Aleksandr Bogdanov and Sergei Eisenstein on Emotions: The Affectional, the Theory of Expressiveness, and the Emotional Script

Lyubov Bugaeva

doi:10.2478/csj-2021-0008

Abstract

Abstract In Empiriomonism, Aleksandr Bogdanov introduces the term ‘affectional’ that he borrowed from Richard Avenarius but revised in the light of William James’s theory of emotions. The ‘affectional’ is an index of energy balance between suffering and pleasure. Employing Bogdanov’s revised notions of affectional as an element of any organization or complex, Sergei Eisenstein develops the principles of expressivity. He sees emotions as an organism’s embodied reaction to its interaction with the environment. Eisenstein proposes a notion of an emotional script, which is a narrative of a prospective viewer telling what has impressed him. Aleksandr Rzheshevskiy, a scriptwriter of Eisenstein’s never completed ‘Bezhin Meadow’ (1937), became an ‘emotional scriptwriter’ in practice. The paper investigates the relations between Bogdanov’s notions of the affectional, Eisenstein’s theory of expressiveness, and the emotional script as conceived by Eisenstein and realized by Rzheshevskiy.

Highlights

In Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy (1904–1906), Aleksandr Bogdanov introduces the term ‘affectional’ that he borrows from Richard Avenarius
Developing the idea of organization, Bogdanov, like Avenarius, distinguishes between two types of line of experience – dependent, that is, reliant on the state of the nervous system, and independent, that is, free from such kind of reliance in the sense of not being reducible to sensations – and looks into emotional complexes that he categorizes as psychic processes
Recognizing the distinctiveness of emotional complexes, Bogdanov objects to singling them out as something purely psychic within the system of experience, and he argues that emotional complexes and psychophysical entities are constituted by elements of an equivalent nature

Summary

Commentary by Sergey Ogudov

Lyubov Bugaeva explores the concepts of emotional experience developed by Aleksander Bogdanov and Sergei Eisenstein in the context of the history of ideas. The author finds the origins of these concepts in the works of Richard Avenarius and William James and draws a reasonable conclusion about their influence on Eisenstein’s cinematography She claims that, for Eisenstein, the work of screenwriter Aleksandr Rzheshevskiy was an example of intense reliving of emotional experience. For Eisenstein, the work of screenwriter Aleksandr Rzheshevskiy was an example of intense reliving of emotional experience She pays special attention in the article to the current idea of emotional experience developed in neuroscience and cognitive theory. Sergei Zenkin developed a thought-provoking idea of mimetic communication, which, as opposed to semiotic communication, is based on the perceptual ‘contagion’ of the reader through the text It seems that it makes sense to find parallels to Bogdanov’s and Eisenstein’s concepts in neuroscience and to discuss their mediated influence on contemporary literary and film studies. The idea of ‘Bezhin Meadow’ was preceded by the never realized script ‘Tribunal’; motifs of ‘Bezhin Meadow’ can be found in the script ‘In the USSR’, and the father–son conflict interested Rzheshevskiy up to the late plays written in the early 1960s

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