Diving in the Pneumasphere - part I

by Mark Hutchinson

This blog, I am told, is a place to do our ‘stream of consciousness’ stuff – you know, the ideas we have when we are not really thinking about anything, the things which just drop into your head while reading a book and looking out a bus window. Me, I am an Australian-born, Christian social scientist who is married to someone from an infinitely older culture than my own (Italy). As I teach and think, I am a reticulating experiment in observing myself – my life regards my faith and my discipline, my faith my undisciplined life, and my discipline my living faith. It constantly escapes nice dualities, logical dialectics. And that is how I started following this particular idea by one of America’s (many, various and seemingly omnipresent) public intellectuals, Tom Wolfe. As a church historian interested in Italy, I was reading on Savonarola and the Bonfire of the Vanities, a term which I knew had been used by Wolfe as a book title. It seemed an apposite thought in a religious tradition (Pentecostalism) more marked by shiny new PDAs than Franciscan apostolic poverty. And so the ideas come together and spark off one another…

The nation that produced ‘gonzo journalism’ produces characters not afraid to make sweeping statements, to cross disciplines and coin phrases which careful scholars are slower to fill up with the content of patient research.  ‘Statusphere’ is a term reportedly introduced by American novelist, Tom Wolfe, to describe the hierarchical environment in which humans construct meaning by constant reflexive comparison.  (He has since gone beyond even this conceptual nature of world construction, and combined his social theory with the biophysical research of Michael Gazzaniga to suggest that humans are driven by their nature to create order, to interpret, to ask ‘how am I going?’)[1] In the old world, the statusphere is dominated by fixed social relationships and hierarchies. Money is a means of exchange, but family and blood and shared history are just as important. Wanderers from places like Australia, where (indigenous families aside) most family histories are only four or five generations long, ‘feel’ the unity of place and meaning almost immediately.  The power of that encounter is the reason inside the reason for foreign expatriate communities in ancient cultures around the world.  In the new world, however, the passing of history has not yet seeped into the stones. Meaning is detached from the material by the intermediating function of symbolic exchange markers such as money. In these circumstances, Wolffe notes, the statusphere fractures, making it possible for people to simply create their own subcultures for self-appreciation. It is the frontier of the human identity, the exaltation of the self in a world where ‘self’ is merely "a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment" (Scura 1990, 257).  As one interpretation of Wolfe’s work puts it:

the American Culture had reached a point, a point brought on by widespread affluence and consumerism, that the masses, not just the Hefners of the world, could create their own "statuspheres." He recognized Southern California as a "veritable paradise of statuspheres." Southern California of the 1960's had the optimum cultural and economic infrastructure for the rapid and spontaneous formation of statuspheres: affluence, mobility, population density, good weather, a well established consumer culture, a disproportionately large number of young people, and an ahistorical zeitgeist.[2]

The cultural separation point was also the political separation point. Place and relationship in new world cultures has an element of the ‘not yet serious’, of being plastic and survivable.  This is the reality inside Henry James’ innocent Americans in Paris, of larrikin Australians going (not quite) ‘back home’ in Britain. This definition of man as “homo ludens” (man the player) is a natural result of the redefinition of the rights of the citizen in the American Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, a term borrowed from the founder of modern social economics, Adam Smith (who coined it as "life liberty and the pursuit of property").  At the emergence of the modern world, the social self thus took a radically individualist, materialist and biological turn. Man was no longer a “creation” of God, but a creature which was self-creating from the material and intellectual products of enculturated space. It is this space which Wolfe calls the ‘statusphere’. It is the space in which we move, and breathe, and have our… morning coffee.

The term is, of course, a metaphor, and like all good metaphors it has power to compel the imagination. The term is the application of developments in scientific terminology to the Weberian understanding of society. Just as one has – with a growing understanding of the complex interdependencies in biology and ecology – a description of that part of the Earth and atmosphere which can support life as part of the global ‘biosphere’ (Vernadsky, 1929), so those asking questions about the difference between animal life and human life posit a space in which human consciousness and identity can ‘live’ (‘the statusphere’).  The human identity which comes to be in this space Wolfe has recently called ‘homo loquax’ (man talking):

Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech. As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking."

Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon. It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals. Our animal friends — we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we — the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars — they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life.[3]

It is a definition that the lit-crit crew in universities will love and hate – in part they love it because it is what they have been saying all along. But they also hate it, because they mostly hate Wolfe for his tendency to use their theories against themselves. 

The Christian imagination is as impelled by these discussions as others. We have an attitude to the createdness of humankind (it was); to the fallenness of that creation from its original model (it did); and to the role that personal change plays in moving from one state to another (it does and will do). To quote Rich Mullins’ take on the Apostles Creed, the reflexiveness between self and an other is likewise modeled in the ‘renewing of the mind’ as we walk towards becoming followers of Christ:  ‘I did not make it, no it is making me; / It is the very truth of God and not the invention of any man.”  In other words, Christians can accept the idea that identity is both in-born, and is progressively made and remade from the environment. We cannot accept that all things are equal in that remaking. First, there is a Divine Interest in our path, and so there is both an active impulse as well as a reflexive active/passive impulse in the process of being remade. Secondly, we are being remade not into anything, but into something – ie., the image of God.  Finally, happiness is not the ultimate aim – this latter is rather ‘to love God and enjoy him forever’, or variants of that which indicate that love is the medium, God the aim, en-JOY-ment is the outcome and eternity the time frame. 

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[1]              Michael Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain,

: Dana Press, 2005.

[2] http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/511/projects/gorenflo/final/hope.htm, accessed

.

[3] http://www.stnews.org/Commentary-2835.htm, accessed

.

16/5/06

16/5/06

New York

Comments

[Shane Clifton]

"Statusphere" - it is a term that inspires the imagination. Assuming i have understood you correctly, it has me thinking of the way in which we frame our identity using markers that make sense to us, but that may make no sense to others outside our particular community. Is there a sense in which we gradually buy in the particularities of community statusphere's as we become inculturated.

In Pentecostalism, the statusphere might include appropriating the status-identity accompanying spiritual giftedness, or in the contemporary situation - church growth or financial success? Hopefully, many of these status markers are appropriated from the Scriptures and Christian tradition - although it seems to me that many other aspects of contemporary culture frame the statusphere of the church.

[Deborah Taggart]

Wow, I feel like I just jumped into a timewarp and I'm back in 'Church in Australian Society' class; reading a lot that I don't fully understand, but there are clumps that resound with me, amuse me, and thoughts that bounce me up into other thought clouds....

My favourite moment of your article (well, part 1 anyway ;)) is the following quote: "As I teach and think, I am a reticulating experiment in observing myself – my life regards my faith and my discipline, my faith my undisciplined life, and my discipline my living faith". I love the notion of continually developing self-awareness, and also the thought that our faith integrates (or should integrate) into the other aspects of our lives. And more than that, that our faith (being from God, not just from ourselves) should actually shape and challenge us. As Veli-Matti Karkkainen writes in his book on Pneumatology: even as we study the Spirit, we must bear in mind that on a much more probing level - and with intent to transform - the Spirit searches us.