loaded with social significance because they symbolize membership in existing
and prospective coalitions in the intellectual network. New ideas are created
as combinations or reframings of old ones; the intellectual’s creative intuitions
are feelings about what groups these ideas are appealing to and which intel-
lectual antagonists are being opposed. The network structure of the intellectual
world is transposed into the creative individual’s mind. Creative flashes are the
emotional energy that comes from imaginary interaction rituals.
Thinking is a conversation with imaginary audiences.^15 In the case of the
creative intellectual, this is not just any imagined audience (like the Meadian
“generalized other” in its most abstract sense). High degrees of intellectual
creativity come from realistically invoking existing or prospective intellectual
audiences, offering what the marketplace for ideas will find most in demand.
This requires that the individual creator must know his or her audience well,
through reading and above all through face-to-face contacts which ramify into
the crucial junctures of the network. Successful interaction rituals bring in-
creases in emotional energy, deriving from a favorable balance of resources
vis-à-vis one’s interlocutors: possessing the cultural capital that makes one
accepted as a member of the group, and above all cultural capital which enables
one to capture the center of attention within it. Creative intellectuals experience
such interaction rituals inside their head. The emotional energy of success in
these imaginary rituals is what constitutes creative energy: the capacity for
sustained concentration, the sensation of being pulled along by the attraction
of a flow of ideas. If the process is often accompanied by a feeling of exultation,
it is because these are not merely any ideas but ideas that feel successful.
This does not mean that intellectuals must be self-conscious about whom
their ideals will appeal to. They need not think about thought collectives at
all; they can concentrate entirely on the reference of their thoughts—in phi-
losophy, mathematics, sociology, whatever—and try to work out the ideas that
seem to them best. The social sense of their ideas is present nevertheless, and
it is this that guides them in constructing new idea combinations. Creative
enthusiasm is nothing but the emotional energy specific to intellectuals who
are in those crucial network positions where they have the cultural capital that
will appeal to key audiences. It is the emotional side of anticipating how the
intellectual community will restructure itself into new coalitions, using one’s
idea creations as new emblems of membership. To speak in Mead’s idiom,
intellectual creators have their generalized others lodged most firmly in the core
of the intellectual community; their own thinking is an implicit conversation
which reaffirms the existence of the concerns of other intellectuals. The creative
intellectual, in playing with different ideas, is playing with different restructur-
ings of the intellectual community, producing a new generalized other within
his or her mind, in confidence that the intellectual network will reorganize itself
around these ideas.
52 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory