Vibe Shifts and the Art of Existence

Lectures et analyses, January 2025.

Happy end of January! The times are dark, but we read on.

This was supposed to be more of a list of what I read over the past month, but turned into a loosely-interconnected manifesto—the sort of thing I find useful for forcing myself to clarify half-conscious thoughts, but is probably an interminable slog to most everyone else. Hence this table of contents for people who might want to skip to what they’re interested in:

• How I approach thinking about the present

• The gay reasons I wanted to read Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and other stuff I’ve been reading in connection with that

• Straight people problems (sort of)! Featuring Foucault, Plato, and the TikTok relationship guru Jillian Turecki

• Novels by Tony Tulathimutte, ARX-Han, and A. Natasha Joukovsky

• Links to articles, essays, and podcasts I recommend this month

Vibes and the theory of the present

I think of this Substack as a space for different vectors of inquiry I have running simultaneously, “threads” that may sometimes intersect but have their own independent path. Another way of looking at it is to say I am asking political questions on different levels: the level of individual/subjective experience (i.e., writing about literature and sexuality), and the level of the larger structures of history (interpreting the new political moment). At the moment I’m most intrinsically interested in the first level, not only for its connection to my personal life, but also because it seems the most wide open to experiment. As I’ll get to below, it seems that the individual or interpersonal/ethical level is where the contemporary discourse of the past however long, maybe my entire adult life, is really bad, really alarmingly impoverished.

I spent the first half of the month writing about Foucault, a project that speaks to the first level, but the second, more properly political level imposed itself with Trump taking office. Part of my task in thinking about politics in a more general sense is to update my “theory of the present.” (I don’t think my ability to locate the present in history quite recovered from COVID; on that note, it surprises me how little the pandemic features in punditry about the current moment.) I started thinking about that last year, looking back on my own political engagement up to 2020, reckoning with the devastation of that defeat. (It is also hard to overstate the effects of 2020 on the widely noted sense of resignation on the left—I mean the actual left, not liberals, though it may include them—and its strange absence from the debate.) I’ve just finished up an exchange about the socialist moment with Jon Baskin, editor of The Point, where I try to take a big-picture view of what happened and what, if anything, might have gone differently.

And then there is the “vibe shift” stuff that has been going on for a while but really exploded the past week or so. For those blessedly out of the loop, that is a conflagration about whether or not we’ve entered a new cultural era. After reading and categorizing dozens of takes going back several years, I think this “debate” essentially comes down to whether wokeness is “over.” Vibe-shift talk either states the obvious—that the steam went out of a certain aesthetic of being on the left in the past couple of years—or groundlessly prophesies some sweeping post-woke era (for which the evidence is limited and dubious.) I have always been against reducing political analysis to superstructural matters like wokeness, and I that’s probably why I find the “vibe shift” frame so limiting and uninteresting. Even in the realm of something as a vague as cultural moods, we are better off thinking about ongoing contradictions and strange interrelations rather than micro-historical breaks. Neither I or anyone else knows exactly what is going on, and the best way to approach it is probably from a longer view than the past two years or even the past decade, with questions rather than declarations.

In the immediate present, the concrete political questions—What’s going on inside the MAGA coalition? What are the actual interests of people like Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen?—are much more interesting than vibe punditry. On the other hand, the “vibe shift” thing is a fascinating opportunity to observe the working of political-intellectual discourse itself, a kind of structural snapshot. What’s going on here? Who wants what, and is trying to make what happen? What concepts are they using to do it? It brings everything together: ideas, concepts, and sociological positions, which is both what makes it frustrating as a debate and interesting as a subject of an intellectual history of the present.

The Greeks and gay subjectivity

Most of my nonfiction reading this month was around writing the Foucault series, including a couple of old classics, K.J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1972), John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1981), and some articles on Roman sexuality by Paul Veyne, an ancient historian who worked closely with Foucault at the Collège de France. From there I’ve dipped into Plato himself, who I haven’t read since undergrad: the Phaedrus and Symposium, two of his major dialogues that address love and desire, and the Republic.¹ This is a combination of two different interests that Foucault brings together: the history—and historical variability—of homosexuality, and for lack of better term the ethics of subjectivity, or what it means to live a good life.

