Edmund de Waal is a contemporary artist, ceramicist and writer, whose book The Hare with Amber Eyes has been translated into many languages and hailed as a great literary and publishing success. His most recent exhibition, psalm, opened in Venice this summer to coincide with the Biennale Arte 2019. He came up with a portfolio for this edition of Electra, in which photographs of the exhibition are part of a poetic diary that recounts an inner and outer journey. This manuscript is full of themes from this writer-artist: memories, books, objects, senses and places. We see what we hear and hear what we see, because the words and images are the two sides of the coin with which we buy the world. ‘We are always from somewhere else,’ quotes de Waal. This is why we are all travellers and it is our journey that designs the space and the time with which we create our world.
In the series of drawings he selected for Electra, North American artist Dean Monogenis imagines the world before a new flood, conceiving this Portfolio as an artwork in itself – as a painting or a sculpture. In his work, space is a time that becomes space. Imagination is construction, utopia is reality, and the past is the future.
For Álvaro Siza, drawing is his pact with the world and with himself. This highly renowned architect, who received the Pritzker Prize in 1992 for his work in so many countries around the world, never ceases to draw what he sees and what he imagines: buildings, objects, bodies, faces, figures (frequently his own), animals, landscapes, visions, dreams and sentiments. His drawings see and open eyes. They listen and they scrutinise. They play and they have fun. They mention and they measure. They think and they meditate.
Several Lebanese artists volunteered their services during the war years and created camouflage military fatigues for the fighting militias. Their designs were catalogued in this book by Farid Sarroukh, a mediocre painter who was irked (but not surprised) by his colleagues’ eager collaboration with the militias.
In our time, memory, in its social and collective dimensions, has become a theme of public discussion, closely linked to violent, or even traumatic, historical events, from the Holocaust to 9/11. Today the possibility of turning memory into a literary device, like Proust, is reduced or even impossible: at this time individual memory, as a psychic mechanism, is confronted with its technological prostheses, e.g. smartphones, computers and the Internet, where all the memory in the world, which used to be represented in libraries and archives, is stored. Since memory and the manifestations of its hegemony (visible in the obsession with heritage, in the ceaseless inauguration of museums, and in the public agenda of celebrations and reflections) mark our time with a whiff of decadence, we devote to it ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra.
Quoting four passages and using them as four separate starting points – an excerpt from a Borges tale, another from Frances A. Yates’ The Art of Memory, Rimbaud’s poem ‘Voyelles’, and a series of excerpts from St Augustine’s Confessions – Maria Filomena Molder follows a winding path through the question of the force of memory and the forms and instruments of mnemotechnics.
François Hartog is a professor of Greek and modern historiography at École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is a historian who has also undertaken a substantial amount of important theoretic reflection on basic issues of historiography and the different ways of experiencing time that define each age. The thinking of history as a discipline and the actual concept of history are important contributions that Hartog has made and that extend to the entire field of human sciences.
An obsession with memory, a memory wave, a memory culture: these describe a current phenomenon that consists of the hypertrophy of memory, with manifestations that are cultural, social and political. The concept linked to individual psychology – personal memory, which we have known is uncertain and vulnerable to unconscious detours, at least since Freud – has been transferred to the collective plane and expanded as a viscous and extremely appealing matter. To such an extent that ‘memory’ has become a master-signifier of our time – a time that is subjected to the regime of the present, to what the historian François Hartog calls ‘presentism’. (On the question of memory, as it has been made the main topic of this issue of Electra, the theoretical contributions of this French historian to the ‘regimes of historicity’ are very important: for that reason, we conducted an interview with him, which we include here). But, even though our time is dominated by the historical category of the present, it is simultaneously obsessed with the past.
Bernd Stiegler is an important media theorist and historian, and the author of various books on photography; he teaches at the University of Constanz. In this text, he traces the history of a progressive twentieth-century rediscovery: doomed to oblivion until quite late on, photography has now become a cultural good, and the conservation of photographic heritage has become an obligation.
The Italian historian Enzo Traverso, a professor at Cornell University, is the author of important books on the Holocaust and on twentieth-century political ideas. In this text, he describes and analyses a transition that, from his point of view, marks the end of the twentieth century: the utopias gave place to the cult of memory, which led to the proliferation of ‘remembrance’ and set the melancholy tone that characterises the spirit of our times.
Taking Borges’ famous short story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ as her starting point, Carla Ganito, a lecturer in the Faculty of Human Sciences at the Catholic University, Lisbon, analyses the complex dialectics between memory and forgetfulness in the digital age. She shows that the internet has brought a new but paradoxical condition that consists of making memories permanent, in taking away the right to be forgotten, at the same time as it transforms us into amnesiacs.
An essential task of our historical consciousness is to think about the time we live in, and to present it as a complex unity for which we have no name. The evident manifestations of the age and its less visible but distinctive traits are the topics of five texts that make up the special feature of this inaugural issue.
Each epoch has its needs, its problems, its desires, obsessions, and a vocabulary where all this polarizes.However, a difference marks these times of ours: never before have there been such powerful means of communicating and amplifying fetish words with ideological value.
