Just Vibes: A Note on Affect and Politics

 

Anyone interested in the politics of affect or the connection of affect and politics has to confront the fact that affects are not just a way of making sense of politics, but are increasingly the way politics themselves are presented and talked about. This follows a general tendency to frame not just politics, but all of social life according to the pop affect theory of vibes. 

What is a vibe? There are no doubt many answers to this, but my own particular theory is that vibe comes the forefront in the age of social media because that is what we see or know of each other. Or, put differently, a society in which social media is dominant presents itself as an immense accumulation of vibes. When we encounter people through social media we do not learn the usual information that we would often learn when meeting someone. We do not usually ask those questions that would make a first conversation or first date, where are you from? Any siblings? etc. We do not learn facts about the people we interact with online, but we do learn a little about their tastes and interests through what they share and discuss. I would argue that what we primarily learn about people is not what they like or do, but how they relate to their tastes, interests, and activities. Do they obsessively post about the movies they like, do they post a picture of their dog everyday, do they complain about every inconvenience?  This way of relating to what they relate to could be called their vibe. If you want the footnotes I would point out that I am defining vibe in a way that is very close to what Spinoza calls ingenium, especially as this term has been defined by Jacques Louis Lontaine in his work on Spinoza. 

It would be hard to say when vibes became central to politics. Historians would probably point to the television age, and the debates between Kennedy and Nixon. Reagan also comes to mind as a president who defined himself primarily in terms of a vibe, a way of relating to the idea of something called America. Obama understood and presented himself as a vibe, as being the personification of Hope. It is also worth noting that Obama's post-presidential career has been primarily that of a vibe as well. His curated lists of albums and books exist primarily to perpetuate that vibe. Trump is a vibe.  Part of his appeal is that he offers an expression of the constant sense of anger and nostalgia that is the background of noise of daily life for some many Americans. 

The last few tumultuous weeks, ever since the assassination attempt on Trump's life, have been a strange vibe shift in American politics. I remember seeing someone post an image on social media of Trump with his fist in the air with a caption that stated that the election was already over. It felt that way, especially after the disastrous debate with Biden the previous month. Then a series of events took place, Biden dropped out, Harris was nominated, and Walz was selected as VP. The last month has been a reminder of Althusser's aleatory materialism, that inevitability is often a retroactive illusion. As Althusser argues, "Instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it, we must think necessity as the becoming necessary of the encounter of contingencies." What appeared to be inevitable, even necessary, suddenly seemed contingent.

This shift was primarily a shift in the affective composition of politics. A vibe shift, to use the parlance of our times. This can be most clearly seen in the use of the term "weird" by the Harris campaign, and Tim Walz, as a label for Trump and Vance. The term names not so much a position or policy, but a vibe, a way of relating to one's policies or goals. The term has taken off in part because of Vance.  As much as we can consider Trump to be the embodiment of anger and nostalgia he also has an ability to sell his positions by distancing himself from them. His constant uses of phrasing like "people are saying" and his joking/not joking delivery works for him. It tells his followers what they want to hear, but gives him plausible deniability especially for the major media outlets that go to great lengths to treat Trump as a normal political candidate. Vance, however, has no such ability, and as Gabriel Winant pointed out on twitter, his attempt to be both the thinking man's Trump and a populist, to give intellectual legitimacy to Trump's rage and nostalgia while being a man of the people, just does not work. It comes off as weird. (For a longer read I recommend Winant's long piece on Vance's class politics). 

The use of the term "weird" by the Harris campaign also marks a shift in the affective composition of the Democratic Party, who suddenly seem less like "temporarily embarrassed Republicans" (to paraphrase Steinbeck) than like people who are proud of their own position and values. (For more clarification on the temporarily embarrassed Republicans line, Adam Kotsko offers a good description of the way in which conservative positions are considered the default positions here) The vibes have shifted from whiny and apologetic to joyful and willing to fight. This affective shift has for the most part been disconnected from any real shift of priorities and policy. There has been a lot of discussion of Harris and Walz's affects, her joy and laughter and his dad jokes, but little about specific policy positions. As of today there is no policy section on their website. Vicky Osterweil has pointed out that there is a massive disconnect between the vibe of the Harris campaign, which is simultaneously hopeful and combative, which seems to represent a different affective orientation than Trump (or even Biden) and the reality of policy. As Osterweil writes,  

"A divide has quickly emerged between them and people who have not been sucked up in the emotion, activists and radicals who are incredulous at the enthusiasm, trying desperately to remind these Walz-pilled posters that Democrats are currently behind the genocide in Gaza, that Kamala is in fact already in power. Comrades from Minnesota have pointed out that Walz, who was a national guardsman himself, was the one who sent in the National Guard to put down the George Floyd Uprising in Minneapolis, and that Walz, despite getting to the governor's mansion on a campaign focused on climate and ecological justice, crushed an indigenous led water-protector movement to push forward the Line 3 Fracking Pipeline. The aforementioned enthusiastic supporters are responding with some variation of "yeah, we know, but stop killing our vibe".

These two groups are talking past one another. The memers are responding to a structure of feeling, an experience of hope and joy, an affect, one that I sometimes share. On multiple occasions I have been moved by seeing the nominees actually stand up to these creeps and call them what they are, by witty and dismissive press releases or in front of cheering crowds. It's a powerful image, it feels good, at least in the moments where the crowd isn't chanting "USA! USA! USA!" And many of the memes have been really fucking funny.

The Cassandras, meanwhile, are speaking with hard-won-knowledge and wisdom from decades in the fight, and are trying to stop people from rushing into the same mistake made during Obama's campaign, or indeed Bernie Sanders' (or Corbyn's, or Syriza's, or Podemos' etc. etc.) They're trying to protect these erstwhile friends from throwing themselves behind a campaign that can only ever betray them. But because they're not acknowledging the power of the affect shift, perhaps because they genuinely don't share it, they are left sounding to the memers like they're arguing against feeling good itself."

That is a long quote, but it is a great piece. It outlines what are think are the two inevitable conclusions of this moment. First, it would be foolish to disregard and disqualify the current vibe shift in politics. The emergent sense of political possibility, and the undermining of a particular affective hegemony, the one that presents the anger and ressentiment of Trump as the dominant structure of feeling, are themselves positive development. At the same time, however, it would be equally foolish to treat these vibe shifts as a substantial change in politics, especially since they are sometimes just different vibes for the same policies. The challenge is keeping both of these thoughts together, to maintain both the affective sense of possibility and change, while working for actual change. This would be another kind of parallelism, to cite Spinoza.