THE SECOND VIBE SHIFT, OR, THE ANGELS OF THE KISS

But what if they came forward again, these angels, even just to destabilize the terrain one more time and forever—to mark out the Sunderers?

It was the day of the Sunderers, and the angels were standing back. Some might say that it was these angels who created this thing, this moment, that once had a Name. The Angels invented it, and then watched as the Sunderers sundered it and caused the beef that made of everyone a divider, a beefer, a Retard. Such is what happens within scenes—to them. They self-divide so that the individuals they only just carry can survive.

That was the day of the Dividers, and the Angels stood back. The same thing happens to civilizations—save that in this case, in the case happening right now, into what will we fall apart after the Sundering?

S. Armour 𝔼𝕣𝕚𝕤 @unbridled_id

everyone from the og vibe shift crew now has beef with each other and it’s no coincidence

But what if they came forward again, these Angels, having never gone away? What if one among them said: Since I am the only one who invented the vibe shift and therefore the only one who knows what it means, I am also the only one to know when it ends and when it starts again. Only I get to decide who owns it, who steals it, who wants it most. Only the Angels know which is a Sunderer and which an angel.

THE SECOND VIBE SHIFT

The vibe shift was and remains angelicist through and through, and it names the moment when digital creativity is irreversibly impacted by a sense of digital extinction (extinction as it is caused, felt, experienced on the internet). Not only does the vibe shift not belong to anyone else, but it only belongs to us—to angelicism, to the clones, to those who pursue it in name or otherwise. Even Mike Crumps was vulnerable enough to admit as much:

The best clue for my purposes [searching for the origin of the vibe shift] is in angelicism01’s Substack post ‘Somebody Please Columbine The Entire The Cut Editorial Staff’ [here]—a picture of a tweet from a now-deleted angelicism clone account from June 6, 2021 that says: ‘The Great VIBE SHIFT, 1-5 June 2021. Where were you?’ That’s the evidence for why the angelicists are the real vibe shifters, and [Sean] Monahan just a vibe grifter. The angelicism clone used the term just days before Monahan’s Substack post, and they have the receipts!

It’s true we have all the angelic receipts, so much so that there never was any need to say anything or even to ironize the situation (as Crumplar hints at). That deleted clone account Crumps mentions happened to be me, which does little to confirm the dumb rumor that angelicism01 has somehow been running every single angelicism clone account for the last two years, even the ones created by Chinese teenagers in Guangzhou and Beijing. And that tweet was not the only form of bragging rights we had, choosing till now to stand aside.

Also days before Monahan’s empty Substack post on the Vibe Shift, I wrote an essay called ‘What Is The Internet, According To Honor Levy, And How Long Will It Last?’. This essay was about a 48 hour long TikTok binge that I witnessed live on the lowiqhonorlevy account. I wrote about Levy’s TikTok because I agree with Charlotte Fang that Honor Levy’s TikTok is one of the great works of art of the 21st century. It was exciting to watch it coalesce and accelerate and perfect itself—a process that carried it right into the middle of last year—not so much a matter of having-to-be-there, as simply being there. Anyone can be there right now by simply going here.

♡ Charlotte Fang ♱ 金光 World Prince @CharlotteFang77

honor levy tik tok is one of the great works of the 21c

The essay on lowiqhonorlevy TikTok uses the word ‘vibe’ no less than nine times, in different combinations, including referring to ‘the Pure Vibe’. This was in the same twenty-four hour period as the angelicism tweet referring to the ‘great VIBE SHIFT’, and still days before Monahan took the term ‘vibe shift’, zeroed it out, and failed to credit anyone at all. One of the points here is that in making the term meaningless, and being helped by people like Crumplar, a whole scene of young artists and writers was subjected to something like a semiotic coup. Not only that, the name for our digital ecocide moment was missed. Walk warily, walk warily, be careful what you say: because now the Sunderers are hovering round.

THE ANGELIC DIVIDERS

But since the vibe shift really was meaningful, far more so than these ‘dividers’ allow, then its ransacking must also be. Saying it’s a thing of the past would assume we had known what it was and meant in that past—so that when it was erased, we knew exactly what it had been and how to start again. But that’s plainly not the case. So here is another way of thinking about what happened to the vibe shift. A more complex metaphor.

My opening line is an allusion to a late poem by D.H. Lawrence called ‘Walk Warily’, which begins like this:

Walk Warily, walk warily, be careful what you say:
because now the Sunderers are hovering round,
the Dividers are close upon us, dogging our every breath
and watching our every step,
and beating their great wings in our panting faces.

The angels are standing back, the angels of the kiss.