Gender issues have indeed revolutionised the conventional way of thinking about sexual difference. However, it is now clear that we must challenge its limitations, point out its failed possibilities, and critique its representations and conventions.
An essential task of our historical consciousness is to think about the time we live in, and to present it as a complex unity for which we have no name. The evident manifestations of the age and its less visible but distinctive traits are the topics of five texts that make up the special feature of this inaugural issue.
This text conjures up a voyage, a ‘theory-fiction’ that leads the reader to the Anthropocene, the new geological age. The fiction begins with a well-known character, recognizable by his yellow head of hair and his tweets, and ends with a fantasy where a reinvented Marx is the author of a critique of political astronomy.
The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and the philosopher Déborah Danowski talked with Andrea Cavalletti about the book they co-authored, Há Mundo por Vir? Ensaio Sobre os Medos e os Fins [The Ends of the World]. An incursion into the imagery of the End, at a time when the fear of an ecological catastrophe has spread out.
The traditional categories of modern politics are now inadequate. The foundations of the very notion of democracy are undermined, while the words inherited from modernity, which had once served political action and political ideas, are now devoid of sense.
Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their established boundaries.
Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates. In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their established boundaries.
Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates.In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their established boundaries.
It was the time when the future was an ism. Technology was making a modern epic out of human labour. It was the time when Fernando Pessoa made this metallic exclamation in the paroxysmal, paradoxical, relentless voice of Álvaro de Campos in the opening words of the verbal spark called Triumphal Ode:
By the painful light of the factory’s huge electric lamps I write in a fever. I write gnashing my teeth, rabid for the beauty of all this, For this beauty completely unknown to the ancients.
O wheels, O gears, eternal r-r-r-r-r-r-r!
Often announced throughout the 20th century as the spectre of ‘technological unemployment’ grew, the end of work has become a common trope with the emergence of new digital technologies and the development of intelligent machines that replace humans in production. This article covers the numerous signs of the end of work (or employment, at least), mainly focusing on the contemporary debate about the ‘crisis of work’, which either acquires a utopian character or draws an apocalyptic scenario.
Work is one of the greatest issues of our time, an all-encompassing social fact and a world of paradoxes – there is both too much of it and not enough, at a time when artificial intelligence is replacing people and their jobs, while employees’ lives are increasingly diminished due to longer working hours and a loss of autonomy. The announcement of the end of work as we know it and the predictions of what has been termed a new ‘post-work’ society have not yet led to a suitable response at the political level nor in the customs and habits of the entire social system. However, the idea that it is necessary to reinvent work and how it is distributed to eliminate the increasingly relentless contrast between an elite and a huge mass of the unemployed, precariously employed, intermittently employed and temporarily employed is gaining ground. The current pandemic and its related circumstances have reinforced the idea of smart working and working from home, which, although operating within the framework and according to the rules of a system that has been dysfunctional for a long time, may be the beginning of a radical transformation. The issue of work, a diverse topic that covers many areas, is the ‘subject’ of this issue of Electra.
Nick Srnicek, a Canadian professor at King’s College in London, is one of the authors of the Accelerate Manifesto and a book which imagines a post-capitalist world without work. Helen Hester is a founding member of a collective responsible for the book Xenofeminism. Written by both, this article focuses on a type of work that is generally neglected in political calculations and sociological research: the unpaid labour of social reproduction that consists of such activities as cleaning, caring and cooking.
Jason Read, a Spinozian and professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine (USA), writes a blog (Unemployed Negativity) in which he analyses how work is depicted in films and books. In this article, the subject of analysis is the famous TV series Breaking Bad, in which the plot, focused on the character of the chemistry teacher-turned-drug lord Walter White, emphasises the role of work as a central issue.
Economist, essayist and founder in 2000 of the French journal Multitudes, Yann Moulier-Boutang reflects on the imminent changes to the nature and organisation of work resulting from the structural crisis affecting it and laid bare by the pandemic-related lockdown, in particular due to the spotlight now focused on the massive informal sector that highlights the necessary distinction between activity, labour and employment.
Examining some of the defining stages in the thought and representation of work by certain philosophers, from Antiquity to the present day, the essayist André Barata, a professor of philosophy, analyses Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse to show how work engenders the humanising factors of habit and repetition.
Immaterial labour – activities of a cognitive nature enhanced by the new digital technologies that have given rise to so-called ‘platform capitalism’ – has implied a huge transformation in the world of work and the expansion of precariousness, to the point that the traditional idea of employment is beginning to be seen as a thing of the past. These are the issues discussed in this article by José Nuno Matos, an expert in the sociology of work and a researcher at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais in Lisbon.
Often announced throughout the 20th century as the spectre of ‘technological unemployment’ grew, the end of work has become a common trope with the emergence of new digital technologies and the development of intelligent machines that replace humans in production. This article covers the numerous signs of the end of work (or employment, at least), mainly focusing on the contemporary debate about the ‘crisis of work’, which either acquires a utopian character or draws an apocalyptic scenario.