I wanted to read Foucault more closely because I’ve had a slowly dawning sense, reading other gay intellectuals, of finding a style of thought that I had been looking for, beginning to hazily elaborate to myself. The starting point for that was perhaps the awareness that I found the available frameworks for gay subjectivity thin and ill-fitting, particularly the “born this way” story. (I’ve often said that even if we accept a determinist etiology of homosexuality, to which I have no objection in principle, the “choice” part is still by far more important.) In other words, I was looking for a framework with more ethical agency: if one chooses to be gay, why? What exactly are we choosing? Why would we?

The next point on that arc was a sense that many gay men have a practical response to such questions that remains poorly articulated. You don’t get a welcome packet that comes with a positive vision of gay subjectivity. You get, at best, a thin notion of “pride,” awkwardly mixed in with the dominant straight concepts of love/relationships/marriage/family, which may be in tension with your actual life and may make you (needlessly) feel bad about it. There is the one ethic that somewhat articulates itself today, the post-gender queer umbrella, but for myself and others that is also unappealing and at odds with our self-conception. And yet, nonetheless we discover a practical ethic that makes sense to us and that we share in common with a particular gay scene, without much recourse to theory or literature. It is one that still bears resemblance to the gay worlds in Andrew Holleran, Edmund White, and Larry Kramer, despite the fact that so much of this is absent from contemporary gay fiction, if such a thing can even be said to exist.²

The queer theorist David Halperin has tried to theorize the gay practical ethic as it relates to AIDS and communal responses to disease-prevention (in What Do Gay Men Want?), as it relates to cultural styles and traditions (in How to Be Gay), and in relation to sex and love (in his 2016 article, “What is Sex For?”). Halperin, himself a classicist, takes direct inspiration from Foucault and his pursuit of a “style of life” or “art of existence” in the later volumes of the History of Sexuality. A promising line of inquiry, to be sure. But I have a sense that we have already seen everything Foucault himself has to say about ancient homosexuality—it was governed by an art of living, or techniques of the self, rather than a list of prohibitions—and that the rest of the books are mostly meticulous presentation of evidence for that thesis.

The straights and the good life

But homosexuality is far from the only, if even the main, interest of the History of Sexuality: in fact, I think it is ultimately less a work about sexuality than one about visions of “the good life.” The more I have thought about the question of “gay subjectivity,” the more it seems to be the adjunct of a broader contemporary crisis of subjectivity that is all too rarely treated with due seriousness, leaving the field wide open to therapy and self-help influencers. Reading Plato’s Republic again after so long only put that into relief: however strange and debatable the Platonic vision may be, it surprises with its intense emphasis on the “ends” of human life, the formation of the good and fully-realized self. (The translator, Robin Waterfield, argues that The Republic should be read not as a work of political theory about “justice,” but as a portrait of human psychology and the proper synthesis of its competing parts.)

I don’t think this more “metaphysical” type of ethical reflection becomes obsolete or unimportant simply because world has become complex and scientific, or as the earlier Foucault would argue, the modern world has made subjectivity itself the object of technocratic intervention. And that domain of ethics of life seems to be a true void in contemporary thought—maybe especially on the political left.³ Nowhere is this more notable than in heterosexual gender and sexuality discourse; to judge by that—with the obvious grain of salt about online discourse vs. lived reality—one could be forgiven for concluding that the straights are absolutely falling apart. What strikes one above all is the narrowness in which questions are posed, the anxiety and negativity, the pseudo-political overlay—everything is about what is wrong, what has allegedly failed and broken down, how to buffer oneself against a hostile environment; there is strikingly little imagination about what a good version of sexuality—or of life—would look like. Or there is the completely apolitical, asocial world of self-help-style relationship advice.

