open to women, and women philosophers were also found among the Cynics,
who were iconoclastic about sexism as well as everything else. In late antiq-
uity women appeared among the Platonic mathematicians. In the 1600s and
1700s, when European networks broke free from the monopolistic male uni-
versities, we find Anne Conway, a spiritual monist linked to the circle of Henry
More, and Catherine Cockburn, who weighed in on the side of Locke and
debated Shaftesbury and Hutcheson. In the 1800s, when women broke into
the philosophical field, they included German Idealist sympathizers such as
Madame de Staël and radical materialists such as Mary Ann Evans (George
Eliot); in more recent times women appear in the networks alike of the
analytical school as well as the Paris existentialists and structuralists. Leaders
of feminist theory—Dorothy Smith in sociology, a pupil of the ethnometho-
dologist Harold Garfinkel, and thus a grandpupil of the network of Alfred
Schutz and the phenomenologists; Julia Kristeva, in the Tel Quel circle with
Derrida—recombine the cultural capital and emotional energy of the larger
intellectual networks of the preceding generation.
Historians of the future, looking back at our times, will see the feminist
movement as one of the forces reshaping intellectual life. But the intellectual
field is never dominated by just one faction, whether feminist or masculinist;
and it is predictable that as there are increasing numbers of women in the
intellectual field with the overcoming of institutional discrimination, women
will spread throughout the various positions which make up the dynamics of
intellectual life. There is no deep philosophical battle between male and female
mentalities because mentalities do not intrinsically exist. That opposition is put
forward in the intellectual field today because the creative field always operates
by oppositions; our current debates are another phase of the age-old dynamic.
The core of the networks that have dominated attention during the genera-
tions of recorded history, and that totals 100 or 500 or 2,700 names, was
privileged over all the others who did not make it into the center of attention.
To speak of this as a little company of genius would be to misread the
sociological point entirely. It is the networks which write the plot of this story;
and the structure of network competition over the attention space, which
determines creativity, is focused so that the famous ideas become formulated
through the mouths and pens of a few individuals. To say that the community
of creative intellectuals is small is really to say that the networks are focused
at a few peaks. The struggle of human beings to situate themselves high on
such a peak, and the conditions which make those peaks few but interlinked,
are the substance of the sociology of philosophies, and of intellectual life.
In this struggle almost all of us must fail. This wounds our intellectual
egotism, and deflates the dream of glory, posthumous if need be, which is
the symbolic reward of intellectual work. There simply is not room in the78 • (^) The Skeleton of Theory