Everyone loves talking about ‘vibe’. Everything new that happens in life – be it political, cultural, personal – can apparently be attributed to ‘vibes’. If change is afoot, we are witnessing a ‘vibe shift’. If something undesirable is happening, it’s because ‘the vibes are off’. And so on…
Interpretation of ‘vibes’ is usually deployed either as a means of measuring all that is fluid in contemporary culture, or as a general law that seems to govern all that can occur. In either case, vibe is most often presented as some great all-encompassing energy that provides the catalyst for everything we experience, but is only truly noticeable when meaningful change is felt at the level of everyday life.
Yet what vibe actually is remains frustratingly vague: it’s as if all phenomena attributed to it are as spectral as the language that attempts to capture it.1 But I think we can resolve this: the central conceit at the core of ‘vibes’ is not nearly as vaporous as its vocabulary would suggest.
‘Vibes’ is roughly analogous to what Raymond Williams called ‘structures of feeling’. Both terms are concerned with how best to conceptualise a culture before its territory has been fully mapped. But Williams’ terminology goes further, and demonstrates that a useful analysis of culture necessitates a temporal framework: placing objects of cultural inquiry firmly in the present tense, distinct from that which has preceded them, yet before the point at which they can be historicised and therefore navigable as a cohesive whole.
‘Structures of feeling’ as a concept accounts for ‘All the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and confusion’2. What is this a description of, if not ‘vibe’? This is what it means when people say they are ‘just vibing it’, or that a political project is ‘running on vibes alone’ – acts, thoughts and feelings are contributing towards something, but what that something is is yet to be determined.
The movings and happenings of culture are diffuse and unquantifiable not because they are lacking in materiality or ‘realness’, but because they exist before any coherent political or cultural forms have been codified around them. It’s only through examining the precisely embryonic nature of these cultural properties that we can begin to analyse how they may congeal into more tangible social formations, and what those formations will come to represent:
‘We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies.’3
We start to see culture as a patchwork in the first instance: inchoate, individually felt, which only later congeals into an emergent political or cultural form. Looking at this emergent stage in its own right tells us much about what elements were ultimately driving the grand political phenomena that we come to recognise as this congealment progresses. This is what ‘vibe’ is: the feeling of a culture being formed.
Yet we’re still not fully capturing the motor that brings these ‘structures of feeling’ into being, nor the process that imbues ‘vibe’ with the capacity to latterly catalyse a solid cultural formation. So I think we can go further, and posit that we should think of ‘vibe’ as sentient capital, the motive force at the heart of our world.
First, we should establish that capacity for movement is capital’s central property. It is, as David Harvey writes, ‘a process and not a thing’, whose ‘internalized rules of operation are such as to ensure that it is a dynamic and revolutionary mode of social organization, restlessly and ceaselessly transforming the society within which it is embedded.’4
Internalised is the operative term here. The imperative of growth and accumulation, inherent to capital, renders it self-perpetuating, self-replicating. The story of capitalism is the story of this replication process becoming so exponentially all-encompassing that all of life becomes subsumed by it, ‘culture’ included.5
More than that, as part of this subsumption, that which drives capital also comes to drive all that it subsumes, guiding the trajectory of society and all that occurs within it. And so the economic process we call ‘growth’ isn’t something we ‘do’ to capital, but rather something that it does to us. Capital, as in
Jed’s conception of hydrocarbon energy, ‘moves the social and economic process that we are used to thinking of as human’6. That which gives capital ‘life’ is an animus independent of anything beyond itself.
We need to think of capital, as Ian Wright does, as ‘a being, an autonomous entity….an alien cognition that acts in the world to bind the form of value to its content’. This de facto ‘sentience’7 governs everything that happens in society: capital begets commodity production, which begets culture.
Through its self-perpetuation, capital reproduces not only itself, but also the conditions in which it can thrive: not only the ideal environment for its production, but for its consumption too. It is not just about delivering desire, but creating desire. To adapt Wolfgang Streeck’s conception of marketing (a process that is in its essence the engineering of these ideal environments), capital not only ‘discovers, but typically also develops consumer preferences’:
‘it asks consumers what they would like, but it also proposes things to them things they might be prepared to like, including things they never imagined could have existed. Good marketing, in this sense, co-opts consumers as co-designers, in an effort to haul more of their as-yet commercially idle wants, into market relations.’8
This cycle of desire-creation and desire-fulfilment, which is a corollary of the cycle of production and consumption, is what creates the conditions for all of what we think of as ‘culture’ to propagate. That includes changing aesthetic tastes, new trends in cinema, fashion, social etiquette, the political ‘march to reaction’, anything you can name. Everything.
Culture, then, is how capital expresses itself: how it speaks, how it feels, how it ‘lives’. This is what we perceive as ‘vibe’. Or, as John Ganz puts it, in the clearest expression I’ve seen on the topic: ‘Why do the vibes shift? Because capital moves.’9 Everything described as a ‘vibe shift’ can be explained through the rubric of capital: everything is vibes, because everything is capital.
(This article is also available to read on Substack)
- ‘I was thinking of how vibe was being used back when it was described certain TikToks, as evoking a feeling that can’t be pinned down in words, or a claim that couldn’t be substantiated with data. Then it was a general word for a mood or a feeling; it seemed to mean the opposite of “having an idea,” insofar as having ideas also means being able to slot them into causal relationships. Vibe indicated an inability to analyze a certain situation that is accepted instead as a gestalt, a mystic whole.‘
‘Where vibe once conveyed something that can’t be analyzed, now it conveys a purposeful indifference to analysis or explanation, as well as to the components that make up something. It is as though the preponderance of vibe talk made explanations irrelevant in all cases, and now we speak of vibes to forbid comprehension, which would be unfun.’
(Rob Horning, ‘It mostly works: what is the “vibe” in vibe coding?’, Internal Exile) ↩︎ - Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’ in Marxism and Literature, p129. ↩︎
- Ibid., p132. ↩︎
- David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, p. 343. ↩︎
- ‘Culture, once the antithesis of material production, has now been folded into production.’ (Terry Eagleton, ‘Where does culture come from?’, London Review of Books) ↩︎
- Jed, ‘Capitalism was here even before human existence, waiting for a host’, The Spouter ↩︎
- That is, the sense that capital behaves as if it were capable of intelligent ‘action’ that is essentially independent of anything beyond itself. I hope to massively expand on these ideas at some point, given the time and opportunity. ↩︎
- Wolfgang Streeck, ‘Citizens as Customers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption’ in How Will Capitalism End?, p. 99. ↩︎
- John Ganz, ‘What Happened Here?’, Unpopular Front. ↩︎
Disposable Everything 