Interview about the Vibe & Phish
Excerpt and Link to an Interview about the Vibe and the Band Phish
Interview Question: I loved the emphasis on attending to the vibe and bodily emanation in your paper. This strikes me as having political implications for how we think about what constitutes knowledge. Can you say more about what we can glean or know by way of attending to what otherwise seems ever-present or too ephemeral to capture?
My Answer: Here, politics means something different. It’s not about Democrats and Republicans, but about how we live, how we exist. The vibe is a way of knowing that undermines the Western paradigm’s approach to reason and truth. Rather than seeking knowledge about the exterior world, the vibe is about knowing how we relate in the moment. We then orient to each other differently. Rather than following a prescribed set of actions and behaviors (wake, eat, work, sleep), we live emergently. How would global humanity live and exist if we all acted spontaneously, in the moment, like an improvisational jam without beginning or end? I pose this as a guiding ideal, not as an either/or dichotomy between predetermined and spontaneous action. But I think we can agree that vibing with each other in the moment is not valued within the current system of society.
Note: This interview is based on an academic article I wrote. The article has a separate post here entitled “More”.
PowerPoint slide from the Phish Studies Conference, 2019