273–274) which find that creative persons have a strong desire to make their
own judgments; this in turn is typically related to childhood opportunities for
independence and novel experience. Often too there is a period of physical or
social isolation in which these young persons become introduced to a vicarious
community of the mind. Their IR chains become detached from the local
circulation of mundane culture and from its pressures for local conformity.
The lowering of ritual density is a prerequisite for innovation; but it must also
be linked to the intermittent support of the rituals of intellectual communities
to give it content and energy. Such a career pattern from childhood onward
shows the successive development of energies directed at independence and
innovation; for some people this energy channels into the networks of an
intellectual field, whereupon it is transformed upward or downward depending
on the structural opportunities available.
“Emotional energy” describes well the surge of creative impulse that comes
upon intellectuals or artists when they are doing their best work. It enables
them to achieve intense periods of concentration, and charges them with the
physical strength to work long periods of time. It is this feeling of creative
ideas seeming to flow spontaneously that the Greeks attributed mythologically
to visitations of the Muses or daimones.
Emotional energy alone is not enough: in the absence of sufficient cultural
capital and related network position in an intellectual community, creative
enthusiasm is more likely a prelude to frustrated ambitions and failure of
recognition. Conversely, one might have the CC but lack the EE in that
situation to be able to use it. This is apparent in more mundane situations, in
conversations when one is unable to think of what one wanted to say, only to
have it come rushing to mind after one has left the scene. This is what Rousseau
called “l’esprit d’escalier,” the clever remark that comes too late, when one is
already descending the stairs. This happens because the power situation in the
immediate interaction is unfavorable, reducing one’s emotional energy and
leaving one unable to have the confidence and initiative to use one’s cultural
capital to good social effect. This shortage of focused energy afflicts intellec-
tuals in the form of writer’s block. Here too the flow of energy comes from
one’s sense of where the opportunities are for forming favorable social alliances
(in this case vicarious ones), and where these opportunities are blocked.^6
The emotional energy specific to creative intellectual fields is not the same
as the confidence and aggressiveness of persons in other arenas of social life.
It is not the same as the emotional energy of the successful politician or the
financial entrepreneur, of the sociability star or the sexual hotshot. Each of
these is specific to a particular kind of social market, where the opportunities
are especially good for certain people’s particular kinds of cultural capital and
emotional energy. There are distinctive kinds of cultural capital and hence of34 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory