In his intriguing new book, Timothy Pachirat sets out to do political theory via unconventional and provocative means. He observed the operational processes of a large meatpacking plant at close range, participated in those processes as an employee, and reflects here on what he encountered. This project raises important questions about the interrelations among “sense-experience,” moral judgment, and political action. And although its silences on certain substantive and methodological issues can be frustrating, the book succeeds in bringing to the fore both a valuable new perspective on the politics of the visual and a procedure of engaged analysis from which political theorists can learn a great deal.
Pachirat's core intention in Every Twelve Seconds is to reveal how both concealment and, ironically, visibility collude to deprive human beings of direct sensory experiences of the killing that occurs on a massive scale in factories where cattle are slaughtered and processed into food commodities. The author reiterates the now-common lament that the windowless walls of modern meat factories enable a consumer culture in which carnivores can blithely purchase shrink-wrapped meat cuts from the grocery store with no thought to the blood and stench of the slaughter. More originally, however, he describes how the routines of fresh beef production also deny such disturbing sense-experiences to the very workers who are physically closest to the carnage.
Pachirat takes full advantage of his ethnographic approach to elaborate this latter trajectory of thought. His account begins with two chapters that map the lines of sight and the impediments to visibility that structure the interior space of the meatpacking facility where he worked for five and a half months in 2004. Only a tiny cohort of workers, he shows, witnesses the passage of the animal from a living to a dead state, due to this spatialization of the highly differentiated labor process. Meanwhile, linguistic and work–cultural conventions generate a semiotics of denial that disjoin the “clean” from the “dirty” places within the factory and, even within the dirty zones, relieve the vast majority of workers from any “emotional responsibility for the killing of the animal” (p. 84).
The author moves on to a sequence of four chapters in which he tells his story of applying for a job and then working at the factory in three different capacities: as a “liver-hanger” in the commodity-fabrication part of the plant, as a chute worker driving live cattle into the killing zone, and as a quality-control worker checking meat for contamination and watching workers to see if they have followed food-safety protocols.
Pachirat is a talented writer with a knack for making horribly repellant scenes unexpectedly absorbing. Moreover, the book not only relates the events occurring inside the plant but also “itself enacts a politics of sight by making visible a massive, routinized work of killing that many would prefer to keep hidden” (p. 15). That is, in one respect, he aims to explain how all of the plant workers alike, albeit in job-specific ways, lose a sense of the suffering and “the individuality of the animals” (p. 15) through the work they perform. But in addition, Pachirat strategically deploys his prose to provoke corporeal responses among readers that range from shock to disgust to grief for the perpetually vanishing but suffering body of the animal. He not only writes about the politics of affect and of making visible, but also models a writerly practice of such politics, mingling narrative, analysis, and performativity in an intellectually risky and fruitful way.
Every Twelve Seconds concludes with a chapter that lies somewhat askew of these foregoing discussions. Pachirat here discusses the ambiguous implications of a politics based on bringing to light what has been concealed. Referencing Norbert Elias, he notes the historically contextual character of the moral repugnance such politics seeks to incite, as well as of common sense about what should not be seen publicly. Hence, the effect of moral revulsion attending the revelation of that which has been hidden depends, ironically, on given cultural norms of concealment, which the shock effect then inadvertently reinforces. Pachirat thus ends with a salutary call for “a context-sensitive politics of sight that recognizes both the possibilities and pitfalls of organized, concerted attempts to make visible what is hidden” (p. 255). To fill out a sense of what such a politics would look like, however, he might have considered organized efforts to illuminate the veiled operations of slaughterhouses or other sites of modern mass killing. His story of working in the slaughterhouse does not, in itself, provide a sufficiently satisfying, concrete reference point for the concluding political reflections because it remains so preoccupied with his individual experiences, rather than moving outward toward those of other persons or groups.
In general, the political dynamics of intersubjectivity, group cultural formation, and collective action are undertheorized throughout Pachirat's study. Detailed examination of such phenomena certainly lay beyond the scope of the project, but the book at least might have offered some commentary on how the political effects the author wants to generate could have been accomplished as the efforts of people struggling to cooperate across lines of class, racial, gender, legal, and linguistic difference, inequality, and domination.
More specifically, Pachirat could have more systematically interrogated the relation between his theoretical labors, bodily exertions, and moral–emotional responses and those of other groups of workers. For instance, he writes that by seeing a line of cow heads “gliding above the kill floor in what seems an endless succession, one is able to grasp … the sheer, staggering volume of the killing” (p. 72, emphasis in original). Does this sight register in precisely the same way for workers in the plant who do not share Pachirat's cultural and racial background? It would be important to know this, to understand the political implications of the sensory-affective moments that arise within distinct individuals' and groups' everyday labor inside the slaughterhouse. Similarly, a more self-critical discussion of the central role of deception and “passing” in his idiosyncratic ethnographic approach, in terms of both ethical issues and possible effects on substantive research findings—including the interactions with co-workers he discusses anecdotally—would have been helpful.
More precise development of core philosophical–political concepts in dialogue with other theorists, in turn, also would have ameliorated these problems. Although Pachirat argues persuasively that the distribution of physical space within the factory impedes “immediate and visceral confrontation with the work of industrialized killing” (p. 84), he does not ask: What specifically constitutes an “immediate and visceral” experience, and what roles might language and sociocultural positionality play in the constitution of such experience as morally or politically significant? Pachirat's conclusions would have carried even more theoretically innovative heft had he engaged Elias on these questions more critically and in conversation with others who have conceptualized rigorously the ethical and political dynamics of “the visceral register,” such as William Connolly (Why I Am Not a Secularist, 1999) or Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialectics, 1973). Similarly, Pachirat borrows effectively from Michel Foucault's theory of disciplinary surveillance to explain how techniques to make the unseen visible generate domination; yet he does not comment on the friction between a Foucauldian notion of discursively constituted subjectivity and the many suggestions in this book, such as in generic references to “the realities of killing” (p. 84), that a prediscursive human experience of animality in the throes of death is possible.
Despite these lacunae in the analysis, however, Every Twelve Seconds achieves much that is vitally important. It demonstrates in compelling fashion that intellectually vigorous political inquiry can be richly empirical without bowing to the positivist prejudices of mainstream social science. Above all, the book casts a blood-spattered gauntlet at the feet of political and critical theorists of many stripes, daring us to think and write from concrete sociopolitical sites in all their physically brutal, morally anesthetizing, and just plain uncomfortable complexity.
