Collective being first registers as shared objecthood under a third’s look
Evidence
It is instructive to compare this basic opposition of series to group with its early form in Being and Nothingness, where the same phenomenon was described as the distinction between the “we-subject” and the “we-object.” There, of course, the crucial role in the formation of a collective type of being was played by the look of the third party, the outside observer (which was, of course, the source of the notion of the “third” described in the earlier section). It is only when I feel myself become an object along with someone else under the look of such a “third” that I experience my being as a “we-object”; for then, in our mutual interdependency, in our shame and rage, our beings are somehow mingled in the eyes of the onlooker, for whom we are both somehow “the same”: two representatives of a class or a species, two anonymous types of something, two workers or intellectuals or Americans or whatever. Then my being is outside me, inextricably involved with that of my partner and his with mine, in that we share a common situation, face a common enemy, and submit to a mutual alienation or reification. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 501
Categorization
- XREF: The we-object analyzed here is the phenomenological precursor of Jameson’s seriality/group distinction in the Critique — connects to later treatment of class consciousness and alienation as shared objecthood. — connects to: Being perceived as an object by another creates communal shame and alienation