Human sacrifice is typically assumed to be a "primitive" institution, one that long ago vanished from Western civilization. Unfortunately, quite the opposite is true. The institution of sacrifice lives on. Although much of it is hidden from view in unexpected forms, it remains an essential part of first world everyday life, politics, and economy.
A number of antique cultures, including the ancient Egyptians, the Aztecs, and various Hindu sects, learned to incorporate sacrifice into social life as a visible institution. The practice was legitimized through an association with religious or mystical necessity. Through sacrifice, the gods could be appeased, or even bribed to perform actions beyond the control of either the collective or individual agent involved in the ritual killing. Sacrifice brought together in a concrete manner the worlds of the visible (sensual) and the invisible (spiritual). Anthropologists have speculated that the psychological benefit of this hyperreal performance lay in its power to relieve anxiety among participants by giving them a sense of control over nonrational elements of existence; an obvious political/economic benefit of ordering death through social ceremony would be enhancement of population management and social control. In cultures where rituals included cannibalism, human flesh may have been a much-needed source of protein. Yet such theories, while they do have some explanatory power, tend to miss the interconnection between the nonrational economy of death and the rational economy of surplus and waste. This willingness to ignore such a connection is one reason why sacrifice continues, unnoticed and incessant, as a standard institution in all cultures of advanced surplus economy.
Our western propensity for repressing the disturbing aspects of existence means that we are not likely to have a visible institution of sacrifice; at any rate, the legitimizing spectacle that religion would otherwise provide for the practice has melted away under the heated process of rationalization. However, the social functions that human sacrifice once provided must still be fulfilled. Bourgeois society, never content to discard any social action that can either generate profit or maintain social order, allows sacrifice to continue at the margins of (in)visibility. Rather than eliminate the institution, society has driven sacrifice into the under-economy of taboo social relationships and bad objects which should never be brought to mind, viewed, or even named. This realm is the foundation on which the capitalist empire of excess is built.
The under-economy is organized around two kinds of sacrifice, both of which have specific material and hyperreal effects in the over-economy: One is guided by the principle of excess, the other by the principle of autonomy. Sacrifice under the sign of excess is connected to two key economic processes&emdash;the production of more than is needed on one hand, and the consumption of more than is needed on the other. To achieve this state of excessive overproduction/overconsumption, considerable numbers of citizens and aliens alike must be maimed and killed. For example, consider the use of gasoline vehicles, which most regard as an indispensable right. In light of this context, a minority political contingent claimed that the sacrifice of lives during the Gulf War was necessary to provide the western war machine with a secure supply of fuel, and to ensure that first world citizens could fuel their cars at a reasonable cost. Though this explanation is widely understood in some sense, it remains a marginal opinion. Our social arena demands that political-economic sacrifice be left unmentioned. The Gulf War and its sacrifices were officially sanctioned for the purpose of "liberating" Kuwait, and to stop a "dictator" with militant delusions of grandeur. The morality was visible, but the economic imperative was hidden underneath it, and only briefly became visible through the mediating signs of leftist defiance/deviance. While the war drew some attention to the under-economy sacrifices needed to maintain an excess supply of oil, little or no attention was paid to the deaths of the more than 50,000 people who are sacrificed each year in fatal auto accidents. This number is acceptable to most of us in exchange for the freedom to drive&emdash;so long as the sacrifice remains hidden and abstract.
Such statistics point toward the second variety of sacrifice, that which is guided by the principle of autonomy. This type of sacrifice, especially when visible, is evidently abhorrent to all political positions except the radical left (unlike sacrifice for excess, which is acceptable to all except the radical left). For those who occupy this lonely political position, sacrifice is an unfortunate but necessary consequence of the liberation of desire, a compromise which must be accepted as part of the responsibilities of freedom. For the greater the autonomy given individuals, the greater the sacrifice required. Death and autonomy (that is, the expression of desire) are inherently linked. Such sacrifices as these revolve around the ability to give, control, and take life at an individual level. Desire can take any emotional form, and it is difficult to accurately predict how it will manifest in action. A possibility always exists that the action will be violent, and hence actively connected with mortality. There is a high degree of emergent uncertainty associated with nonrational activity, and this tends to produce great anxiety; when reminders of our own mortality begin to surface, and the economy of sacrifice becomes more visible, hysteria and panic are typically not far behind. The alternative to facing up to this form of sacrifice and the discomfort of uncertainty has traditionally been the surrender of individual sovereignty to the state apparatus, which is entrusted to legislate what forms of social action will be acceptable. The greater the fear of this form of sacrifice, the more homogenous and repressed the social action required to allay the fear.
