This book sounds great, bonkers in a fascinating way, and the post does a great job presenting it, threading the needle of debates people have been having here on Substack. I guess that I have some predictable reservations about Collins as you present him, which I think you have as well. His theories about how networks operate aren’t social science in the sense of offering a cause-and-effect model, and they abstract from how members of a given network understand what they themselves are up to. (Probably not *that* much, if Collins could have a drink with Pico della Mirandola, Pico would maybe admit that Collins had understood a lot about the Renaissance).
I seem incapable of writing short, non-pompous comments on this website, so here’s a too-long one: “Philosophy” in the western and Islamic worlds is a user’s category, going all the way back to Hericlitus. So a sociology of philosophy from the Eleatics to Patricia Churchland is the study of a 2,500 year old continuous living tradition that’s always been more or less self-conscious. “Literature” I think did not become a user’s category until the early 19th century? I’ve always been told the modern meaning of that word comes from Mme. de Stäel, but now that I type this it sounds wrong. You’d know better than me: of course the idea of literature has a thousand precursors. Anyway, Plato distinguished philosophy from poetry, the telling of beautiful lies about the gods. Whatever he meant by expelling the poets from the city, Plato like Parmenides produced great literature by any standard. The effort to make philosophy ugly has as often as not failed when the philosophy is good. Even in dry-as-dust analytical philosophy the greatest name is Wittgenstein, an extraordinary modernist writer. The other aspect of literature vs. philosophy you bring up is harder to quibble about: philosophical writing is often written for a smaller, self-consciously elite audience. But it doesn’t apply to the 18th century outside of Germany, or to the Discourse on Method. (I know you aren’t trying to draw a hard-and-fast distinction, really the opposite.)
Where might literature and the sociology of literature fit into the quarrel between philosophy and poetry? This is certainly my professional deformation speaking, but I’d date its emergence to A. W. Schlegel and Goethe, synthesizing ideas that had emerged in the 18th debates that gave birth to aesthetics. For them, works of literature (Schlegel calls all art “poetry”) are in part the products of different cultural milieux, of a Volksgeist or a national esprit in Montesquieu’s sense, determined at a first approximation by the nexus of language, form of government, mode of subsistence and religion. Schlegel draws a distinction between nature- and art- poetry, and if we’re charitable readers the distinction is still interesting. “Nature” poetry expresses of a culture’s mythological worldview, with the artist aspiring to anonymity. In “art” poetry the artist self-consciously transforms inherited genres and is appreciated for doing so. The emergence of this poetry results in a certain secularization of art, and the phenomena of recognizable generations and network effects. (These aren’t Schelgel’s terms, but they are what he writes about. What was romantic Symphilosophie if not networked philosophy that gloried in not distinguishing between philosophy and literature?). The secularization that “art poetry” brings about is incomplete because, beyond differences of climate and language, the differences between national literatures are connected to different worldviews, ideas about the cosmic or sacred. (This is true for Shakespeare vs. Sophocles vs. Calderon but even truer when it comes to the Bhagavad Gita, which Schlegel translated). The task of Kunstlehre or Literaturwissenschaft is to complete the secularization initiated by art-poetry through a process of comparison that takes seriously the milieu from which poetry emerges, in order to help make the self-knowledge literature gives us truly universal. (What I’m calling non-reductionist “secularization” Schlegel sometimes called a new or universal mythology, and of course he eventually became a cranky conservative, to the disappointment of Goethe and Hegel. But Schlegel’s inspiration in the 1801 Kunstlehre was Goethe, and the version of this ideal that comes from Goethe I at least find digestible.)
