The yellow vests and the communicative constitution of a protest movement

Literature review

The zeitgeist of the early 21st century is one of the resistance against neoliberal capitalism which reflects widespread discontent with economic and political disparities that have given rise to what Standing (2011) calls the precariat, that is, a population on the margins of society that has diminishing access to stable employment and state benefits. This increasing social, political and economic unrest is enacted in and through protest movements as typified by the gilets jaunes in France (Genestier, 2019). Key to such protest movements is thus resistance to the authority of the state and the political elite who are considered to be distant, alien and self-serving. Resistance can be considered from many different perspectives (e.g. individual or collective, political or social, and overt or covert) and, as a concept, has been used to cover almost anything from hairstyles to fully fledged revolution.

However, despite the diverse collection of writings about resistance, Hollander and Einwohner (2004), in their seminal synthesis of the literature, note that action and opposition are two themes that are consistent across the plethora of work that addresses the issue of resistance. They point out that academics studying resistance seem ‘to agree that resistance is not a quality of an actor or a state of being, but involves some active behavior, whether verbal, cognitive, or physical’ and that these actions involve countering, contradicting, enacting social change, rejecting, challenging, opposing, subverting, damaging and/or disrupting (Hollander and Einwohner, 2004: 538). Resistance therefore, while being a context bound, dynamic, fluid and unpredictable feature of social life can be simply defined as an ‘oppositional act’ (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016: 417). Moreover, Hollander and Einwohner (2004) set out eight types of resistance (overt, covert, unwitting, target-defined, externally defined, missed, attempted and not resistance) arguing that overt resistance, which would include protest movements such as the gilet jaunes, ‘is behavior that is visible and readily recognized by both targets and observers as resistance and, further, is intended to be recognized as such’ (p. 545).

In other words, and in contrast to covert resistance which might involve such phenomena as gossip, petty theft and foot-dragging that might not even be noticed by the targets of resistance (Scott, 1985), an overt protest movement publicly constitutes itself as such. Thus, restricting our analysis to overt protest, it can be said that a protest movement such as the gilet jaunes is enacted in and through the

acts or patterns of actions [which] are defined as ‘resistance’ within ongoing processes of negotiation between different agents of resistance (the resisters), between the agents of resistance and the agents of power (the targets), and between the two former parties and different observers. (Johansson and Vinthagen, 2016: 418)

Understanding how social practices (actions) are constituted as resistance and how a protest movement is constituted as resisting something or someone is thus at the heart of understanding resistance.

To explicate the constitution of the gilets jaunes, we take a communicative approach that has mainly been associated with the communicative constitution of organization (CCO; see ‘Method). Taking a wider definition of organization to include protest movements such as the gilets jaunes, we draw on the insights of how organizations are communicatively constituted and extend this to the gilets jaune protest movement. Organizations, and protest movements, are traditionally understood as preexistent structures in which communication takes place. Consequently, much research has investigated how protest movements communicate and transmit information (see, for example, Cammaerts et al., 2014; Fahlenbrach et al., 2014; Mattoni and Treré, 2014; Van Laer and Van Aelst, 2010).

More specifically, research has often focused on protest movements’ use of social media which provide new ‘opportunities for citizens and subordinate groups in society to bypass state and market controls and the mainstream media to constitute alternative collective identities’ (Cammaerts, 2015: 1031). This work, as summarized by Cammaerts (2015), concentrates on the way in which protest movements use social media to organize internally, discuss debate and deliberate, coordinate action, disseminate information by bypassing mainstream media system, attack the movement’s ideological enemies and so on. Furthermore, Cammaerts (2015) also notes that the use of social media allows protest movements to preserve artifacts that bear witness to the movement and provide ‘an archive, a memory and a repository of text and audio-visual symbolic content relating to protests, tactics, organizations, and ideas’ which ‘enables the symbols embedded in these discourses to be culturally transmitted, feeding struggles and contributing to a collective memory of protest’ (p. 1031, italics added). More specifically, Cammaerts (2012: 125) also notes that such an archive is constituted in part through photographs and films that are either streamed in real time and/or posted after the event on social network platforms. Doing this enables the symbols and discourses of protest to be ‘culturally transmitted on a long term basis, feeding the struggle and contributing to the construction of a collective memory of protests’ (Cammaerts, 2012: 125, italics added).

