Inciting Action by Analyzing Pachirat

The book Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat explores “the politics of sight”, or the intentional invisibilizing or transparentizing of repugnant acts in order to encourage or limit them, through the case study of a beef slaughter house in Omaha, NE. While also utilizing the politics of sight, Pachirat hopes for great political and social change concerning the immoral acts that happen at meat plants through a radical act of transparency: a narrative ethnography. Writers with similar goals of great change in social and political issues can make use of Pachirat’s techniques, which this article explains and summarizes. His style of writing hopes not to just spread awareness but incite action. After analyzing Pachirat’s book, four helpful tips were gathered: 1) conveying an objective tone through storytelling can better persuade readers by presenting as unbiased; 2) evidence and writing structure can be most effective when the writer sticks to their strengths by reflexively drawing on their background; 3) writers need to assess the restrictions they are under and the audience they wish to reach when effectively inciting a population to action; and 4) transparency can incite great social and political change, but to maximize its effectiveness writers must work within larger discussions to practice storytelling which is thoughtfully done and context-specific to each cause. By understanding these techniques, writers can enter larger discussions of writing as activism, encourage dialogue of multiple political and social issues, and hopefully incite change through action.