(and Heidegger) from 1949, “Existentialism,” or, in the original German, “Zwei europaische Philosophien (Marxismus und Existentialismus),” an essay written in the wake of his return to Hungary and on the very cusp of his disillusionment with Stalinization in the emerging East Bloc. Indeed, the title of the first section of Search is a direct citation, “Marxism and Existentialism,” with the significant exception that the homonymic pun on the French et (est) provocatively, even heretically, equates Marxism with existentialism. Eager to defend existentialism from the charge of solipsism and bourgeois decadence, Sartre moves to challenge both Lukács’s sociology (if existentialism is determined by a particular class’s experience of the “collapse” of social democracy, how do we account for Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s quite different reactions to National Socialism?) and his anthropology (what precisely remains of the concept of human freedom in historical determinism?). Sartre’s ultimate concession that existentialism is to be metabolized by a thus reinvigorated (i.e., post-Stalinist) Marxism should not be understood to vitiate the importance he attaches to fleshing out his theory of the subject. Indeed, this is precisely what compels the attention to collectivities and groups where the question of the radio broadcast arises.
As if to underscore the importance of the question of collectivities, Sartre announces his turn to it thus: “We can now elucidate [éclairer] the meaning of serial structure and the possibility of applying this knowledge [connaissance] to the study of the dialectical intelligibility of the social” (Critique 269). Both serial structure and dialectical intelligibility are essential concepts of the Critique. That they are “now” in a position to be clarified marks an important, perhaps even decisive moment in the text.
Immediately prior to the discussion of the radio broadcast is Sartre’s startlingly evocative analysis of riders waiting at a bus stop in Paris. Using a distinction between “series” and “group” (as well as between praxis and the practico-inert), he demonstrates how something, some agency, external to the riders organizes them as a unity in isolation from one another: the bus, its route (indeed, urban space as a whole), and even more fundamentally the ticket that, by virtue of its articulation of an arithmetical series determining the boarding sequence (clearly a bygone procedure), is interiorized by the riders as a version of what Marx in volume 1 of Capital called the commodity, that is, as an object producing in its circulation the occulted system of their social relations. To thus restate what Marx understood by “fetishism,” Sartre invokes the concept of the series, that is, an unintelligible ordering out of which a group, through a concerted praxis of dialectical intelligibility, might emerge. Key here is the structure of seriality, the now familiar—given the enduring, if erratic, relevance of Debord and the Situationist International—motif of separation, or, more specifically, the fully interiorized sense of being alone together. This insight is crucial to Sartre’s project in the Critique because, as he says plainly at one point, he is concerned to identify how human freedom is constrained, not by the deliberate pursuit of conflicting interests, but by the interiorized forms of exteriority that render humanity, as he says in an evocative footnote, a race haunted by robots of their own making. Aware that the gathering at the bus stop lacks sufficient explanatory scope, Sartre reaches for the radio dial, or, as he says, the communication through alterity that characterizes “all mass media” (Critique 271).
Here one is brought directly to the highly charged humanistic motif of presence. This most phenomenological of concepts is deployed by Sartre to restate the relation between the bus stop and the radio in terms of direct (the bus stop) and indirect (the radio) gatherings. Both, to be sure, exhibit the structure of seriality, but in a manner clarified by an inflection of the present/absent variety. What, then, does Sartre mean by presence? He writes: “Presence will be defined as the maximum distance permitting the immediate establishment of relations of reciprocity between two individuals, given the society’s techniques and tools” (Critique 270). He offers the telephone and the two-way radio on an airplane as examples—both importantly acousmatic—as if to make sure that “distance” is not construed too narrowly. In then turning to absence—“the impossibility of individuals establishing relations of reciprocity between themselves” (270–71)—he establishes the full significance of distance. It is a way to represent the space that contains what Sartre understands, following Hegel, reciprocity. This last is more than a mere affirmation of cooperation or mutuality. It refers to the ontological work of recognition and thus undergirds what Marxism understands by “solidarity.” In Sartre’s hands reciprocity stands opposite alterity, that is, the form of social mediation premised on a passive interiorization of the “given,” the so-called nature of things. Presence names the limit of reciprocity and thus also of alterity. It is not about the face to face but about the anthro-technological conditions of a totalizing proximity. It is about the Near that may also be far, the distance that is not distant, in effect, the essence of humanity such that that essence might express itself in common with others concerned to wrest praxis from the robotic grasp of the practico-inert, or what Marx called dead labor.
How, then, does this bear on the two radios: the ground-to-air or two-way radio and the broadcast radio? The latter, by virtue of exemplifying an indirect or absent seriality, would appear to fall squarely into the experience of alterity, that is, a distance that in compromising the conditions of reciprocity would appear to fall beyond the far into the purely remote. Does this not undercut presence as the conceptual link between Heidegger and Sartre on the radio? Actually, no, but to understand why one needs to trace attentively the political dimension of Sartre’s analysis, a dimension that has direct and sustained recourse to the concept of voice (la voix).
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