Sacrifice has always been understood as a necessary component of war. Typically, the youth of a culture are sent to battle as cannon fodder, while the support structure (spectacle) of the war machine bemoans their loss, and covers their victimization by granting them the status of patriots or heroes. The connection between the spirit world and sacrifice may be lost, but here it is replaced by metaphysical notions of national principles (progress, democracy, free markets, etc.). The lack of any absolute grounding for these "sacred" principles is obfuscated by spectacles of misdirection, illusion, and distraction: Parades, military funerals, monuments, TV specials, and so on. At the same time, the rationalized contract&emdash;that the sacrifice of x amount of people will yield y amount of profit, prestige, land, and other sacrificial victims&emdash;is well known, but unmentionable. Whether this silence is a means of avoiding the dissonance of moral contradiction, or a means of avoiding negative sanctions, tends to vary.
The necessity of sacrifice as manifest in genocide is candidly explained by fascist social philosophy: Since social solidarity through similarity of soul (manifest as a common institution of religion) is no longer possible in an enlightened age, other means must be used to bring an economically differentiated society together into a cohesive unit. Religious solidarity can be replaced by genetic solidarity, by eliminating all or some (ethnic cleansing) of those not up to (genetic) code. In addition, as the fascists saw, considerable social pressures will be neutralized if this elimination of a given population opens new geographic territory where the correctly coded underclass can relocate. In the philosophy of leftist authoritarians (Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.), an ideological code replaces the genetic code as the basis for solidarity. The notion of ideological inferiority, in combination with a spectacular support structure, creates the possibility for making rationalized mass sacrifice palatable both morally and economically. There is no doubt that modern advancements, like technology, have truly improved on the efficiency of the primitive model of sacrifice by adding rationalized extermination, both in terms of the numbers sacrificed and the speed with which modern necropolises can be constructed.
There is little reason to continue describing the emergence of sacrifice into the realm of the visible. Anyone who has reflected on these manifestations for even a moment knows the patterns. What is not typically understood is that these epic forms of sacrifice, such as genocide, do not exhaust the list. These are only the "final solutions"&emdash;pathological manifestations of an under-economy that is always swirling with death.
Every commodity has a degree of risk attached to it, and the possibility for loss of life always exists. Most people manage to keep the uncertainty of life at a reasonable distance, and thereby save themselves the constant trial of wondering whether it is about to end. Yet some cannot keep mortality out of their minds. One situation that conjures this unfortunate state of consciousness is when one loses an intimate to sacrifice. In this case, the object associated with that sacrifice typically becomes regarded as abject by the individual suffering the loss. Often, aggregates of individuals who project death onto the same object form organizations which attempt to reveal the particular sacrifice signified by the fetish object, as well as attempting to destroy the abject object itself.
Much confusion has arisen recently over the nature of the abject. Given recent literature and art exhibitions on the subject, one would think that the abject is defined only by the bourgeois aesthetic of repulsion toward the "filth" of homelessness and toward "perverted" sexual activities. Such things are but one tiny aspect of the abject, if they are in the realm of the abject at all. (Extreme sexual practices may well be a means to escape the abject rather than a means of participation in it). Any object that mediates the affective apprehension of mortality can become a temporary manifestation of the abject. The abject is liquid, sliding into existence at one moment, only to evaporate into nothingness the next. Abject objects are everywhere: they may be safety pins, telephone cords, or automatic garage door openers.
Consider the following scenario: A child wanders into a garage with an automatic garage door opener. While the child is standing in the liminal space between garage and driveway, the garage door is accidentally activated, drops down on the child's head, and breaks h/er neck. What will follow? A cry of alarm will arise, announcing the need to ban the automatic garage door (now in a state of limited fetishization). An organization of people who have had loved ones killed by automatic garage doors is formed. The members go to Congress to ask for a law to ban automatic garage doors. Their arguments are simple: "If banning garage doors saves one life, just ONE, it will be worth it;" and "Automatic garage doors are killing our children!" They are perceived as crackpots and denied legislation.
Oddly enough, this scenario could have the exact opposite ending. (One only has to recall the untimely elimination of lawn darts to know the absurd thinking and behavior that fear of the abject can conjure). Once an object is claimed to be abject by a credible organization, its role in the over-economy is assessed. If the object is deemed profitable, and much beloved, or if it provides efficiency in everyday life, then its connection to sacrifice will once again be repressed, and the object will retain its place in the pantheon of either luxury or convenience. (Lots of lobbying, spectacular actions, and other tactics of influence will be used to either destroy or save the contested object's image. Whichever occurs, the perception that triumphs in the legislation process is primarily a product of hyperreality).
If the object's abject status cannot be spectacularly sustained at a social level, then containment strategies are often used. For instance, many people drown in swimming pools each year, and yet swimming pools (or even better, bodies of water) are not banned. Rather, they are contained. Laws are passed requiring locked fences around pools. The fenced pool does not conjure associations with death&emdash;hyperreality has declared that this object is not used as a sacrificial altar. Such is also the case with helmet laws for motorcyclists or seat belt laws for drivers. These laws help us to disassociate motorcycles and cars from the under-economy, and keep them clean and visible in the over-economy. At the same time, we know that more than 50,000 will die in the US this year in motor vehicle mishaps.
Recognition of the car as an abject object is extremely temporary. Much care has been taken by the state to mediate the temporary abject relationships between subject and auto. Signs of safety abound&emdash;traffic laws, safety inspections, the highway code&emdash;and so the auto is disassociated even further from death. Even more important, however, is the vague intuition of the fairness surrounding this variety of sacrifice. The victims of this ritual seem to be selected by lot. If one has a spatial connection to cars, one enters the dead pool. The greater one's association with the object, the greater the chance of personal sacrifice. Those who love the mechanical extensions of existence as cyborg, and use their engines to explore speeds that defy the intentions of the flesh, are those willing to trade their lives for forbidden sensations. Mix this desire with rationalized indulgence in various intoxicants and the probability of death continues to rise, as does the intensity of pleasure. Unfortunately the intensity of the violence that often accompanies this sensual exploration is so great that others not receiving the foretaste of paradise are also swept into the vortex of mortality; however, if one drives or rides in autos, such consequences must be recognized. The secondary victim, rewarded at best only by the freedom to drive, is chosen at random, so again sacrifice lurks under the sign of blind occurrence (the lattice of coincidence).
Some manifestations of sacrifice seem to have a less benign aura. Victims can be chosen on the basis of extreme prejudice. For example, many people enjoy eating grapes. Because eating grapes is pleasurable, people are happiest when they can buy them at a low price, and have continuous access to them. In order to ensure that most people will have continuous physical and financial access to grapes, industrial farming techniques are used to produce an amount of grapes that well exceeds the demand. If the supply and demand were in equilibrium, any logistical error that occurred would cause food stores to either run out or be left with overstock. Grape lovers would be inconvenienced and profits would be lost. In order to be safe and sure that everyone who is economically able gets the grapes s/he desires, an excess is produced. What is not eaten is wasted&emdash;only too much is enough.
The production techniques needed for continuous bumper crops require that pesticides be used. Small doses of pesticides are not considered dangerous to humans, and so the grape consumer worries little about them, and is happy with the excess of production. Costs remain low partly because of the use of pesticides, but also because of the use of inexpensive human labor to harvest the grapes. Unfortunately, the underclass members who must sell their low-cost labor to the grape-producing employers are exposed to large toxic doses of pesticide. Excess collects its souls through the painful process of slow poisoning. To complicate matters further, this class of sacrificial victims tends to have a similar ethnic heritage. For this altar, victims clearly are not selected by lot.
