This year we will explore the social and political implications of “frequencies.” Our discussions will unfold from, and try to relate to one another, several of this term’s multiple meanings. These may usefully be gathered under the rubrics of temporality, intensity, sociality.
Frequency as rate of recurrence. The regularity and rapidity with which an event, practice, or process recurs. The speed and character of repetition
Frequency as register and intensity of recurrence. The quality, shape, and character of the vibrating, repeating, sonic or visual wave that we encounter as sound, image, pattern, or feeling with various degrees of clarity and intensity. The relation between signal and noise, medium and message, form and content, dissonance and synchrony.
Frequency as density, regularity, and quality of social encounters. The character or intensity of the crowd. Regularity of attendance. Familiarity with venue and setting. The very fact of gathering. The commonalities and diversities in play and at stake.
This polyvalent term serves as a rich point of departure for any attempt to grasp everyday life, social arrangements, and political engagement on multiple scales.
Frequencies convey the importance of that which is ever present yet barely discernable in social spaces and lived experience: the sonic, visual, affective, intersubjective, and temporal tone or feel of a time and space, situation and interaction, event and experience. Vibes! Wave lengths!
We are interested in the way that everyday experience is shaped by sets of intersecting frequencies. Likewise, everyday practices, dispositions, orientations, apprehensions, and heterogeneities may be understood from the perspective of frequencies. Large scale and long-term structural processes are also cause and consequence of converging frequencies. At the other end of the scale, low frequencies suggest sub rosa forms of association which reveal how the barely audible or the fugitive resonances of silence sound out the unbridgeable and the incomprehensible. Many situations may be shaped by the co-existence of incommensurable frequencies despite other more evident affiliations and alignments.
The registers of frequencies further asks us to imagine the range of analog and digital technologies, devices, and equipment that provides social actors with the capacities to connect and disconnect to local and global movements, politics, and events. What kinds of technological frequencies -- past, present, and future -- act to best engender democracy or repress it? How can we turn the dials of power up and down, and/or find the zones, voices, and messages to best apprehend the strategies and tactics available to us? What might it mean to consider the circulation of ideas, images, and affects in various media in terms of frequency?
We are interested in the quantitative and qualitative frequencies that characterize a situation, the frequencies available for inhabiting the situation, and the frequencies chosen for transforming a situation. What opens to us when we think about politics as a capacity to identity, shift, and invent frequencies? When we foreground registers, rate, and intensities of critique, refusal, redirection, and creation? When our social analysis and political experiments attend directly to sound, light, image, density, regularity, affect, intensity – i.e., to the climate of a situation? When we attend to the generative or disabling character of certain kinds and rates of repetition?
We cannot grasp or transform a situation without attending to frequencies. In what ways is our quality of life today undermined or impoverished by certain sets of interlocking frequencies? What constellation of frequencies might be cause and consequence for social mutuality and substantive democracy? What frequencies might nourish human flourishing on multiple scales? How might certain frequencies mark thresholds that trigger consequential effects?
Frequencies becoming thresholds that "trigger a specific effect" in a sort of "quantity into quality" vein. I'm thinking here about how certain frequencies and their transformations also allow for particular formations to pass in and out of consciousness, become cognizable, and ideally apprehendable across subjectivities, generations, even species. Also, beyond the living and animate, we might add something more generally about the various frequencies of "vibrant matter" itself?
An analytic of frequencies invites us to reconsider conventionally understood boundaries between quality and quantity, density and ethereality, materiality and immateriality, inside and outside, facts and feelings, objective conditions and subjective experience. It may help us to better grasp why particular arrangements are more or less perceptible and legible to social actors. Such an analytic, attuned to wave lengths, invites us to consider the profound interconnections among and between humans, life, and non-living matter.
Graduate Center students whose research engages or illuminates some aspect of frequencies, whatever the historical period or geographical region, are encouraged to apply by indicating their interest in the CGSC on the Graduate Center’s Dissertation Fellowship Competition application form, due January 15, 2025.
Information about the CGSC’s Mid-Career CUNY Faculty Fellowships will be circulated soon.
