A sociology of survival

Intellectual thought and its scholarly presentation have a taken-for-granted for? mat. From an early age, education consistently instils habits which mould a con? formity to this manner of exploration. Once admitted to the academic arena, this pattern is further cemented. Ideas must be fashioned into acceptable products?"a book, " " an article, " " a theory ' '?and in this fetishism of ideas, much of the cre? ative process becomes obscured in obeisance to the institutionalized mode of ra? tionality. The eureka of the bathtub must be properly clothed before meeting the public. Thus, for those of us who are interested in the sociology of the creative process and its distortion in Western industrial societies, the tantalizing need to penetrate to the underworld of a thinker's creative roots is seldom satisfied. In this climate, Kurt Wolffs Surrender and Catch is both a refreshing relief and an important document. It is presented as the search for a form that will not, through its imposition, distort the intersubjective experience it seeks to reflect. Its subject matter is directly concerned with those states of being crucial to thought and creation, yet enough at odds with our prevailing rules of rational presentation to be seldom confronted in scholarly sociology. Rather than writing about a phenomenological epoch?, Wolff attempts to locate the moments akin to phenomenological epoch? that occur within his own life-experience. His task is then to communicate and penetrate these states, to explore what is characteristic of them, and to extend them. What emerges is a pattern wider than a straightforward theory: closer, perhaps, to the first sketch of an exploratory landscape. There is an immense sense of urgency behind the project. Based in an under? standing of our Western industrial and world crisis, especially as explored by the Frankfurt School1, it is a political response which forms a mosaic of styles to ex? plore the depth to which certain ruling habits shape our experience and perception against our human survival. In this sense, the work can be seen as one response to Adorno's call for a new kind of thinking, necessary because