anniekoh:

Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight is not a book that promises the reader a happy ever after. I didn’t post the cover image here — the bloody lower half of a slaughterhouse worker — because of the immediate revulsion it can spark. After getting the book, I kept it between a sci-fi novel and a Foucault reader so only its spine was visible. After all, if we’ve seen Food Inc. or read Temple Grandin, we think we know enough about what goes on inside a slaughterhouse. But what Pachirat sees during his six months working in a Nebraska slaughterhouse for his dissertation research is at a very different level of detail: the emotional and practical and the practical management of avoiding the emotions. A focus on food safety deflects the attention away from the work of killing onto the technical realm of hygiene. His fellow internal “quality control” worker fills out her audit forms before she even goes to see if the live animals are being handled properly, because it’s too hard for her to see them being killed. 

From James McWilliams’ interview with Timothy Pachirat:

The slaughterhouse as a whole is divided into compartmentalized departments. The front office is isolated from the fabrication department, which is in turn isolated from the cooler, which is in turn isolated from the kill floor. It is entirely possible to spend years working in the front office, fabrication department, or cooler of an industrialized slaughterhouse that slaughters over half a million cattle per year without ever once encountering a live animal much less witnessing one being killed.

But second and most importantly, the work of killing is hidden even at the site where one might expect it to be most visible: the kill floor itself. The complex division of labor and space acts to compartmentalize and neutralize the experience of “killing work” for each of the workers on the kill floor. After the knocker shoots the cattle, they fall onto a conveyor belt where they are shackled and hoisted onto an overhead line. Hanging upside down by their hind legs, they travel through a series of ninety degree turns that take them out of the knocker’s line of sight. There, a presticker and sticker sever the carotid arteries and jugular veins. The animals then bleed out as they travel further down the overhead chain to the tail ripper, who begins the process of removing their body parts and hides. Of over 800 workers on the kill floor, only four are directly involved in the killing of the cattle and less than 20 have a line of sight to the killing.  

There is a kind of collective mythology built up around the knocker, a mythology that allows for an implicit moral exchange in which the knocker alone performs the work of killing, while the work of the other 800 slaughterhouse workers is morally unrelated to that killing. It is a fiction, but a convincing one: of all the workers in the slaughterhouse, only the knocker delivers the blow that begins the irreversible process of transforming the live creatures into dead ones. If you listen carefully enough to the hundreds of workers performing the 120 other jobs on the kill floor, this might be the refrain you hear: ‘Only the knocker.’ It is simple moral math: the kill floor operates with 120+1 jobs. And as long as the 1 exists, as long as there is some plausible narrative that concentrates the heaviest weight of the dirtiest work on this 1, then the other 120 kill floor workers can say, and believe it, ‘I’m not going to take part in this.’

[Image of a Temple Grandin designed cattle chute]

At one point, the internal dissonance between what he sees (contamination) and what he is supposed to do (make sure the production line isn’t shut down) sparks the following exchange.

One day in early November, I was writing up the standard “No FMI” on the CCP-1 form when Miguel, the worker who pinned each carcass with a number and weight as it passed the scale, pointed to a large piece of fecal material on the back of one of the half-sides passing by. I frowned and shook my head as if to say, “Man, that is so bad” — the typical ritual when workers or supervisors see contamination on a carcass. This frowning and shaking of the head conveys that the person who sees the contamination does not approve of it while freeing him or her from responsibility for it. Instead of simply shaking his head back, Miguel held up one of his hands and pantomimed with his other that I should document the fecal material. Then he motioned for me to come over to him and ordered, “Tomorrow you write that there is too much shit everywhere.” (p. 200)

They bust out laughing because he and Miguel know that he will be fired if he does that. The ludicrousness of sustained pretense is transmuted into black humor. 

[Timothy Pachirat is a political science professor at the New School]

The top images of this post are close-ups of Pachirat’s incredibly detailed floor plan of the slaughterhouse that is included in the book and also included in Boing Boing’s interview with him.

Months after I left the slaughterhouse, I got in an argument with a brilliant friend over who was more morally responsible for the killing of the animals: those who ate meat or the 121 workers who did the killing. She maintained, passionately and with conviction, that the people who did the killing were more responsible because they were the ones performing the physical actions that took the animal’s lives. Meat eaters, she claimed, were only indirectly responsible. At the time, I took the opposite position, holding that those who benefited at a distance, delegating this terrible work to others while disclaiming responsibility for it, bore more moral responsibility, particularly in contexts like the slaughterhouse, where those with the fewest opportunities in society performed the dirty work.

I am now more inclined to think that it is the preoccupation with moral responsibility itself that serves as a deflection. In the words of philosopher John Lachs, ‘The responsibility for an act can be passed on, but its experience cannot.’ I’m keenly interested in asking what it might mean for those who benefit from physically and morally dirty work not only to assume some share of responsibility for it but also to directly experience it. What might it mean, in other words, to collapse some of the mechanisms of physical, social, and linguistic distances that separate our ‘normal’ lives from the violence and exploitation required to sustain and reproduce them?

Pachirat quotes from Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Dispossessed to highlight the deliberate distances that have been built between making (or slaughtering) and buying (and eating). The protagonist visits the shopping district in a world much like our own in which “none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories.. Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.”