The ways of thinking about art that Schlegel opposed are still with us today. On the one hand there was the Platonic tradition of Leibniz, Malebranche, Shaftesbury (and their 18th century handbook-writing disciples). For writers in this tradition the content of art is Beauty which reflects eternal Reason, and the “sociological” details of the culture or networks of influence from which it emerged are of limited interest. On the other hand there was the materialism of the Enlightenment (La Mettrie etc.), which tries to explain the pleasure we take in different kinds of art in terms of the disposition of our “machine,” something which does not vary across cultures. This way of thinking secularizes you into a perspective where art is merely decorative. This is the case with Bourdieu, but also say Daron Acemoglu, who is supposed to be the rare economist who takes “culture” seriously. Contemporary social science presupposes and gives succor to a very reductive way of looking at life that is unable to find art interesting. The experience of great art can disrupt this perspective, but this experience tempts art lovers to an untenable platonism. I see the value of your Substack contributions as showing the writers and critics here that, firstly, like your friend who wanted to know what Hart Crane had for lunch, they are already interested in sociology whether they know it or not. Secondly, that actual academic sociology speaks to their deepest interests, even if the academic sociologists sometimes need a helping hand from you. It harkens back to the old romanticism in a way the new romanticism should appreciate.
Thanks for this fantastic comment, which it took me a while to get to.
The book is actually much weirder, at times more implausible, and also much more brilliant than it was possible to convey. Or, maybe, than I wanted to convey, since my aim was to figure out what might be useful for me, and hopefully for others, rather than to highlight its many strange treasures, some the real article and some, perhaps, ultimately tinsel. I will say, though, that I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's not social science because of the cause and effect thing. The demographer and economic historian Anthony Wrigley (a genius) has an article where he talks about using a model of rising and falling pressures rather than cause and effect to discuss historical change--it is actually still causal, but it's multi causal, and it allows you to admit that, when you're talking about the history of whole societies, you can't really isolate causes from one another. I think Collins fits within that kind of framework: powerful tendencies and pressures, which must always be taken into account, but few (not none) rigid, universal laws. If you had total power over society and its operations, you could probably reverse engineer philosophical genius 9 times out of 10 but maybe the 10th wouldn't work. (Now I'm just making stuff up.)
Just briefly. Yes, literature is an 18th century category, and it's quite true that the claims that are made for it in the 18th and 19th centuries, and especially by the Germans, are distinct from anything that came before. But I was using it as a synonym for poetry, which as you note does exist in antiquity and after. It flickers in and out of distinctiveness, but then so does philosophy (as "philosophy") at moments in medieval Europe when literary production is dominated by the church and monasteries. In general, I think it's harder to draw a line between it and other discourses than is the case with philosophy, but not that much harder. Formally, in fact, the line actually easy and objective if we stick with the traditional categories of verse / drama / fiction (in my current project, this is the line I'm using: no essays).
And thanks, I hope that I am working in the spirit of Hegel & co, since who, as a literary historian, wouldn't want to be?! And, of course, the mere use of the phrase "literary history..."
Great piece Julianne! Btw I can’t think of a better model for how academics can communicate with a wider public than what you’re doing. You’re taking a very dense but very interesting text - the sort of thing that was, like, hidden behind academic publishing catalogs - and making it accessible to an engaged lay audience. It’s striking that not that many academics do what you’re doing (although obviously more now), and writing like this really helps to unlock a lot of knowledge.
Thanks, Sam! Yes, the diagrams are amazing. I often feel data visualizations are overused, but I like these, probably because he just kind of constructed them himself out of his own insights and reading. They're argument, not just rhetoric.
Thank you for bringing Randall Collins's work to my attention and in such a clearly set-forth and engaging way! It's really interesting to compare the impact of networks on philosophy vs. science vs. literature—out of the three, science seems to depend on internal networks the most and literature the least, but at the same time there are finer distinctions to be made between commercial fiction and experimental. I've often wondered why fiction of a more popular sort, like the kind Dickens serialized or even like fanfiction, hasn't been more prevalent on Substack, but the fact that this platform consists of a large group of engaged writers (and encourages engagement through likes, comments, etc.) as opposed to passive readers does seem a plausible explanation. Perhaps what Brian Eno calls "scenius" is emerging in a really fruitful way.
Because of the social media aspect of Substack, sometimes I feel like I'm writing or at least aiming for a lay audience, but actually it turns out that, since most people on here are writers, one seems to be writing more for an internal than external audience. It'll be interesting to see how that pushes the writing here going forward!
