the absent referent

The book The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams that I bought a while ago has just arrived today and I have been reading through bits of it. I came across this piece of text which I think explains perfectly what I'm trying to say about how we view meat.


"Through butchering, animals become absent referents. Animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist. Animals' lives precede and enable the existence of meat. If animals are alives they cannot be meat. Thus a dead body replaces the live animal. Without animals there would be no meat eating, yet they are absent from the act of eating meat because they have been transformed into food.
Animals are made absent through language that renames dead bodies before consumers participate in eating them. Our culture further mystifies the term "meat" with gastronomic language, so we do not conjure dead, butchered animals, but cuisine. Language thus contributes even further to animals' absences. While the cultural meanings of meat and meat eating shift historically, one essential part of meat's meaning is static: One does not eat meat without the death of an animals. Live animals are thus the absent referents in the concept of meat. The absent referent premits us to forget about the animal as an indepenent entity; it also enable us to resist efforts to make animals present.
There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally abesnt because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people's experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else."

they're made out of meat

A video that Yates told me about, I found it odd, funny and a little disturbing. For some reason it made me feel a bit sick at the end!

pigs head

Meant to mention in my last blog that I've also bought a pigs head mask for my photos. Was wanting to use a cows head then draw the cuts of meat on the body but I couldn't find a mask that was good enough so I opted for a pig instead. I might actually prefer this as a pigs skin is very close in comparison to ours, tattoo artists often practice on a piece of pig meat before humans as our skin is so similar. This might help to get what I want to say across better than if I was to use a cow. I wanted to see how the mask would look in a photo on a person, so I took a couple of photos and played around with them a bit.

Oh and ignore the Cliff Richard calender.

walk no.2

Whenever I need inspiration or need to think I go for a walk along with River Dee, it's so quiet and peaceful there it allows me to clear my head and think properly. When I went for my walk I was also once again hoping to find some cows though again had no luck. Where does Aberdeen hide it's cows!? Anyway I walked further than I have before and came across some interesting things. Ended up walking into a wooded patch then came across a cluster of houses, where a group of people were doing some sort of gardening in the middle of them, I ran away up a hill where I found the fluffiest sheep, but no cows!





I have also bought two books, the first, In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave by Peter Singer has arrived and is very interesting, I'll be using it for CCS as well. The second book, The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams hasn't arrived yet, I think it's being shipped from America but it's taking forever! Somebody may be getting an angry email soon.

progress

I meant to put this up a while ago. The photographers name is Nicolai Howalt, I was made aware of him from one of our tutors Judy, he has a piece of work called How to Hunt with some very powerful images in it. They show the fragility of life and the power and control we have over it.

Nicolai Howalt - How to Hunt

He also did a piece called Dying Birds, which are close up shots of the birds being shot out of the sky. I found these images very interesting as a few almost don't look like the birds as they twist and distort after being shot.

Nicolai Howalt - Dying Birds


So I emailed the abattoir that I was wanting to visit and unfortunately they have just never replied! I sent them another email but they have yet to reply to that too. This is fairly annoying for me as I was really wanting to be able to see the whole process to help me in my decision making. There is another abattoir in Portlethen that I could contact however I am struggling to find an email address for them. I would phone but I tend to panic when I'm on the phone and I would rather that they took me seriously! I'll have to keep looking into that. Also considering about enquiring to spend some time on a farm one day, would be good to see how the whole farming business works so I can get some insight into these peoples lives.

Went for a walk last week I think it was to find some cows, walked for around 3 hours didn't find a single cow! Did find a load of sheep though so I took photos of them, one seemed to have a real problem with us, kept giving us the evil eye.



Anyway because I would like people to become less ignorant of where their food comes from and make them aware that the bit of food on their plate was still once an animal, I want to try using people to depict the animals, so they would be swapping positions. I think it would be interesting to take a cuts of beef diagram and impose it onto a person. We don't see people as food and so even when they were turned into food we would still see them as a person, much like how I still see the animal even when it is mince. I realise it is different as it is our own species, however at the same time we are still flesh and muscle, living and breathing just as any other creature that we kill is, but we are conditioned to find cannibalism grotesque as it endangers the survival of our species so are disgusted at the thought of eating another human. For this reason I want to use people to depict the animals, we don't see animals as animals when they are on our plate, we are ignorant of the process of lifeand death for these animals and so I think that by showing it through a human, it may make people more aware. However I don't want to come across as a meat bashing vegetarian activist so I may have to change my ideas slightly if it looks like I'm just preaching to people.