiny” bonded to death and ruin. Doom revels in the “holy revolt” of the oppressed, it is the contour that gives “unauthorized seeing” its grim bent, and it is the “modern soul’s” incidental preoccupation. Doom is the anxiety in the mishandling of biopower, and in turn, the affirmation used by those in power to dictate the terms of public life as always out of reach of the individual. Our readings this week speak on the strategies of power in spaces of appearance where Doom is both underlying and overarching, a promise as well as a deferment, taking place in the now in preparation for the later, banking on ties to the past.
Within Percepticide, Taylor asks “What do we learn to focus on? What are we trained to overlook? How do we get these signals?” She goes on to define a “self-blinding of the general population” that can be conflated with Doom. If this percepticide “blinds, maims, kills through the senses,” then human faculties are being usurped and replaced with Doom; an ease with death; an eternal peace of mind. Doom is a tool used in the strategy of power, which is comprised as a system. Interestingly, systems are generally puzzles, there is more to them than meets the eye, making their totality difficult to realize. Therefore, the most accessible cause will “appease crowds appetite for violence,” since natural causes are of no interest.
Girad’s assessment of the crowd as spectator and prosecutor brings us to questions of audience in judgements of power. Prosecutors look to an audience to join in on the game of persecution as a means to spread the Doom. Why should a single individual be complicit in acts of persecutory violence when the spectacle can be used as a strategy to differentiate? The crowd inevitably helps to reinforce this culture of krino, or the way in which a collective persecution satiates a thirst for condemnation. What Girad calls an “engagement in a form of repression,” I will call an abdication to Doom.
So if spaces of appearance bend to the will of power, we rigidly come to rely on a script or a Theatre of Terror that makes Doom common-sense or natural. Theatre begs for an audience to its spectacle. The audience warrants meaning to the spectacular ceremony, but also becomes co-conspirators, teammates, or potentially silent symbols in agreement. Here, power becomes inscribed on the body, as the voyeur chooses to victimize, lest they become victims themselves. The objective of this corporeal Doom State is akin to terrorism and torture, for it aims to “prove to the population at large that the regime has the power to control it.” In identifying more readily with the victim, the spectator is doing themselves a disservice, opting to remain in the dreadful bondage of terror as a means to escape the potentiality of livelihood. In this way, Taylor contends, “torture also threatens to reduce the world of public.” This public destabilization is enacted through threats of violence that have managed to seep into the private. Its amplification is the adornment that gives power its controlling features. And, as Foucault contends, “power relations operate through people,” which in turn flings criticism back on the spectator, who must decide what role they wish to play in the “pathetic drama” in which they have inevitably been cast.