Vibe Shiftlessness

Cliché as revelation.

“It scared me, the word ‘vibrations.’” —Brian Wilson

The word “vibe,” once a plaything of hippies, has itself become a vibe. It’s the vibe of our times, a lazy devil-may-care linguistic shrug radiating through culture and, now, politics. If you have nothing to say, at least you can say “vibe shift.”

I did an exhaustive search of every opinion column published by major U.S. newspapers since the recent election, and I found that the phrase “vibe shift” appears 4,322 times. That number is a complete fabrication — I did no such search — but I would argue that it gets the vibe right.

Not long ago, “pivot” was the journalistic cliché of choice. Everything and everyone was either pivoting or preparing to pivot. The thing about the word “pivot,” as annoying as it became, is that it connotes an actual, physical movement. It suggests that there’s substance, even weightiness, to whatever is doing the pivoting. Even when used as a metaphor, the word remains bedded in the material world where actual things — a point guard, say, or a swivel on a fishing line — actually pivot. When Philip Larkin ends his poem “If, My Darling” with a reference to his beloved’s “unpriceable pivot,” one knows that there’s a there there.

There’s no there in “vibe.” A vibe is a metaphorical construct from the get-go, existing only in the airy world of hunches and feelings, fuzzy sensations, half-thought thoughts. Vibes are too vague to pivot. They can only shift. And shift they do, back and forth, this way and that.

Clichés can be revelatory. How we speak is how we see. To say that a social or political or cultural movement is a vibe is to suggest it takes place independently of human agency or even intention. It happens the way weather happens. “Vibe” signifies a way of thinking that reflects, and perhaps stems from, the immaterial digital medium through which thoughts and opinions flow today. Out of the chaos of messages some viral wind emerges. It blows in one direction until its force dissipates and other winds begin to blow in other directions. The source of the wind remains obscure. It’s a vibe.

Making the connection between media and perception, the technology critic Michael Sacasas recently posited that “‘vibes’ are the unit of measurement for perception when you’ve technologically extend[ed] your nervous system beyond the body.” He was building on an observation Marshall McLuhan made in Understanding Media in 1964:

By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and bodily heat-controls — all such extensions of our bodies, including cities — will be translated into information systems. Electromagnetic technology requires utter human docility and quiescence of meditation as befits an organism that now wears its brain outside its skull and its nerves outside its hide.

When everything, including ourselves, exists as media content, as electromagnetic vibrations in an all-encompassing system of communication, then reality itself becomes the pattern formed by those vibrations — a vibe, in our favored shorthand. And history becomes a record of the shifting of those patterns.

I have to disagree slightly with Sacasas. I wouldn’t say that vibes form the new unit of measurement for perception. I’d say they form the new field of perception, establishing the context for all we see and sense. What is that context? It’s a context that exists outside the spatial and temporal context that has, for all of human history until now, determined how we make sense of the world and ourselves. It’s a context of vacancy, of flux without footing in the world. And we, quiescent observers, go with the flow, become the flow.

It scares me, the word “vibe.”