varying degrees the qualities which generate interaction rituals. In principle,
we can predict what will happen: how much solidarity will be generated in
various situations, what kinds of symbols are created and how attached par-
ticular people are to them. These encounters produce an ongoing flow of social
motivations, as people come away from each situation with a store of charged
symbols (which can be called cultural capital, or CC), and with emotional
energies. Persons are attracted to those situations in which they can make the
best use of their previously acquired cultural capital and symbolic resources to
focus discursive action and thereby generate further solidarity.^2 Individual lives
are chains of interaction rituals; the meshing of these chains constitutes every-
thing that is social structure in all its myriad shapes.
Consider now the peculiar kinds of interaction ritual chains that constitute
the world of intellectuals.The Interaction Rituals of Intellectuals
Intellectual groups have something in common with all social memberships.
Every local group is attached to its symbols; but the nature of these symbols
varies, and so does members’ self-consciousness in relation to them. Isolated
communities, where the same lineup of persons is recurrently thrown together,
tend to reify their symbols as if they were concrete objects; at the extremes of
self-subsistent tribes or deliberately separated cult communities, the emotional
attachment to symbols is personified as magical or religious forces. At the other
extreme of the continuum, encounters take place at the shifting nodes of
far-flung networks, where a changing cast of characters negotiates fleeting
relations with a mixture of cultural capitals. These patterns result in abstract
symbols, which participants treat with detachment and reflexive awareness of
their social relativity. Intellectuals are a peculiar combination of the intensely
localistic and the detached and cosmopolitan, of Durkheimian mechanical and
organic solidarity.
Intellectual sacred objects are created in communities which spread widely
yet are turned inward, oriented toward exchange with their own members
rather than outsiders, and which claim the sole right to decide reflectively on
the validity of their ideas. Purely local groups such as the tribe or the circle of
friends are primarily concerned with their own solidarity and identity; they do
not make the kind of universalistic and transcendental claim for their symbols
that intellectuals do for their “truth.” Intellectuals are much more reflexively
and self-analytically aware of their group identity than are lay groups. Intel-
lectuals look on themselves from the abstract standpoint of historical, philo-
sophical, or even sociological or psychological reflection. Artists have histori-
cally acquired a similarly haughty attitude about their art.
24 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory