The Resurgence Of The Real: Body, Nature, And Place In A Hypermodern World [Hardcover]

Charlene Spretnak (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1997

The closing years of this century find Americans skeptical of modern institutions—the political system, the gloablized economy, the public schools—and their abilities to solve the most basic problems of our time. Amid the rising tide of discontent, the public debates—including the ”culture wars”—seem to be a mere spinning of wheels.In a penetrating analysis of our times, Charlene Spretnak asserts that both the liberal and conservative sides in those debates are situated in the very orientation that created the modern crisis: the mechanistic worldview with Homo economicus at the center. The grand claims of modernity no longer inspire confidence because its destructive effects seem to be multiplying. The author, an influential public intellectual, speaks poignantly to our growing sense of what has been lost and what is slipping away.Yet Charlene Spretnak argues persuasively that the intensification of the modern crises is not inevitable and is already being challenged by an impressive network of corrective efforts. The new acceptance of holistic medicine (forced by the healthcare crisis, the new understandings in science of nature’s powers of dynamic creativity and self-organization, the new political opposition of community-based activists to the forces of globalization, and the new surge of independence efforts by ancient nations that have been devoured by modern states—all are part of an emergent value system that counters the modern conception of liberty as a flight from body, nature and place.After identifying ”epochal rumblings” embedded in the nightly news in the 1990s, Charlene Spretnak illuminates the sources of the modern condition with exceptional clarity. Moreover, she reframes ”the other history” of the modern era: the ecospiritual lineage of movements that resisted the corrosive effects of the industrialized modern world. These include the Arts and Crafts movement, the cosmological schools of painting, the stream of Modernist writers and artists who did not embrace the ”machine aesthetic” after World War One, and Gandhi’s ”Constructive Program.” The grassroots movements today that are forging a new politics of local and regional revitalization beyond left-and-right are heir to a rich tradition, to which the author brings original interpretations.Finally, Charlene Spretnak concludes her wideranging exploration with an engaging story of an American heartland city in the near future that has largely decoupled from the destructive dynamics of the globalized economy and initiated a range of pragmatic alternatives in its region.Both a sharp critique and a graceful performance of the art of the possible, The Resurgence of the Real changes the way we thing about living in the modern world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Resurgence of the Real is a fascinating proposal for correcting the ills of contemporary society. On the one hand, it offers an eloquent critique of modernity's tendency toward scientism and industrialism at the expense of holistic environmentalism. On the other hand, the distinction drawn between modernism and postmodernism turns out to be simplistic and largely illusory, for although Charlene Spretnak identifies her postmodernism as also "pre-modern," its origins and articulation are part and parcel of the modernist project. Still, her call to recover awareness of our context, our relationships to others and to our environment, is not only valid but necessary to our survival.

From Kirkus Reviews

The well-trod ground of ecospiritualism is trundled over once again by Spretnak (The Politics of Women's Spirituality, 1981, etc.). Modernism is Spretnak's unoriginal bugbear: It can be found tattering the social fabric; it lurks behind the disintegration of the economy, health care, everyday life, ethnic and racial hatreds. Modernism is the deep structure repressing the ``real,'' imposing discontinuities ``between humans and the rest of the natural world, between self and others, between body and mind.'' Economic expansion and technological innovation, Modernism's frayed mantras, are little but the mechanistic blatherings of an ideology gone sour, Spretnak intones. The body is not a biomachine requiring external intervention upon breakdown; it is a self-correcting energy system. Nature is not simply matter to be acted upon; it is a dynamic, self-regulating cosmos. Place is not just where you are, but an influential ecosocial frame. Yes, yes. The mingling of body- mind/cosmos/place is where Spretnak situates the ``real,'' so she mooches about in the theories of chaos, complexity, and Gaia, and in the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, and revolutionary artistic movements to buttress her point. And they are points well taken but here made ponderously and without a whit of humor. The writing is lumbered, and Spretnak comes across as schoolmarmish and scolding: ``Ironically, the counterculture of the sixties was dismissed as romantic even though its ignorance of the Romantics was almost total.'' She is drawn to the dry, high-minded ``geologian'' Thomas Berry, reasonably enough, but her position is impoverished when she ignores the spirited intellectual high jinks of Paul Feyerabend and others who so nimbly eviscerated the notion of modernity. ``The gist of all this is that life is an interactive phenomenon of planetary and biospheric scale.'' Stop the presses. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 276 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books (April 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201534193
• ISBN-13: 978-0201534191
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,249,798 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charlene Spretnak is the author of several books on ecological and relational thought, cultural history, spirituality and religion, feminism, the problems of modernity, and contemporary events. These include GREEN POLITICS: The Global Promise (principle coauthor); THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION OF GREEN POLITICS; STATES OF GRACE: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age; THE RESURGENCE OF THE REAL: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World; and RELATIONAL REALITY. She is also author of MISSING MARY and LOST GODDESSES OF EARLY GREECE, as well as editor of an anthology, THE POLITICS OF WOMEN'S SPIRITUALITY. She is currently working on a book on the spiritual dimensions of modern and contemporary art. She was one of the initial theorists of the women's spirituality movement in the 1970s and was a co-founder of the Green Party movement in the United States in the 1980s. In 2006 she was named by the Environment Department of the British government one of the "100 Eco-Heroes of All Time." She was raised in Ohio and now resides in Ojai, California, with her husband, where she enjoys gardening and walks through the nature preserves. For further information about her books, see www.CharleneSpretnak.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful & Elegant Critique of the Post-Modern Mystique!, June 22, 2000