Yes, I'll be curious to know how things work out with your writing, which definitely appeals to the narrower pool of intellectual reader-writers, but maybe also has a lot to say to the generally aesthetically and intellectually curious?
I know, I just don't see this site as a platform for the next Dickens, and I do think these underlying dynamics must be part of. I'd like another Dickens (well, I'd like another Balzac), but I'd also like another scene like the Inns of Court in 1590s or Christ Church in the 1620s where everyone is just writing elaborate, witty in jokes to each other.
Altogether too kind, Julianne. I may be moved to respond, thereby I suppose bearing out your thesis--though, in it may be with a certain lag. This for some contingent reasons, but for an essential one, too, I think. For while the "conversational" account of writing is one I am willing to concede, I think to become literary writing, the external must be first thoroughly internalized, metabolized, transformed. Some such time-lag--the delayed response, but also, a kind of internal depth in the receiver, as if the outside world spoke down a well--might be part of what we mean by autonomy. Internal and outer life operating at different timescales. Much to ponder.
This is great, thanks, it sits here waiting to be read, and it will be.
The speculations about the differently networked nature of science / philosophy / literature, and about the fascinating border areas where two fields begin to bleed into each other are fantastic. A powerful way to understand Collins seems to be thinking about what it is about philosophy that makes this approach (a poetics of networks? where poetics is not something proper to poetry, obv.) so applicable to it, and where else and why it is or is not applicable.
(re: literature beginning to show philosophical tendencies, everyone could add their favorite historical moment but I think German Romanticism is an obvious one. The room Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling shared in Jena is where not just the network but the disciplinary overlap was embodied.)
Footnote 4: that is a serious alternative to Harold Bloom's entire theory of poetry, the business about its agonistic nature, anxiety of influence, etc. (Actually, it supersedes it rather than offering an alternative, because it is that new paradigm that can fully account for whatever the previous could explain: it contains the Bloomian model, and so much more.)
So not just distinctions between phil and lit (which as Secret Squirrel points out below, is a tricky concept anyway) but distinctions between the (commercial?) novel and poetry--all based on the level of reflexivity / responsiveness of the networks. (This is terrible shorthand, but referencing stuff in what you wrote, so hopefully makes some sense.)
Really great piece, not least for where you take it. And there, the comparative question, and the question of Substack, which is nicely unfolded in the comments, is really illuminating.
You’ll really like it, I think. Curious about your reactions—and the connections you see with the media history you’re working on. There’s so much overlap there. Future special issue idea, maybe…
Yes, I should have mentioned it, but of course he devotes quite a lot of time to the Jena network, which brilliantly proves his point about important figures knowing each other before doing their major work—which means that networks are genuinely formative, true agents in the intellectual process, not just the effect of people who are already important and famous getting to know each other, like pop stars meeting Elon Musk or something. And then the rise of the German university system, and its export to other countries, is one of the more consequential episodes in his history. I think the French examples—the Enlightenment and the Existentialists are the only cases where the literary network just IS the philosophical network, but as you say, lots of overlap elsewhere.
Yes, excellent point about Bloom. I’ve been rereading him (well, skimming) because of this generations project, but this is more comprehensive, I agree.
I will need to look. Even with the existentialists, the network might be seen as an overlap, no? In the sense that Kojeve or Merleau-Ponty were not literary figures, and yet they were crucial to the network, even if they are not categorized as existentialists? (Although Wikipedia tells me Merleau-Ponty apparently wrote a novel under a pseudonym...)
But that is hairsplitting.
More exciting is what these overlaps say about the kind of philosophy (and literature) they were all doing. Philosophy overlapping with serious poetry is different from philosophy overlapping with the novel. The literary also just tends to loosen things up: Bloomsbury included a lot of different things pretty extraneous to literature, but then again, the novel is a baggy monster that can metabolize anything.
One just needs to be cautious to not turn this into the key to all disciplines.
Nice piece. One of the things that's often striking to me, when I read about important networks or scenes of the past, is how few people it ends up being who constitute the core of a given scene. Does Collins have an estimate of the precise number of people who make up a given scene like he does of the number of "warring camps" at a given time?
