A dear-headed and completely unresigned militant recently gave this testimony: "Today, I know that disinterested militancy doesn't exist. Our upbringing, our schooling, our family, the social world as a whole rarely make us into well­ rounded and serene personalities. We're full of hurts, existential issues to be resolved, relational expectations, and it's with this 'inner baggage' that we enter into a militant life. Through our struggles, we're all looking for 'something else,' for gratifica­tions, recognition, social and friendly relations, human warmth, meaning to give to our life. In most militants this search for gratifications remains rather discreet, it doesn't take up all the space. In certain persons, it should be said, it occupies a disproportionate space. We can all think of examples of militants constantly monopolizing the talk or trying to control everything, of others putting on a performance or always playing on peoples' feelings, of others who are especially sensitive, very aggressive or peremptory in the ways they express themselves … These problems of recognition, gratifications, or power seem to me to explain single-handedly the majority of conflicts in the radical groups […] In my view, many apparently political conflicts mask conflicts of ego and between persons. That's my hypothesis. It's not necessarily correct. But from my experience, I have the strong feeling that something else is at play in the meetings, the mobilizations, the radical organi­zations, 'something else' than the struggle properly speaking, a veritable human theater with its comedies, its tragedies, its smooth marivaudages, which often push the political objectives which supposedly brought us together into the background." The Invisible Committee, Now, p.53-54
The experience of Nuit debout in Paris, which conveys many of the limitations of attempts to direct-democratic and horizontal forms
But if there was a fundamental defect of Nuit debout from the start, it was, on the pretext of going beyond classic politics, the way in which it reproduced and staged the latter's principal axiom according to which politics is a particular sphere, separate from "life," an activity consisting in speaking, debating, and voting. With the result that Nuit debout came to resemble an imaginary parliament, a kind of legislative organ with no executive function, and hence a manifestation of powerlessness that was sure to please the media and the governing authorities. One participant sums up what happened, or rather what didn't happen, at Nuit debout: "The only shared position, perhaps, is the desire for an endless discussion [...] The unsaid and the vague have always been privileged to the detriment of taking a position, which would be selective by definition, hence supposedly non­ inclusive." The Invisible Committee, Now, p.55
Nuit debout, in Paris, was many things. It was a rallying point and a starting point for all sorts of incredible actions. It was the site of wonderful encounters, ofinformal conversations, ofreunions after the demonstrations. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.54
We were here to be together, but the rules separated us. We were here to exorcise the curse of our respective solitudes, but the assemblies gave the curse a glaring visibility. For me the assembly should be the place where the collective is experienced, felt, explored, confirmed, and finally, if only in a punctual way, declared. But for that, it would have been necessary for real discussions to occur. The problem was that we didn't talk to each other, we spoke one after the other. The worst of what we meant to avert on the Place unfolded there in a general incomprehension: a collective impotence that mistakes the spectacle of solitudes for the invention of an active collective. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.55-56
"Like many others, I sometimes had the impression that there was a kind of opaque power structure that furnished the major orientations of the movement [...] [that there was] another level of decision-making than that of the ordinary assemblies." The micro­ bureaucracy that ran Nuit debout in Paris, and that was literally a bureaucracy of the microphone, was caught in this uncomfortable situation that it could only roll out its vertical strategies hidden behind the spectacle of horizontality presented each day at 6 pm by the sovereign assembly of empti­ness that was held there, with its changing walk-on actors. That is why what was said there basically didn't matter much, and least of all to its organizers. Their ambitions and strategies were deployed else­ where than on the square, and in a language whose cynicism could be given free rein only on the terrace of a hipster cafe, in the last stage of intoxi­cation, between accomplices. Nuit debout showed in an exemplary way how "direct democracy," "collective intelligence," "horizontality," and hyperformalism could function as means of con­trol and a method of sabotage. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.55-56
[…] every time an assembly begins to turn in circles, and nothing is said beyond a rambling succession of leftist monologues, there's almost always someone who will shout, "No, please! Not Nuit debout!" This is the huge credit that must be granted to Nuit debout: it made the misery of assemblyism not just a theoretical certainty but a shared experience. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.57
At bottom, the problem of political decision-making only redoubles and displaces to a collective scale what is already an illusion in the individual: the belief that our actions, our thoughts, our gestures, our words, and our behaviors result from decisions emanating from a central, conscious, and sovereign entity­ the Self. The fantasy of the "sovereignty of the Assembly" only repeats on the collective plane the sovereignty of the Self. […] One understands better, therefore, where the unbelievable narcissism of the general assemblies of Nuit debout comes from. It's the thing, more­ over, that ended up killing them, by making them the site, in speech after speech, of repeated out­ bursts of individual narcissism, which is to say, outbursts of powerlessness. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.58