In this particular case, the under-economy remains well hidden. Who thinks about those who died to produce grapes when purchasing or eating them? Who considers a grape an abject object, besides this particular labor group caught in the invisibility of the under-economy? As individuals, it is quite uncomfortable for us to think about those who died for our (those who eat grapes') pleasure&emdash;our own sadism can be disconcerting. (Buy a whip and some leathers&emdash;commodified sadism is so much easier). But on the macro level, the mechanisms to support repression are well deployed. Work laws in regard to "aliens" are quite strict. An employer has no problem deporting those who might break the silence and shed light on the taboo of sacrifice. Unofficial negative sanctions are also useful. Visit your local United Farm Workers office along the Rio Grande valley, where the bullet holes in the building are quite intentional. And let us not forget that labor as commodity also supplies one part of the grim harvest of excess.
The primary commodity of ghetto economy is labor, or perhaps (to be more accurate) potential labor. The supply of labor must always exceed the demand for it. Should there be a national crisis, or should an economic boom occur in a particular industry, a labor pool must be immediately available from which the state may draw soldiers or from which employers may recruit workers. Marx explained this process as the function of the reserve labor army. During long periods of unemployment, potential workers are housed in ghetto conditions&emdash;a spatial lock-down noted for economically desperate conditions. How could it be any other way, since no one is producing? Assuming that no emergency or boom occurs, a situation develops in which some reserve workers may be drafted into the low end of the workplace, but the majority are wasted. Lack of health care, inadequate diets, and violent competition over limited resources are the implements of sacrifice. Like the sacrificial pool of farm workers, the reserve labor army in the US consists disproportionately of minorities. The scope of this bitter harvest works beyond the mechanisms of repression&emdash;the spatial lock-down cannot contain it. New signs to reinstate the opaque boundary between the over- and under-economies have become necessary from the conservative point of view. For example, calls to bring back "family values" function as a euphemistic plea to push back into the darkness the horror of the sacrifice for excess. "Family values" is a euphemism for a militant reoccupation of the visible by the forces of social order, and in no way should be construed as a call to abolish the under-economy&emdash;quite the opposite. Such representation is in fact yet another spectacular means to perpetuate and strengthen the shadowy border between the two economies.
Sociopathic killers are terrorists devoid of political intentionality. This is a popular perception. Like terrorists, sociopaths tend to bring out the worst in people as well as in governments. Terrorists and killers force people to confront the abject in an unstable situation where the horror of the abject seems to consume all that is visible&emdash;revealing the malevolent foundation of hyper-rationalized political-economy. When this process continues for long enough, panic and hysteria are bound to follow. These nonrational motivating impulses are unacceptable in rational society, and yet so many decisions are made on their behalf. The fear of killers surpasses the fear of terrorists&emdash;having a political agenda at least makes the latter somewhat predictable, but sociopaths have no intelligible agenda. They are the very icon of the under-economy. They are a frightening reminder that anyone can be a sacrificial victim&emdash;none shall be spared. Rational argument means nothing when a killer bursts into visibility. Dying in a car accident is far more probable than being the victim of a killer, and yet the news of a killer on the loose inspires panic; the news of a fatal traffic accident&emdash;so long as an intimate is not involved&emdash;evokes indifference. When one is faced with a killer, individual autonomy seems to come at too high a price. The idea of passively existing at one moment and then being violently thrown into nonexistence the next makes people want to give their sovereignty to a protector. The police state offers the illusion of total order, a place where such happenings are seemingly impossible, whereas the opposite is true. The police state, in fact, dramatically increases the odds of violent death. Unlike the nonrational (and hence unpredictable) sociopath, the police state has instrumental reasons for killing (for example, its own self-perpetuation). Giving it the sovereignty to treat life as it pleases only increases the odds of untimely death for everybody (although for malcontents and marginals, the odds are extraordinarily increased). But the hysterical group, caught up in the panic of crime spree hype, has never been known for cool thinking. Is it any wonder that crime bills are passed on the heels of media-scrutinized deaths, or that contemporary campaign platforms are saturated with "tough on crime" rhetoric? Serial killers, macho gang kids, and armed mad junkies cannot be stopped by more police, by tougher sentencing, and/or by more jails. Those who live in the under-economy (or is it "those who fulfill the stereotypes of over-economy hyperreality"?) cannot be deterred by the disciplinary apparatus of the over-economy, such as fear of capital punishment; that apparatus only works to repress the desires and deter the actions of those who are already members in good standing of the over-economy itself.
