Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Giulia Rispoli,
C
Maja Soboleva
BOOK
O UL
GENERAL EDITOR:
IN RG T
U
EDITORIAL BOARD:
SPHERICAL
SPHERICAL
BOOK
COPYRIGHTS
http://crucible.org.aalto.fi/spherical/
© Authors
ISBN 978-952-60-0076-3
Helsinki, Finland
2016
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New concepts of space in the arts grew out of the discovery of new
geometries and physical laws at the turn of the last century. The
invention of non-Euclidean geometry at the end of the nineteenth
century and the discovery of Relativity Theory and Minkowski space-
time at the beginning of the twentieth century had profound
repercussions in the arts, ranging from the traditional avant-garde of the
early century to Minimalism in the 1960s and 70s. Hyperspace presents a
useful representation for addressing the artistic concepts of space-time –
the fourth dimension, motion, and the faceting of perspective that
evolved out of this period. The tesseract provides a model-metaphor for
forms of composition that derive from the deconstruction of linear
sources, allowing for a multi-dimensional re-composition of the parts that
actively engages the viewer in constructing associative flow structures.
The twentieth century avant-garde movements can be seen as the
forbearers of somatic montage in contemporary cinema. Somatic
montage1 explores the concept of montage in the visual arts, poetry, and
literature, but especially in cine-installation and immersive cinema as a
formal construct rooted in the notions of juxtaposition, cells, and collision
developed by Sergei Eisenstein and the Soviet cinema. A somatic
approach to cinema montage engages a supra-dimensional interaction
between the film’s content and the viewer with the immersive space in a
unity of form, participation, and content. In a somatic montage the film is
physically distributed throughout an architectural or virtual theater. The
scenes occupy different spatial as well as temporal locations as an added
dimension of montage. Immersive cinema affords expanding the
signification structure of a film from its internal narrative out into a
navigable projection space.
Immersive film creation is in the early stages of development
towards a modern, cinematic language. The notion of somatic montage
proposed here is presented as a broader, multi-dimensional interpretation
of what Eisenstein called the “disjunctive method of narration”
(Eisenstein 1949a), made applicable to immersive cinema. The external
architecture of the projection space is utilized as an ordering element in
the compositional flow of the film, providing the viewer a conceptual and
navigable space to build their own field of associations and meaning in
the construction of a poetic narrative. Using this construct, the body, with
1 The nomenclature ‘somatic montage’ was first introduced by this author in “The
Cine-poetics of Fulldome Cinema” (Chamier-Waite 2013).
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Immersive cinema 2
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Because the only light reaching the dome is that from the ‘stars’, the
negative image space is deep black, creating a convincing, immersive
experience.
In the 1960s, many planetaria began to combine the star
projector shows with multimedia slide shows that used arrays of slide
projectors and cross-dissolve techniques. The advantage here was the
new ability to add photographic and graphic imagery to their
presentations. However, these shows also presented certain drawbacks.
First, the slide imagery was static. Second, many of these slide shows were
created using conventional optics and projectors. In order to project
naturalistically onto a dome, however, the images must be photographed
and projected using special curved optics, the ‘fisheye lens’, to pre-distort
the planar image so that it matches the curved surface. The visible,
rectangular frame of the conventional photographs and the ambient spill
light from these projections destroyed the immersive illusion of deep
darkness that is the planetarium’s main attraction.
3 http://www.carnegiesciencecenter.org/exhibits/zeiss/
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Fig. 2. Combined laser, star machine, and slide projections in the planetarium. Photo
Frank-Michael Arndt, Zeiss-Großplanetarium, Berlin
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the slide and laser shows, despite the addition of motion, due to the poor
image quality and high expense of early video projectors. Most
significantly, the standard quadratic image projection and luminous grey
‘black’ of video projection destroyed the illusion of limitless space created
by the dome. These were, however, early attempts at incorporating live-
action content using a form of spatial montage, or collage, of the video
projection cells with the other light sources.
The first immersive film which used moving, photographic
imagery seamlessly covering the entire hemispherical space was shown in
1973 in a specially built theater, the new OmniMAX format. OmniMAX
films were shot using a fisheye lens and an exceptionally large film
format4 to create live-action images for the dome. OmniMAX remained
the dominant immersive format until the rapid development of computer
animation techniques and high-definition video in the 1990’s contributed
to the beginning of fulldome video projection in a standard planetarium.
With the innovations of OmniMax and fulldome, the hemispherical
projection became truly cinematic and immersive cinema was born.
Figure 3 shows a still image from the experimental immersive film
Moonwalk (Waite 2010) where the entire, sixty-foot diameter planetarium
dome is projected with a photographic image of the full Moon.
Temporal montage
4 OmniMAX and IMAX used what is known as a ‘15-perf’, or ‘15/70’, a fifteen
sprocket hole, horizontal piece of 70mm film as opposed to the vertical ‘5-perf’, 65mm
area of standard large format film, providing three times the image area per frame.
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Fig. 3. Moonwalk (2010) by Clea T. Waite: fulldome projection at the Adler Planetarium.
Photo Mark Webb.
5 Film historians maintain an open debate as to who first used the close-up in film, but
especially Eisenstein acknowledges Griffiths as the first director to develop it into an
element of modern cinematic language. See (Eisenstein 1949a).
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incompatible with the nature of cinema. Art can never have the interplay
of concepts as its ultimate goal.”(Tarkovskiĭ 1987) For Tarkovski, Walsh,
or Tati, montage takes place within the deep time, the extended and
highly detailed image, of the shot.
Conventional, immersive cinema style principally adheres to
Bazin’s concepts of the mise-en-scène and a total cinema. Immersive
experiences are composed of wide, visually detailed, temporally long
shots, chrono-spatial continuity, linear narrative, and an ongoing
fascination with the realistic image. Often there are no edits at all. Video
art, in contrast, often explores disjunctive space, visual fragmentation,
and narrative ambiguity while using architectonic, immersive
constructions of multiple screens. Whereas conventional narratives rooted
in literature tend towards closure, video art tends towards dispersal,
disrupting linearity and moving meaning outwards by placing cells across
multiple screens. By departing from the impulse towards literary realism,
the poetry of a more avant-garde approach to cinema emerges through
the associations created by spatialized juxtaposition. What is missing from
the cinematic language of most immersive films is exactly this notion of
evocative, associative montage. Bordwell talks about the use of film
montage as the fragmentation of space to build an emotional impact.
Poetry and montage are manifestations of the same idiom of
fragmentation and juxtaposition, only in different media. As forms of
expression, fragmented structures compel the mind to fill in the gaps,
opening up an interaction between the recipient and the work by
communicating within a conceptual negative space. This is Eisenstein’s
notion of the disjunctive method of montage by association. Like the
early film avant-garde of the 1920s, a few creators in spherical cinema are
exploring the unique, truly media-specific potential of this young medium
that emphasizes the inherent spatiality over temporality of the immersive
cinema experience.
It is important to note that the effectiveness of certain montage
techniques, such as rapid temporal cutting in conventional, framed
cinema, do not necessarily translate well into the immersive, frameless
formats. The visceral effects of immersive media have a heavy impact on
the sensory apparatus that can make disrupting the space of the film
through fast edits physically unsettling. In spite of this, a rhythmic,
associative montage can be achieved in immersive cinema by employing
the plane of the image, a spatialized collage structure of cells rather than
linear temporality as the axis of composition. Immersion is chiefly about
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Somatic montage
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mechanical cats, and the vast void of nothingness, empty silence, that
occupies the majority of matter and space at every scale. These are
‘advanced’ notions implying an ambiguity to reality that we are still
learning to understand over one hundred years later, far removed from
our every day experience of the world.
These profound concepts discovered in mathematics and physics
have resonated with creative artists and intellectuals since their inception
at the turn of the last century. The cultural impact of these ideas
instigated a Modernist series of artistic and philosophical movements.
Painting, sculpture, music, literature, cinema, and architecture –
influences from the new mathematics and physics can be found in all
these forms. Starting with Cubism, Futurism, Dada, and avant-garde
cinema, we can follow these influences through the Modernist literature
of Joyce, the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, to the Minimalism of the
1960s, up until the beginning of post-modernism in the 1980s. These
avant-garde movements share a formal engagement with breaking the
singular point-of-view through the disruption of linear narrative, single-
point perspective, and spatio-temporal continuity. Motion,
fragmentation, simultaneity, ambiguity, and participation with the work
of art are constructs that are indicative of the Modernist approach. The
Cubists, for example, aspired to portraying a perceived representation
over an observed one. The historian of architecture Sigfried Giedion, in
Space, Time, and Architecture, analyzes the Cubist rejection of single point
perspective: “Cubism breaks with Renaissance perspective. It views
objects relatively: that is from many points of view, no one of which has
exclusive authority. And in so dissecting objects it sees them
simultaneously from all sides – from above and below, from inside and
outside” (Giedion 2009). Giedion’s analysis brings into focus the
implication of observer motion and simultaneous interiority/exteriority in
Cubism that also features in Bragdon’s description of the tesseract. The
Cubist rejection of Renaissance perspective in favor of a multi-point,
faceted perspective embraced a notion of spatial unfolding. In cinema,
the notion of unfolding can be realized in the concept of spatial montage,
the presentation of multiple, time-based cells distributed across a plane to
form a three-dimensional, space-time network of associations through
simultaneous presentation. With the tesseract model, this unfolding
occurs in the fourth dimension in which time-based cells are faceted
within a three-dimensional space; a Cubistic, immersive cinema space,
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that extends beyond the plane, allowing a view simultaneously within and
without a film, presenting it continuously in space and time.
The historical development of these concepts: disjunctive
montage, faceted perspective, the curvature of space-time, n-dimensional
spaces, spatial montage, and disrupted narrative that arose in the
twentieth century culminated in a Modernist Zeitgeist that embraces
spatial and temporal ambiguity, simultaneity, fragmentation, peripatetic
perception, and a heightened personal involvement with a work of art.
The notion of somatic montage gathers these impulses into a formal
construct for creating a cinema that occupies three-dimensional space
and time; an immersive, somatic, proprioceptive form that extends the
notions of temporal and spatial montage, alternative narrative,
simultaneity, and multiple viewpoints into an immersive, formal structure
for cinematic art-making.
The tesseract, with its embodiment of three-space and time,
provides a model-metaphor for constructing a spatio-temporal flow
structure in an immersive cinema. The observer must navigate through
the cinema space using the motion of their body in time to experience all
the facets of the tesseract space. In doing so, she experiences the
information contained within the space as simultaneous cells occupying
its individual faces – faces which can never be seen all at once. She
assembles these cells into a unique narrative through engaging her
memory to fill in the voids between the spatialized elements as she makes
her own peripatetic juxtapositions of this physical and conceptual space.
The early twentieth century phenomenological philosopher Maurice
Merleau-Ponty examined the role of motion, the body, and a peripatetic
experience in the perception of objects in space, a perception, which he
noted, is always partial and must be assembled into a whole through
experience. He uses the cube as an example of how we construct
meaning through our bodies, assembling fragments of perception
together into our memory:
From the point of view of my body I never see as equal the six sides of
the cube, even if it is made of glass, and yet the word 'cube' has a meaning; the
cube itself, the cube in reality, beyond its sensible appearances, has its six equal
sides. As I move round it, I see the front face, hitherto a square, change its
shape, then disappear, while the other sides come into view and one by one
become squares. But the successive stages of this experience are for me merely
the opportunity of conceiving the whole cube with its six equal and
simultaneous faces, the intelligible structure which provides the explanation of
it. … the experience of my own movement conditions the position of an object,
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upon a most curious ‘dual unity’. The effect generated by a work of art is
due to the fact that there takes place within it a dual process: an
impetuous progressive rise along the lines of the highest conceptual steps
of consciousness and a simultaneous penetration by means of the
structure of the form into layers of profoundest sensuous thinking. The
polar separation of these two lines of aspiration creates that remarkable
tension of unity of form and content characteristic of true artworks.”
(Leyda 1986)
Fig. 5. Still from Moonwalk, fulldome digital film. (© 2010 Clea T. Waite)
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between the exhibition locations. Art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss
analyzes David’s cinematic metaphor in Under Blue Cup: “Catherine
David,… planned this procession from train station to exhibition park as
a kind of filmic sequence carefully edited with one display juxtaposed to
another: a series of jump cuts and dissolves. As she explains it: ’Like a
film, Documenta is a long and patient process of montage. Working from a
more or less coherent script, sequences are isolated and thought out;
when their internal structure is established, they are spliced into the
whole.6’” (Krauss 2011) For Krauss, David’s curatorial flow is cinematic.
Filmmaker and artist Peter Greenaway used a similar structure in
his public installation The Stairs-Munich-Projection (1995). Greenaway
placed one hundred movie screens throughout the city of Munich, one
for each year in the history of cinema. Greenaway, master of indexicality,
presented a spatialized database of films which the viewers assembled
into individual narratives as they strolled through town, a somatic
montage. They could enjoy the rhythms internal to the works on screen
or make their own rhythms by standing or moving, waiting or leaving.
Somatic montage addresses a growing theoretical concern as
immersive cinema gains in status and expands from the highly specialized
environments of the planetarium dome and the OmniMAX theater into
the increasingly widespread domains of video installation and virtual
reality. It addresses the basic principles of cinematic montage in relation
to a three-dimensional, architectonic screen as a spatio-temporal
experience. The early twentieth century was a time of exceptional
creative experimentation in cinema and the arts, part of the Zeitgeist of the
new discoveries being made in geometry and physics at that time.
Montage theory and contemporary cinematic language are the legacies of
this experimentation. Comparable formal experiments in montage are
now emerging in immersive cinema media, diverging from the mis-en-scène
approach reminiscent of the earliest films and Bazin’s total cinema, to a
more disjunctive method of montage as developed by Eisenstein and the
proponents of Soviet cinema. The tesseract, the geometric embodiment
of three-dimensional space in combination with the fourth dimension of
time, provides a model metaphor for a new approach to disjunctive
montage in immersive cinema. This strategy promises a rich practice of
immersive, somatic cinema that formally engages a supra-dimensional
6 Krauss is quoting David from "A la rencontre de l'art contemporaine, Catherine
David et la Documenta X," a television program broadcast on Arte August 10,1997
(Krauss 2011: 55-58)
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References
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at a time when he had a special interest in pantomime. The term can also refer to
a circus act or carnival amusement. In 1925 Eisenstein spoke of the “role of circus
and sport in the renewal of acting skills”. See “The problem of the materialist
approach to form” in Taylor 2010: 60, and, on the affinities between circus and
theatre in the early 1920s. Yurenev 1985: 51, 58–59.
9 On the theoretical and practical work of the First Workers’ Theatre see Leach
1994: 151–161.
10 For a fuller account of Eisenstein’s adaptation of the ideas of these thinkers, see
and ‘montage’ in the later theoretical writings of Eisenstein, see Bulgakowa 2001c:
41 and passim.
13 The relatively open membership policy of the Proletkult and the eclecticism of
its activity in the arts are well described in Fitzpatrick 1970 and Mally 1990.
14 Eisenstein described the ideas expressed by him in Strike as “themes of the social
mass”. See “Beseda s rezh. S.M. Eyzenshteynom”. Kino-nedalya 1925 (4): 17.
15 See “The problem of the materialist approach to form” (1925) in Taylor 2010:
exiles; his play Lena (1921); Andreykino Gore (1921) on the everyday life of the
proletariat and the life of children before the revolution. In Bolotnye ogni (1921) he
provides one of first post-revolutionary portraits of the kulak. See Literaturnaya
Entsiklopediya 1934 and Kratkaya Literaturnaya Entsiklopediya 1968: 5.
18 Mstitel’ was published in Ekaterinburg in 1920 and, to commemorate the 50th
in Pletnëv 1921b, it would appear that Flengo had first been published in 1921.
20 Pletnëv 1923. In 103 pages, Pletnëv outlines the history of the gold industry in
material situation of the workers and photographs of the site of the massacre. The
following year, a shorter version was published as a supplement to Kurskaya Pravda
(Pletnëv 1924a).
21 Lebedev-Polyanskiy had helped found the Proletarian University and had been
1920 and 15–20 May 1921 in Proletarskaya Kul’tura, 1921 (20/21). Pletnëv’s initial
attempt to find a middle way between Bogdanovism and Lenin’s conception of
socialism as “the Soviets plus electrification of the countryside” is well illustrated in
his article, “Na ideologicheskom fronte”, Pravda, 27 September 1922.
23 Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Moscow Proletkult (March 1919),
RGALI, f.1230, l. 140. A year earlier, Lebedev-Polyanskiy had expressed the more
nuanced view that socialist intellectuals could be “temporary helpers”, but the
cultural influence they brought to bear should be carefully scrutinized. In the final
analysis, only the proletariat could “resolve” (razreshit’) the question of proletarian
culture”. See his speech of 16 September 1918, in Protokoly Pervoy Vserossiyskoy
Konferentsii Proletarskikh kul’turno-prosvetitel’nykh organizatsii 15–20 sentyabria 1918.g.
Moscow: 1918. On the relationship between workers and intellectuals in the
Proletkult, see Mally 1990: 115–121.
24 In 1922 he wrote that the class consciousness of the proletariat was “alien to the
peasant, the bourgeois, the intellectual (intelligent) – the doctor, lawyer, engineer –
who were reared in the spirit of capitalist competition ...” See Pletnëv, “Na
ideologicheskom fronte” in V.I. Lenin o literature i iskusstve 1967: 460.
Eisenstein assisted Leonid Nikitin with the set designs. See Nikitina 1996 which
has an introduction and commentary by Andrei L. Nikitin, the son of Leonid
Nikitin. For a photograph of one scene, see Leach 1994: 78–81.
28 Yurenev reproduces one of Eisenstein’s graphics for this play. See also Leach
stupidity for every wise man (Na vsyakogo mudretsa dovol’no prostoty), see Yurenev 1985:
62–67; Leach 1994: 142–150, with a photograph of one scene on page 148; and
Bulgakowa 2001a: 36–38.
31 According to a report in Gorn 1923 (9), Eisenstein and Pletnëv were at his time
32 The Dawns of the Proletkult, an anthology by Vasiliy Ignatov of the verse of several
proletarian poets and adapted for the stage by Smyshlyaev, was performed in the
Central Arena of the Proletkult in 1920. One of Eisenstein’s first tasks in the
Proletkult was to assist Leonid Nikitin with the visual effects. See Yurenev 1985:
42, 44; and Leach 1994: 76–77.
33 On Lunacharskiy’s conservative policies regarding the theatre and Platon
Theater, “famous for its highly stylized productions of exotic decadent plays and
multi-level decorative scenery” (Bulgakowa 2001a: 283).
1922, in Voprosy kul’tury pri diktature proletariata 1925: 39–40. Pletnëv had earlier
hailed the 1921 production of his own play as being, “for all its weakness…the first
shaft of light of a proletarian theatre”. See ‘Na ideologicheskom fronte’, Pravda, 27
September 1922, in V.I. Lenin o literature i iskusstve 1967: 465.
40 Judging by Yakovlev’s article, Flengo must have been performed before 24–25
October of 1922. For a résumé of the plot and a photograph of the production of
Flengo by Vladimir Tatarinov, see Leach 1994: 78–79. On 1 February 1925 Flengo
was performed in the Bolshoy Theatre as a “musical dramatization of an episode
of the time of the Paris Commune”, with music by Vladimir Tsybin and a libretto
by “V.Pletnëv and Tyshko”. See http://www.bilet-bolshoy.ru/old-
repertoire/flengo
1922, in Voprosy kul’tury pri diktature proletariata 1925, 42–43. Yakovlev quotes
Meyerhold from the journal Ermitazh (6): 41.
43 Bukharin, whose ideas on culture owed something to Bogdanov, asserted at a
regarded by Bukharin, Krasin and others. In December 1925, the Commissar for
Health, Nikolay Semashko, supported the founding of Bogdanov’s Institute for
Blood Transfusion. Stalin was well disposed towards Bogdanov during his lifetime.
49 Lenin’s anathematization of Bogdanov was taken up by Stalin after Bogdanov’s
death in 1928, which is doubtless one explanation why, even in his memoirs of
1946, Eisenstein makes no mention of Bogdanov.
50“ne raznaya, a odinakovaya revoyiutsionnaya Marksistskaya kritika”. See the contribution
Bogdanov was an abstract theorist. Bogdanov’s theory that proletarian culture was
“socialist culture in the process of development” was identical to that of Trotskiy
(Pletnëv 1924b: 37).
