Money is not just a more or less fleeting and increasingly abstract universal medium. It is the cornerstone of society and its political administration, over which it has today total control. It is not a subject whose boundaries can be delimited though, as it is expanding in all directions. It travels round the planet at the speed of light and takes up all the space. Economics and financial sciences have only partial knowledge of money and it is a complete mystery to common mortals. If we want to find out a little more about it, we have to call upon other skills and disciplines that go beyond the discourse and concepts that have invaded our daily lives: psychoanalysis, anthropology, literature and art. This was what we did when putting this dossier together. We asked for contributions from a wide variety of sources, so that we could look at the very essence of money. And it is because its power is everywhere and determines everything, even when it cannot be seen, that it is so often the subject of metaphysical and theological theories and concepts. Or if we want to turn to pagan ideas, let us say that money is the ultimate shaman that we can call on in this completely secularised world.
This article by Margarida Abreu, economics lecturer at ISEG, Lisbon, focuses on theories of money and the monetary and financial system, in its complexity and the way that it involves a subjective dimension – trust. Among other things, we learn about how cryptocurrencies work and how we are moving towards a society in which hard cash is becoming obsolete.
The author of Doutor Fausto and Ensaio Sobre o Termo da História, among other books and essays, looks at Living Currency by Pierre Klossowski. It is a heterodox essay on the conversion of all libidinal force into a commodity and the resulting social organisation. Klossowski establishes a degree of equivalence between the libidinal economy and the economy of material goods and sheds light on the extreme logic of money and its life, which captures all lives.
This manuscript is by the French poet and essayist Christophe Hanna. He has written a book entitled Argent (Éditions Amsterdam, 2018), whose characters are identified by their first names plus their monthly salary. It was penned on the basis of topics sent to him by the editor of Electra, which he has reduced to subtitles. The poet, who makes no distinction between poetry and theory, has made money an inherent part of his actual writing.
The Italian sociologist and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has written a lot about the way in which capitalism in our time consists of producing ‘the indebted man’. Here he elaborates on the theory that the economy became entirely political for the first time after debt-currency appeared. It was created by the banks out of nothing, after Richard Nixon announced in 1971 that the US dollar would be leaving the gold standard.
The territory of modern and contemporary art today is dominated by institutions that engage in the symbolic transfer of a new ‘aura’ of art to luxury products and vice-versa. The result is the colossal circulation of money around the works and artists involved in speculation on inflated products.
The increasingly volatile nature of the value of money and of money itself, which requires stability above all else, means we are just waiting for the next financial collapse. The philosopher Yves Citton uses this statement to expand on seven ‘lessons’ that need to be taken from this situation, which gives rise to a kind of ‘collapsology’. These seven ‘stories’ or ‘lessons’ are untimely considerations for economic theories.
Anthropologist José Gabriel Pereira Bastos explains money from an anthropological and psychoanalytical point of view, relating it to a symbolic kind of organisation centring on the power of the Father, as he is celebrated in rituals of communities in which magical thinking prevails. From there it is possible to turn not only to Freud but also to anthropology to understand money and its original, archetypical function, in the light of trans-historical laws, taboos and bans.
‘Time is money’: no one has better expressed the absolute power of this earthly deity that governs even the categories of our experience than Benjamin Franklin, in the opening words of his Advice to a Young Tradesman (1748), cited prominently by Max Weber, who explores the idea in the second chapter of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
When can an opinion be a crime? What are the limits to the freedom of expression? At what point does my freedom end because someone else’s begins? These questions have been raised in our times with an urgency that stems from the need to square the freedom of thought and of expression in public (nowadays on the social media as well) with the prevention of threats of whose danger and seriousness history makes us aware. On these clearly topical questions, the Spanish writer and journalist Francisco Alba and the Portuguese lawyer and criminologist Rui Patrício pen their ideas.