Significant here is that Cammaerts (2012) uses the word ‘transmit’ which implies that artifacts (such as YouTube videos) ‘simply’ archive the struggle and so are passive conduits for the transmission of ideas, motives and actions of the movement. From this perspective, the protest movement is considered to be a preexistent social fact in which communication takes place. However, considering communication as a transmission of ideas, attitudes, values and thoughts that takes place within an organization/protest movement is being increasingly called into question by social constructionist approaches to organization which place an emphasis on how organizations are constructed in communicative practice (e.g. Cooren et al., 2011; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Consequently, in this article, rather than explaining how the use of artifacts such as videos of the gilets jaunes-in-action bears witness to the protest and transmits the values of the protest, we set out to show how the gilets jaune protest movement is communicatively constituted in and through such a video.

Method – The Communicative Constitution of Organisation

As previously noted, in order to make visible the communicative constitution of the gilet jaune movement, this article takes a communicative approach to the constitution of an organization (CCO). From this social constructionist perspective, ‘organizations are no longer seen as objective entities, or “social facts” inside of which communication occurs. Organizations are portrayed instead as ongoing and precarious accomplishments realized, experienced, and identified primarily – if not exclusively – in communication processes’ (Cooren et al., 2011: 1150). In other words, organizations do not preexist communication and do not drive what people can and cannot say, or do and do not do; rather the organization is constituted in communication. Adapting Potter’s (1996: 97) metaphor, communication is therefore not a simple mirror that reflects the organization, rather it is a construction yard in which both the organization and the account of the organization are constructed in and through communicative practices.

However, Potter (1996), as with many discourse analysts, limits his analyses to talk and text and ignores the material. In this article, we take a socio-material approach to the communicative constitution of a protest movement, as inspired by the Montreal School which can loosely be described as school of organizational communication consisting of scholars whose research, often using fine-grained analyses of transcripts of naturally occurring talk, concerns the way in which communicative practices embody the organization, and more especially how both human and non-human actants play a role in the communicative constitution of the organization.

In order to consider both the role human and the non-human actants in the way in which organizations are constituted, the Montreal School draws on ANT. ANT was developed by researchers such as Callon (1986) and Latour (2005) who proposed that social action should be considered through a lens of generalized symmetry, whereby the researcher is committed to calling into question the dichotomization of the world into the human which has, or may have, agency, and the non-human which is constituted by passive objects through which human agency is enacted. Contrary to such a dualist world, ANT supposes that actants, defined as ‘anyone or anything that might be deemed to make a difference in a situation’ (Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009: 472), are not necessarily human, rather they are hybrid networks of human and/or non-human entities.

The classic illustration of this is Latour’s (1999) example of a speed bump which has agency because it leads a motorist to slow down. Taking an ANT approach, the fact that the bump slows down the driver is only the beginning of the story; the network that the bump ‘speaks’ for should also be taken into account (i.e. the legislation that authorized the speed bump to be built, the workers who built it, the principles of road safety that justified it, etc.). Thus, it is not only present human actors who are active agents in constructing an organization or a protest movement such as the gilets jaunes, rather it is a plethora of networks of present/non-present and/or human/non-human actants. The Montreal School would argue that the speed bump is a spokesperson or rather spokesobject (see Vásquez and Cooren, 2011), which is the visible face of the actor network that communicates with, and acts on, the motorist. The upshot of this is that agency is always hybrid and should always be considered as shared across a plenum of intertwined agencies, both human and non-human (Latour, 1996). Furthermore, since non-human agents communicate, they, as this article argues, will necessarily play a role in communicatively constituting the organization/protest movement. It is also important to note here that non-human actants may be ‘physical’ entities such as speed bumps, tollbooths and barriers, but they are also ‘things that matter’ to the participants such as ideas and ideologies (Cooren et al., 2012) which also constitute the hybrid presence of human and non-human actants that have agency in the world. In short, ‘an actant can literally be anything provided it is granted to be the source of action’ (Latour, 1996: 373).

However, the Montreal School goes beyond ANT’s observations concerning the importance of both human and non-human actants, and it gives ANT an organizational and interactional twist (Fairhurst and Cooren, 2009: 474), which makes visible and thus analyzable the way in which human and non-human actants express and reveal themselves in communication (Cooren, 2015a). In doing this, scholars from the Montreal School counter traditional views of communication as one in which two or more people interact with each other, and they offer a view of communication in which the agency of all the actants, whether human or non-human, is considered. This has implications for the study of protest movements because, from this perspective, it is not only the human agent that constructs the movement, it is also the non-human.