(1918), reached its fifth edition in 1923. In Pravda for 14 April 1923 he criticized
Bogdanov’s Tektologiya as “reactionary”. See “O kritikakh ‘Tektologii” (1925), in
Bogdanov 1996: 308–315. For Kerzhentsev’s autobiography, see Deyateli... 1989.
55 See E.B. Koritskiy, “Pervye stranitsy NOT”, in U istokov NOT 1990. Two
Organizational aesthetics
57 See, for example, “The method of making a workers’ film” (1925), in Taylor
2010: 65–66.
58 On Arvatov, see Lodder 1983: 239; Zalambani 1999; and Bulgakowa 2001a.
59 See Arvatov 1925; Kiaer 1997: 105–118; and Albera 1990: 179–184. From
materials in the Bogdanov Family Archive we know that Arvatov borrowed books
on scientific subjects from Bogdanov.
Krasin and the First Secretary of the Moscow City Committee of the RKP (b),
Vasiliy Mikhaylov. See Yurenev 1985: 106–109.
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University Press.
Mally, Lynn. 1990. Culture of the Future. The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press.
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Pletnëv, V.F. 1920. Mstitel’. Instsenirovka po rasskazu Kladelya v odnom deystvii.
Ekaterinburg: Gos.izdat.
----------- 1921a. Mstitel’ Leona Kladelya (Pamyati Parizhsoyi Kommuny 1871-1921).
Peterburg: Petropolitprosvet.
----------- 1921b. Lena. Proletarskaya drama v 5-ti deystviyakh. Rostov on Don: Gos.izdat.,
Donskoe otdelenie.
----------- 1921c. Stachki. Instsenirovka po rasskazu Gasteva. Moscow: Moskovskii
Proletkul’t.
----------- 1921d. Stachki. P’esa v 1 deystvii. Ekaterinburg: Gos.izdat.
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literature i iskusstve, 3rd edition. 1967, 457-466.
----------- 1922b. Flengo. Dramaticheskiy epizod v 2-kh deystviyakh po rasskazu Lyus’ena Dekav.
Moscow: Biblioteka Vserossiisk. Proletkul’ta.
----------- 1923. Lena. Ocherk istorii Lenskikh sobytii (s prilozheniem). Moscow: Vserossiiskiy
Proletkul’t.
----------- 1924a. Lena. (4 aprelya 1912). Kursk: Supplement to Kurskaya Pravda.
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Proletkul’t.
----------- 1925. “Otkrytoe pis’mo v redaktsiyu zhurnala “Kino-nedelya”, Kino-nedelya,
(6): 9.
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20 sentyabrya 1918.g. 1918. Moscow: Izd. Proletkul’ta.
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1910–1925. Ithica and London: Cornell University Press.
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Monde russe, 40/3, 415–446.
CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT
1 In this paper, individual terms used by Bogdanov, as well as quotations from his
works, are indicated by double inverted commas.
2 Engels to Joseph Bloch, London, 21–22 September 1890. The letter was first
published in Der sozialistische Akademiker, 19 (Berlin, 1895). See Marx, Karl and
Frederick Engels 2001: 33–37. I am obliged to James D. White for this reference.
3 Georgii Gloveli has pointed out that M. Filippov, the editor of Nauchnoe Obozrenie,
theory, and his own innovations, in Part I of Tektology. He explicitly rejected Marx”s
understanding of art as a mere “embellishment of life” (“iskusstvo schital prostym
ukrasheniem zhizni”). See Bogdanov 2003: 80–81. Whether his understanding of Marx
on this point was correct is a question that need not concern us here. See, on this
question, Rose 1994. Bogdanov had been General Editor of a new translation by
V.A. Bazarov and I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov of Marx’s Capital, published in 1907 and
1909. However, many of Marx’s works did not become available until after
Bogdanov’s death; for example the Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie was not
published in the Soviet Union until 1939.
216. Bogdanov here does not mention that he disagrees with Marx. The article
formed part of a polemic with A.N.Potresov and G.A.Aleksinskiy. Potresov had
argued in Nasha zarya (1913) that art was an indulgence of the leisure class.
8 On the Proletkult, see Sochor 1988, Chapter 6, “School of Socialism: Proletkult”;
December 1912.
Homer and Hesiod and the Hebrew Bible. In architecture, the Coliseum in Rome
was a metaphor for the pride and cruelty of an imperial people; the Gothic
cathedral, a metaphor for the world view of the Middle Ages – the rejection of this
earth and striving towards the after-life. See Bogdanov 1911, 14–18; and
“Proletariat i iskusstvo” (Speech to the First All-Russian Conference of the
Proletkult, 20 September 1918), in Bogdanov 1924/1925: 117–118.
14 See “Sotsial’no-organizatsionnoe znachenie iskusstva” - Theses for a lecture
the World War had amply demonstrated the “immaturity” of its outlook. See
“1918”, in Bogdanov 1924/1925: 101; and “O khudozhestvennom nasledstve”
(1918), Bogdanov 1924/1924: 144–145. On this point, see Sochor 1988: 95 and
White 2013: 52–70.
criticism of the work of art from a class point of view.24 He made this
point concisely in his speech to the First All-Russian Conference of the
Proletkult on 20 September 1918: “The artistic talent is individual, but
creation is a social phenomenon: it emerges out of the collective and
returns to the collective, serving its vital purposes.”25
see Bogdanov 1996, Chapter 3: Basic Organizational Mechanisms. I have here also
used Bogdanov, 1922. On this subject, see Poustilnik 2009, especially 125–129.
27 Bogdanov 1996, Chapter 3: Basic Organizational Mechanisms, 179.
28 Bogdanov 1996, Chapter 3: Basic Organizational Mechanisms, 175.
Culture as mentalité?
Progressive forms
i) “Simplicity” (prostota)
How, Bogdanov asked, was one to identify those writers of the
past who could serve as models for the kinds of technique to be adopted
by the creators of proletarian culture? In answering this question he
drew upon his evolutionary interpretation of history and upon his
organization theory. Every social formation and every ideology, he
argued, went through a life-cycle of birth, maturation, degeneration
(vyrozhdenie) and death. This could be observed not only in the content
but also in the forms of art.46 It was during the phase of growth and
maturity that the art of a civilization attained its most consummate
expression. Proletarian writers should therefore “learn the techniques of
art … from the great masters who came at the period of the rise and
flowering of those classes that are now withering away - the
revolutionary romantics and the classics of different times.”47 The
hallmark of art at its apogée was its ‘simplicity’.48 In 1918, Bogdanov
lauded the “simplicity, clarity and purity of forms” of Pushkin,
Lermontov, Gogol, Nekrasov and Tolstoy.49 In 1920 (when he added
Byron to this list), he wrote:
“What we find in the work of the great masters is a simplicity
that is associated with content that is grandiose, developing or highly
developed, but which has not yet begun to decay. Goethe and Schiller,
and, in Russia, Pushkin and Lermontov, reflected the birth and growth
of new conditions and new forces of life, the rise of a bourgeois culture
did not deny the talent of either Severyanin or Mayakovskiy. See his footnote on
Mayakovskiy, dated 1924, in this same article: 170. Ironically, Bogdanov’s principal
adversary, Lenin, shared his antipathy for the Futurists: on 6 May 1921 Lenin
rebuked Lunacharskiy for printing 5,000 copies of Mayakovskiy’s 150,000,000 and
implored M.N. Pokrovskiy to help him “fight Futurism”. See Lenin to A.V.
Lunacharskiy, 6 May 1921 and Lenin to M.N. Pokrovskiy, 6 May 1921, in Lenin
1970, 179–180.
worked in the railway, metal working and mining industries. Between 1910 and
1914 he was a member, alongside Lunacharskiy, A.K. Gastev and F.I. Kalinin of
the Paris-based Liga proletarskoy kul’tury. His works were published in Gorkiy’s
Prosveshchenie in 1913 and 1914; in an anthology edited by Il’ya Erenburg – Vechera
(Paris, 1914); in Sbornik proletarskikh pisateley (1914) which had a foreword by Gorkiy;
and in Sbornik proletarskikh poetov (1917). In 1917 a volume of his poetry, due to be
published by Gorkiy’s publishing house Parus, was banned by the censor. In March
1917 he was elected chair of the Samara Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies and from 1918
he was chair of the Samara Proletkult. See Russkie pisateli 1989: 540–541.
63 “Prostota ili utonchennost’?” (1920), in Bogdanov 1924/1925: 180.
64 Mikhail Gerasimov and Vladimir Kirillov were prominent in the Kuznitsa group
who held their founding meeting in February 1920. See Brown 1971: 10–12.
should not “deck themselves out in the finery of the bourgeoisie”, but
seek the content of their poetry in comradely relations, in the
experience of workers’ organizations, and in the works of Marx. They
should trust in the collective and in its evolutionary ideology, and
amongst past writers seek out those who had “shown the way”.65
Organizational aesthetics
article was published in Proletarskaya kul’tura (1920), Nr.13–14. See also Bogdanov’s
review of the first issue (May, 1920) of the journal Kuznitsa, in Proletarskaya kul’tura
(1920), Nr.15–16: 91–92.
66 George Gorelik translated organizovannost’ as ‘system-ness’. See Gorelik 1984: 279.
Since Bogdanov does use the term sistematizatsiya, another possible translation might
be ‘degree of systematization’.
67 “Degression”, for Bogdanov, is the process that enables a particular form to
69 See Thesis Nr. 4 for his lecture “On proletarian literary criticism” delivered to an
and convergence of forms”, Section 6: “The division and restoration of unity of the
personality”, p.292. Part II of Tektology was first published in Moscow in 1917
(Preface dated 22 September 1916). Bogdanov also provides a commentary on
Hamlet in “O khudozhestvennom nasledstve” (1918), in Bogdanov 1924/1925: 150–
154.
See also Thesis Nr. 11: “The socio-organizational role of art is its objective meaning,
and this interpretation has nothing in common with the theory of civic art, whereby
art is harnessed to certain specific tasks of an ethical, political or other nature”, in
“Sotsial’no-organizatsionnoe znachenie iskusstva” (1921) in Bogdanov 2004: 5–9.
76 “Proletariat i iskusstvo” (Speech to the First All-Russian Conference of the
say that this theory is quite a favourite, especially with the younger and
less experienced proletarian poets, although it can only be called
childish.”78 Even so, in some of his writings, Bogdanov’s didactic
attitude is reminiscent of the philosopher of an earlier Enlightenment,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762).
By 1920 Bogdanov had become aware that some proletarian
writers found his approach patronizing:
“Some Proletkultists have argued that artistic creation must be
free, and have questioned whether criticism, however scientific, and
however much it claimed to be the most proletarian, could point the
way… the journal Proletarskaya kul’tura has been depicted as a kind of
baby-sitter (“Chto za nyan’ki!”), constantly fretting about what is and what
isn’t proletarian culture”.79
In February 1920, exasperation with the paternalism of the
Proletkult led a group of writers led by Gerasimov to withdraw from its
Moscow branch and, under the auspices of the Commissariat for
Education, to organize their own literary group – Kuznitsa, complaining
that “the conditions of work in Proletkult ... for a variety of reasons,
restrict the creative potential of proletarian writers.”80 It was the
Kuznitsa group that in October 1920 organized the First All Russian
Congress of Proletarian Writers during which the All-Russian
Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP) was founded.81 In December
1920, the replacement of Pavel Lebedev-Polyanskiy by Valerian Pletnëv
as Chair of the Central Committee of the Proletkult marked the
beginning of the end of Bogdanov’s influence inside the Proletkult. In
November 1921 he resigned from all positions in the Proletkult in order
to devote himself entirely to research in blood transfusion. However, the
matter did not end there: the critics of Bogdanov, in some cases acting
under the instructions of Lenin, now faced the task of producing an
alternative to his theory. During the later 1920s, Pletnëv, for one,
ostentatiously dissociated himself from Bogdanov and played his own
ignoble part in the creation of an new orthodoxy.82 On 9 May 1924 the
Press Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
convened a conference on “The policy of the Party in artistic literature”
Bulgakowa 2016.
Conclusion
83 See Voprosy kul’tury pri diktature proletariata 1925. Moscow & Leningrad: Gosizdat,
On this debate, see also Biggart 1992.
84 See O proletarskoy kul’ture 1904–1924. This inside title page of this anthology is
fewer social and economic studies of working class life than the agrarian socialists
did of the peasantry.
86 On Kalinin, see “Novy tip rabotnika” in Bogdanov 1920. Bogdanov quotes from
References
Biggart, John 1990. “Alexander Bogdanov and the theory of a “New Class”. Russian
Review (49, July): 265-282.
--------------- 1992. “Bukharin’s theory of cultural revolution” in The ideas of Nikolai
Bukharin, edited by Anthony Kemp-Welch, 131-158. Oxford: The Clarendon
Press.
Biggart, John and Oksana Bulgakowa 2016. “Eisenstein in the Proletkult. Helsinki:
Spherical Book. Culture as Organization in Early Soviet Thought.
Bogdanov, A. 1904. Iz psikhologii obshchestva. St. Petersburg: Izdanie S.Dorovatovskogo i
A.Charushnikova.
------------- 1904-1906. Empiriomonizm. Stat’i po filosofii, I-III. Moscow & St.Petersburg:
Izdanie S.Dorovatovskogo i A.Charushnikova.
------. 1908. Krasnaya zvezda (Utopiya). Saint-Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov
pechati
------------- 1911. Kul’turnye zadachi nashego vremeni. Moscow: Izdanie S.Dorovatovskogo i
A.Charushnikova.
-------------1913. Vseobshchaya organizatsionnaya nauka: Tektologiya I. St.Petersburg: Izdanie
M.I.Semenova.
------------- 1914. Nauka ob obshestvennom soznanii. Kratkii kurs ideologicheskoy nauki v voprosakh
i otvetakh. Moscow: Knigoizdatel’stvo pisateley v Moskve.
------------- 1920 “Novyy tip rabotnika”, in Sbornik pamyati F.I.Kalinina. Rostov on Don:
Gosizdat.
------------- 1920. Elementy proletarskoy kul’tury v razvitii rabochego klassa. Lektsii prochitannye v
Moskovskom Proletkul’te vesnoyu 1919 goda. Moscow: Gosizdat.
------------- 1921 “Sotsial’no-organizatsionnoe znachenie iskusstva” - Theses for a
lecture delivered to the Russian Academy of Artistic Sciences, 29 October
1921, with an introduction by Charlotte Douglas, Vestnik Mezhdunarodnogo
Instituta A. Bogdanova. 2004 (1): 17, 5-9.
------------- 1922. Tektologiya. Vseobshchaya organizatsionnaya nauka. Petersburg, Moscow,
Berlin: Grzhebin.
------------- 1923a. “Obshchestvenno-nauchnoe znachenie noveishikh tendentsii
estestvoznaniya” (Theses for lecture delivered in the Socialist Academy of
Social Sciences, 24 May 1923). Arkhiv RAN, f.350 op.2, d.4, ll.13-78, in
Bogdanov 2003.
------------- 1923b. Filosofiya zhivogo opyta. Populyarnye ocherki. Materializm, Empiriokrititsizm,
Dialekticheskiy Materializm, Empiriomonizm, Nauka Budushchego. 3rd ed., Petrograd-
Moscow: Kniga.
------------- 1924/1925. O proletarskoy kul’ture 1904-1924. Leningrad-Moscow: Kniga
[This anthology carries the date “1924” on the inside title page and “1925” on
the cover.]
------------- 1929. Krasnaya Zvezda. Leningrad: Krasnaya gazeta [Reprinted in Krasnaya
zvezda: roman-utopiya; Inzhener Menni: fantasticheskiy roman. 1979. Bibliotheca
russica. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag].
------------- 1984. Essays in Tektology. The General Science of Organization. 2nd ed. Edited
and translated by George Gorelik. Seaside California: Intersystems Publications
Limited.
-------------- 1984. Red Star. The First Bolshevik Utopia. Edited by Loren R.Graham and
Richard Stites, translated by Charles Rougle. Bloomington, Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press.
------------- 1995. Stat’i, doklady, pis’ma i vospominaniya 1901-1928, in Neizvestnyy Bogdanov,
Kniga 1, edited by N.S.Antonova & N.V.Drozdova. Moscow: ITs AIRO - XX
------------- 1996. Bogdanov’s Tektology, Book 1. Edited and translated by Peter Dudley,
Vadim N. Sadovsky and Vladimir V. Kelle. University of Hull: Centre for
Systems Studies.
-------------- 1999. Poznanie s istoricheskoy tochki zreniya. Izbrannye psikhologicheskie trudy.
Moscow: Moskovskiy psikhologo-sotsial’nyy institut.
------------- 2003, Tektologiya. Vseobshchaya organizatsionnaya nauka. Moscow: Finansy.
-------------- 2004. “Sotsial’no-organizatsionnoe znachenie iskusstva” - Theses for a
lecture delivered by Alexander Bogdanov to the Russian Academy of Artistic
Sciences, 29 October 1921”, with an introduction by Charlotte Douglas in
Vestnik Mezhdunarodnogo Instituta A. Bogdanova (1): 17, 5-9.
Brown, Edward J. 1971. The proletarian episode in Russian literature, 1928-1932. New York:
Octagon Books.
Eimermacher, Karl. 1972. Dokumente zur sowjetischen Literaturpolitik 1917-1932. Stuttgart:
W. Kohlhammer.
Feuer, Lewis S. [Editor] 1959. Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy.
New York: Doubleday Anchor.
Gloveli, G.D. 2004. “‘Raduga dum i chuvstv’ i ‘krasochnaya shkola””, Vestnik
Mezhdunarodnogo Instituta A.Bogdanova Moscow, 18, 25-48.
---------------- 2009. “The sociology of Alexander Bogdanov and the theories of
progress in the 19th and early 20th centuries” in Oittinen, Vesa (Ed.), Aleksandr
Bogdanov Revisited Helsinki: Aleksanteri Series, 1, 47-79.
Gorbunov, V.V. 1974. Lenin i Proletkul’t. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoy literatury.
Lenin, V.I. 1970. Polnoe sobranie sochineniy, 52. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoy
literatury.
Mally, Lynn 1990. Culture of the Future. The Proletkult Movement in Revolutionary Russia.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press.
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 2001. Collected Works, 49. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Poustilnik, Simona 2009. “Tectology in the context of intellectual thought in Russia”,
in Vesa Oittinen, Editor, Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited. Helsinki: Aleksanteri
Series, 1.
Rose, Margaret. A. 1994. Marx’s lost aesthetic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
No emphasis on Taylorism
No emphasis on Tektology
Spherical Book
1. To say that the class character of science resides in the fact that
it defends the interests of a given class betrays either a journalistic
understanding of science or is a complete misrepresentation. An actually
existing science may be bourgeois or proletarian by its very “nature”, that
is to say in terms of its origin, its point of view, and the methods by which it is
elaborated and explained. In this fundamental sense, all the sciences, not only
the social sciences but all the other sciences, including mathematics and
logic, may be said to have, and actually do have, a class character.2
2. The nature of science resides in the fact that it is the organized,
collective experience of people and that it serves as the instrument of the organization
of the life of society. The current dominant science, in its various branches, is
bourgeois science: it has been developed, for the most part, by
representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia, who have concentrated in
it the material experience that was available to the bourgeois classes; who
have understood it and interpreted it from the point of view of these
classes; and who have organized the processes and practices to which
these classes were accustomed, which were characteristic of them. As a
result, this science has served and continues to serve as an instrument of
the bourgeois structuring of society, firstly as an instrument of the struggle
with, and conquest of, the bourgeoisie over the classes that had had their
day; and then as an instrument of their rule over the labouring classes. At
all times this science has served as an instrument for the organization of
production and for all of the progress in production that has been
achieved under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. Such is the organizing
strength of this science. But here also resides its historical limitation.
3. This limitation is manifest in the very material of science, that is
to say in the content of experience that it organizes, and it is especially
evident in the social sciences. For example, in studying the relations of
production, bourgeois science could not grasp or discern a particular
form of cooperative labour, the comradely or collectivist form, which is in
fact the highest form, because this form was virtually unknown to the
bourgeois classes.
Even more significant is a fundamental limitation of point of view that
affects all of the bourgeois sciences and which is determined by the
1
See Biggart, Gloveli, and Yassour 1998.
2
For an alternative English translation of this first paragraph, see Lecourt 1977.
with much delay and difficulty. This is the origin of the narrow,
professional outlook that develops amongst people working in science,
weakening and acting as a brake on their creative activity.
6. The development of machine production, which brought about
a unity of technical methods, stimulated a trend in science for the
unification of methods and an overcoming of the harmful aspects of
specialization. Much has been achieved along these lines, but as long as
the fundamental divide between the individual branches of science
remains, this trend will be effective only in some sectors, and will not
result in the integrated organization of science as a whole.