It was as if speed, which was the subject that had been planned and announced long ago for this edition, had morphed into the image of our perplexity and blended into the measure of our distance from things. This edition of Electra was ready to go to print when life changed completely. Suddenly spaces closed and time turned about face, pulling tomorrow into today and slowly leading today into tomorrow.
Among the many names that have been used to describe the society in which we live, a matter that also involves issues within the realms of theory (the society of the spectacle, society of simulacra, risk society, etc.), there might be yet another very important name: the society of speed and acceleration. The technical acceleration of modernity, which in recent times has reached a state of paroxysm at the limit of the speed of light thanks to information and digital technologies, has become the most decisive phenomenon not only in social and cultural change but also in the way we live our lives. The experience of time, as marked by acceleration, has become a vertiginous spiral. Everything, from the circulation of money to information, from work rules to leisure activities, takes place at a speed that is increasing relentlessly. This has led to two emblematic diseases of our time. One, burnout, is physical and psychological and the other is socio-political in nature and bears an old name in new clothes, alienation. Appeals have been made to slow down, for the sake of our health and that of our planet. But it was not these appeals that caused a spectacular break in this movement that everyone believed to be irreversible unless there were some kind of natural catastrophe. The slowdown has come in the guise of a virus that has spread all over the world. It was enough for us to experience in practice what we already knew in theory: in the world that we live in, reducing speed brings everything falling down round our ears. Because speed is a total social phenomenon, we have chosen it as the ‘Subject’ for this edition of Electra.
This article was written by a scientist, an astrophysicist who also inhabits the realms of philosophy. Its starting point is the hypothesis that the world has died, in the sense that a ‘transcendental commonality’, which the idea of a cosmos assumes, has already been lost. According to this hypothesis, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is a factor of this cosmocide that makes the question about the ‘post-Covid-19’ world inapt.
Yves Citton is the co-director of the journal Multitudes. His point of departure is the distinction between speed and acceleration, in line with Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek’s #Accelerate: Manifesto, which he translated into French. He sees in collapse, and in the perennial crises in which we live, the only chance of a desirable change. From this point of view, the only suitable strategy for our times consists of accelerating the collapse.
Traditional farming methods and the harmonious use of resources have been completely replaced in agriculture by techno-industrial mechanisms of intensive and accelerated production. Obedience to long timeframes, expansive space, and nature’s laws and caprices have become a luxury in today’s world. A minority obeys them still, and yet others uphold, without reservations, the benefits of an agricultural model that responds to the most modern criteria of speed and efficiency. In the interview below, three agricultural professionals offer their perspectives.
In this article, the French historian François Hartog, who established the basic concepts of ‘presentism’ and ‘regimes of historicity’, delineates the main stages of a history of acceleration. They range from the dawn of modernity to the ‘presentist’ moment in which we are living, a moment for which there exists only the time of a shortened present that determines the triumph of the ‘short term’.
The French philosopher and author of Biopolitique des catastrophes, Frédéric Neyrat, carries out a critical analysis of the present, identifying its ‘kinetic dilemma’, a hesitation between two movements, one too fast and the other too slow, that are responsible for the ecological disaster. Discontinuation, he argues, is the sole ‘kinetic therapy’ that can respond to the immense problems confronting us today.
The phenomena of speed and acceleration determine every aspect of our reality, from cultural and social life to the economy. The coercive force that imposed an increasingly fast pace to human activity, in a crescendo that presupposes limitless resources (with enormous ecological consequences, including for the ecology of time and space) demands a dynamics that cannot slow down since it is the only guarantee of stability. Therefore, abruptly halting this system, hitting the brakes on an ultra-accelerated world, is not the deceleration defended by those who advocate ‘de-growth’. It is not the realisation of a utopia, but a colossal disaster. That is the globalised disaster that we are witnessing, caused by a viral pandemic.
Laurent de Sutter is professor of legal theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and managing editor of the series Perspectives Critiques (PUF – Presses universitaires de France). Here he develops a hypothesis that, under certain conditions, accepts accelerationism – i.e. the perspective that advocates reformulating and not sabotaging or damping down the means and the infrastructure that we have inherited from modernity.
