Looking at time, and the different conceptions of time, be it as subjective elaboration in St. Augustine, empirical apprehension in David Hume or pure intuition of the spirit in Immanuel Kant, it is in the bond, made, unmade or remade, between that which was, is and will be the world, and we within it, that the new is announced, unveiled, affirmed and played out, in interminable play in which it appears, disappears and reappears with its light-filled faces and masks of darkness.

So the new is, or may be, clear and confused, patent and latent, true and false, real and virtual, potential and actual, good and bad, positive and negative, existent and utopian, ugly and beautiful, foreseen and unforeseeable, individual and collective, natural and artificial, and is, sometimes, a number of these things, or their intersection, at the same time. The new is, or may be, creation, discovery, invention, recovery, refusal, deviation, promise, threat, tendency, repetition (eternal return). It is, or may be, subject and object, form and content, theme and technique, method and style. It is, or may be, beginning and end (death is for each life that ends in it an absolutely new thing), proximity and distance, aura and vestige, thought and feeling. That is why the new is said not to be a value, in and of itself.

At every step, the history of the new runs into the history of philosophy and of theology, of art and of science, of literature and of film, of politics and of the media, of ideology and of technology, of anthropology and of cosmology, of psychology and of sociology, of propaganda and of advertising, of architecture and of design, of theatre and of fashion, of sport and of music, of the body and of the mind, of sensations and of eroticism, of nature and of the climate.

Sometimes, the old (or the ancient) is called new, to disguise the fact it is archaic and obsolete. Other times, the new is called old (or outdated) in order to lessen its danger, to discredit its hopefulness and to play down its creative and subversive impulse.

The new also comes with words that support, follow on from and echo it, that are in tune with it. These words are: newness, innovation, renewal. And discontinuity, originality, modernity, contemporaneity.

Originating from Greek, ‘neo’ has become the prefix to words that have grown and multiplied, in our saturated and perplexed times, in order to say reiteration, reclamation or reappropriation of ideas, concepts, schools, currents, events from the past. Some examples: neoconservatism, neoliberalism, neo-baroque, neofigurative, neofascism, neopaganism, neocolonial, neo-avant-garde, neo-Keynsian.

Neo joins a growing list of other prefixes, such as post, hyper, ultra and trans, leading some to see this genealogical exercise in classification as reflecting our age’s obsessive uneasy conscience of the new and its inability to create itself and to define itself without using pre-codified words and without reference to past ages. Ours have been called second-hand times. At the start of his Grammars of Creation, George Steiner writes: ‘We have no more beginnings.’

In the thinking of Michel Foucault, enquiry into newness is a boat that crosses the deep and wide seas of his work, connecting it to episteme, understood as the various relations that, in a given historical period, unite the discursive practices that generate epistemological figures, permitting the creation of new discourse and new knowledge.

In The Order of Things, he asks: ‘What does it mean to inaugurate new thinking?’ And he goes on:

In the shift from circular time to linear time, from stability to progress, from the same to the other, from the New Testament, with the Canonical or Apocryphal Gospels, to Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, from Columbus’ New World to Dvořák’s New World Symphony, from Salazar’s New State to Roosevelt’s New Deal, from the Nouveau Roman to New Technologies, from New Education to Nouvelle Vague, from Art Nouveau (and Jugendstil) to New Age, from Dante’s Vita Nuova to Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen’s Mar Novo, from New Dance to New Circus, from Nu Metal to New Wave, from New Identities to New Families, from New Philosophers to Nouvelle Cuisine, from Nouvelle Critique to New Avant-gardes, from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin to the New Museum in New York, from New Opportunities to New Tendencies, from New Powers to New Wars, from Huxley’s Brave New World to the New Man of Hitler and Stalin (in the catalogue of Jean Clair’s exhibition ‘Les Années 30: La fabrique de “l’homme nouveau’”), from New Amsterdam to New England, the word ‘new’, spoken and written in every language and form of language, traverses nature and culture, knowing and doing, wakefulness and sleep, body and mind, the gods and the stars, humans and other animals, vegetable and mineral.