Consequently, as Wilhoit and Kisselburgh (2019) in their study of the communicative constitution of bike commuters as a protest movement demonstrate, material and spatial practices such as wearing cycling gear or displaying cycling artifacts in the workplace do indeed constitute the protest movement. Thus, organizations/protest movements are not only exclusively talked into being as the linguistic turn in organizational studies would suggest, they are equally enacted through non-human actants (such as space, architecture and clothing) which communicate in ways other than talk. Indeed, from a CCO perspective, the material and the social cannot be neatly separated. As Mills and Cooren (2016) state,

Discourse, turns of talk, ideas and emotions must have a material component in order to exist, which means that they are, in fact, part of this so-called ‘material world’ to which we tend to oppose them. Conversely, tables, chairs, walls and computers are capable of telling us things about who designed them, when and where, which means that they also enter the discursive world. In other words, the material world is, in fact, the world as we know it, composed of beings with various levels of concreteness (from a rock to the flash in someone’s mind we call an idea). (p. 268)

While this observation is not new to organizational research and there is a turn toward matter in social sciences which recognizes the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday life (e.g. Barad, 2003; Leonardi, 2013; Orlikowski, 2007), little of this research, unlike the Montreal School, analyzes the interactional role of non-human actants in the constitution of organization. A key way in which the organization/protest movement is communicatively constituted, and on which this article focuses, is through speaking on its behalf. Through speaking on behalf of the organization/protest movement and acting as its spokesperson/spokesobject, one represents its interests, authors its identity, establishes roles within it, and advances its (political) agenda. The organization/protest movement is thus communicatively constituted through acts of ventriloquism, which is a metaphor used by Cooren (2015b) to denote ‘actions through which someone or something makes someone or something else say or do things’ (p. 476). In sum, an organization/protest movement

materializes, actualizes, presents, embodies itself through all beings who – or that – claim to, or are deemed to, act or speak in its name, whether these beings be spokesperson, policies, operations, employees, by-laws, journals, websites etc. If there is anything that we call an organization, a society, or even a country, it must exist through all these ventriloquial effects of representation/incarnation/materialization/reification. (Cooren, 2012: 6)

Moreover, the interactional twist that the Montreal School has given to CCO is based on fine-grained transcripts of naturally occurring interaction. These analyses often use the terminology and insights of conversation analysis (Sacks, 1992) to demonstrate exactly how it is that networks of actors (both human and non-human) are made present and so enact the organization. The advantage of using fine-grained analyses of interaction is that the researcher never leaves the terra firma of an event that actually happened and the researcher can, provided there is sufficient warrant for their claims in the analyses of the transcript, scale up (i.e. explicate how the local interaction produces, and is produced by, the extra-local; Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009) from the interaction to the organization. Thus, whatever claims the researcher makes about how the organization/protest movement is enacted through communicative practice must have their warrant in the fine-grained analysis of actual interaction and the emic orientation of the participants. The Montreal School thus eschews the use of secondhand accounts of organizations and organizing that may be gleaned from interviews, hypothetical models, quantitative surveys and so on, and that may separate the analysts’ observations from, and stand proxy for, the organization as it is constituted in talk.

CCO, as with conversation analysis, therefore has its roots in ethnomethodology (Bencherki, 2014). From this perspective, the video and commentary of the video that we analyze display commonsense knowledge of what the gilet jaune movement is and so renders it accountable so that it becomes intelligible or explicable on demand (Garfinkel, 1967). This recording is therefore not so much a manner of representing and transmitting a version of the gilet jaune movement that preexists communication. Rather, the video is an active agent which constitutes the socio-material practices of being a gilet jaune, and in so doing the video becomes part of the ‘continual enactment and negotiation of collective identity that makes an organization “present” for its members and outside constituents’ (Koschmann, 2013: 81).

Data

As data for this article, we use transcripts and drawings ² that reproduce a small part of a video clip that was publicly available on YouTube. A list of transcription symbols used can be found in Appendix 1. We have kept the original French transcript, and we have provided an interlinear translation in English. The video clip, entitled by those who posted it ‘Motorway tollbooths at Bandol completely destroyed by fire’, lasts approximately 15 minutes. The video was filmed by two gilets jaunes, a man and a woman (M or W in the transcript), during the destruction of the motorway tollbooth in Bandol in the south of France on the night of the 17 and 18 December 2018. As the two gilets jaunes film the action, they also provide a commentary which is specifically framed in the genre of a live press report (e.g. line 7: ‘a little live broadcast direct from th- the tollbooth of Bandol’) of what is going on (e.g. line 54: ‘there is no longer a tollbooth at Bandol it burned (.) this evening the gilets jaunes they have decided that there is no longer a tollbooth at Band↑O ::L’). Occasionally, the filmmakers interact with the gilets jaunes (GJ in the transcript) around them, talk to each other, address non-present humans (e.g. Emmanuel Macron, the French president) and non-humans (e.g. Vinci, the company that manages the motorway), or a presumed audience following the ‘live broadcast’.

