![]() ![]() A movement could express itself in a thousand different ways, but it will only really become comprehensible and valid once it can be pushed through a legitimizing vector erected by these two factors. The truth of action, we are told, lies in the identity and motivations of its protagonists, which constitute the real objects of social inquiry. ![]() Contemporary political rationality cannot comprehend radical actions, only radical actors. It is no accident that many on the far-Left initially interpreted the Yellow Vest phenomenon in France as fascist or naively populist (and therefore in need of a radical "correction"), or that others were so quick to decry the evils of a "cross-class" alliance. If we insist on reading today’s social ruptures through the categories of the 20th century, we can be sure to misread them. Some new thing whose word hasn’t been invented yet. It is not the insurrection that many love to dream about, it is not an act of sedition, it is not the seizure of a territory. We think it’s worthwhile to begin drawing some lessons from this complex and unfinished sequence, in the hopes that we may better act within similar circumstances in the future, which are bound to arrive. Whatever the outcome of the present sequence of struggle, it is clear that the Yellow Vests have broken the rules of politics and social movements as we know them. So far, the Yellow Vests have initiated a process that no one understands, but that no one can ignore. Leftists, commentators, and politicians have failed to understand the basic intention of the movement, while the politicals-from the anarchists to the unionists to the neo-Nazis-either attempt to steer the movement or else reject it completely. Although the early phase of the movement legitimized itself with slogans about the gasoline tax initiated by Macron and his team of technocrats, when the tax was repealed under a flurry of cobblestones, the Yellow Vests refused to go home. Since mid-November, hundreds of thousands of disaffected people have repeatedly rioted in the city centers, blocked highways and oil refineries, occupied toll booths and roundabouts across the country, and clashed with police. The moment of the Gilets jaunes, or ‘Yellow Vests’ has ruptured the consensus of French politics and social life. In the process, this meme-like form of movement fends off the danger of far right and citizenist takeover by ‘generalized attacks on private property’, to which the former are allergic. Announcing the politics to come, and hinting that the riot can attain a durability of which it is generally considered incapable, 'the need to invest and defend new places or "sites of life" will eclipse the centrality of "social" differentiations like identities and symbolic positions within a matrix of oppression.' Eschewing the preconstituted symbolic focus of the plaza and the square in previous 'circulation' struggles, here the meme's content goes beyond the phrase. Occupying symbolically destitute spaces and making them into 'new places' by force of direct collective confrontation, the Gilets jaunes overcome the distinction between riot and everyday life, roundabout and site of revolution. This is not so much a movement that uses memes to make symbolic demands as a form of movement as meme. In the following article, Paul Torino & Adrian Wohlleben, two American participants in the Gilets jaunes struggle in France, discern an inverse logic in play. However, they tend to make the phrase eclipse the content, placing the (representational) meme over the (real) movement. People have theorised recent social movements as memes before. ![]()
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