Seriality, or Why the Bus Queue Is a Political Concept

The practico-inert does not merely resist individual praxis. It organizes human beings into collectives of a peculiar and impotent kind, which Sartre calls series, and the structure of these collectives he calls seriality. Chapter Eight treats it as the precise locus of conditioned freedom in the Critique, and the claim deserves the emphasis.

A series is a gathering of people united not by a common project but only externally, through their common relation to a material object. Within it, each member is interchangeable with every other, and each is related to the others in the mode of alterity, of being Other, rather than of being the same. Sartre’s example is the line of people waiting for a bus. They stand together, but they are not a group. They are a plurality of solitudes, each indifferent to the others, united only by the bus they all await and by the material structure that assigns them numbered places.

Why the example is well chosen

It is tempting to read the bus queue as a throwaway illustration, and to look for the serious content in the sections on scarcity and violence. That reading loses the point. The queue is chosen precisely because nothing dramatic is happening in it. No one is oppressing anyone. There is no antagonist. And yet every feature of the concept is present: the material object that gathers, the interchangeability, the indifference, the numbered place that assigns each person a relation to the others which none of them chose and none of them can alter alone.

What the example establishes is that serialization does not require malice or even intention. It requires only that praxis be dispersed through a material arrangement which makes its common effect difficult to recognize and harder to organize.

Free and impotent at the same time

Here is the reason the concept carries so much weight for the argument of this book. In the series, individual praxis is not abolished. Each serialized person continues to project, to need, to act. What the praxis lacks is efficacy: the power to alter the structure that disperses it. That power belongs only to a collective acting in common, and seriality is precisely the dispersal of the collective into impotent alterity.

The serialized worker remains ontologically free, a praxis that surpasses its given toward an end. He lacks practical efficacy. Those two facts are not in tension, and their compatibility is the whole content of the two-register distinction. Sartre forged the concept for a different purpose, in the analysis of class and of the mass media of his day, and it turns out to supply the clearest available demonstration that the registers can come apart completely.

The counter-movement, and its price

The dialectic does not end in seriality. Under the pressure of a common danger, the serialized plurality may suddenly fuse: each member ceasing to be Other and becoming the same as the others in a common praxis, totalizing a shared situation toward a shared end. Sartre’s paradigm is the storming of the Bastille, the moment at which a crowd ceases to be a series of frightened individuals and becomes a group acting as one. In the group-in-fusion, practical efficacy is recovered, because the common praxis can do what no member could do alone.

But the group-in-fusion is unstable. The danger that fused it passes, and with its passing the threat of dissolution back into seriality reappears. To survive, the group must bind itself, and the means of binding is the pledge, by which each member swears to remain and authorizes the others to coerce him should he defect.

The pledge introduces what Sartre calls fraternity-terror: the group’s right of violence over its own members, the dark underside of common freedom. The same act that constitutes the fraternity of the group constitutes its licence to destroy the member who would relapse into seriality. From the pledged group the dialectic proceeds through organization, the differentiation of functions, to institution.

What varies and what does not

Follow the sequence and one thing stays constant while another swings violently. The serialized individual is free and impotent. The member of the group-in-fusion is free and, for a moment, powerful. The member of the institution is free and constrained by a structure his own pledged praxis erected.

The variable is efficacy, conditioned by the degree to which praxis is dispersed by the practico-inert or gathered against it. The constant is the freedom of praxis itself, without which there would be neither dispersal to suffer nor fusion to achieve.

That is why the bus queue is a political concept rather than an illustration. It names the condition in which people remain agents and cannot act, and it explains that condition without denying either half of it.

Developed in Chapter Eight, sections V and VI.