You know, he doesn't, though it would be interesting. The moments he examines range from having dozens of participants (though only a few major ones: you really won't have more than 6 in his view) to only having one or two. Presumably there were other people around who were just friends and interlocutors and hangers on and didn't write anything, or nothing that's survived.
In the modern world he thinks the issue is groups getting too large, not being too small. The contemporary scientific world is apparently divided as follows (he's citing some of these numbers from other studies):
scientific stars (small absolute numbers)
inner core—top producers (1–2 percent of total floating population)
outer core (20 percent of floating population)
transients—a few publications or one-shot producers (75–80 percent of
floating population)
audience and would-be recruits (10 to 100 times size of floating population)
The options when a community gets too large are: dividing into subfields (specialization); skepticism (nothing is knowable / why bother with any of this); conservatism (no point in making anything new; let's turn to the past); synthesis. But there are absolute, insoluabl problems when intellectual communities are so large that not only does one have very little hope of becoming a star (which is generally the case) but one can't really even hope to get near the inner circle.
It makes sense to me that it comes down to a very small number (1-3, maybe) of really major talents who anchor a scene, and then the rest of the people are probably interchangeable. I think you can have a scene without a generational talent, but it will be evanescent. Dimes Square was a scene, for instance, but it's hard to say what it amounted to because there wasn't that one person who really stood above. I think maybe that's where we are with Substack right now. We have a scene, but I don't know if we have any anchors yet, or if we do I'm not sure who they are. Justin Smith seems that smart, but he's not really in the scene with the rest of us.
I do think it's a missed opportunity for some of the existing big names out there to have an influence that outstrips what they can influence on their own. But most (all?) of the truly big names who are on here operate as an island.
Completely agree with all of this. I mean, I'll take an evanescent micro-scene over nothing; if the next Sartre wants to join us later on, even better.
The theory is that if there is a genuinely new intellectual and material opening, a generational talent will emerge. But the question is, is there that kind of opening. My feeling is right now, no. The infrastructure so far doesn't seem oriented toward ambitious, collaborative projects. There are (as we both know) a few people who are trying to get things off the ground, and maybe something will come of that. At its height the Encyclopedia employed 100 people, though. There's another element to the theory that I glossed over because it was too important to treat lightly and I'm still thinking it through. For Collins these things have to happen in person, at least to an extent. Of course he couldn't have envisioned anything like this. But whether the virtual is capable of forging the kinds of social ties that lead to genuinely exciting intellectual transformation is at best an open question (and I personally incline toward "no").
So does there have to be a project or publication of some sort? Are the New York intellectuals not a thing, in the full sense, without Partisan Review and Commentary and Dissent? This is where my weakness in literary history limits me. Did the transcendentalists have a collaborative effort? Bloomsbury?
I don't have deep thoughts on the physical vs. virtual question, though I probably lean toward your instinct that the physical is necessary. I tend to think of it in terms of incentives and bonds. What compels people to give over their most precious work, their intellectual and social energy, and maybe even in some sense their voice to the larger endeavor of the scene. Money? Status? Friendship? Pure creative excitement?
When Ross and Sam come to me and want me to write the good stuff for their new publication, but they can't pay me or can't pay me much, what's the motivation? I'll do some of it, out of (virtual) comradeship, but how much? What would they need to do to incentivize me to subordinate myself, in some sense, to the scene? It's so much easier to imagine this happening if I were physical friends with them, seeing them around town in NYC, gathering together to hash out plans for the next issue, etc.
I don't know if it's a sine qua non but in general there is an institutional structure of some kind: it's what creates continuity, shared enterprises, brings people together, allows new people to meet and make contact. Most of his examples start at school (or monasteries). The Transcendentalists had a club (the Transcendental club) AND a journal (the Dial). And the Bloomsbury group had tons of publishing projects, though they were also all married or related, which possibly works?
