JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

320 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsif, in special circumstances, it is possible to see a symbolic relation between thegathering, as a visible assembly of discrete particles (where it presents itself in avisible form), and its objective unity, this is to be found in the small visible crowdwhich, by its presence as a gathering, becomes a symbol of the practical unity of itsinterest or of some other object which is produced as its inert synthesis. This unityitself, in so far as it is practico-inert, may present itself to individuals through a largerpraxis of which they are either the inert means, the ends or the objects, or a combinationof these, and which constitutes the true synthetic field of their gathering and whichproduces them in the object with their new laws of unified multiplicity. This praxisunifies them by producing the object in which they are already inscribed, in whichtheir forms are negatively determined, and, in so far as it is already other (affected bythe entire inertia of matter), it is this praxis which produces them in common in otherunity.The second point to be made is that the apparent absence of structure in thegathering (or its apparent structures) does not correspond to objective reality: if theywere all unaware of each other and if they carried their social isolation behaviour to thelimit, the passive unity of the gathering in the object would both require and producean ordinal structure from the multiplicity of the organisms. In other words, whatpresents itself to perception either as a sort of organised totality (men huddled together,waiting) or as a dispersal, possesses, as a collecting together of men by the object, acompletely different basic structure which, by means of serial ordering, transcends theconflict between exterior and interior, between unity and identity. From the point ofview of the activity-institution (the exact meaning of these terms will be clarifiedlater), which is represented in Paris by the RATP (the public transport authority), thesmall gathering which slowly forms around the bus stop, apparently by a process ofmere aggregation, already has a serial structure. It was produced in advance as thestructure of some unknown group by the ticket machine attached to the bus stop.Everyone realises it for himself and confirms it for Others through his own individualpraxis and his own ends. This does not mean that he helps to create an active group byfreely determining, with other individuals, the end, the means, and the division oftasks; it means that he actualises his being-outside-himself as a reality shared byseveral people and which already exists, and awaits him, by means of an inert practice,denoted by instrumentality, whose meaning is that it integrates him into an orderedmultiplicity by assigning him a place in a prefabricated seriality.In this sense, the indifferentiation of beings-outside-themselves in the passiveunity of an object exists between them as a serial order, as separation-unity in thepractico-inert milieu of the Other. In other words, there is an objective, fundamental