Not all sacrifices end in death. Some victims need only be maimed to fulfill their sacrificial function. Sports is an excellent example. Some may object that sporting practices exist under a rationalized contract: Professionals are well compensated for the damage done to their bodies. Perhaps this class of sacrificial lambs do lie on the altar voluntarily, since prior to their pain they are treated as kings, given a foretaste of paradise, and therefore their fate is not so grim. But what about all the victims sacrificed to produce this royalty? The quality of sports entertainment demanded by consumers is unquestionably high. Direct participation requires a lifetime of training (although spectacular participation also requires a long indoctrination process), and sometimes bio-modification through mechanical or synthetic means is even necessary. Since the question of who will mature to join the athletic elite has no certain answers, large numbers of people must begin the grooming process early on so the pool of potential talent is large enough to yield the very finest athletes. The leftovers from this process must be wasted. Most escape the grooming process no worse for wear, happy to have participated in it; however, some do not fare so well. Among this class of throwaways are the sacrificially maimed. They are of all ages: Peewees, middle schoolers, high schoolers, and collegiates parade in a stream of bio-destruction. Joints, limbs, bones, ligaments, and more are torn, ripped, and shattered. Unlike their professional counterparts, these victims receive no compensation other than the fun they had on the way to the altar.
In this case, maiming can serve a double function. Those who fail to become participant athletes still bring profit to the developers of professional sports in a manner beyond offering themselves as material to the sports manufacturing machine. Since these sacrificial victims (the failed athletes) are not ordinarily killed (although such errors do occasionally happen), they become potential perfect spectators. The sacrificially disabled are deeply interested in their sport of choice, perhaps even nostalgic for it, and because they cannot play, they are even more willing to pay to watch it being played. The sports industry not only gets product (athletes) from institutionalized sports, but also has its market developed for it free of charge. The harvesting of so many youths for the purpose of developing a sport that can only be watched is surely a sign of the love and sincere desire for the activity. However, it may be a more profound sign of the American love for an ocular order of passivity.
For much of US history the gun has been considered a necessary tool of production. Whether it was used for the common defense, to clear the land of its aboriginal inhabitants, as a means to procure food (particularly protein), or as a means to legally collect commodities (such as furs), guns were considered instruments of construction, without which a household was incomplete. Guns were also perceived as revolutionary tools: Private ownership of weapons acted as a safeguard against tyranny. This latter notion is somewhat anachronistic, since guns are no longer the locus of military hardware, but many still cling to the idea. The NRA tells us that to be good Americans we must be "forever vigilant," and just in case, we must also be armed. These notions have provided conservatives with a mythology and dream of the US that allows them to do that which they rarely do&emdash;keep hysteria at a distance and maintain liberty. Given the conservative record, in which the answer to any social problem is to throw those enveloped in it in jail, isn't it surprising that conservatives do not want to outlaw guns and put those who possess them in prison?
Oddly enough, in this case, liberals are the ones who want to throw people in jail. For liberals, guns have become spectacularly abject, the ultimate bad object choice. The hysteria over assault weapons in particular is at a frenzy. (The actual probability of being killed by an assault weapon is so low that it hardly merits consideration). The hype generating the hysteria is based on three developments: First, the sacrifice of ghetto inmates is starting to spill into suburban visibility; second, the media continuously replays images of sociopaths going into McDonald's, suburban elementary schools, post offices, commuter subway cars, etc. and emptying a clip or two; and third, a decontextualized principle has been discovered that when a gun is fired in a household, the casualties are usually household members. For the most part (excluding victims of sociopaths), the victim of a shooting is not a universal subject, but a subject enveloped within a specific variety of predatory environment. On the other hand, being the (universalized) victim of a sociopath is less likely than being struck by lightning. However, without the stabilizing myths to which the conservatives subscribe, and which help keep the boundary between the over- and under-economies opaque, the possibility seems all too likely that one will join the sacrificial pool of victims exchanged for the freedom to possess a gun. The liberal perception is that a gun is more likely to be used against them instead of on their behalf (CAE has never heard a liberal of the over-economy suggest that their alleged protectors, the police, should not have guns). Consequently, the sacrifices necessary in exchange for freedom seem too disorderly and too visible, and hence the reactionary call for repression. Even with maximum repression (a full ban on all guns with mandatory sentences for possession), the pathologies of an under-economy, straining under the weight of capitalist excess, will not be stopped. Sociopaths aside, the armed citizen in and of h/erself is not the problem; the real problem is the armed citizen enveloped in a predatory and hyper-rationalized economy. Why is the symptom always attacked, and never the sickness?