In the view of Italian philosopher Federico Leoni, the novel coronavirus cannot be regarded simply from the perspective of its very obvious effects of deceleration and shut-down, as, on the contrary, it has also been a factor of acceleration for certain ongoing movements that relate specifically to our times.
These two indirectly conflicting articles speak different languages. They are an eloquent example of a disagreement (i.e. two languages that do not have a common measure) raised by the issue of 'race'. The first is by Vasco M. Barreto, a biologist and researcher at the Faculty of Medical Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. The second is by Pedro Schacht Pereira who has a PhD in Portuguese and Brazilian studies from Brown University in the United States and often writes about racism in the Portuguese press. Anthony Appiah, an important figure in cultural studies, once said, 'It is time for the biological concept of race to disappear without a trace.' But, as Barreto's article shows, the concept has not disappeared and its traces are still appearing in scientific debates. This debate is far from the 'scientific' racism prior to the Second World War, but still raises controversies, reservations and hesitations. On the contrary, from the point of view of post-colonial studies, it is just a discursive category. And it is precisely on the assumption of race as a discursive construction within a culture and a language that Pedro Schacht Pereira bases the issue of racism in a work by Eça de Queirós.
On 18 January 1892 the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Gazeta de Notícias included a Literary Supplement, which was launched with an introductory article by Eça de Queirós. The text bears the eye-catching title “Europe in a nutshell. Our supplement” and is primarily directed at readers who the author knew were inclined to accept the information coming from Europe with few reservations. What is not immediately clear is the purpose with which the Portuguese writer, who presumably wrote the text in Paris, decided to launch a literary supplement with a description of the social situation in Europe in his day.
After decades of uneasy silence, the past year or so has thrown up a series of unconnected episodes that feed into an ongoing debate about racism and the colonial legacy: speaking from a former slaving station (in Senegal), the Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, felt it was relevant to point to the abolition of slavery under the Marquis of Pombal; a group of skinheads kept watch over a statue of Padre António Vieira, seen by many as a proponent of “selective slavery”; the Public Prosecution Service accused a number of police officers of racist abuse and violence against young people in Cova da Moura; the controversy over what to call the “Discoveries Museum” showed that the evolution over time of a single word is enough to paint a psychoanalytical portrait of a people. The USA has also seen a resurgence in the latent racial tensions that Obama preferred to let lie: the country now has a racist president in the White House and identity politics are on the up. Although I run the risk of being called untrue to my roots, or worse, these seemingly disparate events have prompted me to look again at the controversy concerning the intelligence of different ethnic groups. Why? Because this is the last vexata quaestio.
In one of his diaries, Kafka warned, ‘You don’t need to leave your room. Stay sitting at your desks and listen. You don’t even need to listen; just wait. You don’t need to wait; just stay still, silent, alone. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.’ The two diaries that we have published in this edition are by the photographer Daniel Blaufuks and the visual artist Mariana Silva. They are about the lockdown that has been imposed on us by the Covid-19 pandemic. They are based on two places on lockdown in a world held prisoner by the virus and fear: near Lisbon for him; New York for her. In these two ‘Books of Hours’, Blaufuks and Silva look at the world through a window that looks from outside in. But this window was not presented to them on a platter. They were the ones that opened it with a look that thinks, sees, speaks. Was it not also Kafka who said, ‘Man does not grow upwards, but from inside out.’?
This work corresponds to the last eleven days of the (official) lockdown. It is part of a larger undertaking entitled Os dias estão numerados/The Days are Numbered, covering the period from 24 April to 4 May 2020.
It is strange to compose a diary of what living in Queens during quarantine means. Everyone’s experience is atomized and enclosed by the walls of their apartment. These snippets of information become events that happen between the space of my phone screen and the window facing the street outside.
