The world ground to a halt: it stopped to stop something that could kill us, but sped up to speed up what could save us. This is why many plans were put on hold, like a tightrope walker who runs along the wire, stops to concentrate and then moves on into danger.

The Covid-19 pandemic and everything that had to be done to try to limit the propagation, disease and death associated with it created bans, obstacles, limitations, ruptures and violence, with devastating effects.

These difficulties meant that the release of Electra 9 had to be postponed. But the magazine that you are holding is a little different from the one that we had approved as ready to go to press. We used this waiting time as an opportunity to update it with some additional contributions that help us turn our thoughts to what has happened and the unexpected face that this gives to the future. The commonplace that we so often hear vainly repeated that ‘nothing will ever be the same again’ has now gained a strength that makes it less banal, lending it a threatening eloquence. We are going to reflect on this.

This issue, Number 9, marks the beginning of a new year in the life of our magazine.

It all started two years and nine editions ago. Since then, readers have found in Electra a meeting place for common interests and shared discoveries. Its pages have been filled with hard questions and tentative answers, with issues and reasons for thought and criticism. They have been dotted with verbal and visual ideas, arguments and hypotheses, queries and demands, analyses and syntheses, figures and events, and quotations and rebuttals.

In a time that dives between the obvious and the obtuse (Roland Barthes) or runs between the apocalyptic and integrated (Umberto Eco), the determinism of certainties is almost always more harmful and useless than the dissatisfaction of doubt. In it we undertake a search for modes of communication that are also forms of questioning and ways of picking up some grains of sand on the vast beach of the unknown.

As we have already said, we want to use words and images to give a face to our time, albeit in the knowledge that this face is often made of superimposed or successive masks. We are also aware that such a face is always shaky and unstable, incomplete and fallacious, as we have manifestly seen. We also know that it is plural, polymorphous and multiform. In today’s descriptive geometry, the face shown is a solid polyhedron that spins and projects the shadow of its facets, edges and vertices onto the long planes of the world.

Like all times, but even more than all times, this is a time written in the harsh, enduring words of uncertainty, complexity and, now, greater fear. These are its attributes and, without our being aware of them, sight goes blind even when we can see and everything becomes simplistic and superficial, repetitive and reductive, dogmatic and conventional, banal and stupid.

‘What times are these?’ was our question in the founding Subject in Electra 1. After that, following the natural sequence of the numbers in the magazine’s lower right-hand corner, we looked at the stupidity of different times and particularly that of our times. We gave some thought to omnipresent tourism and the hyperbolic journey. We analysed information, journalism and social media as battlefields and sources of spoils. We stared at ‘eternal youth’ and its mythology and its ideal of beauty and pocket immortality. We thought about money, what it is and what it represents. We reflected on ourselves and other animals in a history that runs between silence and a voice, with its desire for identification and distance, violence and submission. We looked at memory and forgetting as peers and alibis – of each other. And now in this Number 9, speed pushes the changeable face of a time that is searching for itself.

By searching for the face of the times, this is a magazine that actually finds its own face. It is a magazine that looks at pictures and listens to voices, in the knowledge that some are the forms and depths of the others. It is a magazine that knows how to take the startled fiction of reality to meet the startling reality of fiction.

It has meaning and makes sense that the focus of the edition that mark the second year of publication of Electra and comes out at a time and in a world where running and halting, celerity and slowness have become even more contrasted, compared and visible, should be devoted to Speed. Speed is a great mark of modernity, the era of technology and the contemporary age.

From Baudelaire to Rimbaud and Fernando Pessoa / Álvaro de Campos, from the Cubists to the Futurists and Vorticists, from Heisenberg to von Braun and Virilio, from Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler to Bruno Munari, from Apollinaire to Milan Kundera and Gonçalo M. Tavares, from Marcel Duchamp to Hartmut Rosa and the accelerationists, speed has been seized on like an arrow shot into the future. When Albert Einstein wrote the most famous equation in human history – E=mc² – he made the speed of light in a vacuum the most poetic of physical constants: 299,792,458 metres per second. The c that represents it comes from the Latin term celeritas, which means speed.

Speed is the variation of space in time and acceleration is the variation of speed in time. In our century, speed is getting faster and faster and so is its acceleration. This magnitude has taken over everything: work and days, leisure and pleasure, anguish and expectations. Speed has changed and determined everything: politics and communication, the economy and society, science and cybernetics, art and love, food and sleep, sickness and health, life and death. Fernando Pessoa said in the nervous voice of Álvaro de Campos, ‘The flywheel in me keeps moving faster.’

