Thanks! No, I hadn't seen this--this is great. I also actually just stumbled across some reflections by the philosopher T.M. Scanlon that could just be transposed into Collins:
AR: You were part of a discussion group of maybe 10 to 12 people back in your Princeton days, with luminaries such as Tom Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Nozick, and many others. In an interview with The Utopian, you called this the most important thing in your philosophical development. What made it so important?
Interesting piece -- thank you. This was never my area, but there seem to be affinities between Collins' framework and rhizome theory in Deleuze and Guattari. Would you agree? Substack is, in fact, quite rhizomatic, but not purely so. There is a pretty clear beginning to it and an obvious capitalistic end, as well as many thumbs on the scale all along the way. But it does seem to extend this idea of decentering or destabilizing canonicity.
My favorite author is Willa Cather, and she struggled enough with modernity. I have no sense of where she'd fit now. She did very much believe in the idea of artistic greatness, which requires a clear structure for curating talent and achievement. Her artist characters are most miserable when they're stuck back on the prairie in some little town where no one cares about their talent or just wants to cut them down to size. One of them, Thea Kronborg, even claims that to love art deeply you must have a "creative hate" of mediocrity. That seems fairly silly in a rhizome. Yet it's rather hard to develop taste without also knowing what it distasteful.
I really love this piece and great to see Henry Oliver's shout-out of it. Julianne - do you know this NYT Mag article? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html
The 'theory of clusters' that's described by there seems to be very close to what Collins has in mind.
Thanks! No, I hadn't seen this--this is great. I also actually just stumbled across some reflections by the philosopher T.M. Scanlon that could just be transposed into Collins:
AR: You were part of a discussion group of maybe 10 to 12 people back in your Princeton days, with luminaries such as Tom Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, Nozick, and many others. In an interview with The Utopian, you called this the most important thing in your philosophical development. What made it so important?
https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2024/12/an-interview-with-tm-scanlon-about-his-moral-philosophy.html
Interesting piece -- thank you. This was never my area, but there seem to be affinities between Collins' framework and rhizome theory in Deleuze and Guattari. Would you agree? Substack is, in fact, quite rhizomatic, but not purely so. There is a pretty clear beginning to it and an obvious capitalistic end, as well as many thumbs on the scale all along the way. But it does seem to extend this idea of decentering or destabilizing canonicity.
My favorite author is Willa Cather, and she struggled enough with modernity. I have no sense of where she'd fit now. She did very much believe in the idea of artistic greatness, which requires a clear structure for curating talent and achievement. Her artist characters are most miserable when they're stuck back on the prairie in some little town where no one cares about their talent or just wants to cut them down to size. One of them, Thea Kronborg, even claims that to love art deeply you must have a "creative hate" of mediocrity. That seems fairly silly in a rhizome. Yet it's rather hard to develop taste without also knowing what it distasteful.