This question was raised after the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded, rather controversially, to Peter Handke, who publicly defended the former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In this section, two authors give us their response: the critic, essayist and translator João Barrento, and the writer and director of the French journal Lignes, Michel Surya. João Barrento reviews a series of problematic ‘cases’ in the art and literature of the twentieth century to demonstrate the complexity of the issue and the different answers that he has obtained; Michel Surya asserts quite radically that great literature, ever the subject of scandal, knows no limits.
Let us make our position clear from the start, as summarised in the two epigraphs. The first, more problematic, written in a Europe on the brink of World War I, implies that body-mind-action should tend towards a human ideal of integrity (the ‘upright gait’ also mentioned by Ernst Bloch); the other (derived from a classic of theoretical thought, written at the end of that war) proposes that art is not above (or below) an ethical conscience and that beauty should not excuse barbarity or forms of thought that legitimise it.
Great books are not loved. Their authors even less so. Great writers are not loved. Their books even less so. The former are always tainted by the suspicion that they are too free. The latter are suspected of allowing themselves this freedom. In either case, this freedom will never be enough for books and their authors. Enough to exhaust the possibilities of freedom itself. This is what gives rise to fear (provoking ‘hostility’, according to Bernhard). In this, they would not like their readers to be more self-sufficient than they are, which is more frightening still.
Stupidity is of all times but each time has its own stupidity. Flaubert inspired us by defining the forms of a stupidity that is neither the eternal nor the timeless type. Instead, this stupidity appears as the symptom of an age, lending it its features — i.e. the platitudes, preconceptions, and worn-out words that form, in their rigidity and conceit, manifestations as hard as rock. In our time of artificial intelligence, the purpose here is to highlight, analyse, and question some of the figures of contemporary stupidity, which cannot be entirely identified without us turning to another word of the same semantic field: idiocy.
If we define the idiot considering the etymological meaning of the word, we find an association with identity and the claim for the private, identity and a rootedness that create hostility towards everything that comes from outside. The rejection of migrants and refugees, who arrive in Europe fleeing war, terrorism, and catastrophes, is fed by a fear mechanism with the attributes of idiocy.
At its origin, the world wide web gave rise to a naïve dream — the utopia of a digital public space that would fulfil all the promises implicit in the modern conception of public space. But the outcome today is clearly a different one; instead of the promised digital paradise, the winners have been chaos and the discourse of stupidity in its most violent and regressive forms, as the example of an image board called 4chan eloquently shows us.
Stupidity makes us reactive, igniting indignation, a redeeming idiophobia and denunciation. But, evidently, it is almost always the stupidity of others that is at stake, since our own, practised in the first person, is nothing but a more or less provisional episode, though overcome, a weakness that has happened in the past and that we can only feel sorry about now: “I was really stupid!”
American philosopher Avital Ronell, author of a book entitled Stupidity, continues here her attempt to understand and analyse the phenomenon and concept of stupidity, showing that, although situated in a space prior to speech, it can be appropriated by literature and by philosophy.
The matrix of contemporary art, its «primitive scene» — Marcel Duchamp’s urinal — was the object of exclusion (from an exhibition) that allows reference to be made to one of the manifestations of stupidity: «stupefaction». The bewilderment many works of art have since been able to arouse in viewers makes the evocation of stupidity pertinent, and even necessary, both in critical reception and in the confrontation of the public with contemporary art.
In the times we are living in, new digital technologies provide us with a true flood of information. But we remain highly ignorant of how this information is produced, selected, and ranked, i.e. there is an information deficit on information itself, which leads to its acritical acceptance and a backward step in thinking and reflection.
The effects of May 1968 can be found in many current forms of struggle and revolt, where a new political awareness is being manifested — proof that the movement which erupted in Paris precisely 50 years ago had a highly mobilizing effect and cannot be reduced to a meaningless event: this is what American historian Kristin Ross shows us.
The relationship between the public sphere and privacy has been completely changed in our time, similarly to what happens in the relationship between the individual (that invention of the Enlightenment) and society.