But back around 1930, using his own name and with that acute, paradoxical, provocative indiscreet intelligence that never stopped on the threshold of anything or anyone, Fernando Pessoa wrote an essay. It was Herostratus, about the search for immortality and ‘speed addicts’:

At the turn of the 21^st century, the philosopher, architect and urbanist Paul Virilio made his thought think about the times that time has. When he said that each speed corresponds to a reality, he gave the highways of time a new speedometer. He spoke of the tyranny of speed and its real and perceived consequences. He even created a new science, dromology, an interdisciplinary field of knowledge, and included in it a triangle of speed, technology and politics.

Virilio believed that politics today was a kind of chronopolitics, a race in time against time. He said with an aphoristic speed reminiscent of the explosive glow of Guy Debord, ‘We live in an age of chronopolitics, in a cult of the speed of light, in a true race against time.’ Or ‘In the age of chronopolitics, the speed of transactions exceeds the time of politics, making the nation-state an increasingly decorative figure.’ And ‘In the age of chronopolitics, the speed of transactions ensures the hegemony of speculation over the real needs of the economy.’ Or, again, ‘Today politics is no longer geopolitics, bound to the land; rather it is aeropolitics: waves, planes and satellites are designing the future.’ And, finally, ‘The acceleration of time has made the world flat.’

He performs an MRI on the body of the present, speaking about the ‘deconstruction of general culture due to the madness, the hallucination of information’. He said, ‘The acceleration of time prevents us from seeing the difference between what is true and false.’ Or ‘The acceleration of real time calls into question the perception of the sensitive world and empathy between human beings.’

These aphorisms speak to us and involve us in another way in the world of time. The effects of this endlessly increasing speed reach the infinitely large and the infinitely small. It is as if our lives have gone from the speed of sound to the speed of light. This is why looking at this increase in speed is being at the centre of time and what is happening and changing in it.

Continuing this conversation, which dates back to antiquity, acceleration and slowness are face to face like two characters in a film that permeates our time. Back in the 1920s, Paul Morand wrote an essay entitled De la vitesse [On Speed] and Valery Larbaud retorted with another essay called La Lenteur [Slowness]. These days, the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics defends increasing and intensifying acceleration, not decreasing it.

The Covid-19 pandemic can also be regarded from the point of view of speed, its variations and their apexes. The fast, global spread of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has slowed down life almost to a stop, and this has been experienced like whiplash. This diabolical game between the acceleration of contagion and the deceleration of contact, between the progress of the disease and the search for an antidote, between silent incubation and blatant symptoms, between patient immobility and the race against time on the part of governments, researchers, physicians and nurses, between seclusion and control, between the face and the mask, has become a symbol of a time that has been obliged to pull up and be feared. Everything has been confined in a slow pause and ‘solipsism of the present moment’ surrounded by nervous, agitated, fearful movements. Proximities have become distances and everything, from work to sex, now has the prefix tele. But the speed of vigilance has made the world a global panoptic.

The political and communicational, biopolitical and geopolitical, economic and social, cultural and scientific, legal and psychological, ethical and ecological consequences of this pandemic and its impositions and requirements, its uses and abuses, will be greater than we imagine. These effects that are multiplied by each other will be infected by the change in the world’s pace and of us in it. From now on, greater or lesser speed will be remembered as a violent compulsion – and will be a measure of the things that happen and have to be addressed. It is as if the world and its space have been grasped by the dangerous hand of time and obliged to look at the contraction and expansion with different eyes. With this pandemic and its aetiology, speed experienced as an awareness of threat or resistance has gone viral.

Looking at these movements and interruptions is, in fact, the purpose of Electra and its cultural map. We could not achieve this goal only in the dossier that we call the Subject. The magazine is made up of many different chapters, and each of them raises an idea, an image, a memory, a possibility, an assertion, an exegesis, a denial, a vision, a listening, a quest. This is why each edition invites its readers to draw a territory of readings and re-readings within itself.

Two years and nine editions! It is with the time that goes by and the time that remains from the time that passes that the magazine weaves its web.

This edition is a reassertion of what connects us to our readers, especially in a time that, more than ever, demands attention, questioning, criticism and the creation of new possibilities. And it is also a renewal of a gratitude that, seen from there, is called interest and recognition. With the readers that make reading Electra a case of loyalty to themselves, we quote Virilio, ‘Art and culture introduce distance and duration. Make your life a work of art.’

*Translated by Wendy Graça