Onshore or offshore, underground or in the air, urban or rural, ancient or modern, hard or soft, visible or invisible, it is in infrastructures that lie the desires whose threads the cunning hands of our audacity or our madness weave, the repressions that our dreams reveal or denounce and the lack of libidinal (and financial) investment that our system of coercive voraciousness diverts to other more ephemeral and provisional, but more profitable and ostentatious, ends.

It is in them that lie reserves, complexes, drives, tensions, traumas, failings, longings, threats, conflicts, dangers. They are the source and the catalyst for revealing slips, failed acts, intimidating symptoms, uncontrolled impulses, meaningful silences.

Psychoanalysts and anthropologists have long used the words ‘infrastructure’ and ‘unconscious’ in close conjunction. As if the unconscious, individual or collective, were an infrastructure of the life of the mind or of cultural systems and as if infrastructure were the unconscious of the material world, the world of energy or the immaterial world.

So it is no surprise that the unconscious and infrastructure combine in the denotations and connotations they generate and underpin. The psychoanalysis of tragedy, from ancient Greece to our own age, from Sophocles to Beckett and Bergman or Gus Van Sant, from Aeschylus to Goethe and Lars von Trier or Béla Tarr, from Euripides to Ibsen and Pasolini or Kurosawa, shows that the place from which the tragic and its mythologies, with their declensions and derivations, originate is in the unconscious. In our discourses about all this, it is as if the literal were the unconscious and infrastructure of the metaphorical.

Prior to Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, Friedrich Nietzsche, with the supernatural instinct he had for surviving himself, spoke of tragedy, its birth and decline, using words that clarify the relations of the Apollonian and the Dyonisian, the lower and the higher, life and death, ethics and aesthetics, human and natural, real and imaginary, the soloist and the choir.

Recently, all over the world, in the midst of the excess of the useless and the dearth of the necessary, of existential tragedies and social dramas, of material chaos and simultaneous and successive wars, of natural disasters and climate disruptions (maelstroms, storms, floods, earthquakes, fires), of human calamities and technical disasters (rail and road accidents, power outages, pandemics, crises), and fast-flowing rivers of news and reports that they generate, we are constantly hearing about infrastructures. As if, in metaphysics, physics were suddenly to appear, even if its presence appears invisible, intangible or imperceptible.

As if, in the theatre, the backstage area, harshly and unforgivingly lit, became the stage. As if a museum’s storerooms were suddenly and indiscreetly shifted upstairs, and put on display in the public galleries. As if, in an unexpected inversion of typological hierarchies, the rear of a house became its front, the parlour where visitors are welcomed.

To think today about infrastructures – what they are, the assumptions they involve, what they mean and what they represent – is to fix our attention on a topic which is crucial for reaching an understanding of the ethos and pathos of our age. And for us to probe the attitudes and behaviours, the programmes and plans, the processes and procedures, the undertakings and risks, the deficits and surpluses, the waste and the savings – of our age and of ourselves in it. And also the accuracy of the calculations and the validity of timeframes, the security of the forecasts and the erosion of resistance, the consistency of sustainabilities and the soundness of institutions, the scale of needs and the grounds for urgency.

To think about infrastructures is to seek to understand the irreplaceable – and ever more crucial – place they occupy in our systems of thought and action, in the strategies of political power and of economic domination, in our systems of freedom and dependency. It is to seek to ascertain its fundamental role in the machinery of surveillance and control, in the apparatus of administration and bureaucracy, in the mechanisms of oversight and manipulation, in the practices of speculation, fraud and trafficking.

From the individual to society, from politics to the economy, from security to logistics, from industry to commerce, from culture to information, from creation to communication, from science to technology, from medicine to food, from architecture to engineering, from art to design, from advertising to data bases, from ecology to religion, from information technology to robotics, from heritage to the movement of persons, goods, services and knowledge, from production to consumption, from conservation to distribution, from air conditioning to sanitary hygiene, from equipment to systems, from materials to functions – infrastructures are what underpin all this, where it all comes together, and sometimes where it meets with disaster.

