Culture As Organiza Tion in Early So Viet Thought

SPHERICAL BOOK CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN EARLY SOVIETBogdanov, Eisenstein, THOUGHT and the Proletkult Giulia Rispoli, Maja Soboleva Maja Giulia Rispoli, Oittinen, Vesa Biggart, John Board: Editorial Pia Tikka Editor: General Published in Tangential Points Publication Series (Crucible Studio, Aalto University, 2016) ISBN 103204787103ABC CULTURE AS ORGANIZATION IN EARLY SOVIET THOUGHT Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult SPHERICAL BOOK COPYRIGHTS Spherical Book Platform Crucible Studio’s Tangential Points Series http://crucible.org.aalto.fi/spherical/ Aalto University School of Arts Design and Architecture books.aalto.fi © Authors ISBN 978-952-60-0076-3 Helsinki, Finland 2016 Outline-generating algorithm, Perspicamus Oy The concept of interactive online publication platfrom “Spherical Book” © Mauri Kaipainen, Eduard Shagal, and Pia Tikka Spherical Book platform software and graphic design © Eduard Shagal EDITORIAL WORDS This anthology “Culture as Organization in Early Soviet Thought” brings together a group of film researchers, historians, political scientists and systems scientists to discuss historical and contemporary tangential points between the sciences and the arts in Russia during the first decades of the twentieth century. All chapters pro- vide new insights into linkages between the arts, philosophy and other disciplines during this period. Tangential points between early Russian systems thinking and approaches to montage that were being developed within the film community are examined in detail. The contributing authors focus on two thinkers: the filmmaker, Sergei M. Eisenstein and the systems theorist, Aleksandr A. Bogdanov. In the early years of his career as a theatre and film director, Eisen- stein worked within the Proletkult, a cross-disciplinary movement the objective of which was to create a new ‘proletarian culture’ by fostering the values of ‘collectivism’ through tuition on literature, theatre, the graphic arts and the sciences. Bogdanov, an economist, culturologist and physician was the principal founder of this movement. Bogdanov delivered regular lectures in the Proletkult and in other educational institutions in which he expounded his tektological ideas of organization as universal mechanisms in nature, society and thought. At one time the closest collaborator of Vladimir I. Lenin, Bogdanov soon became his most feared rival, and his systemic ideas were fated to vanish from Soviet history until their re-discovery in the 1980s. Most of the papers in this anthology were delivered to an interna- tional art and science conference “Tangential Points” organized at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture in 2014. This scholarly meeting was convened to reflect upon apparent similarities between the systemic thinking of Eisenstein and Bogdanov, as hypothesized in the book Enactive Cinema: Simulato- rium Eisensteinense (Tikka 2008). This work, in turn, was grounded in publications that had introduced Bogdanov’s systemic thinking to the English speaking world in the 1980s and later. These works are listed in the references of many of the chapters. The principal inspiration for the conference, however, came from the work of the author of The Origins and Development of Systems Thinking in the Soviet Union (1982), the Finnish scholar Ilmari Susiluoto (1947 – 2016), to whom this anthology is dedicated. By taking the work of Eisenstein and Bogdanov as case studies we were able to search for tangential points between early systems thinking and the creative arts at a level beyond mere generalization. Oksana Bulgakowa invites the reader to follow her on an expedition into Eisenstein’s systems thinking: Eisenstein rejected linear logic and seeked for forms of a hypertext that in his eyes were closer to the associative, spherical, and labyrinthine thought structures, ideas that to date have only found expression in modernist art experi- ments. In John Biggart’s “Sociology of Arts” one learns how Bogdanov integrated the arts into his general theory of the evolu- tion of social formations. Jutta Scherrer analyzes the historical genesis of Bogdanov’s conception of proletarian culture. The con- cern of Maja Soboleva is Bogdanov’s theoretical understanding of culture and its tektological foundations. The chapter by Vesa Oit- tinen opens a window upon the theoretical dispute between Bogdanov and Lenin, between the ‘Machian’ and the ‘orthodox Marxist’ and highlights the centrality of Kantian ‘things-in- themselves’ (Ding an sich) to this dispute. Peter Dudley discusses the Proletkult as an adaptive systemic environment, created for supporting the self-organization of the prole- tariat for radical social change. Giulia Rispoli joins the cohort of systemic thinkers