across Germany in 1795 to meet with them. As the members of the group
opened niches in the intellectual attention space, the success of one helped pull
the others along. Among the former schoolmates, Schelling achieved creative
fame first, with his Philosophy of Nature in 1797. He then used his influence
to get Hegel a position at Jena, the hot center of the Idealist movement, and
access to publishers. It was in trying to keep up with his old comrade that
Hegel struggled to find his own niche in the intellectual world, finally breaking
through in 1806 with The Phenomenology of Spirit, and in the process splitting
with his old friend to take up different spaces in the intellectual world.
There are numerous other instances of this early, formative group structure
in intellectual careers.^7 One gets the impression of a group, starting with the
ingredients of talented young individuals and their available cultural resources,
building up emotional energy through their intense intellectual interactions.
The emotional energy at this time is free-floating; it can go in different direc-
tions, depending on how opportunities arise. As these individuals later work
their way into specific intellectual networks, their energy turns to creativity.
Looking back on them retrospectively, we identify them by their later products:
we see them as incipient philosophers, novelists, poets, whatever the opportu-
nity structure turns them out to be.
The Opportunity Structure
Moment by moment and situation by situation, each person is moving through
a continuum of interaction rituals, real or vicarious, ranging from minimal to
high intensity, which bring in a flow of cultural capital and calibrate their
emotional energy up or down. These local situations are embedded in a larger
structure: in this case the whole intellectual community, spreading as far as the
networks happen to extend in that historical period. What cultural capital
flows to any one individual depends on where that individual is located and
what is nearby. Emotional energy fluctuates by local success or failure in
interaction rituals, and that too depends on something beyond the individual,
namely, the way one’s own cultural capital and emotional energy matches up
with that of the other persons with whom one comes into contact. Opportu-
nities for solidarity or rivalry, and for being near the hot center or off on the
dim periphery, are apportioned within the network as a whole. Cultural capital
flows around these networks, benefiting most those persons who have access
to it while it is still new. Emotional energy also flows around the networks,
collecting in intense pools here and there, but ebbing away at times because
of shifts in the attention space which may be far beyond the province of the
individuals affected by it.
What any individual will do at any moment in time depends on local
Coalitions in the Mind • 37