I think this is why I’ve developed a fascination with relationship influencers: because they propagate what is by far the predominant ethical discourse of our time. I’ve had the vague idea of writing about them as one might about intellectuals; my first subject-target was going to be Jillian Turecki, one of the most prominent TikTok/Substack/podcast relationship gurus. As far as I can tell, Turecki, a “relationship coach,” is characteristic of the type in having no particular credentials; these people tend to be yoga instructors, failed actors, or just good at social media.⁴ Her new book, It Begins With You: The 9 Hard Truths Above Love That Will Change Your Life, debuted on the New York Times bestseller list a couple weeks ago. On its own terms, the book is unobjectionable. Turecki’s is an inward-focused, therapeutic philosophy of self-improvement, but it argues—quite reasonably—that our own lack of self-awareness and lack of purpose in life are usually the root of our dating and relationship issues, not other people. It inveighs against butterflies and chemistry and celebrates compatibility and reciprocal care. Its definition of love is a mutually supportive long-term relationship.

This is all fine as far as it goes. Mutually supportive long-term relationships are wonderful, and most people are probably better off in them. Turecki has plenty of nuanced, if a bit basic, advice about seeing other people for who they are, not as you imagine them. But I have a vague hypothesis that this type of monomaniacal focus on the long-term partnership is part of the reason there is so much anxious, pseudo-political discourse about gender relations right now.⁵ A book like Turecki’s has an extremely narrow view of love, and, I must say, a pretty unromantic one. It speaks of love as “happiness,” but has nothing to say about love as pleasure or aesthetic experience or self-transformation. They have a tendency to look at romantic histories as a series of failures measured against an ideal model of health, a winding path of missed “red flags,” rather than as narrative turning points we live with, against, and in memory of; as episodes that, whatever their ultimate outcome, “bring us closer to the world.”⁶ If the intense sufferings of attraction are a poor guide to long-term compatibility, then what are they for? How are they to be understood and used well as part of a richer and more robust ethic of life? As Christina Nehring wrote all the way back in 2010:

We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence. The result is that we imagine we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland.

I would put it slightly differently: unprecedented opportunity in practice, unendurably bland in explicit reflection and ideas with which to grasp and enact that practice.

Fiction: rejects, incels and lovers

Even though they’ve been widely praised, especially on Substack, I still found the first two books I read this year surprising that for the way they felt like nothing I had ever read and immediately felt like being in the presence of something great. I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024) after reading his Paris Review essay that seemed to echo my own inchoate thoughts about approaching rejection as a kind of aesthetics of self-knowledge. The novel, or interconnected story collection, is a wild, maximalist and hilarious tour of characters who reject their own rejection in disturbing ways. Along the way, Tulathimutte throws out sharp punditry on our cultural obsession with romantic love as the ultimate mark of self-realization, and the power and need that course through online identity-formation and victimization narratives. “It’s almost endearing how people are so transparently their child selves online, how irrespective of content or sophistication the subtext is always Look at me and How dare you, and then sub-subtexts Who am I and Save me.” I found it brilliant and it made me never want to be on the internet again.

ARX-Han’s Incel (2023) has similar themes, but is an even more impressive and unsettling novel. Narrated in a flat, pseudo-academic first-person, it follows Anon, a psychology grad student who has decided to kill himself if he doesn’t get laid by his twenty-second birthday. Anon’s thoughts are an autistic brew of (presumably real) psychology research, philosophy, neo-Nazi ideology and pitiable self-hatred that is only occasionally relativized by the incredulity and mockery of other characters. Aside from its unapologetic intellectual ambition, what is most impressive about Incel is the way it enables a critique of Anon’s pitiless worldview to emerge from within itself: the subtle changes of register when positive social interactions encourage him, forcing him to wrestle with his own intellectualizations. At the same time, it makes his paranoid philosophizing a mirror to a profoundly socially impoverished culture. Not unlike Tulathimutte’s final character, who makes bank running an army of AI-generated Twitter bots that generate fake scandals and push real users into orgies of cancellation, Anon sees the internet as a source of almost touching collective solidarity in misery: “Yes, the internet is hell, and the reason it is hell is because we are in hell. … There is no part of you that does not enjoy being among the suffering of others. The best thing about hell is that it contains other people.”

