exchange or physical artifacts. He claims that the practico-inert
constitutes “fundamental sociality” (CDRi: 318 ). Since he conceives
the group as arising through an essential negation of the practico-inert,
he characterizes the practico-inert as “the matrix of groups and their
grave” (CDRi: 635 ). Sartre’s view is that the motor of history is scarcity
(la rarete ́) of material goods, which leads to a quasi-Hobbesian war of all
against all and the violence that marks history as we know it.^9 Sartre
distinguishes two basic forms of seriality in theCritique, the collective
and the institutional, each at opposite ends of the practico-inert field.
Consider his example of the people waiting at a bus stop. Their bond
of materiality, the practico-inert ensemble, is called thecollective; the
“thing” which forges it, thecollective object, in this case the bus; and the
relations altered thereby,serial. A scarcity of seats coupled with various
demands on the travelers to “meet obligations” generates competition
for places and, depending on what is at stake, even overt violence (think
of the photo of people clinging to the last helicopter out of Saigon toward
the end of the Vietnam War). Sartre’s larger thesis is that scarcity of
material goods (of whatever sort) generates the violence that has marked
recorded history. We noted his single mention of the ideal of a “socialism
of abundance” in a footnote to The Family Idiot, which indicated
the end-ideal of properly human striving. He goes on to describe the
ephemeral nature of the revolutionary group in the French Revolution
as well as its seemingly inevitable demise by the gradual solidification
of its spontaneity, first into the pledged group (where the “oath” serves
as a practico-inert wedge), next into the organized group and finally the
institution, which Sartre seems to regard as the victorious return of
the practico-inert in the social realm. He devotes considerable space in
bookiito the Soviet Union and “directorial” society generally. In other
words, he has an ideal but he is not a prophet, as we shall discover in
his final discussion on ethics with Benny Le ́vy.^10
Processis Sartre’s term for the sequence of impersonal practices that
populate the practico-inert field. The social field, he remarks, “is full
of acts without an author” (SM 163 – 164 ). He lists three “modalities
of human action”: individual praxis (which he also calls “constituting”),
(^9) “Scarcity, as the negation of man in man by matter, is a principle of dialectical intelligibility”
10 (CDRi:^149 ).
SeeHope 69 ff.
Vol. I,Theory of Practical Ensembles 341