The Phenomenon of Social Necessity

If the group-in-fusion formed Sartre's revolutionary paradigm of collective transcendence, the series, in its role as "anti-dialectic," epitomized society as "second nature." His analysis of the series thus came to represent his primary approach to the phenomenon of social necessity. In the end, he hoped to show that all mathematically quantifiable regularity arose within social life through the free acts of individuals.^[52] Indeed, he found necessity and unfreedom already inscribed in the objectifications of free praxis.

According to the Critique , meaningful objects came to the human world through praxis. In practice, freedom and consciousness brought "human functions" to matter: such transforming transcendence placed in a thing "its own future, its own knowledges."^[53] But while objectification through practice evinced freedom, it simultaneously founded the "elementary experience" of necessity. Sartre in fact diverged from Marx in seeing objectification itself as automatically alienation and imposed necessity. The main vehicle of this "fundamental alienation" Sartre called "alterity," which denoted the alteration in meaning that occurred between an act as subjectively intended and the result as objectively interpreted by other human beings. "To the extent that, having attained our own end, we understand that we have in fact realized something else , outside of us, our action is altered, and we have our first dialectical experience of necessity." This form of alienation was unavoidable. Even in his tools, man was forced to mimic the inertia of material nature in order to master it: "The living body uses its inertia to overcome the inertia of things."^[54] At its most extreme, the phenomenon of alterity meant that the work executed by one generation came back to haunt another, in the shape of unintended consequences that formed the inert basis for the work of a new generation.

The series, by contrast, represented a necessity imposed by the ongoing acts of a multiplicity of individuals within a collective. Serial collectivities embraced a negative unity of inertia. Rather than actively transforming the world through free praxis, individuals within serial collectivities merely endured their situation; insofar as each member of the series stood in a relationship of indifference to every other member, each faced a latent threat from every other (whereas in a group, collective concord supplied a tacit assurance that members would not work at cross-purposes). The institu-

tions comprising a serial collectivity thus lost their original meaning for their members, becoming a ritual emcumbrance on praxis. To be sure, only the praxis of each member sustained the serial collective; yet it was a praxis bereft of teleological transcendence. Ultimately the series no longer appeared to its members as praxis at all, but rather as exis , or being in permanence. Where the group represented a perpetual totalizing action, meaningfully restructuring the world according to constitutive intentional acts, the series represented a reified totalization, maintained in existence by passive acts, previously constituted by tradition and habit.

Sartre at one point described necessity as "liberty's destiny in exteriority."^[55] With his final discussion of the series, he took the Critique full circle, from the original praxis of subjectivity to the derivative exis of social objectivity. Although he portrayed the series as an historical sedimentation of free acts, Sartre still insisted that the continued existence of the series depended on the perpetuated perversion of praxis into exis . Within such an historical context, free subjectivity supported unfree objectivity. The agent within the series appeared condemned to pass freely upon himself the sentence imposed by society, which conventionally defined the framework and aspirations of most quotidian acts. Sartre's concept of the "practico-inert" attempted to demarcate this experience, its neologistic conjunction stressing the role of human action in constituting an inert social reality—a reality which most individuals faced passively, as if society were an inert material reality, and hence something foreign to human freedom.^[56]

Through the concepts of alterity, of the series and of the practicoinert, Sartre tried to make intelligible the practical underpinnings of social necessity. He wanted to illustrate how a human dialectic, founded in practico-inert seriality, could produce its opposite, an inhuman antidialectic. On this point, Sartre had indeed modified his position since Being and Nothingness . Where he had earlier found only universal human freedom, he now also declared universal human slavery. Absolute ontological freedom constituted, through the mediation of serial institutions, absolute social unfreedom.^[57] "For those who have read Being and Nothingness , I will say that the foundation of necessity is practical: it is the for-itself, as agent, discovering itself, first of all, as inert, or better, practico-inert in the milieu of the in-itself."^[58] While the emphasis and language were new, the basic vision of subjectivity was not.^[59]