Mediated Spectacles Impact Human Perceptions of the Minds of Animals
Across cultures, human understandings of the minds of most nonhuman animals are derived primarily from mediated representations rather than direct interactions with nonhuman animals (hereafter termed animals). It is through such mediated representations that postindustrial post-modern humans typically encounter many species of animals (Kalof and Fitzgerald 2007). Because these representations are created, they necessarily reflect certain interests of their creators. They also function as sites of interaction where the public is entertained and informed about animals, even as their perceptions of the animals’ minds are shaped.
The contemporary animal rights movement is increasingly using mediated encounters between postindustrial humans and animals. Jasper and Nelkin (1992) assert that the contemporary animal rights movement began with the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) and was bolstered by Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights (1983). Singer’s utilitarian and Regan’s rights-based works employed linear and sustained arguments for the ethical treatment of animals supported by scientific evidence for the capacity of (some) animals to suffer. These works inspired widely noted animal rights protests, which often involved visual representations of the animals in question. In this sense, both the contemporary animal rights movement and animal advocacy movement are emblematic of the Enlightenment tradition of using evidence alongside persuasion with the goal of creating social and political change.
Case in Point: “Chimps Aren’t Chumps”
A New York Times Op-Ed piece “Chimps Aren’t Chumps,” written by Steve Ross (2008), supervisor of behavioral and cognitive research at the Lester Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo, emphasizes the connections between public perceptions of animals and their mediated representations: “A survey that I and several colleagues conducted in 2005 found that one in three visitors to the Lincoln Park Zoo assumed that chimpanzees are not endangered. Yet more than 90 percent of these same visitors understood that gorillas and orangutans face serious threats to their survival. And many of those who imagined chimpanzees to be safe reported that they based their thinking on the prevalence of chimps in advertisements, on television and in the movies” (p. 19). Thus, according to a professional zoologist, mediated representations of animals in popular entertainment and advertising influence public understandings (accurate or otherwise) of chimpanzees. How animals are represented is critical to the ways in which the public perceives them and impacts how people experience animals in their moral imagination.
This finding is in keeping with other observations of claims making and public perceptions of any issue’s social significance. Bob (2005) contends that a “global morality market” exists (p. 4) within which nongovernmental organizations and others compete for public attention regarding the significance of a specific humanitarian crisis or oppressed population. For example, the Uyghurs occupy a similar position to that of the Tibetans in terms of their occupation by China, the documented human rights abuses against them, and the significant possibility of eventual cultural extermination. And, yet, despite their objective similarities in terms of their human grievances, the Uyghurs have not received equivalent popular or political receptions. In postindustrial countries like Canada and the United States (especially around colleges and universities), “Free Tibet” bumper stickers, T-shirts, and other objects promoting some aspect of Tibetan Buddhism, culture, and/or independence may be observed, film actors such as Richard Gere speak of their religious faith in Tibetan Buddhism, and public intellectuals like Jeffrey Hopkins and Robert Thurman generate scholarship, translations, and positive attention regarding Tibetan Buddhism to English-speaking audiences. These factors may be significant in explaining why, for example, in 2007 His Holiness the Dali Lama, the religious leader of the Tibetan people, after lecturing at Cornell University and Ithaca College, was received by Speaker Pelosi and President Bush in Washington, DC (over the expressed concerns of the People’s Republic of China). The Uyghurs have none of the aforementioned means of gaining public attention. The ability to maintain a presence within popular mediated culture contributes to explaining why Tibet, and not other nations and peoples enduring similar crises, receives public and political attention. This case also suggests that the ability to position certain understandings of animals may significantly impact societal perceptions of them.