in the anthology: referring to biological, ecologi- cal and cognitive levels of cybernetic organization, she highlights the contemporary relevance of Bogdanov’s tektological polymor- phic idea of the environment and of knowledge creation. According to Simona Poustilnik, Bogdanov’s tektological conceptions of ‘personality-organization’ and ‘assembling’ provided Soviet Con- structivists with a scientiﬁc rationale for their ‘production art’. Fabian Tompsett describes the impact of Bogdanov and Otto Neur- ath upon the German Figurative Constructivists and points to the relevance of his tektological ideas to political-art movements in the age of digitized information. Among the specific issues addressed is the extent to which Eisenstein’s theoretical work on montage systems was influenced by the systemic thinking of Bogdanov. Daniela Steila applies metaphors of photography and cinema to explain the difference between the views of human perception represented by Lenin and Bogdanov, enabling us to detect traces of Bogdanov’s systemic ideas in the thinking of Eisenstein. Lyubov Bugaeva identifies further potential linkages between the two main subjects of this anthology, in a chapter which investigates the rela- tions between Bogdanov’s notions of the affectional, Eisenstein’s theory of expressiveness, and the emotional script as conceived by Eisenstein and realized by Rzheshevskiy. Some answers are offered to those who might ask what role the Proletkult movement played in the careers of the two. John Biggart and Oksana Bulgakowa examine aspects of how both Bogdanov and Eisenstein challenged traditional modes of thought, integrating modern thinking into their respective disciplines. In different ways this brought about the expulsion of both from the Proletkult movement. As a feature of the anthology, we offer original translations of texts by Eisenstein and Bogdanov. Bogdanov’s “Science and the working class” (1918), translated by Fabian Tompsett comprises fourteen ‘Theses’ for a lecture delivered by Bogdanov to the First All-Russian Conference of the Proletkult in 1918. “An open letter to A. Bogdanov” by Franz Siewert (1921), translated by Fabian Tompsett, brings to life one critical response to Bogdanov’s concept of ‘Prole- tarian art’, as expressed by a contemporary. Two texts by Eisenstein enable the reader to grasp Eisenstein’s original writing style, a style that resembles a line of thought cap- tured on the fly and passed down to us in textual form. Introduced by Oksana Bulgakowa and John Biggart, Eisenstein’s “Cinema of the masses” (1927), translated by Richard Abraham, offers a comprehen- sive and popular explanation of what Eisenstein understood to be his original contribution to the art of ﬁlm. A few months before his death, Eisenstein recapitulated in “the Magic of Art” (1947) translated by Julia Vassilieva, several of the key themes that recur throughout his theoretical output. Bogdanov, like Eisenstein, was aware of the power of art to influence the thinking of the prole- tariat. James D. White examines the philosophical dimension of Bogdanov’s utopian novel Red Star, drawing attention to themes that appear in his more avowedly theoretical works. Red Star was written in order to familiarize workers with Bogdanov’s understanding of the ‘culture of the future’: it is made clear that this culture would entail an assimilation and mastery of Bogdanov’s ‘organization science’. Indeed, Bogdanov’s thinking in the field of organization science evolved and matured at the very time that he articulated his utopian vision in the form of a novel. The reader might ask, how far are these early systemic ideas present in the media art theories of the present day? Clea von Chamier-Waite’s practice-based chapter leads the reader from the rhythmic montage pioneered by Eisenstein and the Soviet avant- garde cinema of the 1920s, to the present day and to her conception of somatic montage for immersive cinema, experienced through the navigation of a four-dimensional cinematic space - a Sphere. The “Spherical Book” was a visionary invention by Eisenstein of a new book form that anticipated hypertext. Whereas in the traditional book form articles were read sequentially, following a linear narrative, the content of the “Spherical Book”, as Eisenstein called it, was to be perceived as a whole, instantaneously, with essays arranged in clusters, each oriented in different direction but circling around a common theme. Our implementation of this idea enables the readers make their own book-montages by emphasizing the themes that are, for them, most important. In response, the Spherical Book algorithm will organize all chapters into a cluster around the chosen themes. The interactive “Spherical Book” platform provides readers and authors with a

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