Human sacrifice is a permanent feature of complex society. Regardless of how severe the order imposed on a society, some people will meet an untimely end to fulfill the demands of production/consumption. Regardless of how free a society is, some people will have to meet an untimely end due to desire's close association with death. Neither a perfectly regimented society nor a perfectly free one would escape the necessity of sacrifice, although the signs under which sacrifice functioned would vary tremendously. The question that must be asked is: If sacrifice is a cultural constant, which is preferable&emdash;sacrifice for the sake of individual autonomy, or sacrifice for social order (rationalized overproduction)? While the side of order offers the illusions of security, and the reality of efficiency, the repressive conditions imposed by the state, and the mental persecution of persistently frustrated desire, make this selection the choice of cowards or of those who have control over the means of production, service, and consumption. Sacrifice under such intensely rationalized conditions happens much more frequently and affects much greater numbers per sacrificial event. Further, the sacrificial victims tend to come from a pool that is determined by ascriptive characteristics. Under this regime, we transform ourselves from autonomous humans into human automatons.
Hence, it would seem better to choose sacrifice for autonomy, and yet the choice is not perfectly clear. Such a preference would mean that programs of mass rationalized sacrifice would be decreased (genocide), but that micro episodes of sacrifice (murder or accident) would not cease, and could possibly even increase. The idea that the state is the cause of all the world's trouble, and that if it were done away with, the natural goodness of people would flourish&emdash;the traditional anarchist view&emdash;seems a bit naive. Although the troubles brought into the world by the state cannot be exaggerated, grievous harm can also be worked through the free desiring agent. The egoistic nature of desire can bring about the very type of social catastrophe generally reserved for the state. In this manner, anarchy and fascism have had an ongoing flirtation with each other. In the name of liberated desire, great cruelty has been inflicted on people. For example, in the US, the household has historically been a free zone for the head of the household (and to a lesser extent for other household members). Relatively free from the tyranny of state surveillance, the household has also been a site of great social upheaval: all sorts of violence and abuse have occurred in this location. This disaster is doubled when one considers that the victims of domestic violence tend to be women and children&emdash;victims of violence selected by ascription. For this reason, many "feminists" have opted to side with the state, calling for a more repressive society. Others would say that the abusers are only expressing frustration and alienation caused by interaction with an exploitive political-economic structure, and that if state oppression were lessened, the occurrence of abuse in temporary free zones would also decrease. This too seems a reasonable possibility; however, a complete end to the violence seems unlikely. Fulfilling desire is not just a matter of empowerment, but also one of overpowering. For this reason, anarchists (using the word in its broadest sense) such as Nietzsche, Bataille, Sorel, and Bakhunin at times became (or praised, in the case of Bataille) the authoritarians that they scorned.
On the psychological level, to choose liberation requires the participant to accept or at least cope with the abject. Much is asked of a person within secular society when s/he is told not to fear death, and to accept the fate of sacrifice should it come. Nor is it easy to accept the notion that violence (in the practical sense of the term) is not categorically evil, but that within certain contexts it can be empowering for all parties. Indeed, the decision is difficult, but CAE would still rather face the anarcho-fascist problem of slippage, and cope with the visibility of the abject, than live as an abstraction within the authoritarian yoke of efficiency under the vision of state-sponsored hyperreality.
Référence: http://www.critical-art.net/ECD/title.html