Social Imaginary and Public Moral Imagination
The perceptions humans hold of the minds and other aspects of animals are derived largely from a highly mediated popular culture, which informs what Taylor (2004) terms the social imaginary. The social imaginary consists of the norms, expectations, and practices that are taken for granted (i.e., imagined to be just the way things are) by the majority in a culture. The social imaginary includes “the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” and the “common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (pp. 23–24). The social imaginary can encourage or inhibit forms of social, cultural, and economic change. For example, Steger (2008) argues that the macro-ideologies of modernity—liberalism and conservatism—emerged as their host societies were evolving a national imaginary that encouraged concepts of citizenship (instead of subjects beholden to monarchs) and national identity. Similarly, how the minds of animals are understood within the social imaginary informs the social positions and statuses of animals. Taylor argues that social life is an amalgamation of different social practices and their related images, ideas, and understandings. In this case, it strongly influences the legitimacy of human practices toward particular animals, such as which animals may be eaten (pp. 23–24). Animal portrayals from animal advocates that depict animals as worthy of ethical consideration may influence the status of the animals within the social imaginary.
Social Imaginary Impacted Through Spectacles
Contemporary animal advocates who focus on logical argumentation face a formidable problem in engaging the public regarding their understanding of the minds of animals: the public fascination with mediated spectacles. In mediated spectacles data may become obscured or distorted in favor of the visually dramatic. This mediated milieu has been termed “the spectacular” by Debord (1995, 2002), Kellner (2003), Edelman (1988), Duncombe (2007), and others (also see Baudrillard 1994). The vast majority of the information and claims (Best 2007) are disseminated, amplified, and/or distorted through the spectacular. Duncombe (2007) contends that claims makers must recognize and adapt to today’s spectacular milieu rather than be swayed by an appealing myth about the efficaciousness of rational persuasion leading to agreement. Rather than believing that “if reasoning people have access to the Truth, the scales will fall from their eyes and they will see reality as it is and, of course, agree with us,” claims makers must embrace the spectacular as an essential vehicle for persuasion and communication: “Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belong to those who tell the better story” (pp. 7–8).
Put another way, my point is that movements that emerge out of an empirical and philosophical tradition tend to overemphasize the weight that data and evidence alone play in influencing third parties. As Duncombe argues, many social and political movements will have unrealistic expectations about facilitating social and political change if they draw on the Enlightenment assumption that reasoned arguments and empirical evidence alone are overwhelming weapons in their persuasive arsenal. Like the contemporary animal rights movement, many progressive political and social movements have emphasized data and theory as essential tools for building consensus while ignoring the roles played by emotional and/or visual appeals, thereby potentially alienating supporters (or unintentionally ceding these tools to their opponents): “Appeals to truth and reality, and faith in rational thought and action, are based in fantasy of the past, or rather past fantasy. Today’s world is linked by media systems and awash in advertising images; political policies are packaged by public relations experts and celebrity gossip is considered news” (p. 5). The Enlightenment tradition’s now myopic view initially relied on the visual—anatomical diagrams, documentation, and “transparency” in scientific and legal proceedings—as essential to establishing and supporting valid and reliable epistemological claims.
One Spectacular Strategy: Sociological Warfare
Promoting alternate understandings of the minds of animals—e.g., the perception of sentience—will necessarily involve engaging and influencing the social imaginary to bridge gaps between audience and the subject animals. Sociological warfare is any strategic effort to alter the public moral imagination about some aspect of the social imaginary (i.e., what is taken for granted). Sociological warfare is deployed by nonstate actors who advocate ideals and alternative visions of social life (see Lowe 2008). Sociological warfare bears some parallel to psychological or political warfare undertaken by state actors in order to pursue specific policy or geopolitical objectives (see Waller 2007). In the case of animal advocacy, sociological warfare might be applied to opposing the sale of fur garments or to promoting an alternative consciousness regarding the positions of animals within human societies (Gusfield 1981).
