In/visible politics: Online–offline world-making of the French far-right

Abstract

This article builds on recent retheorizations of politics as increasingly rearticulated through resistant projects, rejection of the political commons, and fissures that reveal new forms of political worldmaking in the 21st century. Moving between ethnography of online and offline supporters of the French far-right, the article demonstrates how French partisans of the RN and allied far-right movements, perhaps increasingly, are rendering themselves in/visible: That is, there is reluctance to disclose support of the French far-right in face-to-face and public spaces, while political self-disclosure and “openness” flourishes in the anonymity that online spaces provide. But rather than understanding this as straightforward case of extremism-gone-online, I argue that there are important dialogical articulations, and imbrications, between (anonymous) online and (face-to-face) offline political participation that raise questions about correlations among publicness, visibility, citizenship, and democracy. The article reviews critiques of the public sphere while arguing for its cultural embeddedness in especially French understandings of politics and especially a particular “democratic doxa” implying panoptical visibility. It moves to complicate these conceptions of publicness with ethnographic evidence from a far-right chat room in which anonymous participants claim to constitute a more authentic French public, juxtaposing face-to-face ethnography of a far-right town in southern France. In so doing, the article identifies the ways in which offline and online politics in today’s France seem to converge, rather than diverge, challenging scholars to contemplate whether visibility remains central to democratic and electoral processes, or whether we must better account for in/visible political world-making in today’s France and beyond.