… the yellow vests movement is transforming itself on two grounds: a
deep awareness of the situation and solidarity as an answer to this
situation.
It is not just about reflexivity, that is, the ability to reflect on
the condition that we are part of and our role in that condition. What I
see is the emergence of a very dense representation that is beginning
to organise itself as a social and political philosophy. The starting
point is an immense frustration regarding the response of established
powers and the institutions that express them. You may remember that the
first demonstrations were family events, gangs of friends, neighbors,
colleagues. People came with their children in a stroller thinking that
they would make the “elites” understand the need to act urgently. It was
to show that they were part of the soul of this country, the “people”
who would communicate with its leaders. Admittedly, there was anger at
having come to the point that forced this event, but there was also the
enthusiasm to see oneself as the protagonist on the civic scene and the
certainty that they would make ourselves understood.
Now, what do we discover from Saturday to Saturday? That “the
country” is not what we thought. This is not only the country of the
tensions on the roundabouts and blocked supermarkets. At another level,
it is someone else’s country – we do not know who exactly – someone who
does not hesitate to line up in front of you riot walls, armored
vehicles, weapons, tear gas . To you who have spent a significant part
of your monthly income to come to the Champs Elysees and commune with
the nation of citizens, as you feel it through what you have been taught
at school and let it be presented to you in solemn speeches. And there,
on the Champs Elysées, the most symbolic path of the country, you are
treated as an enemy of this specific thing that you have come to claim
and which nourishes your enthusiasm, your frustration and your hope: the
Republic.
The disappointment is immense. You understand quite quickly that this
is not a misunderstanding. I have heard it several times – both from
the left and the right – from mid-December: “I will not go to Paris to
have myself gassed like a criminal. It’s shameful!”, ” I come here for
the good of my country, for the young; and all I find is the baton.”
This explains the change in the composition of the protesters over
time. There are no more children, far fewer women, the retreat of the
non-urban back into their original space. The percolation effect of
these experiences through online networks and direct contacts on
roundabouts was rapid and profound. Another perception of French society
begins to emerge gradually in among the yellow vests.
What are the characteristics of this new perception? How does it change their own position in the political landscape?
First, the trust they had in their connection to the national civic
community is broken. But their analysis is not that everyone is against
them. They see that the majority of the population – that is, other
classes other then their own – support them. Therefore, they feel that
this bond is broken because it is ‘betrayed’ by the ‘elites’. This term
will designate from this stage on all those who have the power to act as
intermediaries between the different parts of the French society,
because they are powerful or institutional actors, often both. The
perception is then that the game is fixed, from the very moment the
cards are dealt. Except for some inevitable elements of conspiracy here
and there, this leads to the realization that the impasse in which they
find themselves is not due to a cyclical coincidence but to a ‘real’
tendency. They express this by saying that “they want to make us nothing
at all, they no longer want a middle class; we must be poor and to obey
everything”. When asked who they are, the answer is complex: “the
financial powers that hold the government in each country; if we replace
Macron with another, it will not change anything. The new will be
forced to do as the old “.
Let us not forget that for a large part of them, whether they voted for Emmanuel Macron or not, LREM [La République En Marche!]
represented a hope for change simply by claiming a non-professional
politics. Now, they are beginning to think that if it can not make any
difference, that power lies elsewhere. They call this obscure dimension
the “system”, “globalization”, “finance”, “Europe”, “money” … according
to their affinities and political cultures. But they speak clearly – and
in a very precise and skillful manner – of the architecture of the
socio-political system which in fact limits any substantial changes.
They thus conclude that this dimension, that channels and frames
possible changes, outweighs the will of the “people” because it always
leads to compromises that perpetuate it.