The primary impetus of sociological warfare is to communicate complex ideological messages to audiences with the intention of influencing the social imaginary itself. This is accomplished by providing a synthesis of direct informational appeals and emotional and/or aesthetic appeals. These efforts often involve a personalizing and subjective narrative that is widely distributed through cultural artifacts. Harriett Beecher Stowe’s 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin personified the suffering created by slavery in the antebellum American South. Roald Dahl and the British Security Coordination generated domestic support in the United States for involvement in World War II and eroded the credibility of isolationists through publishing pro-British articles in popular magazines, including Colliers, Harper’s, Ladies Home Journal, and Town and Country (Conant 2008:41–42). Tom Dooley’s 1956 best-selling (and CIA-supported) first-personal account, Deliver Us From Evil, of Dooley acting as a devout Roman Catholic doctor selflessly treating many of the victims of the Vietminh became the first perspective on the conflict in French Indochina encountered by many Americans (Wilford 2008). Ingrid Newkirk’s Free the Animals (1992) presented a dramatic account of “Valerie,” a police officer who becomes a member of the Animal Liberation Front and participates in the “liberation” of animals (Newkirk 1992). In addition to providing compelling and subjective narratives of macro-level societal and political controversies, these cases also interweave data, argument, and emotionally compelling appeals with the goal of altering the public moral imagination.
Case Studies of Persuasion Within the Spectacular
One noteworthy case of data and spectacle in animal rights protests involves cruelty in the name of science. On May 28, 1984, members of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) penetrated the laboratory of Thomas Gennarelli at the University of Pennsylvania. This raid resulted in the seizure of what were later termed the “Watergate tapes of the animal rights movement”: over sixty hours of videotapes of Gennarelli’s own research on test subject baboons deliberately subjected to head traumas. These tapes were quite graphic in nature and contained understandably troubling depictions of animal research. These tapes were potentially defensible in that they represented animal-based research that might hold benefits for humans who suffered from head traumas. Such justifications were eroded as the research tapes made in Gennarelli’s laboratory documented several violations of the Federal Animal Welfare Act. These violations were damning in that Gennarelli had received roughly one million dollars annually in federal grants to conduct that research since 1971, and neither these tapes nor other documents revealed any scrutiny or sanction by federal government officials regarding violations of the Federal Animal Welfare Act (Finsen and Finsen 1994).
As the Gennarelli research tapes were graphic in nature, derived from an unimpeachable source (Gennarelli’s own data), and documented government-supported animal abuse, they were ideal candidates for deployment in efforts to alter the public moral imagination about animal experimentation. The research tapes were compiled by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) into a thirty-minute documentary titled Unnecessary Fuss (Newkirk and Pacheco 1984). The title was derived from a 1983 interview in which Gennarelli stated that he did not wish for his research to become publicly known because “it might stir up all sorts of unnecessary fuss among those who are sensitive to these sorts of things (Finsen and Finsen 1994:68).” Copies of Unnecessary Fuss were distributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC’s Nightly News, and the Cable News Network (CNN), which broadcast clips from the compilation. Two screenings of Unnecessary Fuss also occurred on Capitol Hill. The mediated publicity of these tapes was amplified by a campaign of civil disobedience organized primarily by PETA and the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) at both the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institute of Health (the primary source of Gennarelli’s funding). The synthesis of traditional protests, civil disobedience, and public outcry generated as a result of the dissemination of Unnecessary Fuss, congressional pressure, and a lack of a systematic response from animal experimentation advocates led to the closure of Gennarelli’s laboratory—the first time in American history that a federally funded research laboratory had been closed as a result of public protests informed by mediated images (Finsen and Finsen 1994; Jasper and Nelkin 1992; Blum 1994; Beers 2006).
Another example of sociological warfare using data and spectacle involves the Sea Shepherd Organization. Paul Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Organization in 1977 after a break with Greenpeace regarding strategies to pursue environmental or animal protection. The core strategy of Watson and the Sea Shepherd Organization was direct confrontation between their ships and whaling vessels at sea in order to interrupt and possibly disrupt commercial whaling. The ships of the Sea Shepherds are named after publicly recognized, quasi-celebrity animal advocates, including Farley Mowat, Steve Irwin, and Cleveland Amory. As noted by Heller in his 2007 account of being aboard the Farley Mowat, Watson succinctly summarizes the Sea Shepherd strategy as “sink ships, but don’t break laws.” The actions of the Sea Shepherds have been the subject of a series aired on Animal Planet titled Whale Wars for three consecutive seasons and is currently in its fourth season.