7. Bourgeois science, with its laborious, obscure and complicated
professional language is scarcely accessible to the working class.
Furthermore, in so far as it has become a commodity in capitalist society,
it sells at a high price. If individual representatives of the proletariat, at a
cost of enormous expenditure of energy, become masters of one or
another branch of science, the class character of science comes into play:
the gulf between science and the principle of collective work, make for an
estrangement in their lives from the interests and mentality of the
working community from which they emerged. Here, professional
narrowness and a tendency towards intellectual aristocratism converge.
In a word, bourgeois science, given that it is a bourgeois ideology in
origin3, organizes the soul of the proletariat according to the bourgeois
model.
8. What this means is that the working class has specific tasks to
carry out in relation to contemporary science:
science must be reinterpreted from a proletarian point of view, both in its
content and in the form in which it is taught;
the creation of a new organization, both for the elaboration of science and for
the dissemination of scientific knowledge amongst the working masses.
In most branches of science, accomplishing these tasks will entail a
methodical assimilation of the legacy of the old world; but in some
branches there will be a need for profound and far-reaching innovation.
9. A reinterpretation of the content of science must first of all
abolish the divide that separates science from the collective-labour
principle: the material of science must be understood and explained as
being the practical experience of humanity; the schemas, conclusions,
and formulae of science must be seen as tools for organizing the entire
3
“Our usual ideas about the social relations between people imply mutual understanding
as their first precondition. (…) What is the essence of this mutual understanding? It is
contained in a common language and the sum of concepts which are expressed by this
language, in what is called common “culture” or, more exactly, ideology” Bogdanov’s
Tektology Book I (Bogdanov 1996).
social practice of people. At the moment, this work is being carried out
almost exclusively in the social sciences, but the approach is insufficiently
planned and organized; this work must be extended to all fields of
knowledge. This transformation will bring science close to the life of the
working class: astronomy as the science that explains the orientation of
work processes in time and space; physics as the science of the resistances
encountered in the course of the collective work of humanity; physiology
as the science of labour power; logic as the theory of the social
harmonization of ideas – given that ideas are also organizational
instruments of labour – all of these sciences will enter into the
consciousness of the proletariat more directly, more easily and more
deeply than they do in their present form.
10. We must also strive to overcome the fragmentation of science
that has come about in the course of specialization: our objective must be
the unity of scientific language and a convergence and generalizing of the
methods of the various branches of knowledge, not only within the sphere
of knowledge but also in relation to the various spheres of practice, so
that a total monistic system can be developed, comprising both domains.
The realization of this goal will be expressed in a universal organizational
science, a science that is needed by the proletariat as the future organizer
of the whole life of humanity in all of its aspects.
11. With regard to the forms in which science is taught, here,
what is needed is a degree of simplification, without prejudice to the
essence of what is being taught. Recently, the work of a number of
democratizers of science has shown how much can be achieved in this
respect, by discarding useless scholastic ballast and by avoiding repetition
of identical principles when they are encountered under different names
in related branches of science. A significant degree of simplification will
be achieved by the very reinterpretation of science from the point of view
of collective labour, since this will liberate science from the abstract
fetishism which, in the old mathematics, mechanics, logic, and other
sciences, frequently resulted in so many pseudo-problems and
unnecessary stratagems being presented as “evidence”.
12. A reinterpretation of the content and a transformation of the
external form of science will mean that “socialism” will become its
foundation, which is to say that science will become adapted to the tasks
of the struggle for, and construction of, socialism. The dissemination of
knowledge and of scientific work must be organized in parallel. The two
processes are inextricably linked. The means for actually achieving these
ends will be the Workers’ University and the Workers’ Encyclopaedia.
13. The Workers’ University must be a system of cultural-
educational institutions that operate at various levels and culminate in a
single centre for the training and organization of scientific forces. At each
level of the system, general educational courses must be complemented
by special, practical and scientific-technical courses that are of use to
society. The unity of principle that underlies the programme, and links
together the various levels and complementary courses must not inhibit
initiatives to perfect particular programmes or particular teaching
methods. The basic form of relationship between teachers and students
should be comradely co-operation, in which the competence of the
former is not taken to justify an unaccountable exercise of authority, and
the trustfulness of the latter does not degenerate into passivity and an
inability to criticize. The principal goal of teaching should be a mastery of
methods.
14. The development of these educational courses, and the
publishing activity of scientific workers of the Workers’ University which
is part of this development, should be directed towards the creation of a
Workers’ Encyclopaedia, which should not be a mere compilation of the
findings of science, but a complete, harmoniously organized system of
explanation of the methods of practice and cognition and of the vital links
between them.
References
Biggart, John, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour. 1998. Bogdanov and His Work: A
Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Aleksandr A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky)
1873–1928. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1977. “La science et la classe ouvrière” translated by Blanche
Grinbaum, in La science, l’art et la classe ouvrière, edited by Dominique Lecourt and
Henri Deluy, 95–102. Paris: Maspero.
--------------- 1996. Bogdanov’s Tektology: Book 1. Foreword by Vadim N. Sadovsky &
Vladimir V. Kelle Edited and with an introduction by Peter Dudley. Hull: Hull
University Centre of Systems Studies.
Lecourt, Dominique. 1977. Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko. London: NLB.
2 Bogdanov favors dynamics and evolution; for him absence of vital-differences is not
an ideal state but, on the contrary, a regression.
3 Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, Bogdanov’s collaborator and brother-in-law, attended the
4 Vladimir Lenin sensed the link between Bogdanov and James and in his work
Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909) criticized them both.
judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we
should not actually feel afraid or angry” (James 1884: 190). However, in
Eisenstein’s view, Jamesian theory is applicable not so much to the actor
as to the spectator. The spectator empathically co-participates in
whatever happens on stage or on screen. Through mirroring and
imitating an actor’s bodily dynamics, the spectator is to achieve a
desirable emotional state. His perception is active; he co-produces and,
therefore, co-authors a film. Eisenstein states in his lecture on
biomechanics in 1935, “James’s point of view has a correct expression in
the theatre in the audience. It’s not that the actor makes a correct
movement and experiences a proper emotion – the audience reproduces
that movement in a concentrated form and through it enters into the
emotional state the actor is demonstrating. The secret of form lies here”
(see Law; Gordon 1996: 208). Eisenstein, who was expelled from
Meyerhold’s theatre in 1922 and from his school in 1924, however,
adopted some of Meyerhold’s ideas and tried to interpret them through
the lenses of the Jamesian theory of emotions or Bogdanov’s
empiriomonism, which he probably came to know during his Proletkult
years (1920–1925).
Mikhail Yampolskiy unveils the closeness of Eisenstein’s aesthetic
views, particularly during his activity in Proletkult, to the ideas of
Bogdanov, who was one of the Proletkult ideologists at that time
(Yampolskiy 2009: 49–50; Tikka 2008: 64–68). In 1923, Eisenstein, as
Yampolskiy points out, tried to combine Meyerhold’s biomechanics with
Bogdanov’s monistic energy theory and interpreted Meyerhold’s acting as
“a mysterious and invisible function of individuality, which is discharging
of abundance of energy” (Yampolskiy 2009: 49). Yampolskiy points out
that Bogdanov based his monistic conception of world organization on
the interaction of active and reactive forces. In Bogdanov’s view, any
activity, decomposing or combinatorial, inevitably meets resistance, weak
or considerable. However, resistance is not a separate independent
notion; it is an antagonist to another activity. When two people are
fighting, the activity of the first one is the resistance for the second one
and vice versa (Bogdanov 1990: 427–428). Bogdanov’s ideas of vital-
divergence are concordant at large with the theory of expressiveness, if
one does, as did Eisenstein, see expressiveness as conflict, impulse and
struggle.
Eisenstein was familiar with Bogdanov’s concept of conflict and,
as was already discussed, he was also influenced by the James–Lange
theory, which serves as a conceptual base for Bogdanov’s theory of the
affectional. In an unnamed manuscript written in Almaty in 1943
Eisenstein reviews the fictitious and the factual in connection with the
Jamesian theory of emotions. In the situation of watching movies, the
spectator is an active perceiver; mirroring an actor’s expressive
5 One of the first emotional scripts and one of the first failures of Rzheshevskiy is A
Simple Case, filmed by Vsevolod Pudovkin (1930). Pudovkin says that when he first
read Rzheshevskiy’s emotional script he had a strange, unfamiliar feeling, as the script
was disturbing like a literary work (Pudovkin 1982: 353).
“Eat up, my little son… Who brought you into this world?”, he
suddenly asked Stepok, very softly.
The boy continued eating.
“Who brought you into this world?? Me or somebody in the Political
Department? he asked again, softly.
“My mother”, answered Stepok, just as quietly, and calmly putting
down his spoon, he got up from the table but his father’s drunken words
followed after him.
“When our God created the heavens, the water and the earth and
people like you and me, my dear little son, he said…”
“What did he say?”, asked Stepok, smiling and gathering up his things,
not turning his head.
“He said”, said the voice of his father, “Be fruitful and multiply, but if
the son betrays his father, kill him like a dog, God says in the Holy Book, kill
him immediately”.
“Did he say that?”, said Stepok without turning his head, smiling and
moving towards the door…
Suddenly, his father, like a drunken bear, punched little Stepok in the
chest with his paws and whispered, his face distorted with indescribable hatred:
“I’ll light the stove… Do you hear me? Right now… I’ll chop you into pieces…
I’ll put you in the pot… Do you hear me? I’ll cook you… And eat you… All by
myself… With bread and pickles… (Rzheshevskiy 1982: 225).
The emotional line of the film narration and the emotional link
between the spectator and what is shown on screen unites Eisenstein’s
theory of expressiveness with Bogdanov’s theory of an ‘affectional’, which
is in turn based on the James–Lange theory.
6This understanding leads him to distinguish among three closely related phenomena:
“an emotion, the feeling of that emotion, and knowing that we have a feeling of that emotion”
(Damasio 1999: 8).
References
Damasio, Antonio. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt.
--------------. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, FL:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Eisenstein, Sergey. 2002. “S zaranee obdumannym namereniem (Montazh
attraktsionov)”. In Eisenstein, Sergey, Metod, 1. Moscow: Muzey kino.
--------------. 2004a. “O forme stsenariya”, in Eisenstein, Sergey. Neravnodushnaya priroda,
1. Moscow: Muzey kino.
--------------. 2004b. “Stanislavskiy i Loyola.” In Eisenstein, Sergey. Neravnodushnaya
priroda, 1. Moscow: Muzei kino.
--------------. 2014. “The Method of Making Workers’ Films.” In Film Manifestos and
Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, edited by Scott MacKenzie. University
of California Press.
Grodal, Torben. 1999. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings and Cognition.
Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
James, William. 1884. “What is an Emotion?” Mind 9, 34: 188–205.
--------------. 1890/1950. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, Vol.
I–II.
---------------. 1905. “The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience”. The
Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 2, 11: 281–287.
Law, Alma, and Mel Gordon. 1996. Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in
Revolutionary Russia. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc.
Pudovkin, Vsevolod. 1982. “Tvorchestvo literatora v kino. O kinematograficheskom
stsenarii Rzheshevskogo”. In A. G. Rzheshevskiy. Zhizn’. Kino. Moskva: Iskusstvo:
353–358.
Rzheshevskiy, A. G. 1982. “Stsenarii. Bezhin lug.” In A. G. Rzheshevskiy. Zhizn’. Kino.
Moscow: Iskusstvo, 215–298.
Smith, Greg M. 2003. The Film Structure and the Emotional System. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Spinoza, Benedict de. 1677/1996. Ethics. London: Penguin Classics.
Tan, Ed S. 1995. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film As An Emotion Machine.
London: Routledge.
Tikka, Pia. 2008. Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteinense. Helsinki: Aalto University
Press.
Yampolskiy, Мikhail. 2009. “Ot Proletkul’ta k Platonu: Eisenstein i proekt smyslovoy
samoorganizatsii zhizni”. Kinovedcheskie zapiski 89: 45–89.
Zacks, Jeffrey M. 2015. Flicker: Your Brain On Movies. Oxford, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Zhinkin, N. I. 1971. “Psikhologiya kinovospriyatiya”. Kinematograf segodnya 2. Moscow:
Iskusstvo: 214–254.
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Introduction
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1 A Brazilian theatre director, Augusto Boal coined the notion of the ‘theatre of the
oppressed’ in the 1950s, and later published a series of analyses based on his
practical work.
2
Reflection in more ways than one, as Boal’s intention is exactly the reverse of
Stalin’s. Nevertheless the recognition of the power of ideas is the same.
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those that are exposed to and may act on them. And, by extension, if
ideas are to be rendered safe, they must be controlled - either by
controlling the means of the production of ideas, e.g., directed
advancement or inhibition of idea producing individuals, or by
manipulating or distorting language such that ideas cannot be formed,
e.g., Orwell’s Newspeak; or by controlling the means by which ideas are
promulgated, i.e., censorship in any of its many forms.
These mechanisms of control are apparent in Boal’s analysis of
theatrical forms. Beginning in ancient Greece, where, in order to take
control of the Dionysian feast, which traditional followed the
completion of the harvest, Boal (quoting Hauser 1957) has the
tragedians in the pay of the state, retained to create a restraining
structure around the workers’ potentially dangerous revelry.
“The tragedians are in fact state bursars and state purveyors –
the state pays them for the plays that are performed, but naturally
does not allow pieces to be performed that would run counter to its
policies or the interests of the governing classes” (Boal 1979:
Introduction).
According to Boal, the Aristotelian theory of tragedy casts it as
a form of social control designed to ensure that the workers were
brought to a point where they understood their social failings in
relation to the state and landowners, and were encouraged, by way of
the didactic elements of plays, to self-impose limits on their behaviour.
For Boal, “Aristotle constructs the first, extremely powerful poetic-
political system for the intimidation of the spectator” (Boal 1979:
Introduction).
In the Aristotelian form of tragedy the hero, or main
protagonist, has a single, fatal, tragic flaw which eventually brings about
his or her downfall - According to Boal, it is by recognizing this flaw in
themselves and witnessing the hero’s downfall that the audience is
brought to a point of catharsis – partly due to terror at the sight of the
hero’s destruction and partly due to the release of tension caused as
order is restored.
In this coercive form of theatre the spectators “delegate power
to the characters to act and think in their place [and] in so doing …
purge themselves of their tragic flaw … of something capable of
changing society” (Boal 1979: 155).
Here, Boal is defining a particular cultural product as a
method by which to enforce social change. And, although he is
defining that power as conservative, as serving the interest of the status
quo, it is behavioural change nevertheless. It forces a change in the
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2. Elements of tektology
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The bi-regulator
When two complexes, each subject to the processes of
progressive podbor, and therefore the potential for structural crises
consequent thereon, are brought into a relationship of bi-regulation,
the nature of the relationship will be such that, however else and
however much they are impacted by their wider environments, each
will act to modify or constrain the behaviour of the other to the extent
that their relationship is maintained.
A traditional interpretation of this would be that, in effect,
internal crises (in either of the participants) are prevented, or that such
crises as occur leave the participant in which they occur better
adapted to the needs of the other. That is, either the complex as a
whole achieves a state of ongoing stability, or, following an internal
crisis, the participant subject to structural change takes on a form in
which it can (perhaps minimally) survive whilst reducing the internal
stress this places on its counterpart. Where neither of these outcomes is
the case there is either a complete disruption of the bi-regulative
arrangement (the pair separate) or, where the arrangement continues,
a radical redefinition of the relationship between them.
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3. Adaptive Systems
3 The term ‘viable system’, which is implicit in the works by Beer cited in the
references, was often used by him in public addresses but is not found in his
published works.
4 Note that Ashby, who includes Starling in the index to Design for a Brain, does not
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machines using cybernetic principles led to the insight that the basic
model needed to be extended to include a second feedback loop – one
that assessed not the success or failure of a particular activity but the
impact of that activity, or, more correctly, the impact of the
environmental response to that activity, on the acting system or
organization. With the introduction of the ultrastable system Ashby
makes it explicit that action cannot exist in a vacuum; rather, in a
sentient or perceiving system, it exists in the context of the benefit of
the system as a whole.
Where Ashby’s model identifies the need for a systemic or
organizational context to be present in order for learning to occur,
Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) extends the notion of the ‘reacting
system’ (Beer 1985). His extension takes it from being a simple or
single homogeneous activity and defines the conditions necessary to
manage a complex of potentially heterogeneous activities which,
collectively and individually, contribute to the creation of the systemic
whole. Beer also extends the ability for organizational learning and/or
adaptation by introducing the concept of “’recursion’ (structural
similarity between levels of organizational complexity) which allows
for some degree of autonomy in the making of local adaptive change
so long as it does not compromise the integrity of the whole.
6
This is figuratively, rather than strictly, correct because of the additional
complexity introduced in the VSM which requires the formal separation of
“System 3” as a unifying management function. Because it utilizes only a single
“reacting system” this is not necessary in Ashby’s model.
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The trialogue
The trialogue, developed by Dudley (Dudley 2000; 2007) as an
extension of the models of Ashby and Beer, overcomes this problem
by rendering organizational identity ‘plastic’ – an emergent and
dynamic entity existing at the intersection of environmental and
structural possibility. There is an obvious (if latent) problem with this:
in the absence of an established moral or strategic compass, there is
the possibility that the organization becomes capricious, wantonly
opportunistic, or possibly catatonic. However when it is accepted that
the trialogue operates as the management element of a viable system
and is therefore subject to the embededness implied by Beer’s notion
of recursion, it becomes apparent that there will be both ethico-moral
and performativity imperatives (as an accepted function of
membership) which will tend to hold local behaviours away from
(accepted as) dysfunctional extremes.
Understood in this way, the trialogue can be said to provide a
basis for understanding the changes that take place (in systemic
identity) along a psycho-social continuum running from self-directed
or experiential learning through formal education and/or socialization
on to the more directive forms of psychotherapy. All of which can be
seen as responses to, or manipulation of, environmental and/or
internal factors in such a manner as to render currently held notions of
identity problematic; thereby instigating, and then supporting,
adaptive or desirable change.
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Reflections (I)
“The proletariat must have its own class art to organize its own
forces in social labor, struggle, and construction” (Roberts 1998: 16).
That the Proletkult was conceived as a movement for
consolidating revolutionary momentum following the revolution
proper (in counter-position to Boal’s rehearsal for revolution’) seems
beyond doubt, as is the general conclusion that culture in general, and
cultural products in particular, can be used as political ‘weapons’.
In the light of the discussion above, it is also clear that it would
have been possible for Bogdanov to have conceptualized the
revolution as a societal level crisis – as the radical re-definition of the
relationship between the ruling class and the masses and the re-
establishment of a new relationship between the proletariat and the
Bolshevik leadership; and, as a result of this, the establishment of a
new developmental trajectory for society as a movement of progressive
podbor, controlled by virtue of tektological understanding.
Proletarian culture then becomes a method for ensuring that,
as this societal podbor progresses, it continues along a path that cements
the social gains made possible by the revolution. Here again, as with
Boal, culture is acting to mediate between those who make up society
and the society which they create. Indeed, the extent to which “the
Proletkult organized literary studios to provide working-class readers
with an elementary literary education” (SovLit), suggests a
commitment (of the kind outlined by Boal) to providing the ability to
create cultural products to those who are directly affected by the
society such products will help to create.
When an analysis is undertaken using adaptive systems theory,
however, a number of points arise.
At the most obvious level it is possible to envisage a (politico-
economic model of) society as a high-level system with the systems of
production and the system of labour as two interacting (i.e., bi-
regulating) sub-systems operating according to the rules that set the
context for performance, or interaction being determined by the
higher level. Culture, according to both Bogdanov and Boal, functions
in order to refresh, or recreate society in a manner that ensures that
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Reflections (II)
I have already stated that culture was the lens, through which the
individual viewed society, and the mirror, through which individuals saw themselves
reflected as members of that society, but that culture does not exist in a
vacuum; it is always historically, ideologically, and theoretically
determined. That is, any form of didactic cultural product is motivated
by the beliefs of its producer.
This tends to suggest that, following the revolution – and the
radical redefinition of the identity of the politico-economic system –
the bi-regulating elements of means of production and labour were not
miraculously made free (from bourgeois domination) and equal (in
terms of perceived productive value) to defining their own new world,
but were immediately re-constrained in a different (if opposite) wider
system, one that too externally determined the nature of the legitimacy
of their bi-regulating interactions; and therefore also determined what
would be acceptable as legitimate cultural forms or products.
