Alexander Bogdanov’s Philosophy of Living Experience was published in three Russian editions between 1913 and 1923, after which for a century it disappeared into obscurity. It was not translated into English until 2016.⁴³ This idea, “living experience,” is a central one for us in this book. Our account of meaning, our transpositional grammar, is a philosophy of living experience and its ordinary meanings.

Born Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky, Bogdanov joined Russia’s underground Social Democratic Labor Party in the 1890s and changed his surname to a pseudonym. “Bogdanov” was his wife’s middle name. Fellow revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Ulianov changed his name to “Lenin” at about the same time.

In 1897, Bogdanov wrote A Short History of Economic Science, analyzing the authoritarian inequalities of the past and forecasting a future when human toil would be relieved by “automatically regulating machines,” a time when people would also travel in “dirigible aircraft,” when “the perfection of wireless telegraphy and telephony will create the possibility for people to communicate with each other under any condition, over any distance,” and with this, “the gradual abolition of all standards of compulsion.”⁴⁴ His predictions about flying and communications were prescient, though the communist revolutions of the twentieth century failed to abolish compulsion. Lenin said in a review, “Mr. Bogdanov’s book is a remarkable manifestation in our economic literature.”⁴⁵ Through many editions, the History of Economic Science became a leading text in the revolutionary call-to-arms.

The Russian Democratic Labor Party was also a place of endless and raucous dispute – arguments, for instance, about whether the party should take an insurrectionary route to revolution, or a parliamentary one. At the second party congress of 1903, Bogdanov sided with Lenin and joined a newly formed, radical splinter group called the Bolsheviks (“majority”). He was arrested and thrown into prison by the Tsarist government during the failed revolutionary attempt of 1905.

From about 1900, Bogdanov became interested in the work of the Austrian scientists and philosophers Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius who had argued that the human mind perceives the natural world through bodily sensations. Bogdanov adopted these ideas, and called them “Empiriomonism.” He wrote numerous articles, then a three-volume treatise published in 1904–06.⁴⁶ Philosophy of Living Experience was written in 1910–11 as a more accessible, synoptic account, hence its subtitle: Popular Outlines.

“The task of philosophy,” says Bogdanov, “consists in harmoniously systematizing experience, … clarifying its interconnectedness.” In a grammar of experience, the subject is “the collective, humanity”; the predicate is human “effort, activity, labor”; and the object is the “matter” of the world. “An idea is always the product of a certain abstraction, i.e. the attenuation and schematization of experience, the distancing of itself from the living concreteness of experience.” “The task of cognition consists in expediently organising experience.”

In order to determine the basic tendency of a series of phenomena, it is necessary to “abstract” – i.e. to detach from them, in practice or intellectually – all incidental tendencies connected with their specific variable conditions. For this it is necessary cognitively to break down phenomena, to distinguish their general from their particular conditions, and to “analyse” them. In consequence, this method is also called the “analytic” method.⁴⁷

In 1905, Bogdanov sent Lenin – then in exile in Finland – the first volume of Empiriomonism. Lenin wrote a long, angry letter. Bogdanov returned the letter saying that, for the sake of political unity, he would pretend he had never read it.⁴⁸ But Lenin was not going to pretend back.

It was obvious from reading Marx and Engels, said Lenin, that “things and their mental pictures or images arise exclusively from sensations … Materialism, in full agreement with natural science, takes matter as primary and regards consciousness, thought and sensation as secondary.”⁴⁹ Lenin spent nearly four hundred pages furiously refuting the heretic Bogdanov, and along with him, the bourgeois sources of Bogdanov’s inspiration, Mach and Avenarius.

Bogdanov swallowed the bait of professorial philosophy … that sensations are functions of man’s central nervous system … [and the] absurd denial that the visual image of a tree is a function of the retina … A philosophy which teaches that physical nature itself is a product [of its conceptualization], is a philosophy of the priests, pure and simple … The ‘empirio-criticists’ fill scores of pages with such unutterable trash … Bogdanov … has abandoned the materialist standpoint and has thereby inevitably condemned himself to confusions … Bogdanov’s denial of objective truth is agnosticism and subjectivism … Bogdanov thinks that to speak of the social organisation of experience is ‘cognitive socialism.’ This is insane twaddle … Experience is experience. And there are people who take this quasi-erudite rigmarole for true wisdom! … Bogdanov’s philosophy contains nothing but a reactionary muddle … Bogdanov absolutely does not know the history of philosophy … empty “philosophical” acrobatics … a stupid and fruitless occupation … a senseless jumble … pseudo-erudite quackery … outrageous distortions of Marxism.⁵⁰

Bogdanov was never able to respond, given the subsequent course of history.

We picked up our copy of Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism online from a second-hand bookstore in Nashville, Tennessee specializing, its website says, in Civil War, Antique Maps, Religion, Genealogy, African Americans, Southern Fiction, Southern History, Children’s Literature, First Editions, and Nashville History.

It’s not clear how Lenin’s book might have ended up there, an arcane tract from the old USSR. Our edition was published in 1947, at the height of Joseph Stalin’s rule. Stalin carefully cultivated the cult of the state’s founding philosopher-ruler. Only this can explain the frequent republication of such a peculiar tract. Who knows what ordinary Russians or ordinary communists might have made of this long and rambling diatribe, the sole purpose of which was to vilify a long-deleted person.

