Two things that really struck me in
today’s readings were the mechanisms that underlie the diminishment of
visibility, and the way that our consumer society encourages this diminishing
visibility as a means of preserving aesthetic interests. In what I found to be a
very effective tactic used in Every
Twelve Seconds, Pachirat sets up a thought experiment describing a world in
which there is total visibility. This world would be “organized around the
removal, rather than the creation of physical, social, linguistic, and
methodological distances” and “ every zone of privilege would exist in full
contact with the zone of confinement that was its counterpart” (240, 242). In this way, eating meat would acquaint the
meat eater with all of the steps taken to turn sow into steak. As I read this,
I thought about how many people (e.g., small farm owners and workers) are privy
to both the consumption side and production side of meat. Surely, there are
many people who are involved in both the killing and eating of meat, and this
underscores the larger objective of this argument. The argument and purpose of
this book and module is not about eating meat, it is about visibility and
accountability.
Pachirat goes on to discuss how
transparency can generate transformational politics. He uses the phrase
“transparent, literally or even figuratively” many times, which I found problematic.
Although the idea that literal transparency (e.g., glass walled
slaughterhouses) could engender political change is not implausible (though
still most likely improbable), the idea that figurative transparency, in the
form of this book for example, could engender political change seems quite
far-fetched to me. We are all reading
this book and these articles, and I imagine that they have only catalyzed
quantitatively and qualitatively paltry changes in our lives. It seems that the
most tangible effect of figurative transparency is the creation of more excuses
and rationalizations. So maybe literal transparency (which seems only viable in
thought experiments really) is the answer, but how long until this literal
transparency falls subject to compassion fatigue anyway?
Pachirat then explicates the
ways in which divisions of labor serve to diminish the literal transparency,
even on the kill floor. Yet, there is still some literal transparency there. In
our consumer society, however, even this transparency can be effectively destroyed.
According to Bauman, “technological progress has reached the point where
productivity grows together with the tapering of employment; factory crews get
leaner and slimmer” (313). How will
“more effective” technology streamline and further obscure industrial
slaughter? How will “more effective” technology streamline and further obscure
torture? Will we one day have the technology to perform all of our “dirty work”
without anyone actually having to see what is going on? In many ways, this
trend has already began. Without such technologies as airplanes and computers,
outsourcing and cheap foreign labor would not be possible or efficient. I wonder
how effectively technology will be used in the future to further distance us from
the underside of our consumer society. This diminished visibility will help
preserve aesthetic interests by allowing consumers, like meat eaters for
example, to consume meat without anyone having to think about where this meat
is coming from.
These aesthetic interests are the
motivating force of our consumer culture, because “consumers [in a consumer
society] must be guided by aesthetic interests, not ethical norms” (Bauman
321). So, is there a place for ethical norms in this consumer society of
diminished visibility? Specter discusses how much of the green movement is
“compelled by economic necessity” (44), and how many of the efforts of the
consumers who buy into this new “green” trend are misguided. All of this makes
for much superficial modification, and no effective or lasting change. I
suppose it is a step in the right direction, at any rate. Still, it is clear that
we have a ways to go. Maybe lasting change needs to begin with transparency and
increased visibility.
Like Britt, I was particularly interested in the focus of this week’s readings on visibility, and the mechanisms that underlie it. Thinking about the alternative paradigms suggested, I started imagining what these alternative paradigms might look and feel like. I, too, wondered about the susceptibility of full visibility to push us into the realm of compassion fatigue, or even just blindness of habit. After all, even according to Pachirat, lack of visibility is not the only force maintaining the grunt and grime of slaughterhouses; it is, as he calls it, “killing mediated by… monotony” (238). He also includes a quote about hunting societies, suggesting “a hunting people’s deep, unreflexive attitude towards animal life” (250). To me, these statements perhaps contradict (if only partly) the notion that, “were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to do it this way.” (246).
ReplyDeleteThis thought process led me to a partial conclusion about the irony of our current situation. Could it be that in preserving this aesthetically driven experience and notion of the ideal for mainstream/upper-class American society, a certain mental framework has emerged that would not otherwise have been cultivated, a framework in which we are distanced enough from the process—both dirty and cruel—to see it in a particularly critical way? Let me explain. Any cruelty that becomes monotony tends to catch its partakers and witnesses in its own internal logic. This is true of many different forms of cruelty, but for whatever reason the one that presently comes to mind is domestic abuse. It takes not only someone on the outside, but also someone who does not buy in to the “normalcy” of that internal logic, to scream “stop!” We, as the ignorantly preserved class that did not know about all of these cruelties in depth until now—at a stage of life where our sense of right and wrong and our notions of aesthetics and the grotesque are pretty firmly cemented—have been implicated in this system for our entire lives, but because it was hidden it was not able to work its way into our consciousnesses as “normal.” This puts us not only in a unique position to criticize the system; I think it might also put us in an ironically unique position to “see” that there is something (indeed, many things) flawed about it. This is not to say that the reverse doesn’t happen—that people in the slaughterhouse don’t cry “cruelty,” etc. because if that were the case there would be no need, really, to render it invisible. But this does not take away from my point that we are in a very particular position of previous ignorance that ironically makes us more susceptible to being horrified over the contents of a book like Pachirat’s.
All of the readings for today did a great job of connecting the ideas of consumption, slaughter, and human impact to ethics on a larger scale. Pachirat’s last chapter was a brilliant display of how the politics of sight in the slaughterhouse were mirrored in every aspect of society today. I agree with Brit that two points I was most focused on were that of visibility and aesthetics. I immediately thought of the connection to Alexander in what we don’t see in regards to prison politics. For me, today’s readings really brought together Professor Stern’s discussion about slaughterhouses as a vehicle of understanding in the way we treat one another. Who has the privilege of blindness? What if we really did have to “touch the hands that sewed the seams” (Pachirat 241) of the jeans when we bought them? The idea of turning society upside down, instead of concealing- revealing, is an idea of revolution. Revolution is about facing the ugliness, admitting to it. This led me to thinking about “inverted quarantine” which I think also has a lot to do with privilege and sight. How do we make choices based off of what we allow ourselves to see and not see, to admit to and to ignore? The aesthetics of what we chose to see create the fake reality we chose to live in. We live in a world of the new Jim Crow, slaughterhouses, consumption, and how else do we change these things but to make them visible?
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