For reasons of space, we bracket out analysis of the comments on the YouTube site that follow the video and we concentrate our analyses on three short extracts taken from the video. Considering the number of social media posts, televised news reports, newspaper articles and so on, concerning the gilets jaunes, this particular video was chosen because it is a naturally occurring document that shows the gilets jaunes themselves constructing the gilet jaune movement in both talk and action in real time. It is not a post hoc interpretation of the movement that, not being based on the terra firma of naturally occurring interaction, may separate observations from, and so stand proxy for, the gilet jaune movement. The video clip therefore constitutes a recording embedded in YouTube, in and through which the gilet jaune protest movement is constituted. This video is therefore not so much a method of representing and transmitting a version of the gilets jaunes as a preexistent sociological phenomenon that is out there somewhere, rather the video is, as we will show, an active agent in constituting the ‘just whatness’ of the gilet jaune protest movement.

Analysis

Extract 1: Talking the gilet jaune movement into being

The first extract analyzed occurs about 90 seconds into the video and is framed in terms of a live broadcast (line 7: ‘a little live broadcast direct from t-the tollbooth of Bandol’). The commentary provided by the female filmmaker (W) accounts for what is happening and so displays her practical reasoning of what it is to be a gilet jaune. Consequently, it enacts the gilet jaune movement. As the commentary is given, the film shows the burning tollbooths (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Burning tollbooth.

In line 8, the commentator announces that ‘we are here with our little gilets jaunes’. This is ambiguous, and since the ambiguity is not resolved by the speaker, it remains ambiguous to the analyst. It could be that the utterance refers to the fact that the filmmakers are wearing high visibility vests (something that is not revealed on the video clip), therefore explicitly identifying themselves as gilets jaunes. Alternatively, it could be that they are at Bandol with their fellow protesters, the collective pronoun ‘our’ signifying that they are part of the movement. In this case, the adjective ‘little’ is perhaps significant. This is because it talks the gilet jaunes into being as ‘little’ in relation to the state. Consequently, it frames the struggle as a David-and-Goliath-like struggle between what Guilluy (2016) calls la France d’en bas (i.e. the precariat and the ‘little’ people) who are able to confront la France d’en haut (i.e. the political elite who benefit from globalization and marketization). In either case, the gilets jaunes, as members of a protest movement and the movement itself, are made present. The actions of the gilets jaunes are then explicitly accounted for and justified (lines 9 ff.: Macron he doesn’t understand the soft way (.) perhaps the gilets jaunes will make him understand the hard way).

Macron, the president of France, is therefore made present in the talk and the gilets jaunes, as a protest movement, is also made present. The reason for burning the tollbooths is made explicit (i.e. making Macron understand the ‘hard way’). This therefore justifies and accounts for the actions of the gilets jaunes, talking them into being as a political movement ‘dialoguing’ with Macron, rather than acting as vandals, madmen or whatever, which could arguably be the first interpretation that comes to mind when we watch the images of the video. The woman commenter/filmmaker therefore ventriloquizes the gilets jaunes and speaks on their behalf. She thus not only makes the movement present in the interaction, but at the same time, the gilet jaune movement also animates her and the gilets jaunes in the video and so accounts for the action of burning the tollbooth visible on the video. Furthermore, the burning of the tollbooth visible on the video (cf. Figure 1) is itself ventriloquized by the video (and the filmmaker) as communicating ‘something’ to Macron. Implicitly, this is ‘the hard way’ (line 11) which involves the destruction of state infrastructure such as the tollbooths which normally ventriloquize the power of the state and communicate the government’s right to tax motorway traffic.