This book sounds great, bonkers in a fascinating way, and the post does a great job presenting it, threading the needle of debates people have been having here on Substack. I guess that I have some predictable reservations about Collins as you present him, which I think you have as well. His theories about how networks operate aren’t social science in the sense of offering a cause-and-effect model, and they abstract from how members of a given network understand what they themselves are up to. (Probably not *that* much, if Collins could have a drink with Pico della Mirandola, Pico would maybe admit that Collins had understood a lot about the Renaissance).
I seem incapable of writing short, non-pompous comments on this website, so here’s a too-long one: “Philosophy” in the western and Islamic worlds is a user’s category, going all the way back to Hericlitus. So a sociology of philosophy from the Eleatics to Patricia Churchland is the study of a 2,500 year old continuous living tradition that’s always been more or less self-conscious. “Literature” I think did not become a user’s category until the early 19th century? I’ve always been told the modern meaning of that word comes from Mme. de Stäel, but now that I type this it sounds wrong. You’d know better than me: of course the idea of literature has a thousand precursors. Anyway, Plato distinguished philosophy from poetry, the telling of beautiful lies about the gods. Whatever he meant by expelling the poets from the city, Plato like Parmenides produced great literature by any standard. The effort to make philosophy ugly has as often as not failed when the philosophy is good. Even in dry-as-dust analytical philosophy the greatest name is Wittgenstein, an extraordinary modernist writer. The other aspect of literature vs. philosophy you bring up is harder to quibble about: philosophical writing is often written for a smaller, self-consciously elite audience. But it doesn’t apply to the 18th century outside of Germany, or to the Discourse on Method. (I know you aren’t trying to draw a hard-and-fast distinction, really the opposite.)
Where might literature and the sociology of literature fit into the quarrel between philosophy and poetry? This is certainly my professional deformation speaking, but I’d date its emergence to A. W. Schlegel and Goethe, synthesizing ideas that had emerged in the 18th debates that gave birth to aesthetics. For them, works of literature (Schlegel calls all art “poetry”) are in part the products of different cultural milieux, of a Volksgeist or a national esprit in Montesquieu’s sense, determined at a first approximation by the nexus of language, form of government, mode of subsistence and religion. Schlegel draws a distinction between nature- and art- poetry, and if we’re charitable readers the distinction is still interesting. “Nature” poetry expresses of a culture’s mythological worldview, with the artist aspiring to anonymity. In “art” poetry the artist self-consciously transforms inherited genres and is appreciated for doing so. The emergence of this poetry results in a certain secularization of art, and the phenomena of recognizable generations and network effects. (These aren’t Schelgel’s terms, but they are what he writes about. What was romantic Symphilosophie if not networked philosophy that gloried in not distinguishing between philosophy and literature?). The secularization that “art poetry” brings about is incomplete because, beyond differences of climate and language, the differences between national literatures are connected to different worldviews, ideas about the cosmic or sacred. (This is true for Shakespeare vs. Sophocles vs. Calderon but even truer when it comes to the Bhagavad Gita, which Schlegel translated). The task of Kunstlehre or Literaturwissenschaft is to complete the secularization initiated by art-poetry through a process of comparison that takes seriously the milieu from which poetry emerges, in order to help make the self-knowledge literature gives us truly universal. (What I’m calling non-reductionist “secularization” Schlegel sometimes called a new or universal mythology, and of course he eventually became a cranky conservative, to the disappointment of Goethe and Hegel. But Schlegel’s inspiration in the 1801 Kunstlehre was Goethe, and the version of this ideal that comes from Goethe I at least find digestible.)
