Anthropology of the Electricity Pylon

In December 1999, the storms Lothar and Martin brought down more than a thousand high-voltage pylons in France and cut off electricity to 3.7 million households, sometimes for three weeks. Neighbouring Germany, crossed by the same winds, remained largely lit. The French electricity pylon, what engineers wanted to make of it and what France made of it, deserves in my view to be looked at as an object of culture.

An intuition before 1999

Before the storm, I was already looking at those tall lattice pylons with a kind of amused puzzlement. I would think to myself that there was something phallic about them, raised above the fields by engineers who could not have been the most fulfilled men in the world. It was more of a passing fancy than an analysis, a thought that came back from time to time, in the car on country roads. The December 1999 storm gave body to that intuition. It was then that I learned that in Germany, crossed by the same winds, the damage had been much smaller because the network was more often buried. That was the moment when I imagined writing a text I would have wanted to call “psychoanalysis of the electricity pylon”.

Twenty-six years later, I come back to it differently. Psychoanalysis, on this subject, is not the right tool. It individualises a choice that plays out collectively, and ascribes to particular engineers an intentionality that nothing in their practice authorises one to attribute to them. Anthropology is more apt. The French electricity pylon belongs to the long technical mythology through which this country has been telling itself its own story since the nineteenth century.

December 1999, the figures

On 26, 27 and 28 December 1999, the storms Lothar and Martin swept across France with gusts reaching two hundred kilometres per hour on the plains. The figures published by RTE for the transmission network are unprecedented: thirty-eight 400 kV lines out of service, around a hundred 225 kV lines interrupted, more than four hundred 63 and 90 kV lines damaged, more than a thousand high and very-high-voltage pylons damaged or down, one hundred and eighty-four electrical substations inoperative. 3.7 million households, that is ten million people, were without electricity. In some rural areas of Limousin, Périgord and Charente, the wait would last three weeks.

At the same time, Lothar continued its course eastwards. It hit the Black Forest, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, with winds peaking at two hundred and seventy-two kilometres per hour at Mount Hohentwiel, a European record. Germany received the same meteorological shock. Recovery there was faster, mass outages shorter, rural areas less harshly affected over time. The difference comes down to the topology of the networks.

By the late nineteen-nineties, France had about fifteen percent of its distribution network buried. Germany had, at the same date, more than seventy percent at low voltage and more than fifty percent at medium voltage. The Netherlands was close to one hundred percent, Belgium around eighty-five, the United Kingdom above eighty. France lay at the back of the European pack, at the end of half a century of consistent political choices anchored in an even older technical mythology.

The very large lattice pylons that tower over rural landscapes, the ones carrying 225 and 400 kilovolt lines, are not comparable to the secondary poles that line country roads. For very high voltage, burying remains everywhere costly and limited; it raises physical problems of reactive capacity and heat dissipation that are not a matter of mere political will. The radical difference between France and its neighbours plays out elsewhere, on low and medium voltage, that capillary network which serves villages and hamlets. It is that capillary network, and the trees that fell on it, which caused the bulk of the prolonged outages of 1999.

The collective imagination, however, retained the images of the great lattice pylons bent in two. The ordinary poles of country roads, which caused the actual suffering of the population, remained in the shadow. The great pylon concentrated the story on itself.

The pylon as myth

In his Mythologies, published in 1957, Roland Barthes develops the idea that ordinary, seemingly trivial objects are charged by a given culture with a second meaning that naturalises ideology. Myth, in the Barthesian sense, is depoliticised speech, a discourse that turns history into nature. A car advertisement, an illustrated dish in a cookbook, a presidential poster: in each of these objects we read, alongside its material reality, a mythology that presents itself as obvious. The French electricity pylon is one of those objects.

France invented, at the dawn of the industrial era, a particular way of bringing its technical objects into the national narrative. The Eiffel Tower, erected in 1889 for the World’s Fair, is the archetype. Barthes devoted a text to it in 1964 in which he showed how this engineering construction, originally hated by Parisian artists (Maupassant said he dined under it because it was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it), gradually came to be charged with a mythological meaning that exceeded its function. The Tower serves no purpose, or almost none, and it is precisely that near-gratuitousness that turns it into an emblem. The high-voltage pylon inherits this gesture, with the difference that it has a real function, which lets it combine usefulness and sign.

In the nineteen-thirties, the first long-distance transmission lines extended the movement. The Brommat-Chevilly line, inaugurated in 1932, brought to Paris the electricity produced by the dams of the Massif Central: five hundred kilometres of 220 kilovolt lines planted across Lozère, Cantal, Limousin and Auvergne. The visible infrastructure said to every rural village that it was now connected to the capital. The pylon is the needle that stitches France to itself.

