“Move Along,Nothing to See Here”: Police visuality,the right to look,and the right to maim

Abstract

At demonstrations and uprisings throughout the world, police and military mete out punishment via a particular form of violence that is designed not to kill, but rather to maim. This paper examines this understudied dimension of the police power in the phenomena of blinding those who stare back at police, including journalists and civilians. While visuality, the relationship between power, knowledge, and seeing, proscribes or prohibits what visual theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff terms the right to look, maiming functions as a means of pacification against staring, debilitating individuals with often permanent injuries and scars as well as populations through having to suffer distorted versions of life, what queer theorist Jasbir Puar refers to as the sovereign right to maim. Subsequently, the state and its police tell us how to look. When we deviate from its visuality and commands of “Move along, nothing to see here,” we expose ourselves to potential debilitation, often through “less lethal” means. However, when police tell us there is nothing to see, we must not avert our attention but continue to embody the right to look. Otherwise, we lose the possibility of staring quite literally and with it, the power of the (counter-)visual.