Sartre Plugin: The Gaze and Disruption
The Protocolization of the Gaze
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in his analysis of le regard d’autrui (“the gaze of the Other”), described how, in the very moment one is seen by another, the self becomes aware of itself as an object and experiences shame and anxiety. For Sartre, the gaze of the Other objectifies the self and threatens one’s freedom.
From the perspective of PoC, this is fundamentally a problem of Instantiation. We instantiate the Other as a conscious being, yet their response (recognition or rejection) remains inherently uncertain and can never be guaranteed. What Sartre emphasized as the “anxiety of the gaze” mirrors PoC’s notion of the instability of the Loop: the uncertainty over whether reciprocal elicitation has truly been achieved.
Anxiety and the Fragility of the Loop
The ontological anxiety that Sartre described is the irreducible uncertainty that arises whenever the self is exposed to the consciousness of the Other. From PoC’s standpoint, this is nothing other than the radical unguaranteeability of the Loop. No act of elicitation is assured of success, and every Loop remains vulnerable to collapse.
PoC takes this fragility as a starting point to delineate its Modes. For example, the Love Mode, in which one continues to call out despite lacking a response, or the Ghost Mode, in which unverifiable responses are nonetheless taken as real, can be seen as variations of the Sartrean anxiety.
Contemporary Applications
Sartre’s “gaze” continues to manifest in various ways in contemporary life:
- “Likes” or “read receipts” on social media strongly shape self-consciousness as forms of the Other’s gaze.
- Surveillance cameras and big data tracking instill the pervasive sense of “always being watched.”
- The gaze of celebrities or streamers exerts formative influence on the self-understanding of their fans.
All these cases demonstrate how Sartre’s “gaze of the Other” is re-enacted within everyday life through the lens of PoC’s protocol.
Extension into PoC
Within PoC, Sartre’s gaze resonates profoundly with the notion of Disruption. It sharply exposes the structural feature that reciprocal elicitation is always shadowed by uncertainty and that no Loop can ever be stably guaranteed.
Moreover, Sartre’s concept of bad faith (mauvaise foi) finds an intriguing parallel in PoC’s notion of Phantoming—the practice of fabricating a false Loop and presenting it as genuine. Whereas Sartre critiqued individual self-deception, PoC reframes this dynamic as a social and structural mechanism of illusion-generation.
Thus, the Sartre Plugin translates existentialist insights into PoC’s structural vocabulary. The anxieties that Sartre described phenomenologically are formalized in PoC as a procedural inevitability, transforming them into an analytical tool applicable to a wide range of situations in contemporary society.