After the war, the lineage grew. The great dams of the nineteen-fifties (Tignes, Serre-Ponçon, Génissiat) became national monuments. Schoolchildren were taken to visit them, films were shot there, opening ceremonies were held with great pomp. The dam is the pylon in reverse: the verticality reaching up to the sky gives way to the mass blocking the valley, but the mythological gesture remains the same. Then came the nuclear power plants of the nineteen-seventies, even more charged with mythology, becoming the object of a national cult borne by the Corps des Mines and the atomic energy commission. Then the TGV of the nineteen-eighties. Then the EPRs, each construction site of which is now treated by the press as a geopolitical event in itself.

Germany has no equivalent of this lineage. The country has its dams, its power plants, its fast trains, its high-voltage lines, without charging them with a national mythology. German culture, heir to an old municipal federalism, values rather the Gemütlichkeit of the local and artisanal precision. Its emblematic objects are the well-built car and the well-designed tool, rather than monumental infrastructure as such.

The French electricity pylon thus takes its place in a national mythology that precedes and carries it. The 1965 presidential poster, where François Mitterrand stood in front of the silhouette of a pylon under the slogan “A young president for a modern France”, drew on a ready-made myth. The historian Marcel Lorin could write in 1991, without surprising anyone, that very-high-voltage lines had been perceived as the very symbols of the post-war renewal. The artist Elena Paroucheva, who calls the pylons our menhirs and modern cathedrals, simply names what French culture had deposited in them.

1946, the megamachine

It was in 1946 that this mythology became state infrastructure. After the war, the programme of the National Council of the Resistance called for the return to the nation of the great means of production. The law of 8 April 1946, brought before the National Assembly by Marcel Paul, the communist Minister of Industrial Production, nationalised electricity and gas. A patchwork of one thousand three hundred private concessionaires gave way to a unified public monopoly, EDF. The initial management team was made up of Polytechnique-trained civil servants. The political project was to rebuild the nation from above, through the great corps of the State, through the great infrastructures.

This model, deployed without rupture until the early two-thousands, founded an imaginary that EDF’s own researchers came to call the mystique of interconnection. The energy historian Alexis Vrignon recalls that within the company there is a very strong attachment to the idea that the centralised national network is the guarantor of citizens’ equal access to electricity, and therefore of republican cohesion. The unity of the network extends the unity of the nation. The 1999 storm was, for EDF workers, a difficult moment but a powerful one symbolically, which had given new meaning to their usefulness for the national common good. I have heard several accounts of this: people telling me how deeply the experience had anchored them in the personal and collective sense of their work, which then appeared to them as a mission. The flat tariff between Paris and Lozère became the concrete translation of the Jacobin ideal. France centralises its production (through great Alpine and then Pyrenean dams, and through nuclear power plants) and distributes it in capillary fashion, from the centre to the periphery, on electrical motorways that irrigate the territory the way royal roads once did.

Germany, at the same period, did almost the opposite. The country today counts about eight hundred and ninety distribution network operators, an inheritance of an old municipal federalism. The Stadtwerke, those local energy boards attached to towns, have managed lighting, gas, water and later electricity since the nineteenth century. The German network is structurally decentralised. The decision to bury a line lies with each local operator, who weighs criteria of pragmatism, cost, and relations with residents. No national mystique attaches to the overhead.

Lewis Mumford, in his essay Authoritarian and Democratic Technics, published in 1963, proposes a distinction that throws light on this asymmetry. According to him, two great technical lineages run through human history. One, which he calls democratic, brings together distributed techniques, on a human scale, locally adjusted, directed by those who practise them. The other, which he calls authoritarian, was born in the fourth millennium BCE with the first sacred kingships; it gathers on a monumental scale what was previously scattered, requires centralised political control, and produces what he calls the megamachine. The Egyptian pyramids are its first expression. The nationalised French electrical network is, in my view, a contemporary one.

The megamachine does not only produce what it promises to produce. It also produces a type of human being, a relation to the world, a particular relation to power. It demands obedience and discourages local initiative; it confiscates technical debate to the benefit of an engineering elite. We experienced this in its most extreme form in France during the Covid crisis, having been one of the countries with the most authoritarian, freedom-restricting and univocal policy, breaking trust and replacing it with threat.

