Archive of Wavematters
Ignacio Farías
Current environmental challenges pose significant conceptual challenges to the material humanities. They extend far beyond the classic call to move past the nature–culture divide. Take for example current conversations around the planetary (Chakrabarty 2019), the terrestrial (Latour 2018), or even Gaia (Latour 2017). These concepts do important work in shifting attention away from anthropocentric and bounded notions of matter toward more relational, systemic, and dynamic understandings of materiality. They invite us to see materials not as passive substrates or discrete entities, but as active participants in planetary processes—geochemical, atmospheric, and biological—that exceed and entangle human life. In doing so, they challenge the stability of “materiality” itself by foregrounding flux, transformation, interdependency, and scale as central concerns for the material humanities.
In this piece, I want to draw attention to another pressing conceptual challenge: how to incorporate atmospheric wavy phenomena into current discussions in the material humanities. Waves present a fundamental question because they disrupt the dominant emphasis on entities that underpins much of the current interest in more-than-human ontologies within the material humanities. Waves are not entities. They are intensities—energies that move through and across bodies, materials and things. In this regard, they resemble Timothy Morton’s (2013) notion of hyperobjects, whose nonlocality—the way local effects are only partial manifestations of more diffuse fields—resists direct apprehension—climate change being a paradigmatic case. They also share affinities with the concept of intercorporeality, as elaborated by feminist scholars such as Stacy Alaimo (2010) and Astrida Neimanis (2017), where bodies are understood as porous and entangled with their environments, traversed by flows that exceed any singular organism, demonstrating how human bodies are always open to, and shaped by, material flows beyond themselves.
Yet, there is a key conceptual shift. Whereas hyperobjects and intercorporeality are grounded in entity-based imaginaries—whether objects or bodies—waves invite us to think in terms of processes beyond substance. They redirect attention: not to how “bodies” are porous, but to the flows themselves as processes of energy transfer. This is the case for electromagnetic waves which do not rely upon a medium to propagate, but it also applies to mechanical waves like sound. A generative linguistic distinction for appraising waves can be found in Romance languages—where there is a word for the successive movements and undulations of aggregate phenomena composed of multiple particles, such as olas in Spanish or vagues in French, and a different one denote the vibratory and oscillatory nature of propagatory phenomena: the Spanish ondas or the French ondes. These latter waves—encompassing light, sound, radiation, radio—are atmospheric phenomena par excellence. Rather than directing us toward material concreteness, waves push thought toward abstraction. They are irreducible to the bodies they traverse, even as they become perceptible and governable through the ecologies of matter that mediate their propagation.
Waves thus challenge us to move beyond conceptual languages of materiality and materials toward an engagement with how waves come to matter. As I will show in this short piece, this shift is not merely of theoretical interest (section 2), but is central to understanding the ongoing transformation of our world (section 3). It invites us to explore what a politics of materialization of waves entails (section 4).
The material humanities have evolved significantly, moving from concerns with the materiality of the sign to a more grounded focus on materials. This former aimed to break with a purported self-referentiality of the cultural understood as systems of signs, turning instead toward the embodied, situated, and material substrates of meaning—epitomized by Michel Foucault’s call to shift from documents to monuments in historiography or the rise of material culture studies. Its conceptual vocabulary has long been under scrutiny. Tim Ingold (2007), for instance, has been a recent critic, arguing that the notion of “materiality” often reinforces a binary with immateriality, treating matter as an ontological layer—the “concrete” counterpart to discourse or meaning.
In a polemical but generative intervention, Ingold noted that much of the literature on materiality “seems to have hardly anything to say about materials.“ (2007: 1) While perhaps overstated, his critique is instructive: there remains a tendency to treat matter in theoretical abstraction, rather than attending to the specific properties, capacities and tendencies of specific materials that come alive in practice. To address this, Ingold proposes turning to the plural—materials—to recover empirical diversity and invite attention to the particularities of various substances. A similar concern underpins Bruno Latour’s (2007) concept of “idealist materialism”—the paradox in which materialist theories are often articulated in abstract, idealist terms. Instead Latour proposes understanding entities not as self-contained, bounded matter, but as formed through gatherings, becoming “materials” only insofar as they are active, dynamic, and situated in practice.
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010) also provides a compelling vocabulary for engaging with materials in the plural as active and affective. Central to her argument is the idea that materials possess a vitality that exceeds their assigned roles or meanings within a gathering or assemblage. As she puts it: “By vitality I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (2010: viii). She proposes moving beyond a view of things as merely recalcitrant obstacles, toward a more affirmative sense of their capacity to generate effects—independently of the meanings or emotions they provoke in us.