Notice the immediate ambiguity here. There are two sets of Angels, the ones who Sunder and Divide, dog our every breath, and then the Angels of the Kiss who are standing back. In this case, the Dividers are not the enemy, not quite, but still part of the angelic dimension—though they are at the same time clearly named as Sunderers and Dividers.

What’s said here is already amazing in that the division between the Dividers and the angels of the kiss must be very slight and yet very definite at the same time, a bit like a film, since both are Angels with wings and yet so different (unless we assume the Dividers are some other type of creature with wings, like birds). There would only be a flimsy filmy line between the two categories of being, a bit like the film-like thinness of the division between retards and ‘retards’ on the original Retard List. Let’s say then that the retards are angels of the kiss and that the ‘retards’ are Dividers and Sunderers—and yet these two types are, if we know how to read, of the same species.

What’s totally clear is that we are told to ‘walk warily’ because of these a-angelic-Dividers. Or rather, that the existence of the Dividers and the Sunderers is itself a warning; it is itself a prohibition and a sundering; their very being means ‘walk warily’. They are the ones who stop you talking about what has happened. If something is stolen, for example, they don’t want you to say.

Their being means ‘be careful what you say’. They make you be careful, but in the less beneficent sense of having to watch your words until you end up saying nothing about anything. This is cancellation in the primordial sense of Extinction (putting out, extinguishing, getting rid of forever). Be careful what you say or else! Or else: extinction. And this can happen ‘on remote’, from far away.

The poem continues:

They wait, they give way now
to the Sunderers, to the swift ones
the ones with the sharp black wings
and the drumming of pinions of thunder
and hands like salt
and the sudden dripping down of the knife-edge cleavage of the lightning
cleaving, cleaving.

Just as ambiguous here is the standing back of the angels of the kiss. Is that standing back a good thing or not? On first reading it would seem that yes it is a good thing and that the angels of the kiss know what they are doing; in leaving the terrain open to the Sunderers, in standing aside, their watching, which appears to be merely neutral, actually has active powers of hold-out and witnessing and waiting for the right time. There is a sense here that if the Sunderers are going to cleave and be avaricious and swift about everything, taking what is not their own, cleaving us forever apart from one another, separating us heart from heart, and cutting away all caresses with the white triumphance of lightning and electric delight, then the best thing that the Angels of the Kiss can do is say nothing, stand back, and simply allow it to be seen.

KNOWLEDGE AS HATRED: THE REAL INTRODUCTION TO WOKE BRUTALISM

But what else does Lawrence’s poem mean since the line between the two categories of being (angel and angelic sunderer) is so thin and filmy? By existing, the poem does speak, and so indicates it might be useful to at least name the situation. We are the dividers, all of us, and yet some of us are the Angels of the Kiss—and you won’t know you’re on the side of the kissing angels unless you are one. As Lawrence also happens to say,

Don’t be on the side of the angels, it’s too lowering.

This makes sense since, according to the poem, there is no ‘side of the angels’, as both sides are angels, at least if we assume the wings of the Dividers to be angelic and not just metaphoric and bird-like. The angels are not high enough, they are too lowdown, so we have to fall up even further—higher than the angels, more angelic than the angels, translators beyond the poets, and so on. Is this position the position of the angels of the kiss? The real meaning of the poem seems to be that not speaking out is itself too lowering, too much akin to the side of the angels, and so the real side of the Angels would be the side of the angels of the kiss, those who are unstoppable, those who say ‘don’t stop me’, the unstoppable ones, the victorious ones: insofar as there is angelic matter and material, these angels of the kiss won’t stop kissing, they won’t shut up. The kissing would in itself sometimes be ferocious. (This recalls Messiaen’s 4 hour Saint François d’Assise opera and the Angel Musician in Scene V which makes Francis faint with the most beautiful music in the world and then becomes extremely noisy and bavard.)

The link just above is to a recording of Joshua Citarella reading out Sean Monahan’s December 2022 Vibe Shift article in The Guardian on his Monday Night Memes Twitch Stream on 16 January 2023. What’s weird about Citarella streams generally is how condescendingly passive they are. In reading the Monahan essay he gives zero commentary. The Citarella twitch style is a good example of what Robert Pfaller calls interpassive jouissance, which can be defined as delegated enjoyment, a method of extended, indirect enjoyment that pretends to do one thing (give content) but actually simply increases one’s innate consumerist capacities (takes away content). If we read between the lines, we know exactly what Citarella is doing with his silence: he is passively endorsing the party line created by Monahan’s theft and reduction of a term, while taking zero responsibility for his own repetition and giving the twitch stream viewer equally zero chance to elaborate their own understanding. Elsewhere Pfaller says that knowledge is hatred, and in this case all that Citarella has to teach is Monahan’s hatred dressed up as official knowledge. In fact we might wish to say as follows: knowledge is Division. Official knowledge is only for the dividers.

