Thread by @dansguys

Whilst I pretty much came to the conclusion that it's not as simple as just being able to replace ethnography with visual methodologies, I do want to quickly examine a case study that I think would usually come under the purview of ethnographic study as a way of showing how...

...pertinent disrupting conventional methodology can be.

Looking at a political community like the British adaptation of #GiletsJaunes , the Brexit-oriented, reactionary yellow vest movement through questions of vision/visuality is vital to understand their formation

Its extreme right populism is, I would argue, a result of visuality (or, the lack thereof). Why don't we have a left-wing populism akin to the yellow vests taking to the streets of London? Perhaps, because we've never seen what one could look like

If the 'yellow vest' is a sign- constituent of signifier, the vest itself, and signified, its host of meanings, such as worker, working class, populist reactionary - it is THE sign of current radical populism

Whilst I tend to disagree with Saussure's more limited view of signs and meaning, depicting them as more of a logical sequence, it's valuable to point out where this reading functions for the 'yellow vest' sign. Of course, it's even more valuable to point out where it fails

That the yellow vest connotes the working class makes sense- it is worn, because of its inherently visible qualities, by workers in jobs filled by primarily working class people. There is a structural meaning here

Pierce differentiates between three different signs- icon, index and symbol- and, in this formulation, the yellow vest as signifying worker/working class is an indexical sign- as there is a direct correlation between signifier and signified

The yellow vest as populist and reactionary, however, is a symbolic sign- as this meaning is entirely arbitrary.

Arbitrary signs aren't concerning in and of themselves, but it does beg the question, how did this meaning form?

The link betwn the working class and reactionary, hate-fuelled politics is also an arbitrary one and this change in the semiological order, where the meaning of a yellow vest is that of the populist right, then suggests a need for a post-structuralist, post-Saussurean, semiotics

Lacan's conceptualisation of a signifying chain is one such instance of post-Saussurean semiotics (I've discussed this in a thread previously), but I think Barthes' mythology is most valuable for this instance

Across the international community, alt-right groups are claiming the yellow vest as a rallying image for their nationalistic, xenophobic causes, as such the yellow vests have been read as an unruly, unenlightened populist class who are undutifully and ungratefully angry

Except there has been a massive, positive, outpouring of progressive populists in Paris and the original #GiletsJaunes movement. A valid anti-establishment sentiment that desired, not less tax, but more tax on society's elite

We see instead a diverse, grassroots movements that took to the streets of Paris as part of #GiletsJaunes , defying liberal calls for civility and the neoliberal politics stood for by the EU and implemented by Macron

Videos, recorded in the midst of the movement itself- from within its very marches- don't actually depict a ravenous, violent, populist underclass who are motivated by either hatred or boredom (depending on the pol. commentator).

That it took so long for me to rediscover these videos is testament to their invisibility- distributed only in deprivileged spheres of grassroots communication and never afforded a visuality in accordance to their relevance

In Britain, that positivity wasn't widely seen. The violence and fear of #GiletsJaunes instead berated our screens for as long as was deemed necessary (coverage of the movement interestingly ceased around the time of French policy concessions, &not with the movement's end)

The right-wing yellow vest is then a Barthesian myth, in which signs present themselves as natural (2009), constructed by a liberal European establishment to consolidate and naturalize their position of power (as enlightened bastions of liberal civility)

The vest itself clearly had no right-wing connotations, as even when adapted for the movement it was oft adorned with the symbolism of progressive movements. The myth served to distort and delegitimise left action, conflating all forms of anti-establishment politics as one & same

This myth, once reaching British shores, undoubtedly had an effect on how the yellow vest was to be received. Recreated by Ideological State Apparatus, the message was clear; today's radical movements are conservative, not for the metropolitan liberal & adorned in yellow

It lead to an interpellated (Bidet, 2015) British subject who decried the yellow vest movement as reactionary and uninspiring, and gladly abandoned the yellow vest to the right-wing nationalist in exchange for their liberal identity

The preferred reading (Hall, 1980) of the yellow vest sign in Britain's semiological order then is that it is the mark of violence and intimidation. I hope I've effectively made the case for an oppositional reading

That the yellow vest has always had a radical, progressive potential

Such an oppositional reading, however, has no hope of performing significant function. It would be limited in scope and momentum, thanks to the work of elements on the political right and centre alike

With James Goddards' arrest today, one of the leading figures of the right-wing, Brexiteer adaptations of the yellow vest movement, the meaning has become unshakeable, and it is now clear that there will be no left-wing yellow vest movement in Britain:

The British Left simply don't want to be associated with it.

For some reason the videos weren't processing correctly in the thread, so attaching them in these replies

Here's a French rendition of traditional Italian song of resistance, Bella Ciao, that took me four days to find again

And here's the other!

The quality is less than ideal, but I think you get the point!