Chaos of the Body: A Commentary on Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life

Watson, Sean

doi:10.1177/1357034x98004003006

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…New scientific discoveries appear to be confirming the intuitions of pagans, that the world is probabilistic rather than certain, contingent rather than teleological, complex rather than Euclidean (Byrne, 1998;Capra, 1992Capra, , 1996Cilliers, 1998;Watson, 1998). The pagan cosmos is certainly divine, but it does not seem ordained by the gods to move towards a particular absolute, rather it is spontaneous and autopoetic (Capra, 1996;Watson, 1998). Like sacred ritual space the whole cosmos is filled with possibilities for revelation.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…With this somewhat paradoxical relationship between order and chaos in pagan cosmologies it is no wonder that pagans have appropriated many motifs from complexity theory (Byrne, 1998;Cilliers, 1998) to explain how the cosmos functions. New scientific discoveries appear to be confirming the intuitions of pagans, that the world is probabilistic rather than certain, contingent rather than teleological, complex rather than Euclidean (Byrne, 1998;Capra, 1992Capra, , 1996Cilliers, 1998;Watson, 1998). The pagan cosmos is certainly divine, but it does not seem ordained by the gods to move towards a particular absolute, rather it is spontaneous and autopoetic (Capra, 1996;Watson, 1998).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

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Death, Nature and Uncertain Spaces: A Commentary from Paganism

Green

2002

Omega (Westport)

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Contemporary theorists have hypothesized that individuals seek to maximize feelings of ontological security against a modern background of increasing risk, fragmentation, and uncertainty. For some, modernity has become an epoch of death denial consciously divorced from nature through the legacy of the Enlightenment project. Conversely, celebrations of mortality are central to contemporary paganism, particularly where linked to the honoring of the regenerative cycles of nature. For pagans, mortality is often linked to carnivalesque celebration taking place in ambivalent spaces, termed heterotopia, where symbols of life and death meet. In these spaces death is sublimated into a nurturing, rather than life-denying force, strengthening pagan identity and solidarity. Effectively, death becomes interiorized by pagans. Ritualization around “death” becomes not merely a way of assuaging fears about one's own mortality, but an opportunity for insight and self-transformation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 82%

Death, Nature and Uncertain Spaces: A Commentary from Paganism

Green

2002

Omega (Westport)

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“…To grasp much of what is at stake in biopolitics today, I suggest, requires a complexity perspective. Within recent social and cultural theory, the concept of complexity has been utilized in order to conceptualize the social as intertwined with affective forces of life that flow through human and non-human bodies (Clark, 2000;Venn, 2010;Watson, 1998). Such a perspective allows us to see that the anti-masturbation campaign, which began in the early 18th century and spread throughout western cultures over the next 200 years, is characterized by the deployment of biopolitical mechanisms of security that implicitly address themselves to the complexity of life.…”

Section: Complexity and Masturbating Bodiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Biopolitics of Masturbation: Masculinity, Complexity, and Security

Garlick

2013

Body & Society

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Masturbation is a neglected topic in debates around biopower and biopolitics. This article takes Michel Foucault's recasting of the idea of a regulatory, population-level form of biopower in terms of 'mechanisms of security' as its starting point for an investigation into the ways in which bodies enter into and are reshaped by biopolitical discourses on masturbation. While the notion of security faded from view in favour of Foucault's better known focus on governmentality, this article argues that there is value in recovering the concept of security in the context of a genealogy of modern bodies. Specifically, it explores the possibility that a biopolitical perspective on security operates not only above, but also below the disciplining of individual masturbating bodies. The article proceeds, initially, via an examination of contemporary studies of masturbation, arguing that they largely neglect the material dynamism of bodies. The main focus, however, is on rereading some of the key works in the historical antimasturbation literature from a complexity perspective. It is shown that these texts engage with a 'population' of vital forces and affects that must be regulated if life is to remain secure, and which circulate below the level of individual bodies in relation to a complex milieu. Finally, the article claims that men's bodies appear as crucial sites of biopolitics, and that normative forms of masculinity can be regarded as interventions into embodiment that are designed to nullify or regulate complexity.

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Reading Between the Lines

Gadd

2003

Men and Masculinities

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This article discusses the relative merits of psychoanalytic and psychodiscursive approaches to the study of masculinities and men's violence. The case histories of four men are presented and analyzed. Two of these men were antisexist men seeking to help other men to change, and the other two were men who were getting help to stop being violent. Using these case histories, this article seeks to demonstrate that psychic experience is not a simple product of social discourses, and therefore masculinity cannot be straightforwardly read off from what men say. The article concludes by arguing that the psychoanalytic notion of a defended subject draws our attention to the unities among men more effectively than psychodiscursive approaches precisely because it is able to acknowledge biographically mediated differences between men.In their article "Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity," Tim Carrigan, Bob Connell, and John Lee (1985, 566) urged sociologists of gender to focus their attention on the "conflict within masculinity" as much as the conflicts between and among men and women. Against a "powerful current in feminism," Carrigan, Connell, and Lee argued that the relationships between men's social power and men's violence needed to be theorized in ways that did not reduce masculinity (or masculinities) to the "unrelieved villainy" of patriarchal men (p. 552). Carrigan, Connell, and Lee's critique of the oversocialized actor assumed in gender role theory, together with their debunking of the presumption of a "normative standard case" to be measured and proven by social scientific research, sent a clear message to orthodox psychology: namely, that its concepts and practices had blinded its practitioners to the relational quality of gender and the structuring of gender relations. Carrigan, Connell, and Lee identified psychoanalysis as "a more complex and powerful tool" (p. 580) for thinking through the "psychodynamics of masculinity," psychodynamics that should "not been seen as a separate issue from the social relations that invest and construct masculinity" (p. 598).Bob Connell's (1983Connell's ( , 1989Connell's ( , 1995Connell's ( , 1998) subsequent attempts to develop this thesis emphasized the strategic structuring of gender relations within a gender order in which some groups of men constantly seek to secure power over other men and women. Connell also reiterated his belief that psychoanalysis held untapped critical and subversive tools for thinking about the connections between social structure and the psyche (Connell 1983, 13). In particular, Connell (1995, chap. 1; made much of the Freudian insight that masculinity and femininity are not "essences" but cathextic components of experience that men and women negotiate subjectively and intersubjectively. This is why human personalities are multilayered, contradictory, and complexly shaded in character.Linking these insights with a Gramscian model of social relations, Connell showed how in the institutional and interactional struggles of everyday life (patterned ...

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Chaos of the Body: A Commentary on Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

Death, Nature and Uncertain Spaces: A Commentary from Paganism

Death, Nature and Uncertain Spaces: A Commentary from Paganism

The Biopolitics of Masturbation: Masculinity, Complexity, and Security

Reading Between the Lines

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