The images presented by PETA in their ad campaigns are purposed to evoke a reaction in their audience, much like all ads. However, PETA's ads attempt to cause societal revision in an if unconventional, hardly original manner. PETA's ads focus on humanity's struggle between our primal nature and logical scientific sentient mind. PETA's ads appeal to our humanity, the distinction man and beast. Through the visceral image of a bleeding severed cow's head, PETA is attempting to have society repress its primal nature, while at the same time evoking it within us. The PETA ads toe the line of our humanity, raising our struggle to the surface. The action, through which the PETA ads affect us, also walks the line between agents and agency. If we observe the images closely, we can glimpse the dual nature behind their production and their interactions with our psyche. Welling gives us an idea of where to start.
Ecopornography is a type of contemporary visual discourse made up of highly idealized,
anthropomorphized views of landscapes and nonhuman animals. While these images often are
composed or manipulated to stress their subjects' innate similarities to the human bod and to human
social and power structures...the images work to conceal both the material circumstances of their
creation by humans and whatever impact humans may have had on the landforms and animals they
depict (Welling 57).
In PETA's advertisements this role is reversed. Animals are still anthropomorphized, but the images presented are of what others intended to be hidden. PETA's ads are in a sense, the S&M of ecopornography. The purpose and drive behind the ads is to have society repress its primal urges. Ironically, it is primal urges which produce the ads. In their attempt to appeal to humanity, PETA succumbs to their primal urges to protect and care, while suppressing their primal urges of survival. This is simply an instance of human nature between a survival of the collective life and the survival of the individual. The intention of the author towards the author's fictive audience versus the interpretation of the reader. In this sense, PETA's ads make a great metaphor in understanding the struggle of agency and authority paradox as a battle between dual natures of rational humanity and emotional primal humanity, author reacting to author to create and synthesize fruitful new meaning.
1 comment:
There are some very interesting points here and I would like to question a few of them to further understanding. Really, the only thing I would like to mention is in response to what you said in the second half of your post, "PETA succumbs to their primal urges to protect and care, while suppressing their primal urges of survival." This is an interesting concept, but I think slightly misguided.
Humans, while able to eat meat, have not made meat a central portion of their diet until recent changes in production towards large, factory-oriented meat production which made meat both more available and cheaper (slightly different things). Therefore, I don't think it is safe to say that they are "suppressing their primal urges of survival," so much as placing a sense of moral direction over the human temptation and desire for meat. Many vegetarians are actually healthier than their omnivorous counterparts.
I am also going to nit-pick "succumbs." The word has too many connotations to be appropriate here, I think. PETA does not seem to succumb to anything, but rather to take arms for what they view as what is right. One would not say, I do not believe, that Martin Luther King Jr. "succumbed" to a desire for protection and care.
The reason I have gone through this nit-picking is to make a related point, and I do apologize for it. My desire is to demonstrate exactly what you said in your first sentence, "The images presented by PETA in their ad campaigns are purposed to evoke a reaction in their audience..." The same can be said of words and their presentation. Nieztsche proposed that we cannot control our language because it means so many things to different people and Barthes proposed that a fair amount of agency lies with the reader and not with the writer, much like you have proposed is the case with PETA, I believe.
Agency when communicating lies most with he who best understands his audience and the situation. This is what I have attempted to point out, which is not to say that I claim either of these things, only to demonstrate a reader's ability to wrest agency from the writer or artist.
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