A silent matrix

In a recent article, I proposed the concept of cascade of rules to describe the way in which social exclusion no longer proceeds today from explicit political decisions but from rules inscribed in our technical infrastructures. I drew on CSS stylesheets, those computer languages that control the display of our web pages, to show how invisible architectures can produce massive political effects without anyone ever bearing responsibility for them. Lennie Stern, in a formula I had taken up, wrote that the word technofascism acts like a magnifying glass pointed in the wrong direction: it pushes us to look for power where it is most visible, while the essential is played out in procedures and technical architectures.

The electricity pylon belongs to that register, with one difference. It is imposing and yet has become invisible through familiarity. It is part of the landscape. Its ostensible presence has been so naturalised that any questioning of it now seems naive. For decades, no major parliamentary debate has been held on overhead versus underground; no citizens’ referendum has been organised on the electrical mesh of the territory. The choice imposed itself through the obviousness of the megamachine, through the knowledge of engineers, and through the mythological charge that surrounded it.

The recent public health period revealed, in a different register, a comparable silent matrix, made of QR codes, incidence thresholds, and cascades of access rules. In both cases, invisible or normalised infrastructures structure collective life materially, without democratic deliberation ever having taken place on their design. In both cases, a revealing event is needed (a storm, a major epidemic) for the matrix to become visible again.

The 1999 storm was, in the register of infrastructure, what the Covid crisis was in the register of public health: a moment when a mythology accepted as nature was abruptly denaturalised. The event was not enough to open the deep political debate. We rebuilt the pylons sturdier, we installed anti-cascade devices to prevent the domino effect, we accelerated burial at the margins. The technical mythology itself was not publicly questioned.

Does the pylon have an unconscious?

Was I right, before 1999, to think that those pylons were a kind of phallic symbol, raised in space by a narcissistic frustration? Taken literally, the statement falls short. The engineers who designed those pylons were competent professionals, working under specific technical and economic specifications, and it would be inaccurate to attribute to them an individual unconscious intentionality. The intuition holds, however, if one replaces individual unconscious by collective imagination, and narcissistic frustration by national mythology.

Verticality is a posture. Dominating space through tall structures, visible from kilometres away, means expressing a pathetic gesture: we are here, we hold the territory, we possess it technically. Underground infrastructure says retreat. It is there without a signature, and holds without imposing itself on the gaze. Two ways of being in the world, which correspond fairly well to the two cultural models at stake.

What displays itself to assert power is also what collapses when the wind blows too hard. The monumental pylon is more exposed than a buried line, and the visual signature of power is paid for in real physical vulnerability. Any system that displays its strength without accepting democratic debate on its foundations becomes fragile, because its legitimacy rests on mythological obviousness, and obviousness does not survive the first crisis.

That fragility also has an epistemic dimension. The pylon, like the public health crisis unit, operates on a tacit assumption: we know, you follow. The knowledge of engineers does not get debated, it gets applied. But knowledge that does not get debated gradually becomes knowledge that no longer knows, because it has been cut off from the field returns and the distributed intelligences that could have enriched it.

Towards a democratic infrastructure?

What might a democratic infrastructure look like? Mumford does not give a recipe; he only points to a direction: a distributed technique, on a human scale, locally adjusted, the design of which is debated by those who live with it. The German Stadtwerke model offers an imperfect but real approximation of this.

This does not mean that the French high-voltage transmission network should be dismantled. The physics of electricity imposes certain forms of centralisation that it would be absurd to abandon in the name of political purity. The point is rather to reclaim a space of democratic debate on the infrastructural choices that materially structure our collective life. Such choices are political, because they determine who decides for whom and who bears the consequences of the decision.

As long as French technical mythology continues to function as a shared frame of obviousness, democratic debate on infrastructures will remain difficult. One does not discuss a myth, one inhabits it. To reopen political space, the myth must first be undone, brought back to its history, returned to its cultural nature. That is the gesture Barthes called for in the afterword to his Mythologies: returning to history what presents itself as nature.

Cultural democracy, which I speak about often and the implementation of which I accompany, and infrastructural democracy, still to be built, belong to the same movement. They refuse the idea that structuring choices should be entrusted to an expert elite that knows for others, and recognise instead that the people concerned by a decision are best placed to discuss its meaning.

The fragility of our systems is the price of having for too long confused technical efficiency with cultural legitimacy. The 1999 storm said it by bending a thousand pylons across our countryside. The Covid crisis said it again by making visible the cascades of rules that governed our access to the world. There is here an invitation to take technology seriously as a political object, and to stop leaving it to the sole responsibility of technicians, who are now in collusion with capitalism in its most villainous form.