Acoustic Separation; Sacred Shopping

From Paul W. Kahn's Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty

Sacrifice or murder?

A successful state knows how to maintain both law and sacrifice. It knows how to keep them acoustically separated and how to negotiate the line between the two. Most important, it knows who its enemies are. The perception of the enemy invokes the sacrificial imagination, which makes possible the double sided violence of killing and being killed. A government may have the legal power to declare war, but it has no similar declaratory power to create an enemy. Every act of identifying an enemy is fraught with risk, for if the populace fails to see that person or group as the enemy, it will see only murder, not sacrifice. True enemies can be sacrificed in a display of sovereign power, but it is certainly not the case that anyone who is sacrificed becomes the enemy. The possibility of failure is built into the very idea of acoustic separation - that which cannot tolerate contact may, in fact, come into contact. When the victim is not the enemy, his death becomes murder and the agent of that death is a murderer. (156)


On memorialization:

The primary space of memorialization in the United States is the Mall in Washington, DC. There we find juxtaposed the two narratives of the state. On the one hand, there are the memorials to sacrificial violence. On the other, there are the institutions of lawful governance, which are themselves linked to the Mall through the museums that produce a national project of advancing civilization. In one day, the visitor is to divide his time - usually his family's time, for this is an inter-generational project - among the Smithsonian the Vietnam and Lincoln memorials, and the Capitol. We learn that we are a nation that sacrifices for the maintenance of a community dedicated to the project of enlightened self-government under law. We are particular in our sacrifices and universal in our law. We memorialize past violence within a space from which we can simultaneously see the rule of law. We turn from the sacrificial past to the narrative of the present as the stabilized order of law. Thus, the Mall gives geographic representation to the double narrative; it provides anordered, bounded space for each, making possible an easy transition across these two domains. On the Mall, one cannot answer the question of which site best represents the nation. Rather, one absorbs them all, just as Congress, which presides on a hill overlooking this national bricolage, is to absorb them all, producing a law that is simultaneously an expression of the sovereign will and the progressive realization of reason." (159)