From private houses to public buildings, from companies to banks, from factories to offices, from workshops to presses, from schools to laboratories, from hospitals to prisons, from theatres to courtrooms, from cinemas to museums, from restaurants to nightclubs, from hotels to ships, from stadiums to fairgrounds, from libraries to archives, from churches to barracks, from shops, hypermarkets and shopping centres to warehouses, ports and airports, from roads and motorways to railway and underground lines, from car parks to theme parks, from bridges to streets and squares, from green spaces to farmland, from television stations to telecommunications operators, from hubs to studios, from all these human activities, lasting or ephemeral, necessary or contingent, compulsory or optional, independent or in networks, local or universal, interior or coastal: infrastructures are a fundamental condition for functioning, movement, operation, growth, maintenance or renewal.

Without infrastructures, our world would stop, shut down (or disconnect), grind to a halt, fall apart. Or rather: without infrastructures, the age we call our own would be deprived of any past, present or future, would lose its shape and content, would negate itself, be diverted, contradict itself, lose its way, be dismembered, cancel itself out, cease to be what it is, become something else, something different or even the opposite of what it is.

In the dossier of issue 32 of our magazine, this topic might come as a surprise. But on reflection, it would be more surprising if this topic did not present itself. One of the founding purposes of Electra as an editorial project was to draw an unstable and always unfinished portrait of our times, and the absence of this crucial subject would constitute a huge obstacle to reaching such an understanding and a form of blindness that would prevent us from seeing (or sensing) that which surrounds us and, to a large extent, constrains, determines and defines us.

With his initial training as an engineer and his great interest in architecture (he co-designed a house in Vienna, which became a material symbol of his complex thought), Ludwig Wittgenstein often made use of technical metaphors to make his second philosophy of language easier to understand (words are utensils arranged and available in a toolbox). In his later philosophical thought, words are infrastructures whose meaning depends on and derives from their practical use, their social context and the rules of that field. The signs of verbal language are not just visual and auditory objects, nor are their logical signals. They institute a sense of belonging, a material practice and form of sharing, which is also anthropological, social and cultural, thereby conferring solidity on our everyday existence and representing a certain way of life and world view.

A quotation from Martin Heidegger is the starting point for the ‘Passages’ section of this edition of Electra: ‘The essence of technology is by no means anything technological.’ For the German philosopher, whose Nazi sympathies and collaboration with the regime morally diminishes his intellectual stature, the age of technology is the age when that which is human retreats and Being ceases to appear. Rather than in the machine and its workings, the danger lies in the technical mentality which sees the world as available stock and the human as capital to be used, abused, exchanged and spent, radically changing our attitude to nature and our way of inhabiting the Earth.

Before and after Martin Heidegger, other thinkers have made significant and varied contributions to a philosophy of technology: Plato, Descartes, Henri Bergson, Gilbert Simondon, Hans Jonas, Jacques Ellul, André Leroi-Gourhan.

With the development and rapid expansion of Artificial Intelligence, a prodi- gious infrastructure made of multiple powerful infrastructures, it is becoming yet more urgent and pressing to create original thought that investigates and ponders, examines and explores, assesses and questions this new crucial development and its enormous and still unknown consequences for the future of human beings and of the planet they inhabit, so often with thoughtless and threatening irresponsibility.

In addition to the gnoseological, epistemological and ethical issues that it raises, despite its positive potential, with the systems for creation, information, communication and control which may be combined with it, AI represents, above all in the current phase of technocapitalism which has also been called technofeudalism, digital capitalism, surveillance capitalism and anarcho‑capitalism, unprecedented, vast power which can be used – is already being used – against the political institutions of democracy and the rule of law.

This voracious and overwhelming power, with its dominating and hegemonic impetus, could actually threaten our most luminous ethical and cultural heritage and undermine our way of life and our more peaceful, tolerant and civilised forms of living as a society.

In the hands of certain individuals, such as predatory politicians and techno-industrial oligarchs, this omnipresent instrument of control and manipulation, operated by despotic centres of power and global, unregulated communication networks, propagates forms of undermining freedom, some evident, others concealed.

Putting them into action with a world view according to which everything that is good for their interests is good for humanity, they use this instrument to promote, shamelessly and without any constraint, the savagery that swaps courtesy for brutality, axiological values for corrupting money, principles for ends, the alter ego for the ego, altruism for narcissism, understanding for cruelty, cosmopolitanism for provincialism, universalism for chauvinism, science for obscurantism, knowledge for prejudice, quality for quantity, truth for lies and ethical decency for moral pornography. Many of these threats have been explored in previous editions of Electra.