Interpassive jouissance is actually a useful category for thinking about all sorts of contemporary discourse, and the ways in which sheer cancellation is often dressed up as something else. Think for example of Glenn Greenwald’s new Rumble show, or Ulysse Carrière’s idea of woke brutalism. Carrière’s Disneyfication of cancel culture, using a Way Of The Water Na’vi avatar to make what seem like cute and dialectically finessed points suggesting that James Cameron is less reactionary than Dasha Nekrasova or something, is actually hatred disguised as interpassive knowledge. Carrière is just the same old ontological friend of the pod of Sundering knowledge creation as every other disturbed Virtual Millennial pretending that the One can distract us for long enough until we remember that there is no Pandora in place and the Earth really is dying. ‘The Millennial’ here is, regardless of age, the one who wants the same old culture and culture war back—you know, the one that benefits them, and gives them full control over what films get shown, who says what, and so on. Woke brutalism is hatred as knowledge pimped out as the cutely aggressive interpassive chatter of the One—and nothing else.

THE SECOND VIBE SHIFT—CORECORE

Following on from my last post, and changing tone, we can also say that the TikTok wave of miniature cinema called corecore is the beautiful return of the oppressed from the summer of 2021. It is the revenge of the OG vibe shift and the sense of digital extinction that defined it—the very thing the Typological Woke Brutalist Millennial Sunderer wishes to erase. More specifically, corecore is the return of the digitally compressed and impacted finitude that was at the heart of the first time round, the real first time, fr fr, before the sunderers of whatever age pretended they were able to take back a vanished terrain. The fact that even Mike Crumplar had the wounded sense of dignity to admit that angelicism owns the bragging rights for the OG Vibe Shift makes him a marginally less dishonest writer than Monahan but a less funny protagonist of Woke Brutalism. At least he knows inside who the real angels of the kiss are.

But whatever, right? Since all of these beings are of the same ultimate kind, who cares? This should have been bygones by now, had not the original (real) meaning of the vibe shift been the self-same new sensitivity to the digital image of extinction that corecore now produces in overflow. Try to forget how the metaphoric Millennial Dividers killed the original vibe shift, but what corecore now correlates is that the REAL meanings never went away. Monahan offers his own divider’s slip and admits as much in his ‘vibe shift’ article for The Guardian only just a month ago, writing:

Millennials went into lockdown still feeling young, but they came out shocked to find the first cohort of Zoomers now ruling the roost.

Dead giveaway. By redefining the vibe shift as spotting Trucker Hats in NYC, Monahan empties out the ferocious sense of finitude in its original use and returns ‘the scene’ safe and sound to Sunderers of all ages. Which is fine, if you like the cookie self-sundering, except what they really strive to cancel now is nothing less than the new image of extinction that corecore returns to its ongoing place. They want to get rid of the Angels of the Kiss.

What the Monahan article also proves is the very bad infinity of trend hubris after-effects he would presumably have seen coming, were he really anything of the sort. Why was he even claiming for the first time, a year late, that he coined a term everyone knows was invented by me? A banal thing to note except where the situation starts to mean something else. In Monahan’s case, the vibe shift ‘vibe’ was emptied of all meaning precisely because it was now too scary for him and the other aging cripples ‘to find the first cohort of Zoomers now ruling the roost’. In other words, we need a new woke brutalism because we know we lost control. But if the meaning of trend analysis is from now on extinction qua extinction—and just that was the meaning of the vibe shift (I can confirm it was)—then *that* vibe really is a heavily metaphorical forever.

Please give us back our scene, they say. Fine, but first you have to void all the guiding terms of relevant meaning to the point where you have nothing left but underhand dick-riding on my name. Extinction now, according to the mendicants, can mean ‘Trucker hats’ and ‘rock music’, things which actually have nothing at all to do with culture or cultural change in the already present late 21st century. And Honor Levy’s TikTok, which invented corecore long before anyone else, can be put to one side while we relisten to The Strokes and watch James Cameron movies in safety. In fact, so impoverished is Monahan’s sense of what the vibe shift really is or was that he ends up having invented something like an extremely watered down children’s dictionary definition of Kuhn’s ‘paradigm shift’. The Indie Sleaze ‘vibe shift’ that hallowed out the real, real one and returned all the millennials to the dry, dead land of woke brutalism had no finitude in it, no tears, no sense of the corecore to come, no . . . nothing. It was nothing at all. Don’t worry Sean, you can go back to sleep now, you and Patrick and Mike and all the other Fast Ones and Sunderers who fell off before the beginning and who will have nothing at all to do with what’s next.

Is corecore the real second vibe shift? I don’t think so, but I will be the first to let you know when it happens.