Frequency

Waves

In physics, frequency is a property of waves – those mercurial semiotic forms used to objectify, rationalize, standardize and explain everything that can be called energy, and more. As Stefan Helmreich explains, “The notion that the universe is made up of waves of heat, sound, electricity, light, gamma rays is a social epistemological accomplishment that consolidates in the nineteenth century, as analogies between these different phenomena are calibrated to one another – and to a master symbolism of water waves” (Helmreich 2010).
 

This consolidation or calibration assumes waves are regular, uniform, and unifying, a representation of the way things work, as verified by experimentation and math. But waves are weird, examples of what Stengers (following Latour) calls a “factish” – a “product and producer of a practice, existing through it and causing it to exist” (2010: 80). In this sense, waves are “fabricated beings that are as such capable of an autonomous mode of existence” (2010: 91). Initially a representation of physical processes over time, waves came to be understood as a quality of the thing (energy) itself rather than a form that resulted from inscribing a moving or pulsing process, whether of the earth (as in seismic activity) or a human heartbeat. In this way, the various forms of inscriptions of waves “formatted claims about ontology” (Helmreich 2020: 289).
 

As a factish, a wave is precise, exact, a regularly curving line, peaks and valleys equidistant and of the same height. But as a model or representation, a wave is also vague, the word in French suggesting another way of approaching waves (and frequency). Waves are multiple, portrayed differently according to their classification, their mode of interaction, the form of energy or its frequency, or how they are approached. And though frequency depends on waves with periodicity that is regular and as such can be ordered, measured, and represented, it also requires movement with a difference: oscillation, a texture that is not entirely smooth and perhaps not linear, rhythm or pulse that pushes and pauses, a topology of hills and valleys – an immanent differentiation that is part of what makes one frequency distinct from another.
 

How can we think waves against “objectivity”? Beyond their work of standardization and commensurability, of seamless continuity and evidentiary norms? Perhaps we can take this spirit of speculation and uncertainty and turn to frequency as differentiating, investigating disruptions and disturbances, nonlinearities that take the form of glitches, distortion, or beats or find the wedge into transformations and transmogrifications that might yield something unexpected.
 

Sense-ability

Frequency brings [us] to the limits of the human, an “immense world” (Yong 2022) sensed by other than human species of which humans can only access to a minute portion. Bats echolocate using high frequencies outside the range of human hearing. Whales communicate with low frequency calls that can travel up to 10,000 miles. A platypus uses electroreception to navigate underwater, sensing the electrical impulses of prey. Spiders sense through their webs, proprioception extending far beyond the body. Other species – sharks and birds and turtles – depend on the earth’s magnetic field to guide their planetary migrations.
 

Infra

The infra is lower or higher or simply beyond the known or perceptible. In the nineteenth century, a realm beyond perceptibility afforded new imaginaries, or gave validity to existing ones. The allure of the unfelt or barely felt folds together spiritualism with physics.
 

A new awareness and potentiality of the invisible emerged with the X-ray, which brought into perceptibility that which was previously inaccessible to sight. Roaming imaginations might wonder what else might exist that could not be seen or heard or felt. Or as Gillian Beer suggests, “for most people, once observed, it was not easy to know where the application of the principle stopped. It could be made into a description of mind; it could become grounds for spiritualism; it could provide a vocabulary for degenerationism; it could dislimn all boundaries and disturb all organizations” (1996: 300-1). The list of new unknowns made possible by waves sounds more like a lingering question, “could” reverberating as a conditional. These things “could” come into being, or they might not, they could suggest a continuity across all things wavy, or they might differentiate from one another, appearing as quite different kinds of things and exposing the vagueness of the form holding them together.
 

What interests me is the vast range of what is described by the term frequency, and the potential to modulate energy waves of different types: slowing down or speeding up, stretching or compressing, altering durations, oscillations, periodicity, turning light into sound or sound into heat, a sound artist listening to electromagnetic fields of the municipal power grid and a ghost hunter tuning in to spirits lingering in an abandoned rail tunnel.

References
Beer, Gillian. 1996. “Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism.” In Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, 295–318. Oxford University Press.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2020. “Wave Theory ~ Social Theory.” Public Culture 32 (2(91)): 287–326.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2010. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Yong, Ed. 2022. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. New York: Random House.