Ethnography of a PETA Protest: Looking Back by Keeping an Eye on the Future

¹ The photographs used by animal activists are decisively not the kind of animal photos to which Susan Sontag refers in her book On Photography, the coffee table variety which contain images of dogs and cats dressed up in children’s clothing or wild animals in their majestic glory atop mountains or waterfalls. No, these kinds of photographs are the ones which stick in your throat: they are often of dead animals, and if not dead then nearly so, hanging onto life by a bare thread. They are animals that have been sliced through, cut open, on the verge of the moment that sees them divided into parts to be either discarded or sold. Indeed animal activism could not operate without producing photographs of what happens to animals behind-the-scenes in industries like factory farming and vivisection. Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on photography, compiled nearly a century ago, tap into some of the reasons why.

Those activists who purport to be a voice for animals reiterate Benjamin’s point that “there remains something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer’s art, something that cannot be silenced” (One-way 242). Here it is precisely through the image that the animal gains a voice. Those activists who are certain that we need to see before we can believe also stress how important it is to bring things closer to the public, which is to say, to make them more accessible and tangible through mechanical reproduction on a mass scale (250). Even though Benjamin remained critical of the reproductive capabilities brought on by modern technology, he nonetheless acknowledged that it could increase the dissemination of the original (artwork, event). Indeed many animal activists believe that it is only by first witnessing animal abuse in all its fine detail that we can eradicate it, utilizing photography because “photography isolates the moment a person ‘steps out’” and permits us to see details of structure in the smallest of things (243). The photograph is often more real than the moment in time it captures.

We might ask ourselves if such photos used in animal activism reflect a past that is public or private, a past that is collectively known or kept hidden from view. Clearly they stir something within the viewer on an individual level and inhabit the viewer personally. One could argue that the efficacy of photographs of torture stems from their ability to confuse the boundaries between a public and private past. Indeed it is not so easy to differentiate between the punctum – Roland Barthes’ term for that which secretly and personally pricks only me – and the studium – his term for that which historically, collectively, and decisively public, including graphic images steeped in pain. Susan Sontag reminds us that a photograph cannot be evidence on its own; it must stir something within the viewer (Photography 19). For Barthes, the punctum is at once what is added to the photograph and what is already present, a “trigger” (49, 55) that serves to fill the whole picture, to irradiate all else, that which becomes the only thing one can see. The photographs used by animal advocates, particularly in this leafleting event, depend heavily on the punctum for effect. Because it is what speaks to the viewer personally and, at the same time, references a more broad and universal epidemic, the punctum acts as a catalyst for social change. In this way are photographs, more often than not, at once a public and private phenomena.

11:40. I walk past the group again. A fifth woman has joined them.

11:43. I lean, very still, against some scaffolding at the corner. I mark myself as definitively not part of the protestors, this group of people who by all intents and purposes are now going about a rehearsal in a very public space. I pretend like I am waiting for someone and often look at my watch in order to keep up this appearance.²

Maintaining a relative distance from the performance, however, takes a great deal of effort, something which Schechner noted at length through his collaborations with anthropologist Victor Turner. In the end, one of the similarities between theatre and anthropology was that both effected a change in participant and viewer alike, casting suspicion on the possibility that we could ever, simply, ‘watch a show.’

Suddenly she extends a leaflet in my direction and asks, in an even tone devoid of emotion, ‘Would you like one?’ So much for being a passive observer.

I stammer for a good ten seconds before I remember the activist box I have in my office, complete with pins, stickers, and leaflets just like the one she is offering to me. Almost, but not quite. I manage to mumble: ‘Oh, no, I actually have many at home.’

‘Well, would you like to actually read one?’ There is no humor in her voice and I realize that, to her, I am the enemy. What is implied in her tone, what is left off the end of her sentence, is ‘…for once.’

I am further mortified. ‘Oh, no, I mean … I’m actually an activist.’ I have repeated the word ‘actually’ twice. I am desperate to convey to her that I am authentic, legitimate, that I am an activist, just like her, that I am not a fake.⁴

‘Oh, okay.’ She withdraws the leaflet, but casts an apprehensive look my way. I am not sure if she believes me. I want to try and prove myself again.

‘Is there something going on?’ Playing so dumb, now. Of course I know what’s going on because I received the same email as she did which is why I knew to come here in the first place.

‘Some sort of fur festival, or something like it.’

I give a little laugh. Showing I’m cool, you know? ‘Oh, nice,’ I say, with as much sarcasm as I can muster.

But she doesn’t catch my irony. She is on guard, defensive, which forecloses any attempt at a liaison with me. ‘Uh, not really.’ She looks away with feelings of being put on, like I have fooled her into thinking she could trust me. Which is completely unfounded.

Isn’t it?

The two women continue their choreography, one hand holding a stack of flyers while the other intermittently propels said flyers towards the people walking by, all the while trying to keep her poster from being carried off into the horizon. The bellmen from the adjacent hotel keep circling, too, fidgeting nervously with their ties. Undoubtedly they’ve heard those whisperings that animal rights activists are terrorists who will stop at nothing to get their point across.

It is always interesting to note the reactions of these passers-by, because after all, it is for them that these performances take place. One woman is pushing a baby carriage. ‘That’s okay, I got nothing against that [i.e. their protesting]. I don’t wear fur.’ Another expensively dressed woman glides by with her female companion, looks in the direction of the fur shop, and says with a wide smile, ‘That’s where we’re heading!’ A guy in a sausage delivery truck snickers.

