Unprofessional vision? Politics, (video)evidence and accountability after the work of Michael Lynch

As part of an ongoing critical dialogue with Charles Goodwin’s work on “professional vision” (1994), Michael Lynch has observed on a number of occasions that ‘viral’ videos—often those depicting instances of police and military misconduct—are publicly circulated artifacts that “vulgarise” and thus render perspicuous issues of ‘evidence’, ‘expertise’, ‘accountability’, and ‘visibility’ as matters of practical rather than philosophical concern (Lynch 1993, 146; see Lynch 1999, 2014, 2018, 2002; Lindwall and Lynch 2021). Alongside the video of Rodney King’s beating and, more recently, the murder of George Floyd, one such video to have gained particular global notoriety is WikiLeaks’ 2010 “Collateral Murder”, which presented leaked gun camera footage from a 2007 US Army Apache helicopter combat patrol in a Baghdad suburb in the course of which, among others, two journalists were killed, two children shot and seriously wounded, and a building in a residential area destroyed with missiles. As with the King and Floyd cases, Collateral Murder, in the form of WikiLeaks’ edited version of the video, was watched in revulsion by millions as a transparent example of egregious wrongdoing—the killing, wounding, and harming of innocents. In this contribution we revisit the unedited footage, extending consideration to its less examined second half in which the Apache team attacks and destroys a building, where we are among the first to do so in any detailed manner. We do that to explore Lynch’s ethnomethodological insights into politics, evidence and accountability as they are rendered—or fail to be rendered—perspicuous by this case. Rather than seeking to establish our own form of ‘professional vision’ as a competitor to the Apache crews’, we suggest that Lynch’s work, if taken seriously, asks us to embrace its ‘vulgar’ counterpart by working through whatwe can make of the video by drawing on our vernacular competencies as ordinary members and the problems we encounter in doing so. We will tease out what might be at stake ethnomethodologically—not an ‘unprofessional’ but practical understanding—with reference to the ‘raw’ Collateral Murder footage and what, as video, it does and does not make available to the viewer. We end by reflecting on “ethnomethodology’s program” (Garfinkel 2002) in light of the issues this strand in Lynch’s work raises, more specifically the care we need to exhibit when we seek to gain instruction in worldly practices and their equally worldly evaluation.