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

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.