Sartre’s interpretive model makes each series symbolically contain all the others

Evidence

By contrast, the relationship between the various series in Sartre’s mode of interpretation must be described as symbolic; which is to say that their relationship is precisely not arbitrary, but that in some fashion each series reflects and contains within itself all the others. Thus, Baudelaire’s peculiar gait in walking ultimately (and if properly analyzed) contains the secret of his psychology, his socio-economic ideology, and his poetic sensibility itself. Thus Genet’s style recapitulates his whole life experience, and a purely tactile reaction such as that toward stickiness (viscosité) is inherently symbolic of an original choice of being itself. Earlier, of course, Sartre maintained the position that the basic series, the ultimate signified, was the relationship to being. It is now clear, however, that even granting the priority of the economic in his present thought, this particular model does not demand the priority of any particular series over any other, for they are all implicit in each other, taken separately. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 454

Categorization

• XREF: This is the Sartrean version of totality that can be traced back to Lukács’s totality and forward to Jameson’s own totalizing criticism — key lineage thread.
• DEFINE: Defines the symbolic relationship among series, distinguishing it from a merely arbitrary sign relation.