When it comes to cultural critique, or the attempt to use
cultural products to bring about directed social change, it seems that
emancipatory culture, including its cultural products and forms, is
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legitimately able only to provide the means for forming the questions
that problematize the current status quo, and therefore create the
conditions that might lead to or perpetuate – but not create – social
change. There is a very fine line between didactic liberation and
propaganda.
It could be argued that Bogdanov, in attempting to hand
control of the production of cultural forms directly to the proletariat,
was attempting to avoid this re-taking of control; and that the
resistance to the attempts of the Proletkult to maintain autonomy from
the central apparatus was symptomatic of the existence and operation
of such a wider system.
References
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Moscow, 8.VII.19471
Art has never been ‘art for art’s sake’ for me.
Nor has it been a way of creating something that would not
resemble the world – ‘a world of my own’.
And yet it has never had the aim of ‘reflecting’ the existing
world, either.
I have always taken on the task of deploying of influence to
impact upon feelings and thoughts, to exert influence upon the
psyche and exercise this influence to mould the spectator’s
consciousness in the desired, needed, selected direction.
This was clearly stated in the first published declaration of
my credo. And it has remained an all-encompassing orientation
throughout my work.
I shall quote from LEF (1923), No 3 (June–July):
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2 Quoted using the following translation of ‘Montage of Attraction’ by
Daniel Gerould. The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 18, No. 1, Popular Entertainments
(March 1974): 77–85.
3 [S. Eisenstein’s note:] “Magic, here, is not an empty figure of speech.
For art (the real thing) artificially returns the spectator to the primitive
stage of sensuous thinking, to its norms and types, and this stage is in reality a
stage of magical connection with nature.
When you have achieved, par exemple, a synaesthetic merging of sound
and image, you have subjected the viewer’s perception to sensuous thinking
conditions, where the synaesthetic perception is the only possible one – there is
still no differentiation of perception.
And you have the spectator ‘re-oriented’, not to the norms of today’s
perception, but to the norms of a primordially sensuous one – he is “returned”
to the magical stage of sensation.
And the idea that has been realized by a system of such influences,
embodied in a form by such means – irresistibly controls the emotions.
For the feelings and consciousness in this case are submissive and
manageable, almost as if one were in a trance.
And from a passive magical state which perceives art synaesthetically –
it is possible to move to an actively magical one in which the spectator is
possessed and managed by a magician-creator.
The former is worked on by the latter.”
Eisenstein__________________THE MAGIC OF ART_____________________Page 3 of 5
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4 ‘the
part taken for the whole’.
5 Il’ya
Efimovich Repin (1844 – 1930) and Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin (1832 –
1898) were Russian realist painters.
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6 ‘the ultimate example of reflection’.
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EISENSTEIN’S ‘CINEMA OF THE MASSES’
Introduction: Oksana Bulgakowa & John Biggart_____________________________
1 A. E.Belenson, Kino segodnya. Ocherki Sovetskogo kino-iskusstva [Kuleshov-Vertov-
Eizenshtein]. Moscow: Author’s Edition, 1925. Aleksandr Belenson (Beilenson,
1890–1949), was also the editor of the Futurist review, Strelets. After the revolution
of 1917 he wrote lyrics for popular and patriotic songs.
2 Eisenstein, “Po lichnomu voprosu”, in: Iz tvorcheskogo naslediya S.M. Eyzenshteyna.
4
cinematography.” Conceivably, Eisenstein’s experience with Belenson
explains the fact that “Mass Movies”, when it was published in The
Nation on 9 November 1927 was presented not as an interview but as
an article by Eisenstein himself: there was no mention of Fischer,
5
either as interviewer or translator.
“Mass Movies” is a comprehensive and popular explanation of
what Eisenstein understood to be his original contribution to the art of
film and is free of complicated references to psychology, physiology,
and Marxism. Possibly it was Eisenstein’s response to the German
critic, Oskar A. H. Schmitz, who had denied that The Battleship
Potëmkin had any artistic merit, given that the individual was, in this
‘mass movie’, completely absent. Schmitz’s review had been published
in Literarische Welt of 11 March 1927 and had provoked a reply by
Walter Benjamin who offered a very surprising and very accurate
comparison of the film with, not the Bildungsroman, but American
slapstick. Like Potëmkin, that genre of grotesque cinema had invented a
new formula that represented progress in art and had moved in step
6
with the technological revolution.
Later that year, in its issue No.49 dated 6 December, the
German journal Die Weltbühne: Wochenschrift für Politik, Kunst, Wirtschaft,
published, as one of a number of items devoted to Soviet Russia, an
article by Eisenstein under the title “Massenkino” that purported to be
an ‘authorized translation’ by the Austrian literary journalist and poet,
7
Otto Basil. This was, clearly, much the same material that had been
published in The Nation. However, it was not stated in Die Weltbühne
whether Basil’s translation was of the text that had been published in
The Nation, or of a Russian text that he or the editors of Die Weltbühne
had obtained, directly or indirectly, from Eisenstein.
No original Russian texts of the articles that appeared in The
Nation and Die Weltbühne are extant. Neither Fischer nor Basil was
entirely conversant with the terminology of film production and there
4 Marie Seton. Sergei M. Eisenstein. A Biography. London: The Bodley Head 1952,
119. In fact, Eisenstein had already published “The montage of attractions” in
LEF (1923), No.3.
5 Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, “Mass Movies”, The Nation, Vol. CXXV, No.
3253, 9 November 1927. This was a special issue devoted to “Soviet Russia 1917–
1927”.
6 The texts of Schmitz and Benjamin are reprinted in: Fritz Mierau. Russen in
Berlin. Literatur, Malerei, Theater, Film 1918–1933. Leipzig: Reclam 1990, 515–24.
7 “‘Massenkino’ von S.M. Eisenstein”, Die Weltbühne: Wochenschrift für Politik, Kunst,
Wirtschaft, No.49, 6 December 1927, 858–860. Basil’s text was later republished,
without comment, in Filmwissenschaftliche Mitteilungen (Berlin/GDR), 1967 No. 3.
On Otto Basil (1901–1983), see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Basil
are passages in both the English and German texts that are obscure.
However, given Basil’s claim that his translation was ‘authorized’, the
German text was taken as the starting point for this new English
translation by Richard Abraham. This new version takes into account
what we now know of Eisenstein’s cinematic theory, film technique
and vocabulary.
the distinguished Russian scientist, Pavlov, on the operation of the
reflexes; and, on the other, on the teachings of Freud.
Let us take, for example the scene in Potëmkin, in which the
Cossacks slowly, deliberately, descend the Odessa harbour steps, firing
into the masses. Through a deliberate composition of the elements of
limbs, steps, blood, people, we create an impression, but of what kind?
The spectator is not immediately transported to the Odessa wharves of
1905; but as the soldiers’ boots march relentlessly down the steps the
spectator recoils involuntarily, so as to escape from the field of fire.
And when the pram of the panic-stricken mother goes tumbling down
the steps, the spectator grips his cinema seat convulsively, so as to
avoid falling into the sea.
8
Our method of montage is an additional tool for achieving
such effects. In some countries where the film industry is highly
developed, montage is rarely, if ever, practiced. For example, a sledge
will be shown hurtling down a snow-covered toboggan slope, until it
reaches the bottom. But we photograph the bumping of the sledge,
and the spectator feels and even hears this, in the same way that the
9
throbbing of the engines of the Battleship Potëmkin as it steamed into
battle had been felt and heard. This means that the movement of
things and of machines is not a secondary or insignificant aspect of our
films, but a process of fundamental importance. Technical detail, the
alternation of object and close-up, side-view, superimposition,
constitutes the most important part of our work. Such methods cannot
be employed in the theatre. I arrived at the theatre by way of the
Proletkult, but soon went over to film. I believe that the theatre is a
dying industry. It is (for me) a field for the insignificant artisan. Film is
a heavy, highly-organized industry.
We always give great thought to both the visual impact and the
conceptual impact. We never begin a film without a clear idea of our
purpose. Potëmkin was an episode from the heroic struggle of the
revolution, filmed with the intention of electrifying the masses. The
General Line aims to strengthen the link between town and countryside,
one of the political objectives of Bolshevism. October, a film that will
soon be seen everywhere, portrays the ten days in autumn 1917 that
8 The term used by Eisenstein was sborka.
9 In the German text – ‘Panzerkreuzer’. Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potëmkin was
distributed in Germany under the title Panzerkreuzer Potëmkin and for the English-
speaking world as The Battleship Potëmkin. The original ship, the Knyaz’ Potëmkin
Tavricheskiy, was a battleship of the pre-dreadnought class.
shook the world. It depicts an episode in world history, made by the
man in the street, by the worker in the factory, by the lice-infected
soldiers from the trenches. It identifies the masses with world history.
Of course, certain conditions make our work a bit easier. In
October, we worked night after night with four or five thousand
Leningrad workers who had volunteered to take part in the storming
of the Winter Palace. The government provided weapons and
uniforms, as did the army. To supplement the workers and the soldiers
we needed a crowd. The word soon got around and a couple of hours
later the militia had their hands full controlling a throng of ten
thousand.
For Potëmkin, the Black Sea Fleet was placed at our disposal.
10
On 7 November 1917, the Avrora, flagship of the Baltic Fleet, went
over to the Communists and steamed up-river on the Neva to
bombard the Winter Palace. The state lent us the ship for the filming
of this scene in October.
Just as we take our materials from life, so we take our scenery
from real life. We never construct streets, towns or villages. Those that
already exist are more authentic. Permission to film is readily granted.
No private property-owner can protest against the use of his land or
demand payment for its use. Naturally, these things considerably
reduce production costs.
Potëmkin was a staging post. The General Line and October are a
step forward. They are closer to life. We are constantly learning. We
know that our method is the only correct one and that its potential is
limitless.
[The version of Eisenstein’s article that was published in The
Nation concluded with the following paragraph, which does not appear
in the German version.]
“Our method and America’s highly developed movie
technique ought to be a powerful combination. For this reason we are
interested in an invitation to work in the United States during the next
year. If our activities here permit, and we are granted freedom of
11
action in the United States, we may soon be there.”
10 The cruiser Avrora had formed part of a ‘second squadron’ that operated in the
Baltic Sea during the First World War, but it does not appear to have been a
flagship, in the sense of having served as the headquarters of the squadron
commander. At of the end of 1916 the Avrora was in dock in St. Petersburg for
repairs. Its crew played an active part in the revolutions of February and October
in 1917. See http://www.aurora.org.ru/eng/index.php@theme=info.
11 In the intervening years Eisenstein travelled widely in Europe but it was May
Marxist, have their problems. In the Soviet era, Lenin was depicted
CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
as the winner of the dispute. But a closer examination of
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT Bogdanov’s arguments shows that he actually hit upon some weak
Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult points in Lenin’s conception. This does not, however, mean that
Lenin’s critique of Bogdanov as a subjectivist in his theory of
Editor-in-Chief: Pia Tikka cognition was groundless.
Editorial Board: John Biggart, Vesa Oittinen,
Giulia Rispoli, Maja Soboleva
Tangential Points Publications
Aalto University 2016
ISBN 103204787103ABC
Oittinen_________________ON ‘THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES’________________Page 1 of 13
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1 From: Yagodinskiy 2006: 45. The author of the epigram is not mentioned by
name.
Oittinen_________________ON ‘THINGS-IN-THEMSELVES’________________Page 2 of 13
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not yet explain the essence of the phenomenon. In her excellent analysis
of the Russian empirio-criticism, Daniela Steila stressed the specific
traits of how European philosophical currents were recopied in Russia:
this reception has never been purely academic; instead, the Russians
have always sought solutions for the actual problems of their society.
It is, moreover, quite possible to interpret the empirio-critical
revision of Marxism (dubbed by Bogdanov himself as Empiriomonism),
which became very influential in the left current of Russian Social
Democracy – so influential that many contemporaries were ready to
take it as the philosophy proper of Bolshevism – as a continuation of the
subjectivism of the Narodniki. What Mikhailovskiy had claimed in the
1870’s, namely that the subjective factor decides the outcome of the
historical process, seemed now to resurge in the philosophy of
Bogdanov which denounced the determinism of many Marxists. This
explains, why the leaders of Menshevism as well as Bolshevism,
Plekhanov and Lenin, were to a large extent unanimous in their critique
of Bogdanov. It even seemed that the Russian Machists brought the
Narodnik subjectivism to a head, to the extent that they – as Lenin
wrote – approached the subjective-idealist and solipsist positions of
Bishop Berkeley.
The thing-in-itself
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the logic of his own doctrine. That is what Engels meant by his
‘pudding’” (Plekhanov 1976, II:381).2
The quotation shows us the blueprint of Plekhanov’s
argumentation, which he applied again, after a decade, in Materialismus
militans (1908) against another opponent, Bogdanov. In his book
Empiriomonizm (vol. III, 1906) Bogdanov had reproached Plekhanov for
defining the matter as things-in-themselves which affect our organs of
sense. In his ‘second letter’ to his adversary, Plekhanov first quotes
Bogdanov’s reproach:
“Thus [you write smilingly], ‘matter’ (or ‘nature’ in its antithesis
to ‘spirit’) is defined through ‘things-in-themselves’ and through their
capacity to ‘arouse sensations by acting on our sense-organs’. But what
are these ‘things-in-themselves’? ‘That which acts on our sense-organs
and arouses in us various sensations.’ That is all. You will find that
Comrade Beltov has no other definition, if you leave out of account the
probably implied negative characteristics: non-‘sensation’, non-
‘phenomenon’, non-‘experience’ “.3
Then Plekhanov answers – seemingly irritated:
“I don’t define matter ‘through’ things-in-themselves at all. I
assert only that all things-in-themselves are material. By the materiality
of things, I understand – and here you are right – their ability one way
or another, directly or indirectly, to act on our senses and thus arouse in
us sensations of one kind or another.” Plekhanov continued by
explaining, that Kant himself had been inconsequent in defining the
things-in-themselves. On the first page of his Critique of Pure Reason Kant
had acknowledged things-in-themselves to be the source of our
sensations. However, “at the same time he was by no means averse to
recognizing these things as something immaterial, that is to say,
inaccessible to our senses” (Plekhanov 1976, III: 212).
A bit farther in his exposition Plekhanov concedes that “the
expression ‘things-in-themselves exist outside our experience’ is not a
very happy one. It could mean that things in general are inaccessible to
our experience. This is how Kant understood it… “ (Plekhanov 1976,
III: 219). Be it as it may, Plekhanov insists that it is necessary to
relinquish the Kantian agnosticism. This implies that the Marxists
should “employ the term ‘thing-in-itself’ in a quite different sense from
the Kantians and Machists” (Plekhanov 1976, III: 212—213).
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4See Bordyugov (General Editor) 1995. The volume was edited by N.S. Antonova
and has a foreword written by Daniela Steila.
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5 In the Russian language, ‘faith’ (in the religious sense) and ‘belief’ are not clearly
distinguished; the noun vera covers both meanings.
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in the latter ones they are elements of images, or sensations. The elements
of things (or of the ‘environment’) are colours, forms, hardness, softness
and so on, are taken as being independent of the individual [subject –
V. O.], in a connection that is objective: in the complex ‘petal of a rose’,
the colour red is united with the softness, the oval form, pleasant smell
etc. in an objective way, as an ‘object’, quite independently of whether ‘I’
am looking at this petal or not.” (Bogdanov 1910: 167)
The big problem in this argument consists of the following: if
one chooses to understand experience in a ‘realistic’ (materialistic) way,
one cannot cope with the task without the concept of a thing-in-itself,
which is independent of the cognizing and experiencing ‘I’. But for
Bogdanov, this possibility does not exist, since for him there are no
things-in-themselves – everything is but “organized experience”. In
other words, his ‘experience’ does not have a well-defined, independent
‘opposite’: in the quotation above he says outright that the “elements”
of the subjective experience are “the same” as the objective elements. In
other words, although Bogdanov quite rightly finds inconsequences in
Lenin’s use of the concept of a thing-in-itself, this does not mean that
the concept as such would become obsolete.
As to the two other versions of things-in-themselves that
Bogdanov finds in Lenin, the second is derived from Plekhanov. In
general, one can find in Plekhanov more sympathy towards Kantian
argumentation than in Lenin. Plekhanov did not treat the thing-in-itself
and thing-for-us as concepts of the same level as Lenin did in the above-
cited passages. According to Plekhanov, things-in-themselves should be
conceived as a kind on ‘species’ (vid), which lies outside of the experience
but nevertheless affects our senses. This is a reading rather close to Kant
(who, however, never called his things-in-themselves a ‘species’). In
some parts of Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin adheres to
Plekhanov’s interpretation, but is not, according to Bogdanov, able to
distinguish his position from that of Plekhanov, and therefore remains,
even here, inconsistent (Bogdanov 1910: 172).
The third version of Lenin’s concept of thing-in-itself is not very
clearly formulated in Bogdanov’s critique, but even here he is able to
make an interesting and intriguing comment. He notes that despite the
fact that Lenin at times seems to embrace Plekhanov’s interpretation of
thing-in-itself, there however remains “a big difference between
Plekhanov and Lenin, which one is not allowed to lose from sight. For
Plekhanov, the things-in-themselves do not at all have a sensuous
character. Only their ‘appearances’ have this character […] For Il’in,
on the contrary, as he repeatedly asserts, there ‘does not exist any other
existence than a sensuous existence’, and the things-in-themselves are
principally of the same quality as the appearances” (Bogdanov 1910:
173).
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References
Bordyugov, G.A. (General Editor) 1995. Neizvestnyy Bogdanov, kn. 3: A.A. Bogdanov,
Desyatiletiye otluchenija ot marksizma, Moskva: AIRO—XX.
Bogdanov, A.A. 1910. Padenie velikogo fetishizma. Vera i nauka. Moskva: V. Rikhter.
--------------------. 2003. Empiriomonizm. Stat’i po filosofii. Moskva: Iz-vo “Respublika”.
Grille, Dieter. 1966. Lenins Rivale. Bogdanov und seine Philosophie. Köln: Vlg. Wissenschaft
und Politik (Abhandlungen des Bundesinstituts für ostwissenschaftliche und
internationale Studien), Bd. XII.
Lenin, V.I. 1977. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. In: Lenin, V. I., Collected Works vol.
14, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1977
Plekhanov, G. V. 1976 ‟Conrad Schmidt versus Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.” In:
G. V. Plekhanov, Selected Philosophical Works in Five Volumes. Vol. II. Moscow:
Progress.
--------------------. 1976. “Materialismus militans”. In: Selected Philosophical Works in Five
Volumes, Vol. III, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Steila, Daniela. 1996. Scienza e rivoluzione. La recezione dell’empiriocriticismo nella cultura russa
(1870—1910), Torino: Casa Editrice Le Lettere.
Steyla, Daniela. 2013. Nauka i revolyutsiya. Retseptsiya empiriokrititsizma v russkoy kul’ture
(1877–1910 gg.), Moskva: Akademicheskiy Proekt (This is a new, expanded
edition, in Russian, of the edition of 1996).
Volodin, A.I. 1982. “Boy absolyutno neizbezhen”. Istoriko-filosofskie ocherki o knige V.I. Lenina
“Materializm i empiriokrititsizm”. Moskva: Politizdat.
Yagodinskiy. V.N. 2006. Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (Malinovskiy) 1873–
1928. Moskva: Nauka.
An extended version of this paper has been previously published in German in Vesa
Oittinen (ed.), Aleksandr Bogdanov revisited, Helsinki 2006.
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ALEKSANDR BOGDANOV'S TEKTOLOGY:
A SCIENCE OF CONSTRUCTION
Simona Poustilnik_________________________________________________________
“Furor tectologicus”
published it only after end of the war, having earlier believed that the scientific
community was not ready to accept it.
4 Tektology was a unique conception of the general science of organization which
brought into focus the systems notions of all main macroparadigms which
point of Tektology was the universally applicable idea of “organization”
or “complex” as an expedient unity, a combination of elements -
“activities-resistances” and a universal set of organizational laws for all
complexes of the world. As Bogdanov stated:
“My starting point … consists in that structural relations can
be generalized to the same degree of formal schematic clarity as the
relations of quantities in mathematics and on such basis organizational
tasks can be solved using methods analogous to the mathematical”.
(Bogdanov 1989: Book 2, 310).
This apparently purely scientific and innocent scientific
doctrine gave rise to a great outburst of “proletarian” debates and
influenced the development, shaping and interpretation of proletarian
ideology and culture in early Soviet Russia. This is not surprising since
Tektology was designed as a monistic organizational proletarian science
and such a project was possible only in Russia and only at this time.
Bogdanov was deeply influenced by classical science and by the
monistic tradition in philosophy. The idea of the unity of nature and
of its simplicity was one of the first scientific and philosophical notions.