The Sea Shepherd Organization legitimizes its actions through appeals to international law and the scientific community in order to convince audiences that the actions undertaken by the Sea Shepherd organization defend both marine life and legal statutes. Watson justifies the Sea Shepherd’s actions by noting that commercial whaling—especially in international oceanic sanctuaries—is illegal, and therefore actions undertaken to disrupt such hunts are legally protected. Watson argues that the primary justifications cited by Japanese whalers—that they are actually gathering data on whales and thus their actions are sanctioned—are false and indefensible. Conversely, Watson argues that the Sea Shepherds are acting on behalf of whales and other marine mammals in keeping with international law: “Our intention is to stop the criminal whaling. We are not a protest organization. We are here to enforce international conservation law. We don’t wave banners. We intervene…. I don’t give a damn what you think. My clients are the whales and the seals. If you can find me one whale that disagrees with what we’re doing, we might reconsider” (Watson, quoted in Heller 2006:58). The Sea Shepherd Organization’s strategies include placing the Farley Mowat between the whalers and their targets, throwing foul-smelling butyric acid onto the decks of the Japanese fleet to make the decks impassible and to contaminate whale meat, deploying “prop foulers” in the hopes of paralyzing or destroying the engines of the Japanese vessels, and then rapidly disseminating evidence of their activities and interactions with the Japanese whaling fleet to news media and supporters. In their disseminations the protesters elevate the status of whales and seals to “clients” worthy of protection. Heller reports that, while the activities of the Farley Mowat have limited effectiveness in actually inhibiting the Japanese whaling fleet, the press dispatches transmitted to the Sea Shepherds’ supporters and others become tactically significant in this conflict. For example, Heller notes that, due to negative public sentiment generated by communications from the Sea Shepherds and Greenpeace, the Japanese whaling fleet was unable to enter an Australian refueling area, thereby delaying and limiting their hunt. In his dispatches Heller stressed the endangerment of the Farley Mowat’s crew members, Australian citizens who were placed in jeopardy while pursuing their goal of ending whaling in the Antarctic sanctuary. He knew that a near collision between the Farley Mowat and the much larger Nisshin Maru would channel political pressure and public outrage against the Japanese practice of whaling, as he revealed in a conversation between Heller and Watson:
“If he would’ve ended it [referring to the Nisshin Maru ramming and sinking the Farley Mowat] there, that would’ve probably ended commercial whaling. But I still believe that not sacrificing people for that, in that way, is probably a better choice.”
“But personally, you’re willing to make that trade off—trade your own life to stop whaling?”
“Absolutely. But I’m not going to engage in some suicide mission. It’s gotta be a calculated risk.”
The captain said, “If they had sunk us, there’d be such bad PR for them. The Australian navy would be down here in no time. They’d be hauled in for inves tigations. Australia would have to intervene at that point. We have Australian citizens on board….”
Watson ducked into the radio room. By 0605 he already had his first press release posted. It began: “No whale will be killed this Christmas day …”
(Heller 2007:207–208)
This exchange demonstrates Watson’s strategy of intermingling direct action, mediated accounts of direct action, and efforts to manipulate governments to intervene on behalf of the Sea Shepherds (and the organization’s interpretation of international law).
Trends in Sociological Warfare
These examples suggest four interrelated strategies in sociological warfare: the truncation of time and space, the dissemination of evocative information, the personalization of animals, and the undoing of fetishism.
Time and space truncation occurs when perceptions of distance and duration are diminished because of developments in information technology and transportation (see Giddens 1984 on time and space disembedding). For example, when people engage with media accounts about the Sea Shepherd Organization’s documentation of the activities of the Japanese whaling fleet, they do so from thousands of kilometers away. Likewise, they experience the events of Gennarelli’s head injury studies conducted at the University of Pennsylvania as here and now, rather than in some distant temporal period or spatial location. In spite of this temporal and geographic distance, animal advocates are able to use these activities to alter contemporary public perceptions of practices involving animals and to involve the public in animal advocacy.
