Institutional structure makes group members feel both part of and external to their group.

Evidence

Now, with structure or organization, the group becomes itself a grouping of subgroups, and in psychological terms the problem of maintaining group unity may be stated as the difficulty of making every member of the specialized subgroups feel his place in the whole and realize the way in which his own perhaps limited technical responsibilities are on the contrary indispensable to the group effort and remain, as in the group-in-fusion, an omnipresent center. Now slowly membership in the group comes to be felt not so much from the inside as from without; and I learn my group affiliation through the surrounding seriality, which identifies me as a group member, and thus as a symbol for the group as a whole. At this point, the relationship of thirds to each other becomes a more distant and indirect one: it is clear to them that the group is no longer transparent, no longer pure praxis, no longer immediately assimilable to their own actions. It has come to acquire its own opacity, its own inertia, and its members feel themselves at once both a part of it and external to it. This new distance, which Sartre calls quasisovereignty, is of course nothing more than a resolution of the third back into its original components—actor versus witness. … Yet it is part of the natural history of the group that as the rotation of the thirds slows down, as institution and organization begin to come into being, at length a single third finds himself in the dominant position in the now petrified group structure: in him, in his unity as a human organism, the group still tries to see an image of its own organic unity (p. 595). — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 533

Categorization

• XREF: Sartre’s quasi-sovereignty and the theory of the group-in-fusion connect to Jameson’s broader dialectical project and to Lukács’s reification of collective consciousness — group opacity as a microcosm of reification. — connects to: Institutional fit, not sincerity, makes political conduct feel natural. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1277; Families are seen as interdependent and essential, friends interdependent, ethnic groups essential. — Nyla R. Branscombe and Bertjan Doosje (eds.), Collective Guilt: International…, 337
• DEFINE: Defines Sartre’s notion of quasi-sovereignty as the actor/witness split that develops as group structure solidifies.