It held that the diversity of nature was full of amazing and numerous
analogies and repetitions – therefore there should be simple and
universal laws of nature to explain all phenomena. The epoch of
classical science was an era of aspiration for creation of “global
formulae” – universal and simple monistic models and concepts of the
world. For pre-twentieth science, the unity of knowledge was equal to
monism of knowledge – by ascending to more and more abstract levels
of existence it would be possible eventually to arrive at unified all-
embracing laws of existence (as in the Mathesis universalis of Leibniz or
the Divine Calculator of Laplace).5
This old monistic tradition was still very powerful during
Bogdanov’s lifetime.6 As the influential German biologist Ernest
and the simplicity of its explanation (Ockham’s Razor, Fermat’s principle of the
reflection and refraction of light, Maupertuis’ general principle of least action,
Goethe’s protophenomena, etc.).
6 At this time scientists were still preoccupied with analogies between the simple
and the complex, and with the construction of numerous simple models of nature.
For example, the analogy of the cell with the crystal was highly popular. See a
Russian translation by Przhibram, G. 1913. “Obzor mnenii avtorov o znachenii
analogii mezdu kristallom i organizmom”, in What Is Life. New in Biology.
Haeckel7 put it, monism was an evident characteristic of the sciences
and philosophical thought of the end of the nineteenth century. He
believed that the approaching twentieth century would construct “a
system of pure monism” and achieve the “long-desired unity of world-
conception” (Haeckel 1900: XV&390).
Bogdanov designed his new science of organization in
accordance with the monistic assumptions of his era – Tektology’s
subtitle; Universal Organizational Science implied a monistic universal
science. Tektology was to be a monistic science of world-organization,
viewing and summing up the entire universe in terms of and through
organization.8 Bogdanov’s ingenious scientific discovery –“everything
is organization” led him to the conclusion that everything was only
organization – being a “monist” he believed he had created a new
monistic organizational science.9
As a Russian Marxist, Aleksandr Bogdanov was committed to
the scientific reconstruction of society, which appeared to him to be
the highest form of organization. Implementing Marxist-positivistic
practical aspirations, Tektology was to be not merely a monistic
organizational science but a science of monistic organizational
experience. Tektology was meant to be a practical science, its
formulae - “practical global formulae” were intended for the “practical
mastery” of nature, and to be “a powerful instrument of the real
organization of humankind into a single collective.” (Bogdanov 1989:
Book 1, 110).
Allgemeine Structurlehre der Organismen (1866) expanding this term. In Greek, “tekton”
means “theory of construction” and for Bogdanov” “construction” was “the most
general and suitable synonym for the modern notion of organization.” See
Bogdanov 1989: Book 1, 112.
8 The German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, Haeckel’s most important successor as a
Russian Marxism had seen the revolution and class struggle as
the way towards achieving a new social order. Bogdanov had an
opposite vision; the idea of struggle did not fit in with Bogdanov’s
organizational and harmonic vision of the world. Tektology was an “all-
human science” for the gathering together of man and of the world, to
produce a scientifically organized collective by stage of self-
organization without class struggle. The collectivistic organizational
logic of Tektology was based on Bogdanov’s biological worldview, fused
with a Russian philosophical Weltanschauung, which had always been
penetrated by ideas of the harmony of the world and did not accept
the principle of struggle as the moving force of evolution.
Bogdanov introduced the term “complex” as “expedient unity”
(tselesoobrasnost’)10 to denote a combination of elements or “activities-
resistances” and interpreted this in terms of the biological concept of
constant interaction with the environment and adaptation to it
(Bogdanov 1989 Book 1: 112–125).
Following Darwin, Bogdanov conceived of development as the
adaptation of a complex to its environment. The universal regulating
mechanism of tektological development and its adaptation was ‘podbor’.
Bogdanov believed his tektological ‘podbor’ to be merely a logical
extension of Darwin’s principle of “natural selection” discarding the
epithet “natural” (Bogdanov 1989, Book 1: 189–190). But this was not
the case.
How far did Bogdanov really follow Darwin? Is his conception
of selection really an extension of that of Darwin?
Darwin’s theory of evolution “by means of natural selection”
was greatly influenced by the English economist Thomas Malthus and
his theory of population growth exceeding resources. Malthus’s
metaphor of the “struggle for existence” was the matrix for Darwin’s
theory of evolution based on competition. Darwin wrote: “Nothing is
easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for
life” (Darwin 1902: 77).
Russian naturalists perceived nature very differently from
Western naturalists, seeing in nature not over-population but under-
population. Russian philosophy with its humanistic and collectivistic
10 Bogdanov identified three types of “complex” - “organized”, “disorganized” and
tendencies believed in the best sides of both human nature and society.
The same attitude was applied to nature. As the Russian writer and
publicist Aleksandr Herzen put it, everybody has to have a place at
nature’s feast.
For Russian intellectuals, the constructions of Malthus were
offensive and even repugnant, and contrary to the Russian humanistic
tradition, which believed in high human moral ideals and strove for
the improvement of human society11. These intellectuals transferred
the same negative assessment to Darwin and Darwinism. Russian
intellectuals perceived Darwin’s theory as being the concept of a ruling
élite, for the benefit of the ruling élite. For example, the leading
Russian biologist of that time, Nikolay Danilevskiy, described
Darwinism as a “purely English doctrine”, in which is included not
just the features of the English mind but all the features of the English
spirit (Danilevskiy 1885: 178).
In the first Russian translation of Darwin’s Origin of Species
(Rachinskiy 1864) Darwin’s term “natural selection” was translated as
“estestvenniy podbor” (‘podbor’ - “assembling” in re-translation). This
fundamentally changed the meaning of Darwin’s concept of evolution
and removed its emphasis on competition and struggle for existence.
As a result, Russian Darwinism developed without Malthus – without
the struggle for existence. Russian Darwinists and intellectuals
discussed Darwin’s theory of evolution in terms of “assembling” or
“choice” – as nature’s choice of individual traits to uphold its divine
and marvelous order; adaptation represented a kind of reciprocal
“fine-tuning” or creative construction by nature (Chaikovskiy 1989:
121–141).
The correct translation of Darwin’s term “natural selection” –
“estestvenniy otbor” appeared in Russia at the end of the nineteenth
century,12 but the idea of competition as a moving force of evolution
was not really adopted. Most Russian thinkers, philosophers and
scientists of different backgrounds and political views of the generation
of Bogdanov believed that Darwin’s concept of evolution reflected the
negative influence of Malthus. Russian thinkers tried to create
different theories of mutual aid in order to achieve “genuine
11 As Todes has noted, Malthus was seen in Russia as a “hack writer”(Lev Tolstoi),
Timiryazev (1896).
Darwinism”. In 1902 the famous Russian anarchist and biologist,
Prince Petr Kropotkin, devised an alternative concept of evolution:
Mutual Aid as Factor of Evolution.13 In this work, Kropotkin wrote:
“I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that
bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to
the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists… as the
dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of
evolution”. (Kropotkin 1914: 7).
Instead he found “a great deal of mutual aid where Darwin
and Wallace see only struggle.” (1914: 9).
Kropotkin did not deny the existence of competition within the
same species or Darwin’s concept of the “survival of the fittest”.
But he believed that the “fittest” are animals that cooperate with each
other. Kropotkin viewed human morality as a product of the solidarity
and self-sacrifice that originated from the cooperative instincts of the
animal world. 14
It was in conformity with this Russian anti-Malthusian
assessment and tradition, that Bogdanov wrote in Tektology that the
principle of Darwin is a “scientific truth” and that the views of
Malthus should be disregarded “as being fundamentally mistaken”
(Bogdanov 1989: Book 2, 190) and he deliberately adopted the
archaic, by that time, translation ‘podbor’15 since, for him, the term
‘podbor’ corresponded to genuine Darwinism. He believed he was
merely expanding the relevance of the term in Tektology; but in a fact,
tektological ‘podbor’ (“assembling”) – is not an extension of Darwin’s
“natural selection”.
Darwin’s evolution works only through heredity in succession
of generations. Darwin’s “natural selection” meant selective biological
reproduction; each generation continues its evolutionary direction by
taking the next evolutionary step. In Bogdanov’s tektological
13 Petr Kropotkin 1914. Kropotkin wrote his book as a response to Social
selection” as ‘otbor’ since he was a student of Timiryazev and he applied the term
‘otbor’ in Tektology on several occasions.
organizational scheme the mechanism of ‘podbor’ was applied to the
development of any kind of organization, regardless of biological
heredity.
The further and the most important difference resides in the
systems character of tektological ‘podbor’, which, in this respect, is the
direct opposite of Darwin’s “natural selection”. Darwin’s “natural
selection” meant the selecting-survival of individuals through the
adaptation of one particular feature or another in the course of the
struggle for existence. Bogdanov’s ‘podbor’ meant the assembling-
creation of the organization through the concordance of its parts and
expediency (Bogdanov 1989: Book 1, 113) without reference to the
idea of competition. Tektological ‘podbor’ creates the mutual
correspondence of all complexes as parts of a single world-organism –
in line with the understanding of the Russian Darwinists of “natural
podbor” as “fine-tuning” in nature. 16
Tektological ‘podbor’ appears as the universal mechanism of the
construction of any organization and its expediency. In 2008
Chaikovskiy in his fundamental research on the theory of evolution
devoted a special chapter to ‘Podbor’ according to Bogdanov, where he
discussed the importance of Bogdanov’s ‘podbor’ as the foundation the
idea of the universal phenomenon of self-organization in nature
(Chaikovskiy 2008: 363–370). Tektological ‘podbor’ as the universal
organizing principle assembling the complex through the concordance
of its parts was taken up later in the work of the Soviet Constructivists,
as we shall see.
Marxists the idea of the construction of a new rational social
organization based on science was central – and science played a
primary role in Bogdanov’s conception of scientifically organized
humankind. But he viewed the science of the old world as full of
contradictions, too complicated and fragmented, and therefore not
suitable for the purpose of managing the “grandiose task…the triple
organization - of things, people and ideas” the objective of which was
to achieve a new social organization (Bogdanov 1989: Book 1, 106).
Bogdanov considered Marx to be the “great forerunner of
organizational science”. As White has put it, Bogdanov’s concept of
socialism as the “gathering of man” was close to the original idea of
Karl Marx. Marx believed that socialism would create an integral
human community, which would end the fragmentation of the human
psyché brought about by the division of labour and specialization.
Bogdanov conceived of the future collective in a similar fashion – all of
its members would be able to transfer from specialty to specialty.
Science would be available to everyone and the human collective
would be able to control it. But for Marx, the future socialist society
was to result from the inherent social nature of Mankind, whereas for
Bogdanov it would result from the active self-organization of society
(White 1998: 37–38).
Bogdanov’s answer was Tektology as the “socialism of science”.
In his early work, The Gathering of Man (Sobiraniye cheloveka, 1904)
Bogdanov formulated the task of changing “a fractured man” into
“integral man” when knowledge would be the property not of an élite,
but of all members of the collective. It was the hope of replacing the
existing necessity of collective belief by the collective possession of
knowledge that motivated Bogdanov in his path towards Tektology. 17
The class struggle did not fit into Bogdanov’s organizational
vision of a harmonious world. As he explained in Problems of socialism
17 In Engineer Menni (1912), Bogdanov’s second science fiction novel about
(Voprosy sotsializma, 1918) “the class struggle… ignores the organization
stability of the social mechanism.” (Bogdanov 1918: 42). He goes on:
“According to the old notions, socialism first conquers and
then comes into being.... We see things differently – socialistic
development will be completed by a socialistic revolution.” (1918:
101–102). The creative implementation of a socialist, class-based order
will bring the proletariat to a victory that will transform that order into
an all-human order (‘obshchechelovecheskiy stroi’).
Bogdanov completely discarded the notion of class struggle –
now the construction of a new social organization could be achieved
only through a long stage of cultural self-organization of the
proletariat.18 Bogdanov designed a programme for this transition – the
Programme of Proletarian Culture (Proletkult).19 At the core of the
project of the Proletkult there was Tektology, the organizational proletarian
science. To master culture meant to master Tektology, which contained
all the organizational experience and knowledge of humankind. For
Bogdanov, Tektology was the ultimate tool for the construction of new
kinds of relationships between members of the social organization in
the advance towards socialism.20
When Bogdanov says Tektology, he means proletarian science,
and vice versa. Tektology was a proletarian science that had simplified all
sciences from an organizational point of view and so became available
to every member of the collective, and not only to the educated élite. This
science of organization was a proletarian science and a real instrument
for the peaceful transition towards the unified human collective of the
future. In Bogdanov’s own words, Tektology was an “all-human
science” – an instrument for the organization of humankind into
“single intelligent human organism”21 and the purpose of the Proletkult
was to open the path towards socialism by serving as an enabling
18 This explains why he left active political life in 1911 and became Lenin’s most
serious intellectual antagonist and rival.
19 On the Proletkult, see Sochor 1988.
20 Bogdanov was obsessed with this idea. In 1918, at the First All-Russian
Conference of the Proletkult, in his speech Science and the Proletariat (Nauka i
proletariat) Bogdanov spoke of the need to master tektology as a means towards
socialism (the Proletkult catered not for everyone, but primarily for the proletarian
vanguard or proletarian élite).
21 Bogdanov tried to achieve “physiological collectivism” in practice, through
exchange blood transfusions, seeing this as a way of eliminating the “weak link” of
each organism and, most interestingly, of achieving an “outcome beyond the limits
of individuality” (Bogdanov 1989: Book 2, p. 86). At that time many scientists
believed in heredity via blood. See Krementsov 2011.
institution for cultural self-organization and the mastering of
Tektology.22
The Proletkult represented a fusion of Bogdanov’s utopian
aspirations – the scientific utopia of a universal monistic discipline that
was capable of mastering any combination of elements and the social
utopia of the construction of “tektological socialism”.
the planning of the economy” in which he advocated the development
of Soviet economy according to tektological principles (the law of the
least, the principle of equilibrium, etc.).25
In 1924, in the journal Under Banner of Marxism (‘Pod znamenem
marksizma’) it was noted that one of the immediate tasks was – a close
examination and criticism of Tektology from the standpoint of
dialectical materialism (Veinstein 1924: 90) – indeed, critical reviews
of Tektology appeared in this journal on a regular basis.26 In 1930 in the
journal Revolution and Culture (‘Revolyutsiya i kultura’) it was emphasised
once again that “the influence of Bogdanov’s doctrine…necessitates its
serious and deep criticism”.27 In the same year there appeared a
critical review of the economist Bazarov, one of Bogdanov’s followers
in economics, in which it was sarcastically noted: “What can we say
about a naturalist who, on the grounds that a table has four “legs”, like
a cow, would declare that a table is the model of a cow?” (Sobol’ 1930:
60).
Slava Gerovitch, in discussing the evolution of the Soviet
notion of self, has pointed out:
“The “totalitarian model” of Soviet society traditionally
considered “the cog in a wheel” as a central metaphor for the new
Soviet man. This metaphor embodied the notion of the passive
individual subsumed under the collective…” (Gerovitch 2007: 137).
Recently, however, scholars have begun to challenge the
passive nature of the Soviet “totalitarian self”. They argue that the
“new Soviet man” was not just a passive recipient of official ideology.
He made active attempts to construct a new identity for himself,
aspiring after the alluring ideal of the new Soviet man (Gerovitch
2007).
Proletarian collectivism was an essential feature of this identity
and all aspects of a new “proletarian” life - and a necessary
25 It is interesting that Bogdanov introduced the term ‘Soviet exhaustion’
precondition of the construction of a new proletarian art. Bogdanov’s
slogan of “organization” and organizational laws, and his attempt to
construct a collective integral personality-organization possessed a
conceptual creative power. As Susiluoto has pointed out, in Russia,
systems thinking arose as a comprehensive challenge without proof,
through philosophy and theoretical concepts and possessed a “utopian
creative power to influence and change the entire world, now and at
once.” (Susiluoto 2009: 86).
Tektology as a science of the organization of rational
combinations was a powerful and creative instrument, and its ideas
were promoted and available to Soviet intellectuals, artists, and the
mass membership of the Proletkult. Many links were forged between
groups of the Proletkult and Constructivists after the founding of
Constructivism in March 1921.28
The Art Deco style of the early twentieth century was a
celebration of the rise of commerce and machine art, and the human
being was included in the universe of the machine and viewed as a
technical system. During the early Soviet period, life was synonymous
with art, and art became life. New “proletarian” art and “proletarian”
art objects were to be imbued with the idea of a purpose that was
understandable for the proletariat and clearly connected with
everyday life and work experience.29
The Constructivists were dedicated to creating art objects that
would organize the new Soviet man in a collective direction towards
socialism. They were seeking to create the projects and objects of
proletarian constructivist art as a fusion of human being, technique,
science and everyday life based on the principle of concordance of the
parts, forms and materials.30
Tektology provided Constructivists with a scientific rationale,
and with terminology and models for their experiments in a new
“production art”. Bogdanov viewed expediency as being the universal
principle of every form of organization, and that it derived from the
inherent activity of all complexes:
28 For example, Boris Arvatov taught at the Central Proletkult in Moscow.
29 Aleksandr Rodchenko in writing about the new essence of proletarian items of
daily life, referred to “the capitalistic world’s “opium of things”.
30 Alekseiy Gan designated the three principal elements of Constructivism as
“Any practical or theoretical task comes up against a
tektological question: how to organize most expediently a collection of
elements, whether real or ideal.” (Bogdanov 1989: Book 1, 142).
For the Constructivists the conception of “organization” as an
expedient combination of active elements was a powerful idea and
stimulus. Tektological models demonstrated the practical ways for
artists to construct an expedient complex of “production art” in order
to fulfill the political command which required proletarian artists to
deliver practical and functional proletarian art objects.
In 1922 Alekseiy Gan published the groundbreaking work
Constructivism (Gan 1922), in which he pronounced the slogan “labour,
technique and organization!” and “expediency” was proclaimed as a
formal artistic dogma and goal. As Tikka has pointed out:
“In line with the tectological thinking…the constructivist
theorist Alekseiy Gan…elaborated his “Tectonics” on the idea of
“fluidity” (tekuchest’) as a formulation of the workers’ “active social
force” (Tikka 2008: 222).31
Bogdanov spoke of the “worker-organizer”, the Constructivists
– of the “artist- organizer” – both models implied collective work.
Bogdanov conceived of Tektology as the ultimate tool that would
contribute to the attainment of socialism. The Constructivists saw
collective artistic labour as a path towards socialism. Bogdanov did not
make a distinction between creation and labour – and the
Constructivists focused on practical objects inspired by labour,
technique and everyday life.
The Constructivist artist was an “artist-organizer”, an “artist-
worker” – a member of the proletarian collective, organizing and
creating an object of organized art in collective production.32 The
product of constructivist work-art figured as an organized complex in
Bogdanov’s sense of the term created by the proletarian collective and
representing the proletarian collective as “workers-organizers”.
Tektological ‘podbor’-“assembling” as a universal mechanism
for construction, provided the Constructivists with a real method for
constructing an expedient art-object by way of a “cinematic assembly”
31 The term “tectonic” (‘tektonika’) was also used by Constructivists Varvara
Stepanova and Alexandr Rodchenko. Varvara Stepanova in her lecture on
Constructivism in 1921 discussed “tectonic construction” and the role of the artist
as an organizer.
32 For example, Rodchenko asked his students to create the objects, which would
of the elements – in the manner of assembling by tektological ‘podbor’.
In 1922 the Constructivist Dziga Vertov proclaimed:
“Cinema is the art of the fictional motion of things in space
that meet the requirements of science”; ‘kinochestvo’ is “the art of
organizing the necessary movements of things in space and time in a
rhythmical artistic whole.”33
Conclusion
33See Vertov, 1922. Variant Manifesta “My”: http://vertov.ru/Dziga_Vertov/
34 Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is a great example of
Tektology-inspired constructivist cinematic technique in which organized film is
placed at the service of the organized collective. Vertov included in his films
moments of editing of the film, making explicit the process of construction.
References
Shushpanov, Aleksandr N. 2009. “Alternative Social Ideas in Russian Utopian
Novels and Science Fiction at the Beginning of the 20th Century.” In
Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen, 259–281. Helsinki:
Aleksanteri Series, 1.
Sobol’, Valerian.1930. “Teoriya planirovaniya vreditelya Bazarova.” Revolutsiya i
kultura, Moscow, 21–22: 59–66.
Sochor, Zenovia. 1988. Revolution and Culture. The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Ithica and
London: Cornell University Press.