Evocative information refers to presenting factually correct data in an emotionally compelling manner. Rather than presenting purely informative or data-driven argumentation and claims making, evocative information sensationalizes and visualizes. Those who can offer evocative information can more readily traverse the spectacular environment. The Unnecessary Fuss compilation released by PETA to the media is an excellent example of evocative information in that it provided data and compelling visual images of animal suffering from an unassailable source: Gennarelli’s own research (Beauchamp et al. 2008). Related to the production of evocative information is what Arluke (2006) termed, adopting the imagined perspective of Humane Society officers and animal advocates, the “beautiful case” of cruelty, that is, a case that evokes sympathy from an audience without being too graphic to bear or too mundane to be perceived as unworthy of consideration.
The personalization of animals (a subcategory of evocative information) refers to presenting animals as individuals with their own histories, memories, and preferences. Such personalization can be used strategically to erode boundaries of species or societal categories, as when animals widely consumed for food are named and represented as beings with life histories. “Personalization” may occur at a species level (as in the elevation in status of whales as intelligent beings) or in more microsociological scenarios whereby specific animals become subjects of sympathy (as in the case of the primate test subjects of Gennarelli’s head injury laboratory, photographs of which were displayed at public protests outside of the National Institutes of Health). Personalization serves the dual functions of emphasizing the suffering of animals while simultaneously challenging the status of those who impose such suffering on these animals and the politics in which certain activities become more or less normative (Gusfield 1986). For example, in an ongoing controversy over potential deer culling by the town of Cayuga Heights, New York, opponents to the proposed culling have protested at town meetings by showing “posters of individual deer in chairs facing the trustees … [with captions reading] ‘My life matters to me’ and ‘I am an individual with a family’” (Gashler 2009).
Undoing fetishism concerns making consumers aware of the origins of the products they consume. Karl Marx argued that under conditions of capitalism (which extended the social and geographic distances between workers and consumers), consumers of commodities tended to ignore the fact that commodities are the products of human labor and instead perceived these commodities as though they were endowed with qualities that labor did not provide them with (and hence commodities were like fetishes, which are endowed with qualities that they do not, of themselves, have). Revealing this “fetishism of commodities” was one of the concerns of Marx’s analysis of capitalism as unique relative to other relations of production (Tucker 1978). Similarly, many animal advocates are charged with revealing to audiences how many of the products and services they consume are provided through an exploitation of animals. Animal advocates routinely face the difficulty of emphasizing the connections between products (such as food) or activities (such as animal-based research) and the unseen suffering of animals. One method to address the connection is through the utilization of media in order to inject either information or cultural resources (Swidler 1986) into the social imaginary in order to show that the production of certain commodities or activities involve animals (such as animal experimentation). In the case of the Sea Shepherd Organization, media are used to document whales being killed and processed upon whaling ships for the purpose of providing products with no apparent connection to a scientific need for whaling. Undermining facades or simulacra (see Baudrillard 1994) that may dominate the social imaginary regarding how animal-based products are created by revealing the realities of factory farming also serve to create conditions conducive for an alternative consciousness to the practices in question (Gusfield 1981).
These few examples illustrate trends from a “sociological warfare” perspective. As states are increasingly beholden to powerful economic actors that benefit from animal exploitation and are able to successfully increase their entanglements with legislative and judicial bodies (Kenner 2008), and as the capacity for animal advocates to engage in policy formation is weakened (for example, through the passage of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act), more direct efforts to shape the social imaginary become an important route for animal advocacy. As the social imaginary about the minds of animals is increasingly informed by popular culture, more struggles to recast the social imaginary will occur there.
Note
The research for this project was funded, in part, by the SUNY Oneonta Faculty/Professional Staff Research Grant Program. The presentation of this project at the Minds of Animals Conference in Toronto, Ontario was made possible by a faculty development grant from the Office of the Provost at SUNY Oneonta.
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