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The Politics of Sight: Revisiting Timothy Pachirat’s Every Twelve Seconds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2021

JASMINE ENGLISH Open the ORCID record for JASMINE ENGLISH [Opens in a new window]  and
BERNARDO ZACKA Open the ORCID record for BERNARDO ZACKA [Opens in a new window]
JASMINE ENGLISH*
Affiliation:
MIT, United States
BERNARDO ZACKA*
Affiliation:
MIT, United States
*
Jasmine English, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Political Science, MIT, United States, jenglish@mit.edu.
Bernardo Zacka, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, MIT, United States, nardoz@mit.edu.
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Abstract

In his ethnography of industrialized slaughter, Every Twelve Seconds, Timothy Pachirat coins a label to describe political interventions that use visibility as a catalyst for reform—the “politics of sight.” We argue that the politics of sight rests on three premises that are all mistaken or misspecified: (1) that exposing morally repugnant practices will make us see them, (2) that seeing such practices will stop us from acquiescing to them, and (3) that owning up to such practices is preferable to keeping them concealed. To develop our argument, we propose an alternative interpretation of Pachirat’s own ethnographic material informed by theories from social psychology—one that leads to a different critique of the politics of sight than the one Pachirat offers and to a different understanding of the conditions under which it can succeed. Methodologically, we seek to illustrate the value of reanalyzing interpretive research through close reading.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 3 , August 2022 , pp. 1025 - 1037
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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