Counter-narratives vs embodied storytelling: Yellow vests on Youtube

Since the emergence of the French “yellow vests movement”, numerous videos documenting the protest have appeared on Youtube. A majority of these productions stage alternative stories of the movement: showing what the mainstream media do not show, giving the floor to people mostly ignored by traditional news programs, revealing police violence instead of the protesters’ vandalism, etc. As Negt and Kluge (1972) or Enzensberger (1970) have already noticed in a former context, these oppositional productions often perpetuate traditional forms of media narratives. And, indeed, a lot of these videos are subversive at the only level of their content.
Other amateur productions, however, do not replay a “classical” narrative: no narrator, no counter-investigation, no alternative testimonies, etc. I question in two steps the political potentialities of these particular videos which do not aim at propagating counterinformation. First, I show that these videos acknowledge a struggle for the preservation of a concrete visibility of the protesters’ bodies in the urban environment instead of claiming for media visibility, as actualizations of Negt’s “oppositional public sphere” suggest (e.g. Feenberg, 2014; Neumann, 2018). Second, this focus on the bodies reveal that the recurrent topic of these amateur productions is the confrontation of two types of “film characters”: yellow vests moving continuously, fluently, sometimes even dancing vs armored bodies of robot-like policemen, jerking and using mechanical prostheses. My analysis aims at showing that the visual confrontation of these two types of bodies substitute a classical counter-narrative for a subversive storytelling. Their main political efficiency is rooted in a minimalistic slapstick-like narration: a story told by bodies that burst into – and jeopardize – a regulated and stable order. To that extend, these productions pave the way for a new oppositional public sphere that replaces the counter-narrative with an “embodied storytelling”.