Susiluoto, Ilmari. 2009. “The Unfulfilled Promise: Tectology and “Socialist Cybernetics.” In
Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen, 81–104. Helsinki:
Aleksanteri Series, 1.
Tikka, Pia. 2009. “Tracing Tectology in Sergei Eisenstein’s Holistic Thinking.” In
Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited, edited by Vesa Oittinen, 211–234. Helsinki:
Aleksanteri Series, 1.
Todes, Daniel. 1989. Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian
Evolutionary Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Udal’tsov, Aleksandr. 1922. “K kritike teorii klassov u A.Bogdanova.” Pod znamenem
marksizma, Moscow, 7–8: 82–100.
Veinstein, Israel. 1924. “Tektologiya i taktika.” Pod znamenem marksizma, Moscow
1924, 6–7: 90–96.
Vertov, Dziga. 2008. “My. Variant Manifesta.” In Dziga Vertov. Iz naslediya. Moscow:
Eisenstein-tsentr, 2.
White, James. 1998. “Sources and precursors of Bogdanov’s Tektology.” In Alexander
Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia, edited by John Biggart,
Peter Dudley, and Francis King, 25–42. Aldershot: Ashgate.
SHARING IN ACTION:
BOGDANOV, THE LIVING EXPERIENCE AND
THE SYSTEMIC CONCEPT OF THE ENVIRONMENT
Giulia Rispoli______________________________________________________________
CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
environment favours biological organisms most well adapted to its
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT conditions; on the other hand, the environment is seen as a portion
Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult of space (ecosystem) in which populations live and continuously
modify the biogeochemical conditions of that system. By referring
Editor-in-Chief: Pia Tikka to biological, ecological and cognitive levels of cybernetic
Editorial Board: John Biggart, Vesa Oittinen,
organization, I argue that Bogdanov’s tektological polymorphic idea
Giulia Rispoli, Maja Soboleva
Tangential Points Publications of the environment embraces different dimensions of the systemic
Aalto University 2016
ISBN 103204787103ABC
discourse, and can also be useful to understand the process of
knowledge creation underlying the idea of a proletarian culture.
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2 Mach wrote this in his Analysis of Sensations, published in 1886, which laid the
foundation of Empirism. Science, he said, can only attain certainty if it is built on
sensations. See Hirschheim 1992: 19.
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only regulates itself but also repairs itself. As the elements of tissues of organism wear
off it replaces them with material taken from the environment and ‘assimilated’ […].
The dead matter taken from (outside) is transformed by the protoplasm into its
living matter, chemically identical” (Bogdanov, Chapter V, sections 7: 95–99). This
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Conclusion
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References
7This work, written by Bogdanov between the 1910 and the 1911, was probably
based on lectures he gave at the proletarian schools in Capri and Bologna. See
Rowley 2016.
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CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT
1 The large network of cultural organizations of the working class was considered as
2 Quoted by Gloveli 1998: 42.
and had appeared at the end of 1902 (Scherrer 1981: 113–152; Steila
1996:156–166). By a realistic worldview the group around Bogdanov
understood the rejection of any metaphysical absolute and of any pretension
of absolute truth (istina) in favor of the monistic ideal of cognition. In their
collective volume they pleaded for the unity of theory and praxis, and the
question of how one should understand ‘superstructure’ which later became
fundamental for Bogdanov’s conception of culture, was addressed.
In a collection of essays published in 1905 under the title Novyy mir
(New World) Bogdanov developed his concept of collectivism. What he
called sobiranie cheloveka (integration of man) implied the creative potential of
each individual person in the collective. The education of the proletariat
appeared already in this context as the highest goal. Twenty years later, in
1924, in the preface to a collection of his articles on proletarian culture
Bogdanov referred to his early articles “as having already outlined the
highest cultural type of life - the socialist type, which has its source in
proletarian class culture” (Bogdanov 1924: 10). In other words, proletarian
culture contains only elements of socialist culture: proletarian culture is
socialist or collectivist culture in the process of evolution.
Bogdanov’s analysis of the failure of the revolution 1905 and his
confrontation with Lenin over Bolshevik strategy after 1905 made it evident
for him (and his comrades in ideas), that for organizational purposes the
workers needed their own intelligentsia, a rabochaya intelligentsiya (workers’
intelligentsia), and for ideological reasons they needed to become aware of
their own class-consciousness which not only included the workers’
behaviour, thinking, and ideology, but also philosophy, science, and the arts.
In articles and pamphlets written after 1907, Bogdanov advocated the
development of the cultural hegemony of the proletariat prior to its seizure
of power. In a pamphlet directed straight at Lenin Ne nado zatemnyat’ (‘Do not
obscure matters’) Bogdanov asserted that “Bolshevism is not simply a
political phenomenon, it is as much socio-cultural” (Maksimov 1909: 5). This
kind of reasoning had led Bogdanov, Gorkiy, Lunacharskiy and other left
bolsheviks to the founding of two social-democratic party schools for
Russian workers which took place in Capri (August–December 1909) and
Bologna (November 1910–March 1911). In the Capri school, as Bogdanov
remembered 1918 in his article “Proletarian University“ the term
proletarian culture was first openly formulated (Bogdanov 1924: 10). All the
teaching, comprising courses on political economy, socialism, trade
unionism, history, philosophy, literature and art sought to interpret the
entire history of the activity and thought of humanity not only from the
point of view of the working being – what the worker could conceive – but
even more as a complete product of the experience of the working human
being. The goal of the party schools for workers was the development and
organization of the class-consciousness of the proletariat, which for
Bogdanov was identical with the proletariat’s creative potential, namely
proletarian culture.
One of the results of the Capri-school was the creation of the Vpered
group, an independent socio-cultural political faction of the Russian Social
Democratic Workers’ Party, founded by the lecturers and the majority of the
worker-pupils of the Capri school in defence of a ‘pure’, ‘authentic’ and
‘true’ Bolshevism, in opposition to the authoritarian individualism of Lenin’s
style of leadership. In the platform of the Vpered group, essentially drafted by
Bogdanov, the notion of proletarian culture appears for the first time as a
political watchword.
Let me quote a longer passage from the platform of the Vpered group,
which, significantly enough, was taken up by Bogdanov in 1918 when
pleading for a proletarian university:
“The bourgeois world, with its developed culture which has left its
imprint upon modern science, art, and philosophy, rears us imperceptibly in
its fold, while the class struggle and our social ideal draws us in the opposite
direction. We should not break entirely with this culture, which is of the
fabric of history, for we can and should discover in it a powerful weapon in
the struggle against this same old world. To receive it as it is would mean
conserving in ourselves this past against which the struggle is waged. There
is but one solution: to use the previous bourgeois culture to create, in order
to combat bourgeois culture, and to diffuse among the masses, a new
proletarian culture: to develop a proletarian science, reinforce authentically
fraternal relations in the proletarian milieu, elaborate a proletarian
philosophy, and direct art towards the aspirations of the proletariat and its
experience. This is the only route to attaining a universal socialist education,
which would avoid the innumerable contradictions of our life and work, and
which would augment considerably our forces in the struggle, and
approximate at the same time to our ideal of socialism, while elaborating
more and more of its elements in the present” (Sovremennoe polozhenie
1909/1910: 16–17).
In opposition to what Bogdanov considered to be the theoretical
conservatism of Lenin and Plekhanov (Bogdanov 1911: 29–30), the platform
of Vpered group called for the attainment of the cultural hegemony of the
proletariat alongside its political hegemony because politics formed an
organic whole with the other aspects of ideological life of society. For
Bogdanov, the socialist ideal included both political and cultural liberation.
Socialism would be possible only when the proletariat developed its own
intellectual and moral awareness, which could be counter-posed to the old
cultural world (Bogdanov 1911; Sochor 1988: 185).
In an article written at the beginning of 1911 for the Vpered group,
Sotsializm v nastoyashchem (Socialism in the present day) Bogdanov developed
his theory of comradely collaboration, or fraternal union at work
(tovarishcheskoe sotrudnichestvo), which bound the proletariat together at work,
stimulated its sense of psychological unity, of the organic consciousness of
unity – in short, collectivism. What Bogdanov termed collectivism was the
psychology of the working class, its consciousness of itself as a class. In fact, it
was in the process of collective work that the fundamental type of
organization of a whole class was constituted, which made the proletariat
capable of elaborating new forms of life and thought, in brief, its culture.
These fraternal and collectivist relations inside the working collective should
become the organizational base of the party as much as of the proletarian
family structure; they should serve for the elaboration of a new science, a
new philosophy and a new art – that of proletarian culture.
In 1911 Bogdanov left the Vpered group because of émigré infighting
and politicking. Some of his former comrades did not find it realistic “to
create as of now on in the midst of existing society a great proletarian
culture, stronger and more structured than the decaying culture of the
bourgeois classes and immeasurably more free and creative” (Maksimov
1909: 5). In fact, a group around Aleksinskiy wished to revert to traditional
political-economic as opposed to cultural priorities. From this moment on
Bogdanov concentrated on his theoretical work. The first result was the 92-
page long treaty Kult’urnye zadachi nashego vremeni (Cultural tasks of our time),
which appeared that same year. Drawing on his experiences in the party
schools, Bogdanov elaborated here for the first time, systematically, the
concept of proletarian culture which contained essentially all the aspects of
proletarian culture that he had conceptualized until then and which he was
to develop later (Bogdanov 1911).
Here, as in other writings, Bogdanov distinguished three successive
types of culture, each of which depended on a type of organization of
labour, that is, of a technological level of society in different states of
development: authoritarian culture, individualist culture, and collectivist
culture.
assuming responsibility for its own art, at least as long as it was not in power.
On the contrary, art organizes social experience through living images, not
only in the domain of knowledge, but even more in the domains of feelings
and wants. Since it discharges in this way an organizational function in the
life of the collectivity, and by the fact that it harmonizes the feelings and
ideals of the masses, it becomes the most powerful motor of the development
and finally of the victory of the collectivity. The cohesion of the class would
become the greater by the fact of art embracing a field larger than that of
economy and polity.
In Kul’turnye zadachi nashego vremeni Bogdanov was not explicit on the
forms of the new proletarian art. “I leave this to others who are more
competent than I on such questions” (Bogdanov 1911: 77). But, from the
point of view of content, he deemed it especially false and naïve to think that
proletarian art ought to describe the life of workers, their byt (forms and
mode of everyday life) and their struggle. The universe of the experiences of
class, which is the object of the art of the class, is not for that reason in the
least limited; it embraces all the being and all the byt of society just as much
as all of nature. The proletariat lives alongside other classes, whether foreign
or hostile, to which it is bound by numerous threads, spiritual, economic,
and social. Many of these elements had been, consciously or otherwise,
assimilated by the proletariat. And even if it combats them, they are after all
a heritage of the classes of which the proletariat is the issue: the petite
bourgeoisie (meshchanstvo) and the peasantry. Now, the more it knows these
classes, their psychology, organization, and interests, the less the danger of
submitting to their cultural influences; and it will be that much easier for the
proletariat to imbibe from their culture what is useful and progressive. From
the fact of the organizational function of art, “putting into form and
consolidating a definite social organization” (Bogdanov 1911: 51),
proletarian art would be able to show to workers at work, in their social
struggle, and in their daily life, much of what escapes from their
consciousness in the first instance. Thus art is a constitutive element of the
consciousness of self (samosoznanie) of the proletarian class.
Since art organizes the human experience of labour, not in abstract
concepts but in concrete, live images (zhivye obrazy), it is more democratic
than science, more accessible to the masses. Yet, Bogdanov saw in the
“democratization of scientific knowledge” the most urgent cultural task of
the proletariat of his time. According to him it was not a question of literacy
or of the assimilation of the specialized knowledge of distinct disciplines or of
its popularization through pamphlets and public lectures, in the manner
References
part of the series Kleine Bibliothek der russischen Korrespondenz, by A. Seehof &
CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN Co. This series was closely aligned with the Kommunistische Partei
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT
Deutschlands (KPD). However, even before 1920, Bogdanov’s work had
Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult been promoted in Die Aktion.
In June and July 1919 Die Aktion repeatedly advertised a text by
Bogdanov: Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter (‘Science and the Worker’)
Editor-in-Chief: Pia Tikka
Editorial Board: John Biggart, Vesa Oittinen,
(Bogdanov 1919a) which they announced would be available in August
Giulia Rispoli, Maja Soboleva 1919. Efforts to locate a copy of this have proved fruitless. A few weeks
Tangential Points Publications
later the journal published a short text of Bogdanov under the title Die
Aalto University 2016
ISBN 103204787103ABC
Wissenschaft und die Arbeiterklasse (Bogdanov 1919b). This preceded the
publication of a 29 page pamphlet with the same title by the Verlag der
Wochenschrift Die Aktion in 1920 with a preface by Pfemfert2 (Bogdanov
1 A comparison of the articles published in these two issues suggests that the first
contains the text of Bogdanov’s Chto takoe proletarskaya poeziya? (1918) and the second
translations of the poems contained in the original. It is not inconceivable that this
material was published in Die Aktion at the suggestion of Bogdanov, given that Otto
Rühle had been in Moscow in June 1920 to attend the Second Congress of the
Comintern, as reported in Die Aktion in October 1920 (Rühle n.d.).
2See Thomas Moebius, Russische Sozialutopien von Peter I. bis Stalin (2015, 252) who
quotes Pfemfert as follows: “Bogdanov’s work is very valuable. It not only shows the
way and goal, [...] there is more: the security and certainty that the proletarian
worldview is a brilliant idea for humanity.”
OPEN LETTER TO
COMRADE A. BOGDANOV
Translation: Fabian Tompsett _______________________________Franz Seiwert 1921
3 From The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State Chapter IX, Barbarism and
Civilisation (Engels 1942).
4 By “Central Communists” Seiwert is referring to the leaders of the Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands (KPD) who had expelled the more radical Kommunistische Arbeiterpartei
Deutschlands (KAPD) in October 1919. Paul Levi (1883–1930) was their leader. See
also Worum handelt sich? (Seiwert 1920) where Seiwert is particularly bitter about their
role in the Peace of Münster (31st October 1920) where two KPD leaders consented
to the disarmament of the Red Army of the Ruhr. By the 8th April 1920, the
Freikorps had killed over 1,000 militants of the Red Army.
5 George Grosz (1893–1959) was a German Dadaist and Communist activist. In 1921
he was put on trial for Gott mit Uns (Grosz 1920) a portfolio of 9 drawings attacking the
German military for their brutal repression of the Workers’Councils. He and his
publisher were found guilty and fined.
References
Bebel, August. 1879. Die Frau und der Sozialismus Hottingen-Zürich: Verlag der
Volksbuchhandlung.
Biggart, John. 1989. Alexander Bogdanov, Left Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904–1932.
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.328854 accessed 1st
January 2014
Biggart, John, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour. 1998. Bogdanov and His Work: A
Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky)
1873–1928. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bogdanov Alexander. 1919a. ‘Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter’. Advertised for
publication in Die Aktion.
----------- 1919b. ‘Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiterklasse’. Die Aktion No. 35/36 Year 9,
6 September 1919: 596–601.
----------- 1920. Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiterklasse” Berlin: Verlag der Wochenschrift
Die Aktion.
----------- 1921a. ‘Über proletarische Dichtung’. Die Aktion. Nos. 21/22 Year 11, 28 May
1921: 303–309.
----------- 1921b. ‘Beispiel proletarischer Dichtung’. Die Aktion. Nos. 23/24 Year 11, 11
June 1921; 337–340.
6 Max Hölz (1889–1933) was a German Communist activist who organised a Red
Army in Vogtland, near the border with Czechoslovakia at the time of the Ruhr
Uprising in 1920. In 1921 he once again took part in military activity in the March
Action of 1921. He was aligned with the KAPD which supported an attempt to
overthrow the Weimar Republic. He was eventually captured and his trial began in
May 1921 (Kuhn 2012). However, many of the AAUE grouped around Die Aktion were
critical: Otto Rühle had published an article critical of Hölz who responded in his
memoirs (Hölz 2012).
7 Zukunftsstaat: August Bebel (1840–1913) devoted over 100 pages to this concept in
his Die Frau und der Sozialismus (1879) which advocated the application of science and
rational planning to resolving the problems of implementing socialism. See Kenneth
Calkins (1982)
----------- 1923. “Proletarian Poetry”, translated in Labour Monthly Vol. IV, 5 (May,
1923): 276–285, and Vol. IV, 6 (June 1923): 357–362.
Bohnen, Uli. 1978. Franz W. Seiwert 1894–1933. Leben und Werk. Köln: Kölnischer
Kunstverein.
Bohnen, Uli and Backes, Dirk. 1978. Der Schritt, der einmal getan wurde, wird nicht
züruckgenommen: Franz w. Shriften. Berlin: Jarin Krammer Verlag.
Calkins, Kenneth. 1982. ‘The Uses of Utopianism: The Millenarian Dream in Central
European Social Democracy before 1914’. Central European History. 15: 124–148
Die Aktion. 1921. ‘Bericht von der Einheitskonferenz der AAU (Einheitsorganisation)’.
Die Aktion No. 41/42, 15 October 1921.
Engels Freidrich. 1942. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, translated by
Alick West as revised by the Marx/Engels Internet Archive.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ accessed
31 October 2015
Goldwasser, James. 1993. ‘Ret Marut: The Early B. Traven’. The Germanic Review:
Literature, Culture, Theory 68, 3: 133–142.
Gorter, Herman. 1920/1921. ‘Open letter to comrade Lenin, A reply to “left-wing”
communism, an infantile disorder’. Workers’ Dreadnought. London. 12 March–11
June 1921; https://www.marxists.org/archive/gorter/1920/open-letter/
accessed 31 October 2015
Grosz, George. 1920. Gott mit Uns. Berlin: Der Malik-Verlag.
Hölz, Max. 2012. From the “White Cross” to the Red Flag, translated by Gabriel Kuhn
in All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–
1919, edited by Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland: PM Press.
Kuhn, Gabriel. 2012. All Power to the Councils!: A Documentary History of the German
Revolution. Oakland, Ca.: PM Press.
Lenin, Vladimir. 1972. Two Speeches at the First All-Russia Congress on Adult
Education, translated by George Hanna. In Lenin’s Collected Works. 4th English
Edition. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Volume 29, 333–376.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/may/06.htm#bk01
accessed 31 October 2015
Moebius, Thomas. 2015 Russische Sozialutopien von Peter I. bis Stalin. Münster: Lit Verlag.
Plekhanov, Georgi. 1976. ‘Materialismus Militans: Reply to Mr Bogdanov’. In Georgi
Plekhanov’, Selected Philosophical Works. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Volume 3,
188–283. https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1907/materialismus-
militans.htm#n2 accessed 31 October 2015
Rühle, Otto. 1921. ‘Das Ende der mitteldeutschen Kämpfe’. Die Aktion Nos. 15/16 Year
11, 6 April 1921: 215–223.
----------- n.d. ‘Moscow and Ourselves’, translated by Mike Jones marxists.org accessed 5
November 2015. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1920/moscow-and-
ourselves.htm.
Seiwert, Franz. 1920. ‘Worum handelt sich?’. Die Aktion Nos. 37/38 Year 10, 18
September 1920: 514.
----------- 1921. ‘Offener Brief an den Genossen Bogdanow’. Die Aktion Nos. 15/16 Year
11, Nos. 27/28; 373–374.
Wikisource 2016 . ‘Die Aktion’
https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Die_Aktion&oldid=2540295
accessed 27 Jan 2016.
CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT
Introduction
Conjugation-Diffraction
“[T]wo conjugating complexes (…) are in the process of ‘interaction’, their elements-
activities merge, ‘influence’ each other, in general, ‘combine’, pass from one complex to
another” (Bogdanov 1996: 112–3)
Ingression
“If two things lacking common elements are being joined together, their structures must be
altered so that common elements appear. (…) In such situations the method of
ingression is commonly used, that is the method of ‘introduced’ or ‘intermediate’
complexes.” (Bogdanov 1996: 128–9)
Disingression
“It is really quite opposite to ingression. During ingression activities which were not
connected earlier join together forming a “linkage” of conjugating complexes. During
disingression they mutually paralyze one another which results in the formation of a
“boundary”, that is separateness.” (Bogdanov 1996: 201)
“Science is split into an ever larger number of branches, increasingly divergent, always
weakening the living relationship that existed between them. (…) It is further necessary to
do everything possible to eliminate the disparate nature of science that has led to the
increase of specialization; the unity of scientific language must be the objective, matching
and generalizing the methods of the various branches of knowledge, not only in relation to
each other, but as regards the methods of all other areas of practice, developing of a
complete monism of them all.” (Bogdanov 1918; 2016)
individual and of the totality, then art is nothing more than an emergent
work-image (werk-, bildgewordene) organization of labour, of life.” (Seiwert
1978: 39)
Notwithstanding his critique of constructivism (Seiwert 1978),
Seiwert supported El Lisitskiy when he came to Cologne for the
International Pressa exhibition in 1928. The Soviet pavilion here did much
to establish Lisitskiy’s reputation in Western Europe. Augustin Tschinkel, a
Czech contributor to Die Aktion also attended. It was here that the
negotiations were concluded which gave both Tschinkel and Seiwert’s
long-time friend and collaborator, Gerd Arntz, steady work with
employment at the (GeWiMu) that Otto Neurath ran in Vienna. Another
associate, Peter Alma was also employed. Arntz and Tschinkel were
regular contributors to A bis Z, a journal Seiwert edited between October
1929 and February 1933. But there was a tension between their paid work
and their politics: “The working of the [GeWiMu] fitted quite definitely
into my political vision. It was above all the enlightenment on social
relationships in which I could give shape to my ideas. Only I was a bit
more revolutionary, more to the left than the socialists in Vienna” (Arntz
quoted in Benus 2013: 234).
