Aesthetics, politics, and the police hermeneutic: Online videos of police violence beyond the evidentiary function

Abstract

This essay argues that we must look beyond the evidentiary functions of online videos of police violence, like those documenting Eric Garner's killing by the NYPD and the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina, to aesthetics as a response to the limits of juridical process. As merely evidence, these videos are "framed" by what the essay calls the "police hermeneutic," which captures and diffuses their political potential through an interpretive monopoly. Looking closely at the videos surrounding the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant III on the Fruitvale BART station platform, the essay draws on Jacques Rancière's conception aesthetics in relation to the police order and Michel Foucault's description of the "spectacle of the scaffold," to argue that a political potential inheres on the aesthetic level of these images. There the police distribution of bodies and subjects, and interpretation of events, is at once made visible and disrupted by the interventions of fellow travelers and their cell phones on the BART station and then digital media platforms.