JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

326 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsa result, of occasioning, in this field in so far as it is defined as non-grouped, theconditions for an antagonistic grouping (on the basis of scarcity and in divided socialsystems).But the most important point here is that the non-grouped, on the outside, behavetowards the group by positing it through their very praxis as an organic totality. Thusevery new collective organisation can find its archetype in any other older one, becausepraxis as the unification of the practical field objectively tightens the bonds of theobject-group. It is striking that our most elementary patterns of behaviour relate toexternal collectives as if they were organisms. The structure of scandal, for example,is, for everyone, that of a collective taken as a totality: in a theatre, everyone, inconfronting each speech of a scene which he finds outrageous, is in fact conditioned bythe serial reaction of his neighbours. Scandal is the Other as the formula of a series. Butas soon as the first manifestations of scandal have occurred (that is to say, the firstacts of someone acting for the Others in so far as he is Other than himself), they createthe living unity of the audience against the author, simply because the first protester,through his unity as an individual, realises this unity for everyone in transcendence (latranscendance). Moreover, it will remain a profound contradiction in everyone, becausethis unity is that of all the Others (including himself) as Others and by an Other: theprotester was not revealing or expressing popular opinion; rather, he was expressing,in the objective unity of a direct action (shouts, insults, etc.), what still existed foreveryone only as the opinion of the Others, that is to say, as their shifting, serial unity.But once the scandal has been reported and discussed, it becomes, in the eyes of thosewho did not witness it, a synthetic event which gave the audience which saw the playthat night a temporary unity as an organism. Everything becomes clear if we situatethe non-grouped who discover themselves to be a collective through their impotencein relation to the group which they reveal. To the extent that, through the unity of itspraxis, the group determines them in their inorganic inertia, they conceive its ends andits unity through the free unifying unity of their own individual praxis and on themodel of the free synthesis which is fundamentally the practical temporalisation ofthe organism. Indeed, in the practical field, all exterior multiplicity becomes, for everyagent, the object of a unifying synthesis (and, as we have already seen, the result ofthis synthesis is that the serial structure of gatherings is concealed). But the groupwhich I unify in the practical field produces itself, as a group, as already unified, thatis to say, as structured by a unity which in principle eludes my unification and negatesit (in so far as it is praxis relegating me to impotence). This free active unity whicheludes me appears as the substance of a reality of which I myself, in my practical andperceptual field, have unified only its multiplicity as the pure materiality of appearance;