There were also tensions between the theory of factography as
developed by El Lisitskiy as a means to assemble facts through such means
as photomontage (Anysley 1994), and the “sociological graphics”
developed by Seiwert and his fellow Figurative Constructivists: their goal
was to “present people as products of their relationships (…) show
individual people as actual constituent parts of an operation which the
employer can calculate numerically, like other inventory” (Tschinkel
2013). In its intentional way of overlooking any distinction between living
and non-living things, this approach can be seen as pre-figurative of both
cybernetics and the methodologies developed by Barad and Haraway
(Tompsett 2015). However, before completing this circuit, we shall make a
further ingression, this time introducing the triolectics of Asger Jorn and its
impact on Situationism in the 1950s, twenty years after Seiwert’s death.
Jorn gave a talk at the International Congress of Industrial Design,
Milan 1954, where he advocated a new concept of truth based on Bohr’s
complementarity and, as with Seiwert, goes beyond the distinction
between art and science. He echoes Seiwert again: “the word art (Kunst)
means that which we can do, our capacity (können) in any domain. Thus we
are all artists, and all techniques are arts.” (Jorn 2011b: 273). In his “Notes
“Facing the masters/slaves stand the men of refusal, the new proletariat, rich in
revolutionary traditions. From these the masters without slaves will emerge, together with
a superior type of society in which the lived project of childhood and the historical project
of the great aristocrats will be realized” (Vaneigem 1979).
In the 1950s Jorn started collaborating with Guy Debord, who saw
revolution not merely in terms of “politics” or “culture” but in terms of “a
superior organization of the world” (Debord 1981). They were key figures
in the foundation of the Situationniste Internationale (SI) although Jorn was to
leave in 1960. The organization continued until 1972, and subsequently
has been deemed to be very influential as regards avant-gardism in art and
politics.
Many elements of Seiwert’s thought can be seen resurfacing within
the programme of the Situationists particularly in their manifesto
(Situationniste Internationale 1994):
Conclusion
References
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Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (3): 801–831.
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Benkler, Yochai. 2002. “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm.” Yale
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Berners Lee, Timothy. 1999. Weaving the Web. London: Orion Books.
Biggart, John. 1989. “Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904—
1932.” PhD Diss., University of East Anglia.
Biggart, John, Georgii Gloveli, and Avraham Yassour. 1998. Bogdanov and His Work: A
Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873–
1928. Aldershot: Ashgate.
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Bogdanov, Alexandr. 1996. Bogdanov’s Tektology: Book 1. Translated by Vadim N.
Sadovsky, and Vladimir V. Kelle. Hull: Hull Centre of Systems Studies.
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La science, l’art et la classe ouvrière, edited by Dominique Lecourt and Henri Deluy,
137–168. Paris: Maspero.
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Tompsett. In Culture as Organization in Early Soviet Thought. Helsinki: Aalto
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and 4 (6): 357-362.
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Bohr, Niels. 1937. “Causality and Complementarity.” Philosophy of Science, 4 (3): 289–298.
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Thomas Uebel, 3–22. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Vaneigem, Raoul. 1979. Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by John Fullerton and Paul
Seiveking. London: Rising Free.
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Wark, McKenzie. 2015. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso.
PARADISE ORGANIZED.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIMENSION OF ALEXANDER
BOGDANOV’S UTOPIAN NOVEL, RED STAR
James D. White_______________________________________________________________
The utopian novel Red Star is one of the best known and most
accessible of Alexander Bogdanov’s writings. In the guise of
describing the lives of the inhabitants of Mars, Bogdanov sets out his
ideas on the nature of a future socialist society. While the format of a
novel is an unaccustomed one for Bogdanov’s writings, nevertheless
the ideas contained in it are themes that appear in his more avowedly
theoretical works. It is even possible that Bogdanov had in mind a
readership for his novel that was familiar with his other publications.
It is certainly true that to understand Red Star in all its depth it is
necessary to appreciate the many references in it to ideas and
concepts that the author had elaborated prior to the writing of his
novel. The purpose of this paper is to examine this philosophical and
This chapter is peer-reviewed and edited for ideological dimension of Red Star and to suggest what its place in
Bogdanov’s wider system of thought might be.
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CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT
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Chronology
Bogdanov calls Red Star a ‘utopia’, that is, it represents for him an
ideal world. And it was in the context of a discussion on ideals that the
idea for Red Star had its origins. The discussion in question took place
during Bogdanov’s period of exile in Vologda between 1901 and 1903.
This period was one of intense intellectual development for Bogdanov,
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and much of it was stimulated by debates with his fellow exile, the
philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (Biggart 1980). Berdyaev belonged to the
group of thinkers, which included Sergei Bulgakov, Petr Struve and
Mikhail Tugan-Baranovskiy, who had become disillusioned with the
variety of Marxism that had been propounded by Plekhanov and turned
instead to Kant and other idealist philosophers.
In Vologda Berdyaev gave a series of lectures, and in an article
entitled ‘The Struggle for Idealism’, presented a critique of the Marxism
which he had recently abandoned. He found Marxism poor in its spiritual
and moral content. It rejected goodness, morality and beauty, all the most
elevated aspects of human existence. He deplored the idea that the new
society would emerge as a result of a social cataclysm, a Zusammenbruch.
This would take place mechanically, in such a way that there would be no
place for idealism. Moreover, “the new society that would emerge from
this dialectical movement would most probably be as self-satisfied,
complacent and philistine as the one it had replaced” (Berdyaev
1901: 17–18).
Although Bogdanov polemicized against Berdyaev, it was not to
defend the kind of Marxism that Berdyaev had rejected, but to interpret
Marx’s ideas in such a way that they would answer the objections that
Berdyaev had raised. In the article ‘What is Idealism?’ Bogdanov took up
the points that Berdyaev had raised, including the accusation that the new
society would be self-satisfied, complacent and philistine. He agreed that
a socialist society should not be a static one, and as an example of how it
should not be, gave the image of the future society as depicted by Edward
Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward 200-1887 (Bellamy 1888),
which was popular at the time. What Bogdanov says about Bellamy’s
novel provides an insight into the approach he took in writing Red Star.
This is:
“Bellamy’s ideal - the future society portrayed in his novel -
obviously corresponds to the idea of ‘progressiveness.’ But progress is only
progress as long as it is carried out continuously, as long as the harmony
and fullness of life continues to increase. Bellamy’s society is one that has
become petrified in satisfaction and complacency, placidly resting on its
laurels following the victories gained by preceding generations over
nature, both social and external - such a society does not incorporate any
stimulus for further development - it in itself is not progressive.
Consequently, Bellamy’s utopia in the last analysis is not a progressive
ideal, and present-day idealists regard it as a philistine caricature of their
own ideals” (Bogdanov 1906a: 22).
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put this another way: what was the advantage to Bogdanov of locating his
utopia in a Martian rather than in an Earthly setting? The answer must
be that it gave him greater freedom, since he did not have to refer to any
specific places or times, or to make predictions that would later turn out
to be mistaken. In particular, he would not have to explain how socialism
on Earth had come about, something that, as emerges from the novel, he
was uncertain about.
Comradely Cooperation
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divided phenomena into the physical and the psychic. In socialist society
this division is overcome, and the monist view of the world is restored
(Bogdanov 2003: 34–35).
Even on the trip to Mars Leonid discovers that Martian society is
not authoritarian. Menni is the captain of the spacecraft, but he does not
have the power of command. His instructions are followed because he
happens to be the most experienced pilot of the spacecraft (Bogdanov
1984: 38). On Mars itself the comradely relations prevailed between the
individuals, with a directness and absence of formality. Great individuals
are not commemorated, only important events.
A second aspect of Bogdanov’s concept of collectivism is the
elimination of specialization into trades and professions. The analysis of
the human predicament that pervades Bogdanov’s writings is the
fragmentation of human society brought about through specialization and
the division of labour. The concomitant of this fragmentation is
authoritarian relationships and outlooks, fetishism, including commodity
fetishism, and the compartmentalization of experience and knowledge.
The obverse side of this analysis is Bogdanov’s quest for means to heal
these divisions and to re-integrate society, the human personality and the
various sciences into a harmonious whole. Bogdanov’s vision of the
socialist utopia is one in which the fragmentation of all previous forms of
social organization are overcome.
From his earliest works Bogdanov was concerned to find a means
by which this fragmentation of society and experience by the division of
labour could be overcome. The solution that he proposed was “the
elaboration of general methods in all spheres of production.” With the
development of machine industry, in which machines would become
more specialized, while the labour of the workers became more
homogeneous, the formulation of these general methods would become
increasingly feasible. They would break down the barriers between the
workers that the division of labour had erected, and foster the
development of ‘synthetic cooperation’ (which Bogdanov later termed
‘comradely cooperation’) (Bogdanov 1901: 201–203). There is thus a
close association between ‘general methods’ and the formation of
comradely cooperation among the workers. This close association is
carried over into Red Star.
In the novel Leonid undergoes training in such general methods
when he goes to work at a Martian clothing factory. He had to study the
established scientific principles of industrial organization, as well as the
structure of the factory in which he was employed. He had to acquire a
general notion of all the machines in use there, and know in detail the one
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Production
For Bogdanov machines play a major part in the socialist
economy, and in doing so fill several roles: they eliminate the age-old
organizer/executive divide; they overcome the division of labour; they
harness the power of nature (Bogdanov 1906b: 279–280). In Red Star
Bogdanov devotes some evocative passages to the relationship of the
machines to the people:
Hundreds of workers moved confidently among the machines,
their footsteps and voices drowned in a sea of sound. There was not a
trace of tense anxiety on their faces, whose only expression was of quiet
concentration. They seem to be inquisitive, learned observers who had no
real part in all that was going on around them. It was as if they simply
found it interesting to watch how the enormous pieces of metal glided out
beneath the transparent dome on moving platforms and fell into the
steely embrace of dark monsters...It seemed altogether natural that the
steel monsters should not harm the small, big-eyed spectators strolling
confidently among them: the giants simply scorned the frail humans as
quarry unworthy of their awesome might (Bogdanov 1979: 75).
In Bogdanov’s description the colossal machines perform a variety
of operations on the blocks of steel, indicating the different human trades
and specialisations that they have replaced.
Distribution
In an essay entitled ‘Exchange and Technology’ published in 1904
Bogdanov had argued that the form of distribution developed historically
as an adaptation to the society in which it took place. In patriarchal
society products were distributed by the patriarch; in capitalist society
exchange was the form of distribution of the products of social labour. It
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socialist society, but also the means by which that society would be
achieved. Thus, Bogdanov’s concept of Proletarian Culture was a solution
to the problem of carrying out a socialist revolution that he had raised in
Red Star (White 2013).
Conclusions
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References
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1 Sadovskiy 1995; Biggart 1998; Pustil’nik 1995; Dudley & Poustilnik 1996.
2 The term ‘sociomorphism’ can be traced back to the ‘basic metaphor’ of Max
Müller that stresses the universal application of anthropological patterns in
cognition of the world. According to Bogdanov, “the basic metaphor is the embryo
and prototype of the unity of the organizational point of view of the Universe”
(Bogdanov 1996: 16).
3 For example, in his work Empiriomonizm Bogdanov analysed the concept
and the same world-outlook specific to it – its outlook on life and its
method of constructing life” (Bogdanov 1990: 136).
The term ‘organization’ builds the quintessence of
Bogdanov’s constructivist approach to cognition in particular and to
culture in general. Everything – sensual data, everyday meanings
and theoretical concepts – are products of the social organization of
collective experience based on working conditions. Bogdanov is
convinced of the social nature of knowledge.
His approach to cultural studies combines structural
functionalism and historical methods.5 He posits society as an
organising institution and defines culture as a developing system of
normative beliefs, as “ideology” that is represented by historical
social groups and institutions. The scope of ideology is very broad; it
embraces theoretical and practical knowledge, religious and moral
norms, aesthetical ideas and worldviews. The practical problem that
Bogdanov confronts is the heterogeneity of cultural patterns within a
class society depending on what groups are legitimate bearers of
ideological states like knowledge or religious belief. According to
him, the cultural split within society is an important limiting factor
for its progressive development. Therefore Tektology is expected to
pursue its practical agenda by transforming the culture of the
modern society from capitalist to socialist.
5This claim can be proved by analysis of such works as Bogdanov 1904, 1918.
6 One has to differentiate between the real working class and the concept
‘proletariat’ in Bogdanov’s works. According to him, the real working class in
Russia is not socialist because of its mixed social origin and technological
backwardness. In his theoretical argumentations, Bogdanov uses the concept
‘proletariat’, i.e. he means the ideal proletariat.
8 Marx uses the terms ‘proletariat’ and ‘working class’ as synonyms. For
9 Trotsky expressed this idea as following: “Style is class, not alone in art, but
who believed that the proletariat had to build a new cultural system
– that is, to promote a new morality, a new politics and a new art in
order to succeed in the building of socialism. But this new movement
proved to be very far removed from Bogdanov’s original project of a
social, cultural and moral renovation of the working class.
Bogdanov’s reaction to the October Revolution was very
critical. In his open letter to Bukharin in 1921 he admitted: “During
the Bolshevik communist turn I split with the party on an important
theoretical question: it considered the world revolution coming out of
the war as socialist, but I came to the different conclusion.”
(Bordyugov 1995, 1: 204–205) For him the social reality after the
October 1917 was a “disgusting caricature arising out of the war and
the old system” (Bogdanov 1990: 104). The essence of this caricature
is a “state capitalism”. As a “political organization of the military
democracy” and a “perverted form”, the new Soviet Republic
(Bogdanov 1990, 1: 199) was an antipode of Bogdanov’s idea of
socialism. He contrasted regress as a law of the present socialism with
progress as a law of his ideal socialism (Bogdanov 1990: 79). The
present socialism was “first of all, a special form of social
consumption, the authoritarian organization of mass parasitism and
destruction”; on the contrary, the ideal socialism “is, first of all, a
new type of cooperation – the comradely organization of work”
(Bogdanov 1990: 87). For the present socialism, an authoritarian and
even religious way of thinking was inherent; for the ideal socialism, a
free and scientific way of thinking is intrinsic (Bogdanov 1990: 76).
There is a strong correlation between what Bogdanov
thought the Bolsheviks’ socialism was and how he viewed the real
proletarian culture in Russia. It seemed to him that the revolution’s
failure stemmed from organic weaknesses in the working class itself,
its ideological immaturity and a lack of ideological autonomy. He
believed that the working class was inevitably unprepared for or even
unworthy of its revolutionary role. This conviction in the cultural
backwardness of the working class can explain Bogdanov’s attitude
toward the real Proletcult. There were definite limits, produced by
the objective historical conditions, to his engagement. Bogdanov’s
participation at the Proletcult can be seen as a compromise.
Nevertheless, he worked toward the cultural, political and moral
education of the working class. In his article “The Program of
Culture” (1917), Bogdanov recommends to the proletariat “to direct
all its efforts toward mastering of the organizational means and their
systematic working out according to the scale of the problems”
(Bogdanov 1990: 332). He repeated constantly that the working class,
because of its exploited and oppressed condition and because it was
Proletarian Art
nasledstve” (1918a: 39) that poetry is a part of the self-awareness of this class.
11 James D. White has the same opinion. He writes: “In older cultures there were
elements that were useful to the proletariat, but there were also others that were
harmful. This being the case, the proletariat had to learn to distinguish what was
beneficial from what was harmful and alien to it in the heritage of the past”
(White 2013: 34).
References
Biggart, John, Dudley, Peter and King, Francis (eds.) 1998. A. Bogdanov and the
origins of systems thinking in Russia. Aldershot, England and Brookfield,
Vermont: Ashgate.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1904. Iz psichologii obshchestva. Stat’i 1901–1904. Sankt
Peterburg: Dorovatovskiy and Charushnikov.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1916. “Mirovye krizisy, mirnye i voennye”. Petrograd:
Letopis'. №3, 139—163; №4, 133—153; № 5, 113—124; № 7, 214—238.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1918. Nauka ob obshchestvennom soznanii. Kratkiy kurs
ideologicheskoy nauki v voprosakh i otvetakh. Moskva: Knizhnoe izdatel'stvo
pisateley v Moskve.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1918a. Iskusstvo i rabochiy klass. Moskva: Proletarskaya
kul’tura.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr, 1990. Voprosy socializma. Moskva: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoy
literatury.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1995. Otkrytoe pis’mo Bukharinu. In Neizvestnyy Bogdanov. V
trekh knigakh, edited by G.A. Bordyugov. Moskva: IC AIRO-XX.
Bogdanov, Aleksandr. 1996. Tektology. Book 1 edited and translated by Vadim
Sadovsky, Vladimir V. Keille and Peter Dudley, University of Hull: Centre
for Systems Studies.
Dudley, Peter and Poustilnik, Simona. 1996. “Reading the Tektology: Provisional
Findings, Postulates and Research Directions”. In Center for Systems
Studies. The University of Hull. Reseach und memorandum. No. 11.
Lenin, Vladimir. 1967. Polnoe sobranie cochineniy. Izdanie 5-ое. Tom 10, 335–358.
Моskva: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoy literatury.
Mally, Lynn. 1990. Culture of the Future. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Freidrich. 1978. German Ideology, excepted in On the Socialist
Revolution. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoy literatury.
Oittinen, Vesa (ed.) 2009. Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited. Helsinki: Gummerus
Printing.
Plenge, Johann. 1927. ‟Um die allgemeine Organisationslehre”. Weltwirtschaftliches
Archiv. 25. Band: 18–29.
CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN
EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT
1
When criticizing Plekhanov's theory of knowledge, Lenin rather considered it to
have derived from Helmholtz's positions. On the connections of Plekhanov,
Sechenov and Helmholtz. See Steila 1991.
2 Lenin asked his mother to send to him in Geneve a copy of Sechenov's recent
book Elementy mysli in 1904. See Lenin 1904.
3
Bogdanov wrote on this topic another article (Bogdanov 1924), which was mainly
a discussion of Timiryazev's ideas on relativity.
4
Einstein himself acknowledged certain influence of Mach's ideas on his own
positions as a young scientist. See Einstein 1951: 20–21 and Blackmore 1972:
247–285.
5
“Если два таких аппарата, находясь в системах А и В, делают взаимно
съемку этих систем, то их “фильмы” будут изменены, “искажены” по
сравнению со съемкою из своей системы: изображения тел окажутся
укорочены по линии движения, самый ход событий замедлен (“отставание
часов”), то и другое одинаково с обеих сторон. Человек, напр., на этих
“фильмах” имеет один рост, когда он стоит, и другой, - когда лежит. Ясно,
что формулы перехода от координат одной системы следует понимать как
формулы поправок для перехода от более или менее искаженных
изображений к внутренней действительности каждой системы, формулы
подстановки вещей и событий под их воспринимаемые образы.”
6 More on the concept of ‘substitution’, see Steila 2009: 153–157.
7
Archive Fondazione Basso. Bogdanov's Letter to Bazarov, June 21, 1911 (see
Steila 2009: 168).
in the production of reality and its organization, one could say in its
‘montage’.
We cannot find a ‘smoking gun’ that would prove evidentially
that the young Eisenstein had read Bogdanov's epistemological essays.
But, curiously enough, according to Eisenstein as well as Bogdanov,
cinema could provide us with an orientation in the four-dimensional
space-time continuum, which is implicit in Einstein's theory of relativity.
