About October

Reviewed work(s):
Source: October, Vol. 1 (Spring, 1976), pp. 3-5
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778502 .
Accessed: 13/02/2012 20:45

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 About OCTOBER

We have named this journal in celebration of that moment in our century

when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation were
joined in a manner exemplary and unique. For the artists of that time and place,
literature, painting, architecture, film required and generated their own Octobers,
radical departures articulating the historical movement which enclosed them,
sustaining it through civil war, factional dissension and economic crisis.
Within a decade, this movement, that moment, were memorialized in a work
that is itself a celebration of the manner in which aesthetic innovation may be a
vector in the process of social change. Eisenstein's October, of 1927-28, was
commissioned for the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. This was, as well, the
year of Trotsky's expulsion from the Soviet Union. October was the summa of the
silent Soviet film, which transformed the nature of an art paradigmatic for our
century. It was a penultimate stage in that revolutionary project which was to be
modified by the Silence of totalitarian censure and its conscription of Sound.
October was, as we now know, propadeutic for the realization of Eisenstein's two
Utopian projects, Capital and Ulysses,* in which the innovations of intellectual
montage were to be developed to their fullest dialectical potential. Their conception
and their censure are inscribed as the ultimate limits of October in the Arts.
Our aim is not to perpetuate the mythology or hagiography of Revolution. It
is rather to reopen an inquiry into the relationships between the several arts which
flourish in our culture at this time, and in so doing, to open discussion of their role
at this highly problematic juncture. We do not wish to share in that self-
authenticating pathos which produces, with monotonous regularity, testimonies to
the fact that "things are not as good as they were" in 1967, '57-or in 1917.
The cultural life of this country, traditionally characterized by a fragmented
parochialism, has been powerfully transformed over the past decade and a half by
developing interrelationships between her most vital arts. Thus, innovations in the
performing arts have been inflected by the achievements of painters and sculptors,
those of film-makers have been shaped by poetic theory and practice.
* The second issue of October will carry a translation of Eisenstein's unpublished diary entries for
1927-1928 on his project for Capital, together with an introduction by Annette Michelson.
4 OCTOBER

There exists, however, no journal which attempts to assess and sustain these
developments. American criticism continues to exist as a number of isolated and
archaic enterprises, largely predicated upon assumptions still operative in the
literary academy. The best-known of our intellectual journals-among them,
Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, Salmagundi-are staffed or
administered by that academy and, more importantly, articulate its limits and
contradictions. They have, in fact, sustained a division between critical discourse
and significant artistic practice. More than this, they have, in their ostentatious
disregard of innovation in both art and critical method, encouraged the growth of a
new philistinism within the intellectual community. Readers wishing to inform
themselves of developments in contemporary painting and sculpture, writers
desiring to encourage consideration of new cinematic forms must seek out various
overspecialized reviews (The Drama Review, Artforum, Film Culture), which are
unable to provide forums for intensive critical discourse. For none of the latter
publications provides a framework for critical exchange, for intertextuality within
the larger context of theoretical discussion.
October is planned as a quarterly that will be more than merely interdisci-
plinary: one that articulates with maximum directness the structural and social
interrelationships of artistic practice in this country. Its major points of focus will
be the visual arts, cinema, performance, music; it will consider literature in
significant relation to these. October will publish critical and theoretical texts by
scholars and critics, texts and statements by contemporary artists, texts and
documents by artists of the past whose work has influenced contemporary practice.
It will present texts or these kinds in translation from foreign languages as well. Its
emphasis on contemporaneity is designed to initiate a series of reexaminations of
historical developments.
October's structure and policy are predicated upon a dominant concern: the
renewal and strengthening of critical discourse through intensive review of the
methodological options now available. October's strong theoretical emphasis will
be mediated by its consideration of present artistic practice. It is our conviction that
this is possible only within a sustained awareness of the economic and social bases
of that practice, of the material conditions of its origins and processes, and of their
intensely problematic nature at this particular time.
As this issue demonstrates, we will publish writing grounded in presupposi-
tions that are materialist, or at times idealist. Indeed, the tensions between radical
artistic practice and dominant ideology will be a major subject of inquiry. They
demand clarification. In matters of this sort, Marx's evaluation of Balzac is
exemplary; Lukacs's views of Brecht and Kafka are not. The idealisms of Malevich
and Brakhage are among the more interesting and problematic instances of such
contradictions. They are to be analyzed, not dismissed.
'October' is a reference which remains, for us, more than exemplary; it is
instructive. For us, the argument regarding Socialist Realism is nonexistent. Art
begins and ends with a recognition of its conventions. We will not contribute to that
About OCTOBER 5

social critique which, swamped by its own disingenuousness, gives credence to such
an object of repression as a mural about the war in Vietnam, painted by a white
liberal resident in New York, a war fought for the most part by ghetto residents
commanded by elements drawn from the southern lower-middle-class.
Nor do we concur with the vulgar cliche that criticism's hypothetical readers
have no familiarity with works of art. The most apparent constituent of that
attitude too is its innate authoritarianism.
October will be plain of aspect, its illustrations determined by considerations
of textual clarity. These decisions follow from a fundamental choice as to the
primacy of text and the writer's freedom of discourse. Long working experience
with major art journals has convinced us of the need to restore to the criticism of
painting and sculpture, as to that of other arts, an intellectual autonomy seriously
undermined by emphasis on extensive reviewing and lavish illustration. October
wishes to address those readers who, like many writers and artists, feel that the
present format of the major art reviews is producing a form of pictorial journalism
which deflects and compromises critical effort. Limited and judicious illustration
will contribute to the central aim of October's texts: the location of those coordi-
nates whose axes chart contemporary artistic practice and significant critical
discourse.
THE EDITORS