Hello and welcome to Sociological Infatuation. The title came from an extended conversation with a sociology professor friend on what we would name a sociology-themed club. This obviously depended on the type of club (karaoke bar: Oral Traditions) but it did help for eventually coming up with a name fitting what I wanted my next writing project to be.
Some of you may have read Unspoken Politics (unspokenpolitics.net), which has existed for 11 years now, though very infrequently updated since I began grad school in 2017. That is with the exception of a flurry of posting about Unitarian Universalism which I think is the finest work I’ve ever produced as a blogger.
So what is sociological infatuation? In short, it’s an extension of C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination. The opening to the book of that name, entitled “The Promise,” is the first thing you read in an introductory sociology course, and is probably also the one thing you need to have read and internalized for sociology to start working in your everyday life. The sociological imagination is an ability to think in terms of structures and forces, and to transform the tumult of your daily existence into an understanding of why things are the way they are. Through that, we can also begin to understand how to enact change as individuals, small groups, and mass movements. If we don’t appreciate the wider structure of social problems, we will never get anywhere.
Infatuation is defined sometimes as “unreasoning love or attraction.” We tend to think of it in terms of romantic crushes, but I am offering an extension of the word to something that has become very important in the last decade. It is the key to understanding culture, viral media, the economics of consumption, odd turns in labor conflict and development. All of it.
You have to understand vibes.
I will start off with a definition of vibes, followed by a discussion of terms in social science and other fields that are similar to vibes.
Vibes
Intuitive feelings independent of reasoning. Collected they form a picture of an idea, piece of media, person, organization, or nation that can be understood after the fact, though not completely. Vibes may come from something’s visual layout, sound, and relation to known standards like pop culture. Vibes can distinguish between two very similar things, or unify different things under a common gut reaction.
In sociology, we might have several different terms that seem similar to “vibes.” Mores, norms, and folkways are various levels of informal tradition that may be reflected in legal codes, legislation, religious doctrine, etc. There is also the aesthetic which borrows a lot from art theory and philosophy. Natalie Wynn, often referred to as her YouTube channel name, ContraPoints, authored an important video in 2018 called “The Aesthetic,” which talks about being versus looking.
In this case, it was about gender identity, and the role of performing a gender (with all the stereotypes and often asymmetric standards that entails). To be seen as masculine or feminine, there is not only the culturally-specific attributes we attach to those terms, but also a sense that if you’re transitioning, you have to go above and beyond. Being a highly visible trans woman, Wynn talked about how this leads to heavy scrutiny and not just aesthetic skills like makeup but also cosmetic procedures. When doing a performance (what Erving Goffman would call dramaturgy), the vibes are in fact everything. As a non-binary person myself, I am often cast in a cis male role when dating femme people, regardless of my pronouns and stated identity. However if I alter my look and behavior to seem more and more androgynous or femme-hinting, I’m less likely to be asked to plan out a date, for instance. I no longer have cis male vibes.
The content of the actual video has been controversial, as people have sometimes asserted that one of the two characters she has in this dialogue is her actual opinion rather than a Socratic exploration. Erique Zhang wrote an excellent academic article about the video as it relates to performance of gender and the pressure to pass1 that is far better at getting at the details than I ever could.
My point here is how vibes have becoming an increasingly important component of topics often explored in both academic sociology and what I would call everyday sociology: using sociology as a tool in mundane situations to figure out forces are at play. Vibes are not quite an aesthetic, not quite a norm, but under the Zoomer parlance the vibes vocabulary has greatly expanded. Thanks to the cultural hegemony of TikTok, aided by a crumbling media that needs to churn out easy stories, the shift in terminology is substantial. This is not only a relabeling of existing ideas (the Zoomer rizz, short for “charisma” is in some cases like the Millennial game in terms of persuasive flirting, but it’s more malleable than that), but an expansion. While the hippies and the jam band tour obsessives had good vibes, we not only have bad vibes2, cursed vibes, and “fucked” vibes like the low resolution, high angle, terribly lit mugshots this week of people charged with criminal conspiracy in Georgia.
This summer is also noted for being the latest in a series of climate data outpacing climate projections, or at least the projections seen as possible to disclose to the general public. Global temperature and global surface water temperature is on a runaway record that is not merely “the highest in recorded history of modern humans” but just escapes any kind of comparison. The sociological approach to thinking, which often looks at structure, systems, and interactions, comes to understand how the Earth is having various systems coalesce into runaway feedback loops. Each year of my lifetime has brought new “evidence” of climate change, this year is one of the first in which globally, in every corner of the planet, climate is not just changing but in active catastrophe.
Vermont, thought to be one of the best-suited places in a warming planet, was completely overrun by flash flooding that knocked out much of its power grid and every major or minor road.
The devastation on Maui combined historic drought with historic winds in a profoundly unusual and deadly combination. Added to that was the colonial state apparatus in Hawai’i was willfully blocking escape from the fires and refused to use in-place warning systems. It was one of the clearest examples of environmental racism in territory under direct American occupation; the e-waste dumps in west Africa or the cruise ships destroying Central America and the Caribbean either don’t get headlines at all or people have long since normalized how awful the consumption patterns of wealthy countries truly are.
So it is the nexus of these two things. The rise of a vibes-based society and the runaway effects of ecological devastation. It is a trope in sociological journal articles to, after describing the pertinent issue and literature, to suggest that a sociological approach is useful to take; this is essentially a meme now. But seriously, dude, let’s try a sociological approach. Trust me bro.
This is this blog’s purpose.
Housekeeping and Admin
This post and most future ones will be totally free. I plan to have minimal paywalled content- the subscription fee is more a way for me to know that people enjoy this sort of writing.
The subscription price of $5/month or $30/year is literally the lowest Substack will allow me to charge. I also have a founding tier if you’d like to chip in more, that’s just a title.
I have the entire archives of Unspoken Politics in here, which will allow me to let the site’s domain to lapse on Wordpress and keep me from paying money each year just to have the lights on. I’m sifting through that, there’s a lot of broken images especially. It’s not a huge priority and please check unspokenpoltitics.net for the posts in more complete shape due to not having post-transfer weirdness.
I will be sorting multiple streams of information into separate sections.
Sociological Infatuation: the main line of articles about current events, books, journal diving, politics, social science. There may be occasional short podcast episodes coming at some point TBD.
Inherent Worth: the Unitarian Universalist section, which will be infrequently updated. I will sort the large amount of UU-specific writing into there, and it will remain free to read as a public service to whomever wants to learn more about Unitarian Universalism or talk inside baseball about the denomination and its future. Inherent Worth is also a short-lived podcast I co-hosted in 2020, this may be coming back sometime this winter or spring 2024.
Poetry: Yeah, just poetry. Some of this will be old written stuff from Unspoken Politics, some will be audio recordings along with written transcripts of work I’ve produced so far in 2023. Subscribers will get an audiobook/ebook combination when I feel there is enough content to make it a standalone item.
With that, welcome to Sociological Infatuation, vibes at the end of the world.
Erique Zhang (2023) “I don’t just want to look female; I want to be beautiful”: theorizing passing as labor in the transition vlogs of Gigi Gorgeous and Natalie Wynn, Feminist Media Studies, 23:4, 1376-1391, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2022.2041687
2019 saw the second posthumous album by XXXTentacion, Bad Vibes Forever, which definitely summed up the violent, alienated nature of his life and the music scene he was in.