In Eisenstein's essay The Filmic Fourth Dimension we read:
“The fourth dimension? Einstein? Or mysticism? Or a joke? It is
time to stop being frightened of this new knowledge of a fourth
dimension…. Possessing such an excellent instrument of perception as
the cinema – even on its primitive level – for the sensation of
movement, we should soon learn a concrete orientation in this four-
dimensional space-time continuum, and feel as much at home in it as in
our own house-slippers” (Eisenstein 1949: 69–70).
Cinema is “an excellent instrument of perception … for the
sensation of movement”, according to Eisenstein (Eisenstein 1949: 70).
In turn, according to Bogdanov, “our sense organs, memory, and all the
scientific auxiliary means to perceiving and recording facts, can be
considered as a certain kind of cinematographic device” (Bogdanov
1923: 107). This may not provide evidence for a direct or mutually
acknowledged exchange of ideas between Eisenstein and Bogdanov, but
it can certainly be regarded as a tangential point of encounter.
References
-------------- 1996. Bogdanov’s Tektology, Book 1, edited and translated by Peter Dudley,
Vadim N. Sadovsky and Vladimir V. Kelle. University of Hull: Centre for
Systems Studies.
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and introduced by David G. Rowley. Leiden-Boston: Brill.
Dauge Petr G. 1907. “K russkomu izdaniyu.” In Antonio Labriola i Iosif Ditsgen, edited
by Ernest Untermann. St.Petersburg: P.G. Dauge.
Dietzgen, Joseph. 1870–1875. “The Religion of Social-Democracy. Six Sermons.” In
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Reason and the World-at-large, 90-154. Chicago: Kerr.
Einstein, Albert. 1951. “Autobiographisches / Autobiographical Note.” In Albert
Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, edited by Paul A. Schilpp, 1–35. Stuttgart: W.
Kohlhammer Verlag.
Eisenstein, Sergey. 1949. Film Form. Essays in Film Theory, edited by J. Leyda. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Engels, Frederick 1886. “Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German
Philosophy.” In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 1990. Collected Works 26,
353–398. London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Kautsky, Karl 1909. “Über Marx und Mach.” Der Kampf, 10: 451–452;
Kautsky Karl. 1990. “O Markse i Mache.” Vozrozhdenie, 9–12: 77–80.
Lenin, Vladimir I. 1904. “To His Mother. January 8, 1904.” In Vladimir Lenin. 1967.
Collected Works 37, 359. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
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-------------- 1913a. “A ʽScientificʾ System of Sweating”. In Vladimir Lenin. 1963.
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of view and dimensions, creates a tension between the sectors, for the
principle of simultaneity was not to be abandoned. It is the only project
in which such polarity is admitted. This approach lifts the Spherical Book
out of the traditional development of theory and impressively
demonstrates the new theoretical mentality of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the world of closed
holistic systems suffered a breakdown. A multitude of different types of
discourse appeared; they treated the work of art in its various aspects
without aspiring to cover the whole (Iser 1999: 35). Totality as a utopia
was passé, but one adapted the results of a single science as the
worldview — according to old habits — and thus two modes of
thought, the new and the old, were mixed together. A discourse was not
capable of translating the phenomenon of art into a referential
language, and therefore metaphors were used instead of concepts.
Theory also aids understanding of the discourse, not only the
phenomenon of art, and thus the result was double reflections and self–
reflection, mixing of ontological and operational aesthetics. A modest
professional analytical approach became established.
The Spherical Book is a product of this approach. Eisenstein
joins the ranks of specialists, who, like the formalists, are able to
determine what literature is and what constitutes film. He is one of
them, yet he behaves like a man from the last century — he wants
totality, with all his expert knowledge. His Spherical Book is the most
radical attempt at achieving a unity in permanent change from one
level to another, based on reinterpretation and a variable use of the
non–compatible sectors. Eisenstein offers a total framework for these
different discourses by taking the model of a rotating sphere, which
enables transitions and guarantees multiple perspectives.
In Method Eisenstein explores how consciousness functions via
the imprints it leaves in art forms and art techniques. His ideas about
the effects of art undergo a radical re–interpretation. He suggested that
during ecstatic perception of a work, art would activate and provoke
within the observer a shift to pre–logical, sensual thought, which breaks
through rational consciousness like a jolt, as the unconscious does in
Sigmund Freud’s model. Thus the structure of an artwork is perceived
as a form that equates to multi–layered consciousness and the entire
diversity of forms are viewed as an endless chain of invariants that stem
from the basic trauma that consciousness experienced in the course of
evolution, at the transition from pre–logical to logical thought.
Whereas in the first Spherical Book the effects of art are
explained with the aid of conditioning, in Method the return to the basic
(evolutionary) trauma secures the co–participation. Eisenstein discovers
a structural analogy between his concept and those of Marx and Freud
(and does not mention Bogdanov): Freud seeks a basic substance to
explain the human psyché and discovers a simple and universal conflict;
Marx does this with the structure of society. Eisenstein also looks for a
similar, primary conflict in art, which he calls the “basic problem”
[Grundproblem], and at first uses this as the title of the book. Starting from
the assumption that there is a basic conflict between the layers of
consciousness, the traces of which are captured in art forms, Eisenstein
then proceeds to new conceptions of isomorphic structures and, finally,
to a universal model of analysis through which heterogeneous
phenomena can be described, structured, and investigated: painting,
film and circus and music.
Eisenstein uses the concepts of sensuality and rationality to
describe different mental structures; sometimes he refers to mythical,
“concrete” or “objective” thinking and avoids the use of
psychoanalytical concepts. In the 1930s he uses Lévy–Bruhl’s term
“pre–logical thinking”, but when this term was criticized, he exchanges
it for “sensual thinking”, which he finds in Marx. Eisenstein studies
works written by linguists, anthropologists, missionaries, and
ethnographers.2 With his interest in archaic structures, Eisenstein is part
of a general contemporary trend (following the same path as T.S. Eliot,
D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Aby Warburg, Antonin Artaud).
However, it is not the archaic per se, or the mythological practices of
the régimes of Stalin or Hitler that interest him, but rather the
modernist experiments in the arts, which he compares with examples
from classical antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment.
Eisenstein regards the formalized structures of sensual thinking as a
reservoir for the artistic means.
Eisenstein’s analytical model, which he calls Method, can
attribute all art phenomena to one and the same schema (pre–
logical/logical, sensual/rational, consciousness/unconscious). The
model in Method is characterized by a strange reductionism, analogous
to the interpretation of the primary and secondary features of
psychoanalytical hermeneutics. Eisenstein transforms a law of dialectics
about the unity of contradictions into binary opposition. Vyacheslav
Ivanov interpreted the book as a utopia of total semiotization of the
world (Ivanov 1977). However, on closer scrutiny the semiotic
interpretation of the model in Method reveals severe limitations.
In one of the final chapters of Method, “Circle”, Eisenstein
returns to his idea for Spherical Book, and on 17 September 1947 remarks
“In 1932 I began to organize my theoretical notes on film
(which I have been doing for fifteen years now), and I noticed that I
2Eisenstein wrote many notes in the margins of his copies of the books: Lévy-Bruhl
1922 (Russian edition 1930); Werner 1926; Kretschmer 1922 (Russian edition
1927); Winthuis 1928; Granet 1934; Covarrubias 1937; Bilz 1940.
3I do not refer here to the version of the text compiled by Kleiman 2002, but to the
archive manuscript (RGALI 1923-2-231-270, 321-323), which will be published
2007 in four volumes by Potemkin Press, Berlin.
Wagner. In Method I., neither vision nor hearing are regarded as the
basic senses for a theory of art, but instead the sense of touch — a sense
that is usually excluded from aesthetic theory and for which there is no
method of conservation. Eisenstein does not seem to know the texts by
Johann Gottfried Herder and Walter Benjamin; his interest in touch
was aroused by Denis Diderot’s writings, Filippo Thommaso Marinetti’s
Tactilism manifesto and a book by Léon Daudet (Daudet 1930). In the
chapter about the features of pre-logical thinking, Eisenstein attempts to
include the senses of smell and taste in his theory, but abandons this
later. He returns to the sense of touch as one of the basic senses involved
in the origins of the arts in the fourth book, Anthropology, which begins
with a chapter on haptic sense. Eisenstein’s attentiveness to phenomena
that are non-verbal or incapable of being preserved by modern
recording techniques also makes him interested in rhythm. Eisenstein
regards rhythm as a basic element in the creation of an effective
artwork, because the biology of an organism is based on rhythmic
principles (breathing, peristalsis, the functioning of the heart), as is
ecstatic experience. Eisenstein attempts to link the ideas of the German
school of experimental psychology and physiological aesthetics,
associated with Ernst Kretschmer, Wilhelm Wundt, and Friedrich
Nietzsche, with inspirations from his study of the mystical practices of
Ignatius of Loyola. However, his analysis of the ecstatic state and the
production of ecstasy in art is later expanded into a separate study,
“Pathos” (1946/1947), in which Eisenstein uses the examples from the
Rougon-Macquart series of novels by Zola that he lists in the catalogue
of themes in Method I (Eisenstein 1967 : 91–128).
From the language phenomena, Eisenstein selects examples
of linguistic pre-logic, particularly mimetic and magical practices like
incantations, he examines the relationships between a sound, the shape
of a letter, and the meaning, Filippo Thommaso Marinetti’s and
Velemir Khlebnikov’s onomatopoetic. This section comprises theories
of the origin of names and metaphor, research on various kinds of slang,
dialect, and argot. Metaphors are regarded as a practice connected with
taboos, as a deviation from naming and calling. Eisenstein studies
writers, who have broken up the forms of logical language (Edgar Allan
Poe, James Joyce, Marcel Proust), followed the logic of dreams (Gérard
de Nerval), or who work with ambivalent double meanings (Anatole
France’s irony, the collection of erotic riddles and fairy tales of
Aleksandr Afanasiev). He attends Nikolai Marr’s lectures on the origin
of languages. Marr’s paleontology which seeks connections between the
stem of a word and its meaning, directs Eisenstein’s interest toward the
origins of art, the Ur- phenomena of representation: cave paintings,
children’s drawings, outline drawings, and silhouettes. In all these
forms, Eisenstein looks for the connection between rhythm and
movement, and finds this perfected in the ornament. Via the ornament
as pictorial embodiment of rhythm, Eisenstein approaches the dynamic
phenomenon of the plot. The plot is interpreted as a pre-logical and
mimetic phenomenon, as an embodiment of the ritual, which is based
on the rhythmic organization of movement and verbal ambivalence.
The shift of the analysis of non-verbal phenomena to the plot
is explained through a step-wise construction:
1. Double meanings, linguistic ambivalence, which enable a
connection to be made between motor kinetic? functions and the trope
(metonym, metaphor, riddle), on the basis of magical practices: non-
naming, a transferred naming, ritual incantation, etc.
2. The masculine, the feminine, and the bisexual as a physical
form of ambivalence.
3. Ambivalence in a character (Jekyll and Hyde) and in the
personality of an artist (Lewis Carroll and Charles Dodgson).
4. In perennial themes (the search for a father).
Eisenstein has not yet worked out in detail the connection
between these steps but only sketches it. Eisenstein interprets the
ambivalence as an invariant of the unity of opposites and tries to find a
dialectical formula of form, which he describes, however, with the help
of Freudian terms such as “urge”. For the Method I. he wants to write a
series of studies and portraits under the title “Le cas de …” which can
be translated as “The [...] case”, or “The file on [...]”. Honoré de
Balzac, Jules Verne, Lev Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Lewis Carroll are the
candidates for his “case-studies”. Eisenstein intends to analyze the
individual consciousness of an artist in whose personality and work
ambivalence is forcefully present as an expression of conformity to
general laws. In this section he also wishes to investigate utopias as an
expression of the same drive operating at the level of the collective
unconscious.
The word “start” appears in this substantial manuscript of
315 double-sided pages, which also includes material and excerpts
collected during the eight years of work, for the first time on 25 June
1940 when Eisenstein comes across a text by Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe about objective (gegenständliche) thinking. Before he had used
Tolstoy’s term “concrete thinking” or Jonathan Swift’s “language of
objects”, Eisenstein is writing a chapter about the sense of touch as a
substitute for vision and all other senses when he reads Goethe’s
“Significant Help Given by an Ingenious Turn of Phrase”. He tears the
pages out of the book, and puts it in the folder with his notes.
The new plan foregrounds expressive movement, visual
representation, and character wherein he looks for a dynamic triad
consisting of kinesis, mimesis, and psyche. At this time Eisenstein finds a
German title for the book, Grundproblem — basic problem, which
4 The catalogue in the State Library in Berlin lists over 100 books published
between 1880 and 1932 in which the word Grundproblem appears in the title.
The nodes that are the sources and elements of Method, and
thus define it, bring together various gnoseological models (dialectics,
mysticism), specific problems of aesthetics (imitation), and psychology
(ecstasy, superposition) in a strangely sexualized epistemic structure.
Ecstatic states have connections with mysticism, which
Eisenstein defines as the preliminary stage of dialectics. At the
beginning of the twentieth century mysticism enjoyed a revival and was
a hot topic of discussion in European modernism. The image worlds in
the dreams of St. Theresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz are discussed by
Charles Baudelaire (Les Salons, 1845) and Dmitriy Merezhkovskiy (Die
spanischen Mystiker, 1939). The protagonists of Ulysses (1925) and La
Nausée (1938) read Ignatius of Loyola and are well aware of the
hallmarks of his psychological techniques. Eisenstein was introduced to
various hermetic and mystic doctrines in 1920 by the Rosicrucian Boris
Zubakin, who was also a big influence on the young Mikhail Bakhtin.
Eisenstein collected literature on mysticism all his life, which shocked
German left intellectuals.6 In his relationship with Konstantin
Stanislavskiy, who had discovered yoga techniques for his acting
method before Eisenstein did, there is jealousy: Eisenstein does not
interpret Stanislavskiy with reference to Buddhism, but with reference
to Loyola’s mental Exercises.
In Eisenstein’s understanding, the comic is a mirror image of
ecstasy. He is not interested in classic texts of the early twentieth century
on humour (by Bergson or Freud), but primarily in grotesque Mexican
humour that is drug-induced: vacilada. “Vacilada is argot for the
hilarious trance caused by marihuana” (Brenner 1929: 180). Eisenstein
had experienced and studied this phenomenon while in Mexico.
Further, the passages he quotes from Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels of
5 Eisenstein uses Ya (Yazykoznanie for Linguistics), the last letter of the alphabet.
1860 (Baudelaire 1946) are all concerned with the particular kind of
hilarity associated with taking opium. Perhaps Eisenstein became aware
of these passages through reading Entwicklungspsychologie by Heinz
Werner, who quotes from Baudelaire frequently.
“D [ialectics]” is understood primarily as the fusion of
opposites; perhaps this is why mysticism is defined as its preliminary
stage. One foundation of mysticism doctrine is the notion of the
“opposites falling together into one”, for which Nicholas of Cusa
suggested the term coincidentia oppositorum. The intention was to describe
a paradox phenomenon of this unity, by which opposites still remain
opposites. Only this bipolar state allows describing the phenomenon of
God or the basis of existence. As the source, which introduced him to
bipolarity, Eisenstein names Otto Weininger’s book Geschlecht und
Charakter, Gender and Character he read in 1920 (RGALI 1923–2–1109,
133). Eisenstein was not interested in Weininger’s apocalyptic
predictions but in the anthropological interpretation of male–female as
the dialectical basis of our culture and knowledge. He was fascinated by
the notion of androgyny, which travelled from Plato via the alchemists
to Emanuel Swedenborg and was celebrated in Russian symbolist
circles. Eisenstein nourished his notions about androgyny from the
cabbala and fictional and ethnographic works: Ernest Crawley’s The
Mystic Rose (1902), Das Zweigeschlechterwesen (1928) of Josef Winthuis,
Balzac’s novella Seraphita (that popularized Swedenborg’s ideas and
presented them in the form of a love story), and novels by Joséphin
Péladan. He quotes from Vasiliy Rozanov and his book Ljudi lunnogo
sveta (People of the Moonlight, 1913), which is understandable: Rozanov
understands bisexuality as an epistemological, not an ontological,
category,
Eisenstein turns dialectics into a sexualized and
anthropological concept by interpreting dialectics as a mystical
coincidentia oppositorum and as embodiment of the male–female in
androgyny: “Dialectics is a projection into consciousness (in a
philosophical conception) of the bisexuality of our structure. The
legends about the breaking apart of the sexes. Bisexuality as a remnant
— as a memory of an existing phenomenon of bisexuality ([Adam’s] rib
and the separation of Eve)” (Diary, 10.III–22.VIII. 1931; Mexico,
RGALI; 1923–2–1123, l. 182).
The ancient myths provide the material to understand the
phenomenon of unity:
“The most archaic type of “unity in the universe” — close to
our sexually undifferentiated forefathers; the separation of Ad[am] and
Eve, Plato’s being, the story of Lilith and the two people who were
joined at their backs (in cabbala) — is actually closer to the vegetative
phenomenon. Here I shall have to insert facts from the biological drama
before the evolution of the sexes — after [Charles Stockard] The Physical
Basis of Personality [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1931]. For
example, the question of same-sex twins, who develop from one egg [...]
Genius — is a person who fills the dialectic development of the universe
and can engage with it. Bisexuality as a physiological pre-condition
must be present in all creative dialectics” (RGALI; 1923–2–1123, l..
138–139.).
Eisenstein notes these thoughts in his diary and then writes a
letter to Magnus Hirschfeld, dated 23 May 1931, and asks him for proof
of Hegel’s bisexuality.7
Eisenstein’s ideas about conflict, or struggle, are similarly
sexualized. The books about conflict that he consults are not confined to
Marxist interpretations, such as Friedrich Engel’s Dialektik der Natur,
which he reads in 1926 in a recently published Russian translation. In
1930/1931 he studies The Philosophy of Conflict (1919) by the British
sexual psychologist Henry Havelock Ellis. In Eisenstein’s notes there is a
frequently mentioned thought about the conflict-laden harmony in a
work of art, which is based on bipolarity, on the union of opposites,
which strive “upward” and “downward”.8 The reference to Ellis makes
one suspect that this state should not be interpreted as a description of
ecstatic, mystic, or dialectic unity, but as an orgasm, which is defined in
Method as a short-lived but the ‘most common’ transition to ecstasy
(something for everyday use)— attainable repeatedly and regularly.
Recurrence and imitation stand at the golden section in
Eisenstein’s schema. Elsewhere, recurrence is for him inseparable from
rhythm and imitation. For as he states in his text “Imitation as Mastery”
(1929), the art of the modern age, which includes his works, does not
imitate the form but the fundamental structure, that is, the rhythmic
organization. With reference to film, this is not the pictorial
representation, but the ideogram of motion (Eisenstein 1989: 46–48).
These two phenomena are also connected to ecstasy and mysticism.
Loyola’s Exercises propose achieving an ecstatic state through rhythmic
repetition. In the first third of the twentieth century rhythm appears to
be a universal remedy for solving all problems. Economists,
psychologists, philosophers, and artists all have high praise for rhythm.
7 The draft of the letter is in Eisenstein’s diary, published in Eisenstein 1998: 96-97.
8 “The dialectics of an artwork is based on a highly interesting polarity. The effect of
an artwork derives from the fact that a contradictory process is at work in it: the
impetuous, progressive, striving upward to higher mental levels of consciousness and
at the same time in the form of penetrating levels of deepest sensual thought.”
(Eisenstein 1988: 146)
9The most well-known of these texts is “Pushkin, the montageur” (Eisenstein 1995:
109-223).
only applied to poetic texts or films. Eisenstein does not see this as any
kind of rupture. He does not write linearly or diachronically, but
spirally, spherically, and simultaneously; he writes in the way that
thinking often functions. The ideal form of this publication would be a
hypertext, which would retain the virtual simultaneity of all the
references, but which would also make it impossible simply to follow the
flow of the text. The double nature of the old and the new forms
threaten to break the book apart from within. This makes reading the
work both a tortuous and a fascinating experience, as its author
intended: the beginning and end should be reversed and contradictions
united into a symbiosis of information and deformation.
For Eisenstein, the advent of film was the prerequisite for
creating a new kind of theory of art, thanks to the analytical nature of
the film itself. Taking new forms, it can provoke the reader, into
embracing new models of perception. The film art reveals the structure
that remains hidden in other arts., It enables one to manipulate the
direction, the attention, and the meaning, making the analysis
productive. Close-up, double exposure, and reverse movement are film
tricks, but Eisenstein understands them as reifications of figures of
thought. Above all, these figures determine the thinking of the author.
Method is a product of the visualization and cinematographization of
thought, a further experimental, ecstatic, and dialectical film by
Eisenstein.
References
Published in Tangential Points Publication Series (Crucible Studio, Aalto University, 2016)
ISBN 103204787103ABC