But there are many of us who do not want to be pulled into the frame without our consent. We have been out here for a difficult thirty minutes, where people have either outright ignored the protestors or else vociferously upbraided them. I can sense their frustration because they begin more aggressive tactics. My kohl-rimmed friend loudly calls out to man in the midst of a conversation on his cell phone, ‘Excuse me, but your shoes are leather.’ He is stunned for a moment. Then he regains his composure. He realizes he has an audience (me). He smiles condescendingly. ‘That’s too bad, because I really like them.’ He turns his back and walks off.

I take this as a cue that the curtain has fallen for the day. I make my way to the train station and round the corner where I pass a storefront. It has floor-to-ceiling windows and turns out to be a shop that sells, among other items, fur coats and capelets with fur trim. Floating there in the middle of the largest window is a lone postcard sporting, yet again, a very graphic and bloody anti-fur message. I cannot be sure if it was the protestors or, perhaps, someone else who posted it.⁵

⁵ “The condition for [the post card] to arrive … is that it ends up and even that it begins by not arriving” (Derrida, Post-Card 29). Thus at this moment (when the event had officially ended) and within this object (the postcard itself) we see bound together a series of meanings of the ‘post’: at once the postcard arrives when the event is over, indeed is really the only time that a postcard can arrive, its message posted (i.e. stuck up) on the window with the intent of posting a type of communication (i.e. making a post as one does online). Post-haste: if we are so concerned with getting there quickly, do we ignore what happens afterwards in the absence of a person or an event?

The concept of arrival is inextricable from the concept of ‘getting it,’ both in terms of understanding – yes, I get it – or in terms of the hunt – yes, I’ve gotten a hold on it. The structural system of non-arrival pervades every system of writing including speech and physical acts. It is always possible that the postcard does not arrive, that our meaning does not arrive as we intended. How often is one misunderstood, or do one’s intentions go awry? Yet every meaning must arrive somewhere, destined to arrive, just not destined to arrive as intended. Even if the context is unfixed, no matter. The meaning is clear; we get it. Let’s move on. Time’s a wasting.

I wonder who else noticed this postcard on the window. If they noticed it, did they stop to consider it? And if they stopped to consider it, were they moved by what they saw? Is it an event that is happening, that has happened, or will happen in the future? Clearly there are many opportunities for authorial intent to go, as it were, out the window. Photographs even more so than speech or physical acts must be filtered through a myriad of channels. In the case of the photograph, there is not only the subject but the one who takes the photo and the one who circulates the photo, each of whom may imprint on it her or his particular intention. Perhaps this is why we can say, per Benjamin, that the photograph’s basis in quotation ensures may easily arrive at a variety of disparate locations. For better or worse it is destined to exceed the intentions of whomever sent (the message) or took (the photograph). Although postcards are ostensibly private, addressed to someone in particular, they are open for anyone to read, and it is with this openness that interruption can occur. There is always an implicit risk that the receiver of one’s message takes it in a wholly different way than one intended. Perhaps we need to insist again and again, to go back to another form of the ‘post’: .
It goes without saying that animal activists are conceived of in the public imagination as crazed and violent, as perennially on the verge of going postal.

⁶ Robert Sember argues, “Photographs are particularly powerful mourning surfaces because of the temporal contradiction that lies at their heart,” a contradiction which entails they are evidentially present while aporetically absent (37). Photographs refuse to act within prescribed boundaries of presence and absence, and it is this refusal that facilitates their ability to call on the past while, at the same time, keeping an eye on the future. If every spectator is enabled to become a participant, within the street protest scene and beyond, we may perform a number of things simultaneously: we may ignore that we have not historically been able to bridge the gap between performer and spectator; we may allow the photographic punctum, that intense and urgent emotion, to irradiate all else and to become all that we can see; we may begin to see what has been there all along but which we now choose to act upon, or choose to allow ourselves to be acted upon by the punctum itself. We can choose to allow ourselves to act in the name of affect, to feel again, and again, to move forward based on what one feels rather than on what one cognitively knows. Many animal advocates avoid attending street protests like this one simply because they are not armed with the statistics they feel they need in order to defend their animal-rights position against the flood of detractors which inevitably appear. These animals are bred for their fur, they’re used to living in a cage, the critics say, so what’s the big deal? Our Benthamian reply – But they suffer … – is never considered a solid enough reason.

Do we want to practice benevolence, philanthropy, or sympathy in order to help others? Or do we act chiefly to soothe our own pain at the sight of another’s distress? Again, it is a question of intention. Perhaps if the deed is done, it does not matter so much the circuitous routes by which it came to be in the first place, or the second, or the third, or the thirtieth, or …

To go back as one must do in a piece of writing like this is a going back like any other: it is a reassessment, by turns a stubborn stasis and a slippery nuisance, a making sure and then doubly sure and then not sure at all, a realization that we will perhaps never be sure of this or anything else. The incessant negotiation between spectator and participant creates a liminal space between two, where one realizes that one is never wholly either/or. To see is to participate: yes, we are all performers here. But it is this voluntary and constant gesture of self-interruption, of going back and forth and back again, moving between categories and traversing boundaries, of realizing that what we are not is implicitly bound up with what we are. Blank space is anything but an impassable gulf. At the very least it helps engender this precious act of going back while keeping an eye on the future, so powerful, in fact, it can only be repeated and not replaced.