The gilet jaune movement is therefore presented implicitly as making the action of burning the tollbooth say something to Macron. As Cooren (2016: 20) points out, authoring and authority both come from the Latin root, auctor, which means the father, origin or source. Consequently, by ventriloquizing other actants (here the fires that consume the tollbooths), the spokesperson not only multiplies the authors of the action but also shows that the action of showing Macron the ‘hard way’ by burning the tollbooth should be understood as authorized by the gilet jaune movement. This claim of responsibility is supposed to lend weight to, and so justify, these actions. Without being authorized by the gilet jaune movement to act, burning the tollbooth would indeed not be accountable or at least would not be accountable as an act of resistance rather than ‘just’ vandalism or whatever. Thus, an idea – making Macron understand the hard way – animates the gilets jaunes, and is animated by them, and so the authority to burn the booth is (presented as) a moral authority which is justified by the claims that Macron does not understand the soft way.

Extract 2: The high visibility vest as an actant

The dialogue with the non-present Macron can also be seen in Extract 2 which occurs after about 4 minutes of filming and in which a gilet jaune is captured on film chanting for the resignation of Macron and in which the female filmmaker joins in the chanting. In this extract, we first briefly analyze the talk, but we then shift focus to the yellow vest itself as actant (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

The gilet jaune.

The rhythmic chant, MACRON IF YOU ARE A CHAMPION RESIGN, ³ using the familiar and thus disrespectful ‘tu’ form, ⁴ addresses Macron directly, thus making him present to the interaction. Significantly, this chant is taken up by the filmmaker who therefore becomes a co-author of this message and she makes being part of a collective relevant for the interaction and displays her affiliation with the gilet jaune movement (Lerner, 2002). However, it is not only the talk/chant that makes relevant the gilet jaune protest movement, it is also the high visibility vest. Without the vest, the protester could be understood as just a madman ranting. The vest animates the gilet jaune movement and acts as a spokesobject (see Vásquez and Cooren, 2011) which renders his action accountable as those of a gilet jaune rather than a vandal, a madman or whatever. In this way, the motives of the movement are ventriloquized by the vest and the network of actants (humans – other gilets jaunes – and non-humans, ideas, etc.) that animate the chanting gilet jaune and which are made relevant to the interaction. Consequently, the gilet jaune protest movement is ventriloquized through the chant and the vest, and reflexively the vest and the talk ventriloquize the movement to the extent that they are understood to incarnate or embody the principles, values, acceptable practices and norms of the gilets jaunes, and so constitute the movement.

Furthermore, the high visibility vest constitutes the gilets jaunes wearing them as a protest movement. This is because according to French law, any motorist must have a high visibility vest in his or her car and must wear it in case of an accident. Wearing a high visibility vest following a road accident would thus make the hybrid network of vest, the laws, the jurists who wrote the laws, the government ministers who decided on the laws, the principles of road safety and so on relevant. If one wears a high visibility jacket following a road accident, one defers to the rational legal authority of the state. Conversely, if one wears a high visibility jacket while burning down motorway tollbooths and chanting for the resignation of France’s elected president, then one is resisting the legal authority of the state and the vest becomes a spokesobject for a protest movement that establishes a network of actants (including beliefs and values) that opposes the government and calls for its head (president Macron) to resign. In other words, state rational legal authority becomes the constitutive outside (i.e. what the gilets jaunes resist/protest against) of the gilet jaune movement. Such appropriation of objects can be seen in other protest movements. For example, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement has appropriated the word queer, transforming it from an insult into a source of pride. In a similar way, the gilets jaunes appropriate the communicative force of the high visibility vest by ventriloquizing it, and being ventriloquized by it, in a way that those in power did not intend.

Moreover, since everybody in France is supposed to wear a gilet jaune when there is an accident or when a vehicle is broken down, the gilet jaune has the advantage of being a priori associated with all the French adults. The symbol of the gilet jaune is therefore interesting as this piece of clothing is a sort of universal garment that one is legally obliged to wear in specific circumstances. When you see a gilet jaune, it could be anybody (even if, of course, we know that it is not anybody anymore) especially if we are not dealing with road accidents. Thus, the high visibility vest ventriloquizes, to a certain extent, all French men and women (‘le peuple’) who are in opposition to the state, or at least Macron’s government and its allies, such as Vinci. In this way, the protest movement is constituted as an anti-authoritarian movement, that is to say acting to resist the rational legal authority of the state. This can also be seen in the next section in which we discuss the network of authority made present, and ventriloquized, by the tollbooths themselves.

Extract 3: The tollbooth, fire and space as actants

In Extract 3, we continue to focus on the non-human actants contributing to the doing resistance, and we focus on the burning tollbooths, which are the focal points of the film and accompanying commentary. This extract, in which the female filmmaker (W) again justifies and renders accountable the action of burning the tollbooths, occurs at the end of the video just before the filmmakers leave.

