the mask of power. Sartre cites the radio-listening audience as an
example, but he could have mentioned the demonstrators at public
events in the same regard. Interpersonal relations in this condition are
not those of true, positive reciprocity (which is emerging as the prime
value in Sartre’s social philosophy). Rather, imitation or contagion, not
cooperation, is the rule; interchangeability and numerical equivalence,
not uniqueness, obtain among members of a series.
With the emergence of the group-in-fusion this changes. Sartre takes
the group to be the second degree of sociality after seriality, which is the
first. He adopts Malraux’s term “Apocalypse” to describe that moment
when the group breaks out from serial dispersal to gather themselves
into something new and different in kind. The change is qualitative,
since as a group member the individual has achieved a new set of
relations, roles and powers that were not available to him in his serial
state. The group is irreducible to its members yet dependent on their
organic praxes and has an ontological status of its own: it is an entity
of real relations. It mediates the membership of its members just as
they mediate that of one another and of the group insofar as they direct
their praxis to the common end. In contrast with the unfreedom and
“passive activity” of the series, Sartre describes the emergence of the
group as “the sudden resurrection of freedom” (CDRi: 401 ). He warns
that the group “is not a metaphysical reality, but a definite practical
relation of men to an objective and to each other” (CDRi: 404 n.).
This raises the implication, seemingly contrary to his previous
thought and writing, that the individual is free only as a group member
and that he can accomplish nothing of social significance by himself.
This is precisely what he will admit to his Maoist interlocutors in 1974.^12
But if he continues in his quest of the concrete, it seems thatindividuals-
in-relationwill meet his need.
For an object lesson in group formation, its full blossoming and
eventual falling into serial decay, consider Sartre’s analysis of the Parisian
crowd in the Quartier Saint-Antoine, July 14 , 1789 , when they were in
serial flight before royal troops. Suddenly (in Sartre’s imaginative recon-
struction), as if by prior agreement, someone shouts “Stop!”, and the
(^12) “I think that an individual in the group, even if he is a little bit terrorized, is nonetheless
better than an individual alone and considering separation. I don’t think that an individual
alone can accomplish anything” (ORR 171 ).
Vol. I,Theory of Practical Ensembles 343