Manuel DeLanda (2016) draws a useful distinction between the actual properties of materials and their virtual capacities—a move that redirects focus from what a material is to what it can do. The “virtual” in this sense does not mean imaginary or unreal; rather, it refers to the open set of potential actions and transformations that a material can enter into, depending on the relations and conditions it encounters. For example, steel has actual properties such as density and hardness, but it also has virtual capacities: under certain conditions it can cut, bend, or conduct electricity. Which of these capacities is activated depends on the assemblage of forces, tools, and contexts in which the material is situated. The term “assemblage” here designates precisely such a constellation: a heterogeneous composition of elements—material, technical, social, and symbolic—that temporarily come together to produce effects. A knife, for instance, is not only steel but also handle, grip, user, technique, and the context of use. In this sense, cutting is not an inherent property of steel alone but the actualization of its virtual capacity within a particular assemblage. This step toward understanding materials through events (e.g., to cut) rather than as substances (e.g., steel) has been further developed in the Cluster Matters of Activity, insofar as it has focused on specific material-cultural operations such as cutting, filtering, or weaving. These operations are not the inherent activity of materials, but involve the activation—or rather the actualization—of the virtual capacities of material assemblages.
Waves, I will argue, exceed these theoretical frameworks. Certainly, they can be understood as the effect of material activity: such as movements of electrons producing an electromagnetic field or the friction of tires and pavement producing a sound. In this sense, Fritz Heider (2005[1927]) would conceptualize waves [Schwingungen] as material expressions or even as ‘signs’ of something else. Waves would then invite material semiotics, an analysis of oscillations and vibrations that are nothing in themselves, but the expression of something else: a vibrating body or thing. But Heider misses something crucial. Waves are energy transfer and, as such, they also become forces that produce their own effects. In order to pay attention to this, we need to go beyond the idea of material forces, material capacities or material operations, and focus on the processes and politics of materialization, that is, how waves come to matter. This is especially urgent in light of today’s major transformation of the material basis of our life.
Current urban transformations revolve around atmospheric wave phenomena. Consider climate protection and adaptation policies. As it is well known, greenhouse gases warm the planet by trapping infrared radiation—waves—within the atmosphere. This is solar radiation that is absorbed by the Earth’s surface, and then re-emitted as heat radiation. Greenhouse gases capture this radiation and make it matter in the double sense of the word: on the one hand, as warm particles that heat the air and, and on the other hand, as an existential issue. Urban climate adaptation projects respond to these wave-particle transitions in different ways. Many initiatives are focused on reducing the heat trapped in city environments. This includes working with so-called cool materials, especially pavements designed to reflect rather than absorb heat, as well as green and blue infrastructures capable of absorbing solar energy without a corresponding rise in temperature. Cities are also creating ecologies of shade: planting trees or designing structures that block solar exposure. In all of these cases, the key problem is how solar radiation—as a wave-based energy—comes into material form and becomes manageable.
Another example comes from the field of smart cities and digital urbanism, where the so-called last-mile of infrastructure revolves around the propagation of wireless signals. Projects aimed at building an Internet of Things or enabling autonomous vehicles depend on the reliable transmission of electromagnetic waves. The ongoing shift to 5G/6G technologies dramatically illustrates this. Unlike previous systems, which relied on large antennas that would cover wide areas, 5G/6G uses higher radio frequencies with shorter wavelengths. This allows more data transmission, but also limits range and makes signals more vulnerable to interference from buildings or trees. As a result, 5G infrastructure requires a high density of small antennas, often concealed within the urban fabric. Moreover, 5G/6G introduces beamforming, which directs signals toward specific devices, creating more efficient but also more spatially selective coverage. At the same time, concerns are growing around the non-thermal effects of 5G/6G radiation on human and nonhuman health. Citizen groups, independent researchers, and individuals with electromagnetic sensitivities are calling for more investigation into these potential health risks. These voices contest the safety of ever-denser signal infrastructures, raising concerns about a new kind of so-called ‘electrosmog’ that blurs the line between technological infrastructure and bodily vulnerability. The uncertainty and anxiety around wave exposure are becoming a political issue in their own right.
In empirical terms, waves demand attention because they are at the heart of how cities are currently being reconfigured. The properties and behaviors of atmospheric waves directly shape how urban projects are imagined, designed, and contested, and how urban coexistence is imagined, designed and contested. Two major consequences follow from this. First, waves reshape the topologies of the city. The cases outlined above suggest that wave propagation introduces a different kind of spatial logic—one that does not follow the path of modern infrastructure systems but instead requires attention to micro-topographies. These are the local variations—surfaces, gaps, densities—that affect how waves move, and thus how both the signals and their exposure are distributed. The city becomes a critical zone, not just a built environment but a field of variable intensities and exposures. Second, waves are generating new kinds of urban publics concerned about bodily exposure to elusive and often invisible wave effects. These publics are not organized around traditional political categories or languages. Like the waves they mobilized against, they are elusive publics with non-local ontologies: not just a group gathered in one place, but a diffuse network of awareness, influence, and affect.
In this sense, the topologies and politics of wave-oriented urban transformation are not peripheral but have become central to the rethinking of materiality and ecological relations within contemporary cities.
Waves invite us to explore the politics of materialization, that is, how practices of sensing, knowing and governing waves are associated to specific materials, bodies and devices, and which are the onto-political consequences of such associations. I propose approaching materialization as a specific modality of what Callon (1986) once described as the principle of free association: the idea that in actor-networks “everything may be allied to everything else” (Latour 1988: 163). Yet, when we follow how waves come to matter, it becomes evident that there are limits to this associative freedom derived from the affordances and resistances of materials, as well as from the ontology of waves.