The ways of thinking about art that Schlegel opposed are still with us today. On the one hand there was the Platonic tradition of Leibniz, Malebranche, Shaftesbury (and their 18th century handbook-writing disciples). For writers in this tradition the content of art is Beauty which reflects eternal Reason, and the “sociological” details of the culture or networks of influence from which it emerged are of limited interest. On the other hand there was the materialism of the Enlightenment (La Mettrie etc.), which tries to explain the pleasure we take in different kinds of art in terms of the disposition of our “machine,” something which does not vary across cultures. This way of thinking secularizes you into a perspective where art is merely decorative. This is the case with Bourdieu, but also say Daron Acemoglu, who is supposed to be the rare economist who takes “culture” seriously. Contemporary social science presupposes and gives succor to a very reductive way of looking at life that is unable to find art interesting. The experience of great art can disrupt this perspective, but this experience tempts art lovers to an untenable platonism. I see the value of your Substack contributions as showing the writers and critics here that, firstly, like your friend who wanted to know what Hart Crane had for lunch, they are already interested in sociology whether they know it or not. Secondly, that actual academic sociology speaks to their deepest interests, even if the academic sociologists sometimes need a helping hand from you. It harkens back to the old romanticism in a way the new romanticism should appreciate.
Thanks for this fantastic comment, which it took me a while to get to.
The book is actually much weirder, at times more implausible, and also much more brilliant than it was possible to convey. Or, maybe, than I wanted to convey, since my aim was to figure out what might be useful for me, and hopefully for others, rather than to highlight its many strange treasures, some the real article and some, perhaps, ultimately tinsel. I will say, though, that I'm not sure it's fair to say that it's not social science because of the cause and effect thing. The demographer and economic historian Anthony Wrigley (a genius) has an article where he talks about using a model of rising and falling pressures rather than cause and effect to discuss historical change--it is actually still causal, but it's multi causal, and it allows you to admit that, when you're talking about the history of whole societies, you can't really isolate causes from one another. I think Collins fits within that kind of framework: powerful tendencies and pressures, which must always be taken into account, but few (not none) rigid, universal laws. If you had total power over society and its operations, you could probably reverse engineer philosophical genius 9 times out of 10 but maybe the 10th wouldn't work. (Now I'm just making stuff up.)
Just briefly. Yes, literature is an 18th century category, and it's quite true that the claims that are made for it in the 18th and 19th centuries, and especially by the Germans, are distinct from anything that came before. But I was using it as a synonym for poetry, which as you note does exist in antiquity and after. It flickers in and out of distinctiveness, but then so does philosophy (as "philosophy") at moments in medieval Europe when literary production is dominated by the church and monasteries. In general, I think it's harder to draw a line between it and other discourses than is the case with philosophy, but not that much harder. Formally, in fact, the line actually easy and objective if we stick with the traditional categories of verse / drama / fiction (in my current project, this is the line I'm using: no essays).
And thanks, I hope that I am working in the spirit of Hegel & co, since who, as a literary historian, wouldn't want to be?! And, of course, the mere use of the phrase "literary history..."
Great piece Julianne! Btw I can’t think of a better model for how academics can communicate with a wider public than what you’re doing. You’re taking a very dense but very interesting text - the sort of thing that was, like, hidden behind academic publishing catalogs - and making it accessible to an engaged lay audience. It’s striking that not that many academics do what you’re doing (although obviously more now), and writing like this really helps to unlock a lot of knowledge.
And btw that is some kind of a chart!
Thanks, Sam! Yes, the diagrams are amazing. I often feel data visualizations are overused, but I like these, probably because he just kind of constructed them himself out of his own insights and reading. They're argument, not just rhetoric.
Thank you for bringing Randall Collins's work to my attention and in such a clearly set-forth and engaging way! It's really interesting to compare the impact of networks on philosophy vs. science vs. literature—out of the three, science seems to depend on internal networks the most and literature the least, but at the same time there are finer distinctions to be made between commercial fiction and experimental. I've often wondered why fiction of a more popular sort, like the kind Dickens serialized or even like fanfiction, hasn't been more prevalent on Substack, but the fact that this platform consists of a large group of engaged writers (and encourages engagement through likes, comments, etc.) as opposed to passive readers does seem a plausible explanation. Perhaps what Brian Eno calls "scenius" is emerging in a really fruitful way.
Because of the social media aspect of Substack, sometimes I feel like I'm writing or at least aiming for a lay audience, but actually it turns out that, since most people on here are writers, one seems to be writing more for an internal than external audience. It'll be interesting to see how that pushes the writing here going forward!
