Nuit Debout| Up All Night, Down for the Count? A Compositionist Approach to Nuit Debout

Abstract

Nuit Debout is/was, if anything, a furtive phenomenon. How do we account for the emergence, withdrawal, and stuttering attempted returns of Nuit Debout? Nuit Debout needs to be analyzed, and yet its existence confounds analysis. Its operational tactic (intense actions while up all night, then dispersal) defies usual characterization as a social movement. This was compounded by its overall timeline: a rapid upsurge followed by stunning disappearance. What conceptual tools do we have to make sense of the milieu out of which Nuit Debout emerged? And what do media ecologies have to do with it? This article undertakes such an analysis by developing a theoretical framework around social bodies, compositionism, and social reproduction. It draws from autonomist social theory to address what is, or was, Nuit Debout.