It is at this point that the connection is made with a specific power
to which they did not attach great importance before: who asks the
questions? And then: who makes them relevant or important? Here you see
the fundamental questioning of the political process as a whole and,
secondly, the questioning of the role of the media in this process. In
their discussions, they then discover that any kind of question can be
asked and must be examined. I give you my most extreme example in a
group of yellow vests unknown to each other at the edge of the Étoile
Square [Paris]: a man who seems absolutely sane, very eloquent and
friendly, explains that it is natural that a species changes its
environment and that it is only in this context that we must consider
political ecology. In any case, he says, we have already engaged our
future for thousands of years. If the earth can no longer welcome us in
the future, it will be necessary to prepare to inhabit other planets.
The embarrassment is total in the group. Someone illuminated? A
provocateur? Someone then asks him spontaneously the question: “What do
you do in life? – I work in the treatment of nuclear waste”. Given his
words, the man, in addition to having a higher education, is probably an
engineer. The group is thus lead to the idea that this is a an
absolutely “wild” question, but which could finally in some aspects
constitute a legitimate political question.
The interaction within the movement cultivates the feeling that the
frame of the questioning of politics is neither so certain nor so
justified as one believed it to be. This does not mean that the yellow
vests are not in their majority convinced pragmatists, who are focused
on ordinary life. On the contrary, it means that they are compelled by
the process that they themselves have embarked upon to realise that this
pragmatism will not succeed if it is already framed by the questions
posed by the powers in place, by the intelligent interrogations of
“those who know how to do things”. We realize in short that when we know
how to do something, it is impossible to return to the position where
we do not know how to do it, in order then to interrogate it completely.
It is in this deepening process that the taste for direct democracy – in the form of the RIC [référendum d’initiative citoyenne]
and constitutional reform – is cultivated as well as the mistrust for
the “grand debate” organized by the government. What the upper social
strata do not understand about this mistrust is its complexity. It is
not a rejection of specific positions of the government and established
political actors, more generally. It is the rejection of a process that
is known to be convincing, because it is objectively, once the markers
of the questioning are posed. The yellow jackets do not doubt for a
second the intelligence of the leaders. What they doubt is that this
intelligence is put to use as much as is necessary for the benefit of
the “people”. Their demand no longer reveals a technical reasoning of
problem solving, but rather raises the political principle of
identifying problems.
Like any deep political questioning, it puts the questioned before a
practical horizon that is completely inverted. What to do with what we
understood? Without wishing to offend the fans of violence, both fascist
and insurrectional, the yellow vests are mostly not there to practice
subversion and even less social war. They are in favor of a permanent,
predictable and relatively just order. But they understood that there is
not much to expected from the established order either. So we come to
the second foundation of their action: solidarity. Since it runs counter
to the analyses that we are accustomed to doing, we are not
sufficiently aware of the scarcity of the major political phenomenon
that we are witnessing. The yellow vests manage to be in solidary, in
disagreement. It is not without emotional intuition that some see the
movement as “their family”. Through a neural architecture whose model is
of course the internet, they feel that the end of their diversity will
sound the death knell of their legitimacy, because they will turn into a
political ‘current’ like the others, with its own mechanisms and own
truths; convincing but closed, thus subject to the same pressures they
consider unhealthy. Entering the corridors and debates of power can not
be done without limiting their horizon. But now they are aware that
their contribution to France and to Europe is precisely this alternative
possibility of openness.
While it is extremely difficult to find a path that avoids a “return
to normal”, it is not impossible to save time by supporting each other
to maintain the opening. The “Assembly of Assemblies”
in Commercy expresses precisely this affirmation of solidarity. Through
its transparent transmission – managed without external media – and its
reservation with regard to the possibilities of political
representation, it maintains the balance between a broad platform of
political demands and a practice that respects the principles that the
movement now advocates. We must ask how many political spaces –
activists or intellectuals – can take pride in such a balance.
You insist a lot on the government and the media that you seem to
understand as a rather homogeneous space in the world of the yellow
vests. To what extent is this true and why does this homogenisation
exist?