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The male filmmaker (M) draws the viewers’ attention to the burning tollbooths in the genre of a live broadcast (line 107: ‘so we no longer see anything, the fire is too big, the smoke the tollbooths’). The female filmmaker then adds to this description of the scene (line 109: ‘here are the tollbooths’) and then adds a commentary that accounts for the scene. The woman addresses the company (Vinci) who manages the tollbooths for, and on behalf of, the government and tells them to go fuck their mother. The company is thus literally presentified as an anthropomorphized actant in the scene. The company is not only made present by the woman’s talk, it is also ventriloquized by the tollbooths (as spokesobjects) who make relevant a hybrid network of Vinci, the government that Vinci works for, Macron who heads the government, the laws and legislation that allowed for the building of the tollbooths and so on.

Normally, the tollbooth communicates to drivers by indicating to them what they have to pay and when that toll is paid a barrier is raised, communicating to the drivers that they can continue on their way. In this case, voluntary compliance to the rational legal authority embodied by the booth is enacted. However, the video clip draws the viewers’ attention to the fires that are destroying the tollbooths and blocking the motorway. The fires thus become a spokesobject that makes relevant the gilet jaune protest movement which resists the authority of the state to collect money when traveling on a motorway.

In this case, the location of the fires (and the protesters) makes space a further non-human actant that is mobilized to presentify, and constitute, the gilet jaune movement. The flames, as spokesobject of the gilet jaune movement, prevent motorists from using the road and paying the toll – though in other parts of the film, motorists are seen passing through some of the tollbooths, but apparently not paying. In this final scene, the fire blocks the booths (cf. Figure 3) and occupies the space normally dedicated to the motorway traffic. Thus, space, or more precisely movement through space, which Vinci is normatively authorized to regulate, is being opposed by flames, which are ventriloquizing the gilet jaune movement. Non-human actants (the fires) are thus presented as communicatively constituting the gilet jaune protest movement and opposing state authority.

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Figure 3.

The burning tollbooths.

This scene is rendered intelligible and accountable as an act of resistance to authority, rather than ‘just’ vandalism, by the commentary of the female filmmaker. The justification is that Vinci takes – suggesting an involuntary payment – money from her when she takes the motorway to see her mother, sister and grandmother (lines 110–114). She ends this justification by again (cf. line 109) telling Mr. Vinci to fuck his mother, therefore again personifying Vinci and making the company the target of her justification and insults. She therefore treats Vinci not as an abstract and anonymous force but as an actant that can be addressed directly through her talk and through the fire. In so doing, she defines the target of the gilet jaune movement, the non-human company, and so constitutes the gilet jaune movement in terms of what it resists and protests against.

Conclusion

This article therefore shows that investigating the communicative constitution of a protest movement, rather than communication that takes places within the protest movement as preexistent entity, can shed light on how the movement is understood emically by those who ventriloquize it to justify, and account for, their actions. Furthermore, we demonstrate the importance of analyzing both the material and the discursive when investigating the communicative constitution of organization and so of not taking an anthropocentric view of organization/protest movements. Such an approach notably adds to work that investigates the practices through which authority is performed, and supplements this work by investigating how authority is resisted. It also complements existing work on protest movements by going beyond treating communication as an asocial conduit for transmitting the values of the movement to explicating how a video clip actually constitutes the movement and enacts it.

If, as Courpasson and Vallas (2016: 2) argue, given the rise of social and political contention, the ‘question of resistance as a social organizational and political phenomena needs to be placed at centre stage’ by the academic community, then explicating how a protest movement, in this case the gilet jaune movement, is communicatively constructed as a protest movement by both human and non-human actants surely adds a novel perspective to an area of study that has traditionally viewed social media as a way of transmitting messages about protest movements rather than as a way of constituting them.

We cannot claim, however, that this video, or any one particular recording or text for that matter, is a faithful ‘representative’ of the gilet jaune movement. After all, the gilet jaune movement is a movement that brings together many people who are discontented with French society for many reasons, and therefore it is polymorphous and contradictory rather than monolithic and stable. However, we do claim that the discursive and material practices and resources used to communicatively constitute the gilets jaunes in this instance may be used in other instances. Therefore, we end this article with a call for more work into the communicative constitution of the gilets jaunes, and protest movements in general, that look beyond how protest movements communicate to how they are communicatively constituted.