The word ‘new’ is used to say new things or to say new things about old things. Right at the start of the monument of happenings and characters, created or recreated through words which is War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy writes, describing the reception room and hostess of the opening scene of the narrative: ‘Anna Pávlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite.’ This prosaic observation, objectively factual and apparently circumstantial, presents us with elements of linguistics, medicine, psychology, sociology and politics.

In the history of art, the new as an idea, vision, purpose, project and manifesto is presented and accepted as a vehement assertion of the visible.

In the 19th century, each Salon des Indépendants and each Salon de Refusés was a crossing from the ancient to the modern, and a homeless homeland of the new. And in the first half of the 20th century, from Futurism to Dadaism, from Cubism to Surrealism, from Fauvism to Vorticism, there was a continuous succession of ruptures and revolutions carried out in the name of the new, of newness and innovation.

In conversation with André Malraux, Picasso said: ‘We have to make what isn’t there, what has never been made [...], a painter must never do what people expect of him.’

For the surrealists, the new could and should be sought in the ancient and the distant, as happened with Antonin Artaud, in Mexico, when he went to live with the Tarahumara. This ritual experience gave rise to the account Journey to the Land of the Tarahumara, which became a classic of the revelation of and search for the new in the most ancient myth.

Earlier than this, in one of his initiatic letters to his brother and accomplice, Theo, Vincent van Goch, ‘society’s suicide’, as Artaud called him, speaks of his friend Paul Gauguin, with whom he was living and working in Arles, and his search for the new in the distant, saying:

And in a letter to Émile Bernard, he writes: ‘However I, sensing a new world in the offing, and certainly believing in the possibility of a huge rebirth of art...’

We can ask this radical question: does the new actually exist? In the Old Testament, in the book of Ecclesiastes, we can read: ‘What has been will be again, / what has been done will be done again; / there is nothing new under the sun.’

The Bible was written on the earth of time, thinking of the heaven of eternity, and its text stands and hesitates between that eternity and time. It walks on these two feet, in uneven steps and with a swaying gait. The whole of the first book, Genesis, is an unstoppable and epic narrative of the creation of the new. And in the Gospel of St. John, Jesus says: ‘A new command I give you: Love one another.’

Speaking of Henri Bergson, the author of Creative Evolution, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze made the following fundamental assertion: ‘Bergson changed philosophy by posing the question of the new that is being made instead of the question of eternity.’

The painter Eugène Delacroix answered the radical question about the new as follows: ‘The new exists and may even be said to be precisely everything that is most ancient.’ The painter and writer Almada Negreiros, who with Fernando Pessoa was a fellow contributor to the epoch-making Orpheu review, took this assertion as the foundation for his artistic and cultural vision, obsessively pursuing his research into numerology and geometry.

And Marcel Proust, with his talent for pinning down paradox, pointed out that: ‘A true journey of discovery consists not of searching for new landscapes, but of seeing through new eyes.’

Down the ages, there have been recurrent disputes between the old and the new, ancient and modern, traditionalists and revolutionaries, and some of them are landmarks in cultural history. One example is the famous ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ (or ‘Quarrel of the Classics and the Moderns’), which raged in the Académie Française in the late 17th century. The debate is not yet over, and every now and then it breaks out again with renewed fury.

In Portugal, one of founding controversies of the modern era in politics and culture was fought out in the second half of the 19th century, and was known as the ‘Coimbra Question’ or the ‘Question of Good Sense and Good Taste’. The philosopher and distinguished poet, Antero de Quental, one of the leading lights of the Generation of the 70s and spokesman for the European-oriented New Idea, championing socialism, realism and naturalism, wrote the following in an open letter to António Feliciano de Castilho, regarded as heading the traditional literary establishment, with its gatekeeping powers:

In the same climate of tension, rivalry, conflict or outright warfare between the new and the old, creation and repetition, past and future, in 1918, the French poet Apollinaire wrote, on the death of the writer, rebel and social outcast, Joséphin Péladan, author of a work on art that acquired cult status, On the Androgynous:

With this accusation, the author of Alcools denounces the conventional conformism, or conformist conventionalism, of public opinion and of the media that shape it and act as its managers, subjects and, not infrequently, abusers. As well as being resigned to mediocrity, they are all incapable of recognising, appreciating, valuing and sharing the authentically new with their readers. Trapped in the sterile routines of ignorance, their view is that only the old, only the tried and tested, have any value and import. Or else that what matters is the new fake, or faked innovation.

