Notes for Networked Minds Salon Joint Salon: Networked Minds

• loosely organized and perhaps a little random at first, from outside the "required reading" and on those readings as well (?)

Some elements necessary for successful collaborative collectives (according to Gideon Strauss: What public intellectuals need, and why we need public intellectuals | Comment Magazine

• 1. VISION: A common ethos/theme/philosophy/creative goal that aims to move humanity (or smaller scale of course) somewhere meaningful
• 2. PROCESS: Loosely defined, real-time interactions most exemplified by plain old dinner parties (face-to-face conversations over food and drink)
  • Wolff continues by discussing the dinner parties of public intellectuals since the 1920s as a key way in which these intellectual circles were forged. Getting together socially, face-to-face, regularly, over food and drink, is an important part of the development of an intellectual community.
  • Randall Collins argues in The Sociology of Philosophy (and in this I think he is correct) that "The emotional energy of creativity is concentrated at the center of networks, in circles of persons encountering one another face to face." The hot periods of intellectual life, those tumultuous golden ages of simultaneous innovations, occur when several rival circles intersect at a few metropoles of intellectual attention and debate. From this perspective, the history of philosophy is to a considerable extent the history of groups. Nothing abstract is meant here—nothing but groups of friends, discussion partners, close-knit circles that often have the characteristics of social movements.
• 3. LEADERSHIP (weak, minimally hierarchical, but necessary) Often what we see in historically successful or partially-successful communities of thinkers is there was an intellectual "leader" and another more administrative "leader" who made sure the group or circle or scenius could function: __Mr. Collins continues to support this claim at great length, arguing further from the example of philosophy that In the 11 generations from 1600 to 1965, European thought has been organized by some 15 circles: half a dozen circles in the mid-1600s (two of them predominantly scientific); the Whig and Tory literary circles of the early 1700s; then the three great intergenerational successions: the Encyclopedists-Auteuil-Idéologues in France; in Germany the overlapping circles of Berlin-Königsberg from the 1750s to the 1780s and Weimar-Jena-Romanticists in the 1780s to 1810, revolving back to Berlion at the end of the period with the Young Hegelians in the 1830s as the last of this chain. There were a few anti-modernist religious circles in the anglophone world: the Oxford tractarians of the 1830s, the New England Transcendentalists in the 1830s and 1840s, the Green-Jowett circle of Idealists at Balliol College, Oxford, the St. Louis Hegelians in the 1860s and 1870s, and the Society for Physical Research in the 1880s. On the scientific side during the 1800s were the Philosophical Radicals and Evolutionists in London, and an offshoot, the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Metaphysical Society, in the 1870s. Finally there were the three great centres of the early 1900s: the Cambridge Apostles, the Vienna Circle, and the Paris existentialists.
  • "Studies of similar intellectual groups in recent fields show that there is usually a division between an organizational leader who builds the material underpinnings and an intellectual leader who makes the doctrine famous [...]. This is a division of labor which describes the relation between Mersenne and Decartes, or between Bauer and Marx."

Meta Notes about this process

• IG -> BK
  • This is new to both of us, but as we've been saying from the start, we need a place to comment/communicate about the process and other things that are not relevant to the actual content of the materials we put in here
  • might be interesting/good to have a discussion on these notes before salon and maybe then organize the notes more coherently to share or have on hand for the actual live event.
    • BK: Happy to do this tomorrow, I kept the day free
  • this may be just what IG needs, in terms of having organized notes that can be accessed during the discussion. It is NOT a prescription for B to do likewise
    • BK: Great
  • Especially for a joint salon, we might want to figure out a process that works best for us working together. But maybe not if this is the first and last we do, so I'm not sure how much energy we want to put into this. We can just let it self organize.
    • BK: Great, you know I prefer self-organization
  • In my own salons, I took tons of notes, but they were more about research content. Most of the actual salons were emergent and went their own directions, given people's interests (as yours do often too). So that's all good.
    • BK: I'll take notes too but they're more about keeping up than documentation; I'd be more than happy to paste mine in here at the end though.
  • The main reason I'm bringing this up is that the CONTENT of this salon is material I had hoped to continue to work on and build with you for a while longer. So the salon is just a springboard for me. That's why I want to document the notes here. But if this doesn't feel like a MindMeld thing for YOU, then you can let me know and I'll keep my notes in my own Roam after the salon (or before even if you don't want it here
    • BK: Happy to do this in mindmeld
  • I have quite a few more blocks of notes that are specific to our own collaborations and have provided the foundation for some important ideas for generalizing to other types of creative collaborations (at least to me they're important, maybe they're trivial but I'd love to tentatively talk with you about it). It's one of those set of ideas that feel very fragile but maybe quite generative if I can take the criticism and build on it more. I'm fine with putting the notes here, but I'd really want to set up a call to talk directly about the content because it's not worked out enough and I want to make sure to clarify some elements that I'm still struggling with. If we can do that, I'll synchronize the uploading of those notes to the call. It doesn't have to be before the salon if it's better to do it in a week or a few for whatever reasons. THIS IS NOT A BIG DEAL. I'm just a freak and feel protective of ideas at the start, because it's new territory.
    • BK: Yes let's talk about these in conversation. Probably there's not time before the salon, unless you want to try tomorrow.
  • Maybe just respond here to all points?
    • BK: Done :)