A first look at how urban actors – citizens, planners, designers, and concerned publics – attempt to relate to and govern waves shows indeed a remarkable diversity of material alliances. In Europe, for example, different cities implement EU-directives on noise abatement by different material strategies, ranging for protecting, surveilling and educating citizens, over experimenting with street design and surface materials, to simple technological fixes such as installing soundproof windows (Farías forthcoming). It is as though the non-locality, intercorporeality, and atmospheric quality of waves—their existence through whole ecologies of things—would enable arbitrary flexibility in how waves are materialized. From this, one might be tempted to conclude that the politics of materialization is primarily shaped by specific sociotechnical imaginaries and technopolitical cultures. Such an interpretation would overlook the material specificity of wave-matter interactions. It risks reducing the politics of materialization to a form of social constructivism, where matter is passively shaped by meaning.
To counter such an approach, it is helpful to turn to Karen Barad’s concept of materialization, which shifts attention to the question of how matter comes to matter—that is, how material phenomena are not simply given, but emerge through specific intra-actions that entangle matter, meaning, and measurement. Barad develops this concept by taking a critical stance toward Judith Butler’s theory of the materialization of sexed bodies as a result of gender performativity. In short, Barad criticizes Butler’s theory ultimately because it “reinscribes matter as a passive product of discursive practices” (2003: 821). In contrast, Barad argues that “any robust theory of the materialization of bodies would necessarily take account of how the body’s materiality—for example, its anatomy and physiology—and other material forces actively matter to the processes of materialization“ (2003: 809).[1] This is what Barad offers with the concept of “mattering“: “The world”, they argue, “is an ongoing open process of mattering through which ‘mattering’ itself acquires meaning and form in the realization of different agential possibilities“ (2003: 827). In other words: “matter is an active ‘agent’ in its ongoing materialization.“ (2003: 822)
While this perspective is highly productive, it still leaves open the question of the specific mode through which waves come to matter. In the remainder of this article, I will argue that if we begin from the understanding of waves as processes of energy transfer, their materialization must be approached through two interrelated dynamics: conversion and intensification.[2]
Materialization is, at its core, a process of energy conversion. When waves propagate through urban atmospheres—whether they are sound waves, electromagnetic waves, or others—they don’t simply pass through untouched: they interact with materials in various ways. They may be absorbed, reflected, bent, or transformed from one type of energy into another. Sound can become electricity, heat, or even a public health issue. For instance, chronic exposure to noise doesn’t remain merely “sound”—it can convert into stress, a thickening of the blood, and broader political or medical concerns. In short, materialization isn’t just about things becoming visible or tangible—it’s about how shiftings from one register to another, from wave to matter, from the physical to the political, from atmospheres to infrastructures, etc.
In this process, the key lies in the stories—and the storying—of energy conversion. When solar radiation is trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or absorbed by asphalt and re-emitted as heat—producing hot spots in the city—energetic transformations become lived experiences and affective stories. They shape everyday practices: seeking shade, retreating indoors, or lying awake during unbearably hot nights. Such affective responses are not just secondary reactions—they are part of the materialization itself, a conversion that resonates across bodily, spatial, and political registers. Unlike the notion of “infrastructural inversion” (Leigh Star 1999), which seeks to make visible what otherwise remain invisible, thinking and researching materialization as conversion involves exploring shiftings between different modes of existence. It is a methodological orientation toward transformation—attuning to how energies move, become sensed, and acquire meaning across domains.
The materialization of atmospheric waves as a process of energetic conversion is also, fundamentally, a process of material intensification. Waves do not just move through matter; they produce effects within matter by intensifying or disturbing it. Rather than performativity as often imagined as constituting something hitherto inexistent, and thus ultimately framed in binary terms—either it exists or it does not—, materialization needs to be thought as a question of degree: waves can make things exist more or less intensely. Importantly, this intensification is not simply a matter of physical quantity. For instance, sound is not more intense just because it has a higher decibel level. A single drop of water falling from a tap in the middle of the night can become an overwhelmingly intense presence—not because the sound is physically louder, but because of its affective, temporal, and situational force. Over time, in a specific context, it begins to exist more intensely.
In this sense, intensity is not reducible to a measurable value—such as air pressure or temperature—but emerges from the way matter is qualified through its relations, situations, and affects. Heat, too, is not merely more intense when the temperature rises; its intensity also depends on how and where it manifests: on asphalt, in a sealed room, or through sleepless nights. These examples suggest that waves materialize not just by transmitting energy but by modulating how matter exists. To grasp materialization, then, is not only to map matter extensively, as res extensa within a network of relations, but to attune to its intensive existence—to the fluctuating ways in which waves come to matter.
References
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DeLanda, Manuel. 2016. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh University Press.
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—. 2007. ‘Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?’ Isis98(1): 138–42. doi:10.1086/512837.
—. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. John Wiley & Sons.
—. 2018. Down to Earth. Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Polity Press.
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Neimanis, Astrida. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Academic.
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