Some have argued that, in our present age, with social media and its inter- ‑reactions with traditional media, Apollinaire’s diatribe has been vindicated anew, and gained a startling new currency. The end of criticism in the media, its place usurped by comment, lightweight opinion and hidden, misleading or indirect advertising, is another ominous symptom of this.

All those writers − Apollinaire, Péladan, Gourmont − used the press to assert and fight for their ideas. The journals in which they wrote constituted a gesture of rejecting what existed and proposing something new, representing a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’. They were an alternative, offered in the name of the new, to what was old, stale, anachronistic, worn out, exhausted, unacceptable.

It was in those journals that creative and combative vitality was allowed to take the stage. It was there that people could read and see what had previously been neither read nor seen. It was on their pages that bien-pensant vulgarity, doxa, the consensus view and dominant outlook, so often regarded as representing the spirit of the time, were called into question, probed, insulted, challenged. This is why those journals, which shaped their time and heralded times to come, brought violent attacks upon themselves and provoked burning controversies, bitter polemics, heated debates, the exertion of pressure, moralistic campaigning, condemnation and legal battles.

During the same years that Apollinaire pitilessly lampooned the ‘gentlemen of the press’, the great poet Fernando Pessoa, a major figure in Portuguese and European modernism, founded and edited journals, in order to showcase the new, make waves, question the establishment view, issue accusations, change the scale of values, provoke indignation and outcry.

There were doctors and critics who deplored what they read there, and the new things in the writing, as ‘literature of the madhouse’. It was in those pages that Pessoa’s famous British good manners shed their tranquil and elegant use of irony. It was there that those good manners broke down and shook. It was there that his thin, timid voice shouted improprieties and shouted that the emperor was naked. Of these various journals, the most important was Orpheu, of which he later said

However, in the poet of the heteronyms, the body that gestures and acts in life, to make life live, was not unaccompanied by the soul that never loses or removes death from its centre. In Pessoa, the exterior spectacle of the world is inseparable from that cool, inner lucidity that reduces illusions and even disillusions to the dust whence we came and whither we go. In The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares, the semi-heteronym that all but coincides with his creator, speaks about a strange and fleeting kind of newness:

The history of the new often points us to the history of journals, both cultural and literary, artistic and architectural, journals of theatre, film, science and philosophy. And it has also been observed that the history of culture, in recent centuries, could be traced through the insistent history of its cultural journals, like Ariadne’s thread in its intricate labyrinth.

To put together a journal is to give the new an opportunity in each edition that is made for that purpose. In the first edition of Electra, we wrote: ‘We hope that, while being what they are, all issues can be the first of the ones to follow, and the last of the preceding ones.’

From their content to their form, from the text to the pictures, from the artwork to the graphic design, from the editorial line to the aesthetic criteria, journals have showcased the new, spoken of the new, embraced the new, heralded the new. At their best, they offer a unique and splendid vantage point from which to view the new and innovation, originality and creativity, the unexpected and the unknown. They have spearheaded visual, artistic and verbal breakthroughs. Which is to say, aesthetic, moral and political.

Looking back, today, at some of the great journals of the modern and contemporary eras, such as Ver Sacrum, Verve, Il Futurismo, Die Fackel, Blast, Orpheu, Wendingen, Minotaure, Sur, La Nouvelle Revue Française, Les Temps Modernes, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Interview, Rolling Stone, October and Avalanche, we can still find cause for surprise, amazement, admiration and even wonder.

In choosing the new as the ‘Subject’ of this edition of Electra, we reaffirm our allegiance to the principle that the vocation of journals is not to grow tired, not to repeat ourselves and not to stagnate. This is the new that interests us, and not caricatures of the new, fakes, mystifications and abuses.

True to its founding purposes, each issue of Electra is a step into the unknown, where its past editions are always the stepping off point.

P.S.: After six years with no change, Electra has increased its cover price as from this issue. We trust that our readers, mindful of the inflation of recent years, will understand the need for this alteration. Even so, thanks to EDP Foundation, which created this journal, our sales revenues will remain far below our real editorial and production costs. As always, we feel sure that we can rely on your loyalty as readers.