At what point did we begin referring to education predominantly as an investment, love as a contract, family as a partnership, friendship as a network, and the future as a dividend? When did the naturalisation of this language occur, establishing a relationship to the world on the basis of a transaction according to which experience is defined by returns, and subjectivity by value? An indicator of this profound mutation can be found in the way the word speculation inscribed itself so vehemently and yet so banally in the contemporary imaginary. While current usage has reduced it to something commonplace due to its association with financial markets, deals and scams; the word still carries its centuries of muted meanings, when a speculator meant a mystical prophet, star gazer, mirror maker, or visionary artist. These are the forgotten declinations of the prime category of the era of financial capital, that which defines our political unconscious.

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.

On the basis of two films, the teacher, who is also (or especially) a poet and renowned translator, reflects on his experience of dealing with school-age youngsters. He takes the stage in a clear-sighted relationship with the ‘restless’ characters of students going through the different stages of a sinuous ‘mental path’.
 

Stefan Kürten is a well-reputed German artist whose work has been shown in art galleries and institutions in Europe and the USA. He was professor for painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently guest professor at the School of Art and Design, Alfred University, New York. In this portfolio, especially created for Electra, he develops some of the themes and motifs most represented in his work. The respected curator and critic Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, wrote the following essay expressly to accompany this artwork. He speaks of the inspiration that Kürten’s work finds in cinema, of the strange relationship between architecture, innocence and terror – and, also, of the images, and the stories that we derive from them.

Ann Cotten is an Austrian poet and essayist, born in the United States, whose work, recognised for its originality and plurality, has been published by the prestigious German publisher Suhrkamp. Here, the writer introduces us to Steyr, a ‘statutory city’ in Upper Austria, named after one of its two rivers. In understanding the journey to get there, we begin to form a notion of what we are going to find, in a powerful association of nature with historical and cultural memory and with its industrial factory heritage. In this text, in which the impersonal precision of objective information is combined with a personal and subjective look, we are given a portrait of a land that Ann Cotten visited to meet friends who ‘are master skiers and keep a mountain hut for hiking in summer and a chalet for winter sports’.

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.

For some time now in Portugal, the word super has been used and abused as a form of emphasis and overstatement. Rightly or not, individuals from certain social and professional groups employ it as a suffix, noun or adjective, augmenting what is being said and, as a consequence, themselves. It can be likened to the urge to exclaim about everything: ‘It’s great!’ This optimistic desire to hyperbolise the world is an interesting symptom that is important to note. The author of this entry of the ‘Dictionary of Received Ideas’ moves on to discuss the semantics of the word super.

In this article, the sociologist João Sedas Nunes, professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Lisbon, focuses on a new category of football supporters, whom he calls ‘post-supporters’, who make use of the principles of irony and critical detachment. For this reason, they no longer fit into the old model, where passion, and even fanaticism, for a club ruled.

To invoke Friedrich Nietzsche at the start of what we write is always an attempt to look at what we are seeing with wiser and more unconstrained eyes, less obedient and less set in their ways than our own.

In classical Marxist theory, surplus value is defined as the difference between the value of the product of labour and the remuneration that is sufficient to support labour power – a difference that in capitalist regimes is appropriated by capitalist entrepreneurs.In this context, labour is considered a commodity. In actual fact, looked at more closely, labour is not a commodity in Marx’s view, but rather the use value of the unique commodity that is labour power.