In the symbolic universe of the yellow vests there are, of course,
considerable distinctions and nuances. This does not prevent convergence
towards a rather unified vision of the major influences on society. I
am talking about experiential politics. Consider the following
situation: you are alone in not getting by, despite your efforts. You
are ashamed of not being able to do what you think is the minimum for
your children and sometimes for your retired parents as well. You live
this as a personal failure, an individual inadequacy. Your image of what
it means ‘to be normal’ is built from what ‘passes on TV’, the
representations of fiction, the debates, the speeches of the men and
women of influence appearing on the news. Then, for a reason that is
related to the price of fuel, you start talking to others who are
affected by a topic so important to you, so commonplace for ‘normal’
people that you did not assume to be trouble. You exchange ideas on the
internet, you meet people, and you discover that it’s been a long time –
a very long time – that you’re not alone, in your situation. The whole
country is traversed by your difficulties, your uncertainties, your
anxieties. So, all of you ask yourselves the question: how is it that
you did not know this situation, that your innumerable hours of exposure
to the content of politics and the media did not reveal to you this
situation, which is a very widespread experience ? “We started talking
to each other, we no longer felt ashamed,” say my respondents. Sometimes
it feels like a social #MeToo, through which the yellow vests have
linked individual experiential pieces so as to form a general
socio-political picture.
It follows naturally that the collective contemplation of this image
provokes a violent rejection of the politico-media narrative to which
they previously adhered. Here, we must understand another fine point.
Groups that consider themselves intellectual and in the know, would also
feel guilty for not being able to understand the truth, for not looking
for other more critical sources of information, and so on. But for the
yellow vests, what prevails is trust. It must be repeated, they are not
demanding – at least up until now – a collapse of the social order. What
they want is to be respected by the leaders. So when these latter do
not tell you what you think is the most serious problem facing the
country and that rather you are what is at the heart of this problem,
then it is they who are trying to abuse you. There can be no more
indulgent explanations.
The last stage of the rupture is the confirmation of these
conclusions in the representation of the movement by the political
powers and by several media. The yellow vests were for the first time
aware of the struggles around political communication that occur every
day. They were shocked by their own representation in the media and by
the fact that both the government and the media they used to watch or
listen to refused to portray them as “people” who legitimately protest
and peacefully for the benefit of all. This painful realisation
amplifies their mistrust and hostility by joining the political and the
media in one unreliable symbolic ensemble, to put it diplomatically.
…
The forceful challenge of the yellow vests is the full the political
reorganization of post-industrial societies. The fact that they do not
express it in this way does not make it less important. One could indeed
say the opposite: since this issue emerges as an experience and not as a
discourse, it really exists as a reality rather than as an intellectual
projection.
The unacknowledged goal of the established political class is
naturally to contain this interrogation before it appears legitimate in
an enlarged society. It is for this reason, for example, that from the
day before yesterday (Saturday, 9 February), a new discursive assault is
launched under the term “anti-parliamentaryism”. From the moment when
the accusation of being far-right and far-left failed to erode support
for the movement, a new concept appears to trap all of the yellow vests
into a ‘dirty’ category.
The symbolic struggle is strong. There are also some among the media
and the political world who are ironical about their misspelled slogans,
without understanding the crucial importance of this act: daring to
publish its vision even if one is aware that one makes mistakes. To
claim the right to exist as a mediocre, simple, normal being apart from
any “excellence”.
All of this increases the likelihood that the movement will be contained by a spontaneous and implicit alliance of all the forces that fear significant sociopolitical change. If things go this way, the result will seem perfectly acceptable to the winners but it will probably be a disaster for France and for Europe. The only way that will remain open will be the electoral path where those who outdo each other in fear or in identity claims will reap the benefits of the stalemate. This will be an unfortunate outcome for all, except for the political parties that will escape the revelation of their growing uselessness in the affirmation of a citizenship claiming direct access to power.
taken from autonomies
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Der Beitrag An experiential politics (II) – The yellow vests as a “people” thinking erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.