Yes, I'll be curious to know how things work out with your writing, which definitely appeals to the narrower pool of intellectual reader-writers, but maybe also has a lot to say to the generally aesthetically and intellectually curious?
I know, I just don't see this site as a platform for the next Dickens, and I do think these underlying dynamics must be part of. I'd like another Dickens (well, I'd like another Balzac), but I'd also like another scene like the Inns of Court in 1590s or Christ Church in the 1620s where everyone is just writing elaborate, witty in jokes to each other.
Altogether too kind, Julianne. I may be moved to respond, thereby I suppose bearing out your thesis--though, in it may be with a certain lag. This for some contingent reasons, but for an essential one, too, I think. For while the "conversational" account of writing is one I am willing to concede, I think to become literary writing, the external must be first thoroughly internalized, metabolized, transformed. Some such time-lag--the delayed response, but also, a kind of internal depth in the receiver, as if the outside world spoke down a well--might be part of what we mean by autonomy. Internal and outer life operating at different timescales. Much to ponder.
This is great, thanks, it sits here waiting to be read, and it will be.
The speculations about the differently networked nature of science / philosophy / literature, and about the fascinating border areas where two fields begin to bleed into each other are fantastic. A powerful way to understand Collins seems to be thinking about what it is about philosophy that makes this approach (a poetics of networks? where poetics is not something proper to poetry, obv.) so applicable to it, and where else and why it is or is not applicable.
(re: literature beginning to show philosophical tendencies, everyone could add their favorite historical moment but I think German Romanticism is an obvious one. The room Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling shared in Jena is where not just the network but the disciplinary overlap was embodied.)
Footnote 4: that is a serious alternative to Harold Bloom's entire theory of poetry, the business about its agonistic nature, anxiety of influence, etc. (Actually, it supersedes it rather than offering an alternative, because it is that new paradigm that can fully account for whatever the previous could explain: it contains the Bloomian model, and so much more.)
So not just distinctions between phil and lit (which as Secret Squirrel points out below, is a tricky concept anyway) but distinctions between the (commercial?) novel and poetry--all based on the level of reflexivity / responsiveness of the networks. (This is terrible shorthand, but referencing stuff in what you wrote, so hopefully makes some sense.)
Really great piece, not least for where you take it. And there, the comparative question, and the question of Substack, which is nicely unfolded in the comments, is really illuminating.
You’ll really like it, I think. Curious about your reactions—and the connections you see with the media history you’re working on. There’s so much overlap there. Future special issue idea, maybe…
Yes, I should have mentioned it, but of course he devotes quite a lot of time to the Jena network, which brilliantly proves his point about important figures knowing each other before doing their major work—which means that networks are genuinely formative, true agents in the intellectual process, not just the effect of people who are already important and famous getting to know each other, like pop stars meeting Elon Musk or something. And then the rise of the German university system, and its export to other countries, is one of the more consequential episodes in his history. I think the French examples—the Enlightenment and the Existentialists are the only cases where the literary network just IS the philosophical network, but as you say, lots of overlap elsewhere.
Yes, excellent point about Bloom. I’ve been rereading him (well, skimming) because of this generations project, but this is more comprehensive, I agree.
I will need to look. Even with the existentialists, the network might be seen as an overlap, no? In the sense that Kojeve or Merleau-Ponty were not literary figures, and yet they were crucial to the network, even if they are not categorized as existentialists? (Although Wikipedia tells me Merleau-Ponty apparently wrote a novel under a pseudonym...)
But that is hairsplitting.
More exciting is what these overlaps say about the kind of philosophy (and literature) they were all doing. Philosophy overlapping with serious poetry is different from philosophy overlapping with the novel. The literary also just tends to loosen things up: Bloomsbury included a lot of different things pretty extraneous to literature, but then again, the novel is a baggy monster that can metabolize anything.
One just needs to be cautious to not turn this into the key to all disciplines.
Although why not?