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Resurgence Of The Real: Body, Nature, And Place In A Hypermodern World (Hardcover)

In "Resurgence of the Real", Author Charlene Spretnak takes accurate aim at the pandemic, negative and deadening global aspects of the hyper-rationalized social, economic, and political environment of the postindustrial world, diagnosing its ills, and proposing a quite realistic, attainable, and more organic alternative to our misguided ways. In this elegantly written and argued neo-Luddite thesis, Spretnak passionately speaks on behalf of a more enlightened post modern ecology that actively eschews the deadening embrace of 20th century scientism and technological industrialism and recognizes the basic human connection to nature and the environment.

This is a book with a mission and a message. On the one hand, she offers an impressive critique of how our blind fascination with rationalism, science, and technological innovation has strangled out of consciousness any appreciation or awareness of the natural world around us, and has led us into a ritual denial of our fundamental connection to nature. On the other hand, showing how illusory and simplistic our intellectual categories seem to be, she argues for a recovery effort in order to actively regain our individual and collective awareness of our natural context, our relationships to other human beings, and to our basic grounding in the ecology of the real world around us.

But the leap toward such critical awareness eludes many of our contemporaries, who are locked into such a modernistic, mechanistic and rational worldview that they tend to view themselves as bio-machines requiring external interventions when malfunctioning. Every thing about our artificially created and sustained human environment holds us within this kind of faulty and dangerous world-view. Instead, she argues, we need to recognize that we are self-correcting energy systems operating within nature, which she defines as a dynamic and self-regulating cosmos. This is heady and quite intellectually stimulating stuff, and requires a close reading and a requisite ability to think, as they say, "outside the box" of conventional thought.

The author faces the issues of our time with eloquence, clarity, and a keen intellectual acumen. The book is obviously written with great care, passion, and unimpeachable intellectual clarity. Spretnak offers a stinging and accurate diagnosis of what has gone wrong in the post-modern world, and presents, with great lucidity and careful thought, a look at the emerging postmodern ecological world-view we need to overcome the ecological, social, and political problems confronting us. This is a very special, passionate, and wonderful book, and is one offering hope for the future. I hope you enjoy it.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful and Philosophical, June 15, 2000

By 

Renee Thorpe (Karangasem, Bali) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Resurgence of the Real (Paperback)

Humanity is so ready for this groundbreaking book!

I heard Charlene Spretnak on the radio and rushed to buy this book.

Spretnak goes beyond our arbitrary ways of categorizing the world and its inhabitants, offers hope for the environment, for humankind, for our spirit. Forget right and left, modern and postmodern, communist and capitalist, all the usual labeling. Spretnak explores what's wrong with modernity, from its beginnings in the age of Renaissance humanism! She writes eloquently of the suicidal rush to embrace technology at all costs.

Excellent book for any environmentalist, anyone with a spiritual or religious inclination, any art history student, any political scientist.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A worthy slog, November 27, 2007

By 

Cecil Bothwell "Author of "Whale Falls: A... (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Resurgence of the Real (Paperback)

Charlene Spretnak's depth of insight is nearly overwhelming. In fact, the only reservation I have about recommending this book is that it is really heavy going. You're gonna have to work at it -- and you may want to save Chapter 2 for later, unless the concept of "deconstructionist postmodernism" either gives you goose bumps or makes you seethe. (For what it's worth, Spretnak dispatches with the whole empty concept of d-p, but her triumphant campaign isn't for the faint of heart.) In brief, the author's argument is that modernism -- the philosophy which has ruled us for a few hundred years -- has led us astray. In particular it has distorted our relationship to body, nature and place. We have accepted a separation of self (intelligence or spirit) from our physicality, of our lives from nature (as if we lived in glass boxes, or existed "on top" of it), and of our entire existence from its setting. Modern culture embodies the pretense that it is a cloak around the planet which could as easily be draped elsewhere. Of course that is not and has never been the case, but it is the conceit of modernism that such a mental picture is the scientific or objective truth behind our subjective experience. What follows lies all around us today. Spretnak is very optimistic that the Real is coming back with a bang, and just in time. Her philosophic defense of bioregionalism, of holistic health strategies, of Green politics, of deeply felt community, of respectful attention to ancient alternatives, and on and on, is brilliant and invigorating. As is her demolition of the underpinnings of GATT, the World Bank, modern economic theory and the use of computers in grade school classrooms, or the overweening adoption of a computerized mind-set. She blasts Sesame Street out of the water. BAM! Most telling of all is Spretnak's explanation of why radical localism does not imply a new isolationism. She argues that we must learn to live locally in intimate contact with our bioregion, but with utter respect for the global commons. We each live in a place. We all live on earth. We must adopt solutions that work Here without deleteriously impacting There. This one may well knock your socks off. Whew.