Transformation in the Writing: A Case of Surrender-And-Catch: 166 (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science) - Hardcover

Kurt Wolff has written principally in two veins (in English) for the last fifty years, 1) on sociology, epistemology (sociology of knowledge) and the philosophy of sociology; and 2) on the relevance of his formulation of "surrender and catch" to human experience, particularly in its cogni­ tive forms. He published Trying Sociology in 1974, which contains his writings on sociology, and Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today in 1976, which contains his writings on surrender-and-catch. In more recent years, he has published two books, 0 Loma! Constituting a Self (1977-1984) in 1989 and Survival and Sociology: Vindicating the Human Subject (1991). Both of the more recent books add a third vein which is autobiographical and which moves back and forth between the previously established approaches in the earlier works. Transformation in the Writing is the most ambitious to date, because, as Wolff points out in the beginning, it contains writings that "fall quite obviously into three classes: autobiographical; sociology of knowledge, sociology, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory; and our time and its sociological analysis. " The task of this book is to illuminate the connections among these three classes. Wolff has engaged in autobiographical writing his entire life, though this approach to writing has only in recent years grown closer to his intel­ lectual preoccupations with sociology and philosophy.

Transformation in the Writing, A Case of Surrender-and-Catch further develops the concepts first presented in Surrender and Catch (1976) and applied to sociology and its history in Survival and Sociology (1991) and autobiography in O Loma! (1989). This idea involves the recognition of the unprecedented nature of the present time in the history of humankind and the planet, a time when we ourselves, rather than Nature or the Deity, can annihilate both ourselves and our planet. `Surrender' is nonlinguistic (or prelinguistic), `prepredicative', `prephenomenal', and involves suspending or `bracketing' the world, calling it into question. This is the best any individual can do, in view of the point of crisis at which we are now. In Transformation in the Writing Wolff explores how his hypothesis of Surrender(-and-Catch) bears on aspects of autobiography (émigré status, field work), sociology of knowledge, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and on attitudes to our time.