I also really enjoyed A. Natasha Jokouvsky’s Portrait of a Mirror (2022), which I discovered when she posted its banger of an opening paragraph on a Substack notes thread about the beginnings of literary novels. The setup is an almost schlocky partner-swap plot between two power couples who are different shades of rich, but it is a sharply insightful novel how vanity, status, and the desire for genuine connection compete with one another to shape desire. Joukovsky plays with a dense set of references from literature and art history, sometimes to hilarious effect, such as when two of the characters text each other entirely in googled quotes from Horace. I am always trying to figure out what makes me like a novel, what principles are subconsciously governing the distinction between average, really good, and great; I keep coming back to this word ambition. Joukovsky’s prose and insights are impressive, but it’s not just that; it’s the combination of those things with the confidence to philosophize—to actually say something. (Just as I was about to post this, Henry Oliver posted an interview with Joukovsky which will surely be worth listening to.)

Oh, and I finished Middlemarch, which apparently has become a Substack trend since I started it last October. It hardly needs my praise, but I will just say that the experience of reading it somehow transcends even its lofty reputation.⁷ I’m going to be rereading it for the rest of my life.

Other things I read and listened to this month

• Blake Smith’s sharp and funny reading of Sontag’s diaries in the archives

• John Ganz and Freddie DeBoer’s posts on the “vibe shift” before everyone else was yapping about it, both of which got it right back then in different ways

• Max Read, Ganz, and Quinn Slobodian on Elon Musk and the tech right

• Adam Tooze on the myth of historical “energy transitions”

• Jessica Riskin on Robert Sapolsky (author of Behave and Determined) and the way that deterministic philosophy is always a theology

• Adelle Waldman in the new Metropolitan Review on the popular-but-wrong way to interpret being stuck in unrequited love with an underwhelming person

• Miranda July’s advice for people thinking about blowing up their lives

• Naomi Kanakia’s guide to publishers of classic literature (and addendum)

• Geoff Shullenberger’s 2023 essay on wokeness and anti-wokeness as mirror images of each other

• Toril Moi on Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, important context for a book I picked up randomly a few weeks ago

  

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1. I’m really impressed by the introductions in the Oxford Classics series, no matter the time period or genre of the work.

2. I think that Garth Greenwell, despite the absence of any kind of collective gay life from his novels, is at least alive to the presence of a native gay ethics, and is trying in his own way to give voice to it. But on the other hand you still get things like North Morgan’s Into? (2018), which ostensibly depicts the male homosexual world in a way Greenwell does not, but is execrable both as a novel and as a work of the most one-dimensional self-hatred.

3. Ezra Klein is, interestingly, one of the most mainstream figures who seems to notice and comment on this fact. In this conversation with James Pogue about the ideas of the new right, he observes how full those ideas are of thinking about human nature and needs, and posits a division between a therapeutic left and a self-improving right. I’m not sure this is entirely right: there are certainly left-coded scenes with their own life-ethics, and even the non-reactionary philosophy of setting your boundaries, “loving yourself” or knowing your worth, etc, is its own ethic of self-improvement. But it does seem roughly accurate to say these are not questions that treated with the same level of concern in higher-level, more serious left-wing thought.

4. It would not be entirely wrong to think of Turecki as a kind of Jordan Peterson for women, but also not entirely right, since her content is more narrowly focused on relationships is decidedly gender-neutral.

5. This is one of the strange contradictions of the present: even though it’s supposedly a time where anything goes, where people are reinventing relationship structures and exploring everything under the sun, traditional marriage continues to reign supreme as the uncontested marker of achievement and personal worth.

6. Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion.

7. The Oxford Classics edition, again, has an amazing introduction.