
Seriality, Sociability, Silence
HOW TO UNDERSTAND the sudden shift in social life from the lockdowns in March to the demonstrations in June? Models like spectacle and surveillance capture little of the experience of either isolation at home or solidarity in the streets, and they confront only some of the power dynamics in play over the past year. Although these concepts are hardly outmoded, they date to changes in capitalism and governmentality that became urgent in the 1960s and ’70s. Yet the model that seems more salient now is older still. In Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre argued that the fundamental