Social categories like worker and bourgeois arise only through the look

Evidence

The Other by himself alone can not cause these projects to be revealed to the For-itself as techniques; and due to this fact there exists for the Other in so far as he transcends himself toward his possibles, no technique but a concrete doing which is defined in terms of his individual end. The shoe-repairer who puts a new sole on a shoe does not experience himself as “in the process of applying a technique;” he apprehends the situation as demanding this or that action, that particular piece of leather, as requiring a hammer, etc. The For-itself as soon as it assumes a position with respect to the Other, causes techniques to arise in the world as the conduct of the Other as a transcendence-transcended. It is at this moment and at this moment only that there appear in the world—bourgeois and workers, French and Germans, in short, men. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1224

Categorization

• DEFINE: Technique and social categories are not objective givens but arise only when one For-itself assumes a position and causes the Other’s concrete doing to appear as conduct-as-object.
• STORYSTEM: A concrete showing: categories like bourgeois/worker, French/German come into being only through the perceiver positioning himself; a scene could dramatize the instant a ‘technique’ is born from a look.
• XREF: The shoe-repairer example complements Heidegger’s ready-to-hand/hammer analysis and anticipates Beauvoir’s treatment of work and class in The Second Sex. — connects to: The oppressed classes look and this look is ontologically more fundamental — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 586