Marcos Cardão, historian and researcher of mass and popular culture phenomena, writes about the significance of the National Pantheon honours granted to Eusébio, one year after his death, which immortalised him in this temple of national memory.

Taking as her starting point the exhibition Earthkeeping/Earthshaking – Arte, feminismos e ecologia, shown at Galeria Quadrum in Lisbon, the curator and researcher Margarida Mendes writes about the cultural themes and ethics it deals with artistically and which lie at the heart of contemporary debates.

One of the characteristics of our time, which can be observed in many domains and from different perspectives, is the tendency (or trend) – and this word is already part of the complex – to cultivate and give the greatest privileges to everything that presents itself as new, that conforms to the general regime of newness as a social and cultural imperative. In this regime, the new is not that which interrupts the course of the world and time (as were the phenomena that followed the revolution model; the artistic avantgardes, for example), but that which perfectly adapts itself to the spirit of the epoch, the futility of the time, the prevailing ‘neopathy’. Therefore, the attitude that promotes the new as a great imperative which forms on the surface of actuality is not incompatible with a conservative position. The new as a commandment fully satisfies the desires of homogenisation that inevitably inhabit culture, at a time when even heritagisation and museumification are trying to invent factors of novelty.

For the ‘Subject’ of this issue of Electra we chose a topic that is, by definition, always current: ‘the new’. To develop it in several directions we have counted on the valuable contributions of authors from various fields of knowledge: Boris Groys (in an interview), critic, art and media scholar, and philosopher; François Hartog, historian; Iwan Rhys Morus, historian of science; Lionel Ruffel, critic and essayist on literary theory and studies; Nuno Nabais, philosopher.

Taking recent advertisements as a starting point and seeing them as symptoms or surface manifestations which reveal profound traits of our time, journalist and essayist Vincent Cocquebert defines and analyses our ‘egocene era’, as he calls it.

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.

The concept of ‘new’, as it is understood in philosophy, science and art, has a long history beginning with the notion of deviation, which Lucretius identified as the origin of all forms of new. Nuno Nabais, professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon, traces some of the stages in this history in order to arrive at the complex concept of new in contemporary philosophical and scientific thought.

Numbers are the code of universal harmony, divine creation, magic, and also of scientific rationality, calculation and method. Cryptic knowledge is perfectly expressed in numbers, as if they were the emanation of a mathematical God. Our age pays little heed to numerology, but is obsessed with quantification and statistics, which have become the main tool of governance, rankings, ratings and generalised evaluation as a way of managing human and material resources. It is precisely because numbers are now so dominant and powerful (to the extent that politics has become a mere province of the wider economy), that Electra is devoting the ‘Subject’ section of this issue to this area. Here you will find articles about the philosophy of number, forms of digital art, modern governance through numbers, and the history of algorithms and their function in digital networks. These compulsory stops shine light on a variety of incursions into a vast universe that continues to expand in our age - the digital age. All the images dedicated to Numbers in this issue are by António Sena. Throughout a career that spans over five decades, signs, numbers and letters represent his attempts – successful or not – to interpret the world and everything that happens in it. His work also questions the demands, potentialities and illusions of human communication in all its variety of languages. In inviting António Sena to collaborate, Electra recognises an artist who, through his intellectual research and artistic practice, and integrity and persistence, has created a body of work with a considerable formal coherence that is unique in the world of contemporary art.

‘Fame’ – is the central theme of this 11th issue of Electra. We begin with a very brief metalinguistic presentation: the word has recently become slightly anachronistic, referring it seems to something which radiates from the public sphere with characteristics that are no longer those which dominate under the all-encompassing influence of the media. Hence, today we call ‘famous’ people ‘media personalities’, and at the margins of the latest mechanisms of visibility there is really nothing that could be described as ‘fame’. If anything, there are those who benefit from the short-term prestige granted and recognised by a small section of the public and their peers. ‘Media personality’ is the term used to describe someone who frequently appears in the media. Not occasionally but constantly, on media where every appearance is profane – this is the form that fame now almost exclusively takes.

Political communication researcher Susana Salgado comments on a quote from Noel Gallagher, former Oasis vocalist. She warns that, ‘emotions trump facts’ in these times of ‘over-democratisation of the individual’.