related emotional energy for intellectual networks; and there are further spe-
cificities among fields, so that conditions that make persons creative in geology
will usually serve them little in literature or mathematics or music.
In the general model of IR chains, EE goes up or down depending on one’s
immediate and recent experiences in interactions. This applies to intellectuals
as well. If intellectual life is constructed by rituals in which speakers become
centers of attention, and in which ideas and texts symbolize the continuity of
an intellectual community across time, we can expect that individuals’ intel-
lectual EE will be driven upward or downward by their type of contact with
these situations and sacred objects. The crucial variable is how closely one is
drawn into participation in these symbolic activities. The speaker at the semi-
nar increases his or her emotional energy if the audience is responsive; so do
the listeners, if they have the personal cultural capital, and the trajectory of
their own intellectual projects, that makes their ideas mesh well with the line
being expounded. In the opposite direction, the inability to carry off the lecture
for that audience, or the inability to follow it, perhaps even the sense of having
one’s ideas excluded, depresses one’s EE. One’s personal level of EE is like a
reservoir filled up or drained by the amount of experience one has with such
favorable or unfavorable situations, and by the balance between the two.
Flows of EE are cumulative over long as well as short periods of time. Since
possessing high emotional energy is one of the things that enables a person to
attract attention in a ritual interaction, and which affects creativity in general,
there is a tendency for persons who are already well started in EE to become
even more “energy-rich” over time. A high level of energy reaches a plateau
or goes into a reversal if one’s career trajectory takes one into levels of
competition for attention in which one becomes overmatched. This occurs
when someone who has become famous within a particular research specialty
is propelled into a larger arena, perhaps interdisciplinary or in the eye of the
wider public, where one may not have the resources to match up with the
existing competition. The effect of starting with low levels of EE is likely to
be even more emphatically cumulative. Just as success breeds the ingredients
of success, failure breeds intellectual failure. Depression, writer’s block, the
shifting of one’s attention away from intellectual projects and back onto the
everyday world: these are typical pathways by which would-be intellectuals
fail to make a mark and drop out of the field. The majority of the intellectual
field at any time consists of persons who are in this transient position.
The core experiences of intellectuals are their immediate interactions with
other intellectuals. EE is also affected by vicarious experience of the intellectual
community. Since words, ideas, and texts are loaded with connotations of
membership in different segments of intellectual communities, the experience
of reading, even of thinking about intellectual topics, also affects one’s emo-
Coalitions in the Mind • 35