The human project organizes the environment as a totality that reveals its own inertia

Evidence

My project thus totalizes my environment, in that it causes it to order itself around me, and to reveal its own inertia, its own “coefficient of adversity,” by resisting my future end: thus the desert, as I try to survive it, is revealed as an inhuman landscape; thus the open freeway redoubles my own speed, and the ski slope lends itself to my downward flight. The project then leaves behind it these aggregates of matter in the form of totalities, or husks of dead projects, traces of human action which has long since vanished. In this sense, our cities are sedimentations of such totalities, like a sitting room whose owner has died. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 464

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Sartre’s concept of the project via totalization and the ‘coefficient of adversity’ in concrete, vivid examples.
• XREF: Jameson explicating Sartre’s project links to Lukács’s concept of reification and to Adorno’s negative dialectics — the natural landscape and dead objects as reified sedimentations of past praxis. — connects to: The environment is revealed only through and within one’s free project — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1196; The permanence of things is constituted by one’s own ongoing project. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1284; The experience of structure is produced by repeated acts of distribution — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 277
• ADDENDUM: The ‘sedimentations of totalities’ imagery — cities as husks of dead projects — echoes the trees-as-infrastructure essay’s account of how human action leaves durable material traces that reshape future action.

Broader Connections

• The environment is revealed only through and within one’s free project #qualifies (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1196
• The permanence of things is constituted by one’s own ongoing project. #corroborates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1284
• The experience of structure is produced by repeated acts of distribution #complicates (0.73) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 277