Nice piece. One of the things that's often striking to me, when I read about important networks or scenes of the past, is how few people it ends up being who constitute the core of a given scene. Does Collins have an estimate of the precise number of people who make up a given scene like he does of the number of "warring camps" at a given time?
You know, he doesn't, though it would be interesting. The moments he examines range from having dozens of participants (though only a few major ones: you really won't have more than 6 in his view) to only having one or two. Presumably there were other people around who were just friends and interlocutors and hangers on and didn't write anything, or nothing that's survived.
In the modern world he thinks the issue is groups getting too large, not being too small. The contemporary scientific world is apparently divided as follows (he's citing some of these numbers from other studies):
scientific stars (small absolute numbers)
inner core—top producers (1–2 percent of total floating population)
outer core (20 percent of floating population)
transients—a few publications or one-shot producers (75–80 percent of
floating population)
audience and would-be recruits (10 to 100 times size of floating population)
The options when a community gets too large are: dividing into subfields (specialization); skepticism (nothing is knowable / why bother with any of this); conservatism (no point in making anything new; let's turn to the past); synthesis. But there are absolute, insoluabl problems when intellectual communities are so large that not only does one have very little hope of becoming a star (which is generally the case) but one can't really even hope to get near the inner circle.
It makes sense to me that it comes down to a very small number (1-3, maybe) of really major talents who anchor a scene, and then the rest of the people are probably interchangeable. I think you can have a scene without a generational talent, but it will be evanescent. Dimes Square was a scene, for instance, but it's hard to say what it amounted to because there wasn't that one person who really stood above. I think maybe that's where we are with Substack right now. We have a scene, but I don't know if we have any anchors yet, or if we do I'm not sure who they are. Justin Smith seems that smart, but he's not really in the scene with the rest of us.
I do think it's a missed opportunity for some of the existing big names out there to have an influence that outstrips what they can influence on their own. But most (all?) of the truly big names who are on here operate as an island.
Completely agree with all of this. I mean, I'll take an evanescent micro-scene over nothing; if the next Sartre wants to join us later on, even better.
The theory is that if there is a genuinely new intellectual and material opening, a generational talent will emerge. But the question is, is there that kind of opening. My feeling is right now, no. The infrastructure so far doesn't seem oriented toward ambitious, collaborative projects. There are (as we both know) a few people who are trying to get things off the ground, and maybe something will come of that. At its height the Encyclopedia employed 100 people, though. There's another element to the theory that I glossed over because it was too important to treat lightly and I'm still thinking it through. For Collins these things have to happen in person, at least to an extent. Of course he couldn't have envisioned anything like this. But whether the virtual is capable of forging the kinds of social ties that lead to genuinely exciting intellectual transformation is at best an open question (and I personally incline toward "no").
So does there have to be a project or publication of some sort? Are the New York intellectuals not a thing, in the full sense, without Partisan Review and Commentary and Dissent? This is where my weakness in literary history limits me. Did the transcendentalists have a collaborative effort? Bloomsbury?
I don't have deep thoughts on the physical vs. virtual question, though I probably lean toward your instinct that the physical is necessary. I tend to think of it in terms of incentives and bonds. What compels people to give over their most precious work, their intellectual and social energy, and maybe even in some sense their voice to the larger endeavor of the scene. Money? Status? Friendship? Pure creative excitement?
When Ross and Sam come to me and want me to write the good stuff for their new publication, but they can't pay me or can't pay me much, what's the motivation? I'll do some of it, out of (virtual) comradeship, but how much? What would they need to do to incentivize me to subordinate myself, in some sense, to the scene? It's so much easier to imagine this happening if I were physical friends with them, seeing them around town in NYC, gathering together to hash out plans for the next issue, etc.
I don't know if it's a sine qua non but in general there is an institutional structure of some kind: it's what creates continuity, shared enterprises, brings people together, allows new people to meet and make contact. Most of his examples start at school (or monasteries). The Transcendentalists had a club (the Transcendental club) AND a journal (the Dial). And the Bloomsbury group had tons of publishing projects, though they were also all married or related, which possibly works?
Yeah, exactly, I agree. That's well put.
Let me know what you think!