Seriality and Agency: Toward a Weak Ontology of Collective Action

This article revisits the Critique of Dialectical Reason for a present marked by attention scarcity and the algorithmic parameterization of action. Instead of a teleology of totalization, we propose a weak ontology of coordination: we preserve Sartre’s core (being-in-situation, project, the practico-inert, seriality, group-in-fusion) while lowering foundational claims and making operational criteria explicit. We reinterpret the practico-inert as a material–informational infrastructure (dashboards, rankings, routing systems, notifications) that polarizes relevancies and rhythms; we describe seriality as alignment without a shared interiority; and we treat the group-in-fusion as a revocable episode of dense coordination. The conceptual contribution is twofold: (i) a grammar of passages between regimes of action via interventions in rules, rhythms, and feedback; (ii) the introduction of embodied criteria of success—economy of gesture, robustness to perturbations, and transfer across contexts—as markers of when coordination improves without impoverishing agency. The article builds bridges to critical theory (a veto on “natural history” and semantic immunization) and to an operative phenomenology of the gesture (habits, relevancies, “fit”), under public conditions of critique and descriptive reversibility. We offer testable hypotheses in three domains: platform labor and algorithmic routing; coordination of collectives on networks; training-by-metrics in music/sport. Methodologically, the text works implicitly with a cycle of description, negative test, and redescriptions, avoiding syncretism and anchoring modest counterfactual predictions. The result is an auditable framework for diagnosing when metrics and arrangements widen or compress the normative thickness of coordination.