JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

328 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingswords, they transcend and preserve them. Collectives, on the other hand, even whenthey result from the disintegration of active groups, preserve nothing of themselves ascollectives, except for dead, ossified structures which scarcely conceal the flight ofseriality. Similarly, the group, whatever it may be, contains in itself its reasons forrelapsing into the inert being of the gathering: thus the disintegration of a group, as weshall see, has an a priori intelligibility. But the collective— as such and apart from theaction of the factors we are about to study— contains at most the mere possibility ofa synthetic union of its members. Lastly, regardless of pre-history, the important thinghere, in a history conditioned by class struggle, is to explain the transition of oppressedclasses from the state of being collectives to revolutionary group praxis. This isparticularly important because such a transition has really occurred in each case.But having mentioned class relations, I will make a second observation: that itwould be premature to regard these classes as also being groups. In order to determinethe conditions of their intelligibility, I shall, as with collectives, take and discussephemeral, superficial groups, which form and disintegrate rapidly, and approach thebasic groups of society progressively.The upheaval which destroys the collective by the flash of a common praxisobviously originates in a synthetic, and therefore material, transformation, whichoccurs in the context of scarcity and of existing structures. For organisms whose risksand practical movement, as well as their suffering, reside in need, the driving-force iseither danger, at every level of materiality (whether it be hunger, or the bankruptcywhose meaning is hunger, etc.), or transformations of instrumentality (the exigenciesand scarcity of the tool replacing the scarcity of the immediate object of need; or themodifications of the tool, seen in their ascending signification, as necessary modificationsof the collective). In other words, without the original tension of need as a relation ofinteriority with Nature, there would be no change; and, conversely, there is no commonpraxis at any level whose regressive or descending signification is not directly orindirectly related to this original tension. It must therefore be understood at the outsetthat the origin of any restructuration of a collective into a group is a complex eventwhich takes place simultaneously at every level of materiality, but is transcended intoorganising praxis at the level of serial unity.But however universal the event may be, it cannot be lived as its own transcendencetowards the unity of all, unless its universality is objective for everyone, or unless itcreates in everyone a structure of unifying objectivity. Up to this point, in fact—in thedimension of the collective— the real has defined itself by its impossibility. Indeed,what is called the meaning of realities is precisely the meaning of that which, inprinciple, is forbidden. The transformation therefore occurs when impossibility itself