For the philosopher Michel Foucault, archaeologist of power and knowledge, the material apparatus that structures space (the panopticon is one model) are instruments of power that surveil and discipline bodies and behaviours, and control populations and territories.

In this sense, infrastructures, based on specialist knowledge and efficient know-how, constitute a technology geared to security, inseparable from modern political reasoning.

According to the author of The Order of Things and The Birth of the Clinic, knowledge of infrastructures requires analysis of discourse concerning them, the laws governing them and the institutions that manage them, configuring a political sociology of infrastructures or even an ideology of infrastructures.

In this light, the city, urban design, architecture and engineering, with their colossal, sophisticated and indispensable infrastructures, show us how our world is governed, with so much that is right, but so much that is wrong.

In his analysis of the modern metropolis, Foucault belongs to a genealogical tree, in whose branches we find Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamim.

Flaneur, dandy and witness to the great changes made by Hausmann to Paris, the capital of the nineteenth century (as Benjamin called it), Baudelaire, especially in his Tableaux Parisiens, provides the city – and what it left unspoken and unseen – with a dolorous, dreamlike voice, that lies at the origin of our modern sensibility.

In Portugal, Cesário Verde, the visionary of the visible, offers in his poetry a description, at once precise and hallucinatory, of a Lisbon undergoing infrastructural transformation. He wanders through the city, with geometric attention, speaking of the ‘ground mined with pipes’, and of ‘gestures of snow and of metal’. And in his hoarse, rasping voice, he sings of what he sees:

At first glance, it might not appear a literary theme, but there are poems, short stories, novellas and novels in which infrastructures, in both the literal and figurative sense, with their straight lines or sinuous curves, are present as if in a great building with deep foundations.

As may be noted in the Surrealism Manifestos, André Breton saw it as a question of dismantling and replacing the infrastructures of the mind and of life. In other crucial texts, for the proponent of the infra-noire (originating from the Romanian Surrealist Group) and of the poème-objet, the city is an infrastructure that underpins and sustains dreaming, freed from consciousness and reason. And, in the Introduction au discours sur le peu de realité (Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality), the real and the imaginary, the physical and the immaterial, the conscious and the unconscious, the known and the unknown fight a creative duel that renders words magnetic and incandescent.

We may also cite the philosopher, epistemologist and great defender of the infrastructural alliance between science and poetry, Gaston Bachelard, the highly original author of The Psychoanalysis of Fire, who had the wisdom to assert: ‘The imagination finds more reality in what is hidden than in what is shown.’

Master of the material imagination, Jorge Luis Borges (yes, him again) provided fabulous descriptions of infrastructures in his fictions, from The Aleph to The Library of Babel. Ironically deploying minute topographical detail and the language of technical specifications, the account of The Library of Babel opens as follows:

And what should we say of that strange and portentous travel book, which glories in the title Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsíg?! In his enthusiastic review of the book when it was published, George Steiner wrote:

In his work, the French writer Michel Tournier sees in infrastructures and their functions and levels of performance, often unsuspected, the place of allegories and metaphors for the changes in the inner and exterior lives of men and women, for the connections between them and their relationship with the world.

The work of Fernando Pessoa, with scaffolding, attics, foundations, roads, paths, flights, currents, trains, boats, aircraft, bridges and buildings, is often a handbook of poetic technology.

Bursting with explosive interjections and strident onomatopoeia, the Ode Triunfal (Triumphal Ode), by Pessoa / Álvaro de Campos, offers a hallucinogenic apotheosis of infrastructures, in which the soul is a prosthesis of the body:

In Electra, words and images convey thought that never gives up on seeking to understand.

If the editorial of a magazine is a kind of infrastructure for each edition published, the ‘Editorial’ of this issue is a verbal and visual infrastructure that speaks of infrastructures and their meaning, overt or concealed, actual or potential, in our accelerated age and in our world, both threatening and under threat.

On reaching the reader’s hands, we invite them not to rush through these pages, but instead to read them with slow, careful urgency: festina lente, ‘make haste slowly’, as the Roman Emperor Augustus is said to have said!

From the pages of Electra, we look carefully at the machina mundi (‘Behold the great machine of the world’, Os Lusíadas) and listen to what, issuing de profundis, is conveyed, or permitted, by a movement, akin to a rising melody of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a cosmic stanza of Luís de Camões, or a thrilling and restless ode by Fernando Pessoa.