In the April of 1908, the writer Maxim Gorky brought Lenin, Bogdanov, and other Bolshevik leaders to his villa on the Island of Capri. They fought out their factional differences in conversation and chess. Lenin must have been writing Materialism and Empirio-Criticism at this time, because its preface is dated September of that year. Lenin had “the sound of a Hooligan,” said Gorky when he read the manuscript.⁵¹ Bogdanov and Lenin by then had differences in revolutionary strategy too. Bogdanov was considered a potential rival leader of the party. He was thrown out of the party in 1909, by which time Lenin had produced plenty of theory to support that decision.

Now out of political action, Bogdanov wrote two science fiction novels set on already-socialist Mars, Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913). When the Russian revolution came in October 1917, he was partly rehabilitated. For a time he became a member of the Presidium of the Socialist Institute of Scientific Philosophy attached to Moscow State University. He was the general editor of a new Russian edition of the three volumes of Marx’s Capital and allowed to set up “Proletarian Culture” schools to train workers in a socialist version of philosophy and history, but this was soon taken away from him when the regime decided to focus on literacy. As the regime hardened its grip, it became suspicious of grassroots initiatives.

In 1924, Bogdanov started a series of scientific experiments with blood transfusion, a suitably apolitical endeavor – he had originally trained as a doctor. Transfusion was supposed to be a source of bodily and mental rejuvenation. In 1926 he was allowed to start an Institute for Hematology and Blood Transfusions. Bogdanov himself enthusiastically took part in the experiments. In 1928 he contracted tuberculosis following a blood exchange from a student at the institute who carried the disease, but in whom it was currently inactive. Bogdanov died but the student survived.⁵²

Bogdanov’s Philosophy of Living Experience was based on lectures he gave in the socialist worker schools in Bologna and Capri where he taught in 1910–11.⁵³ Avenarius and Mach, he explained, were overly narrow in their empiricism when they claimed that meanings were singularly derived from sensations of the material world. To this, Bogdanov added the idea, which he attributed to Marx, “that objectivity does not have an absolute but a socially-practical meaning.”⁵⁴ The meanings of material reality do not simply present themselves to us; they are as much constructed by our social and historical frames of reference. Experience is socially organized. Socially practical meaning is layered over sensations of the objective world. Or to rephrase this in contemporary terms, meaning is an act of social cognition.

[C]onsider how in practical terms an axe, as a physical body, is distinguished from an axe, as a psychical complex – i.e. a perception or psychical image of it. The axe as a physical body serves to cut wood, but what about the axe as a psychical image? You would say, of course, that it is not useful for cutting wood, and you would be essentially right, but this is not all that could be said … But the axe-body … [is] located in the same moment of time and at the same point in space both for you and for other people with whom you communicate; it is composed of the same parts and possesses the same qualities, and, in general, presents the same elements in the same interconnectedness. The experience of people regarding it is socially agreed upon or – what is the same thing – socially organised. But one cannot say that the corporeal axe is identical for all people. For the lumberjack who is working with it all the time, it has a greater sum of qualities than for a tailor who almost never works with it. For a scholar learned in physics and chemistry, it contains a greater number and a greater variety of elements … But even so, in the experience of these people there is … sufficient agreement for it to be assumed that for the entire collective the corporeal axe is “the same thing.” This experience is socially valid or objective … Now the inner meaning is clear to us: the objectivity of physical experience is its social organisation.⁵⁵

So, how does this social process of meaning-making work? “[T]hought operates with the elements of experience according to the technological and cognitive goals that are in hand,” says Bogdanov.⁵⁶ These tools do not just reflect experience. They extend experience. “An idea is always the product of a certain abstraction, i.e. the attenuation and schematisation of experience, the distancing of itself from the living concreteness of experience.”⁵⁷ This extension of meaning is according to practical social interests, using tools for conceptualization that have developed through human history.

At this point in his argument, Bogdanov introduces the idea of “substitution,” or practices of cognitive work and social meaning that progressively generate broader and deeper meanings in living experience.

We usually observe the sun in the form of a shining yellow circle on a blue field. This is a purely visual form, and if primitive people consider the form to be a material body, then this is an unconscious substitution of the elements of hardness – as perceived by touch – for the elements of colour and form – as perceived by sight. Very early on – apparently even before the birth of scientific astronomy – people began to guess that the sun is not a flat circle, as it appears to the eye, but is a sphere.⁵⁸

The processes of multimodal meaning that we analyze in this book entail substitution more or less in Bogdanov’s sense. The word we use for this is “transposition.” When we see the sun, we extend that meaning by speaking its name, locating its sight within a repertoire of mental images, associating its feeling with bodily experiences of a particular warmth on one’s skin, locating the sun in the space of the sky, perhaps linking it also to ideas about the sun that we have learned from scientific texts, such as its three-dimensional spherical character which is not otherwise obvious. So, we mean the sun with text, image, and body. Meaning is a system of substitutions, a process of meaning transpositions tied together in a multimodal experience.

Bogdanov continues:

The origin of substitution lies in the symbolics of human communication. In place first of other people’s words and gestures, and later of various artistic symbols, written signs, etc., people substitute, as the “content” of those things, various forms of consciousness, feelings, desires, and thoughts … In this way, people “understand” one another, mutually “explain” the meaning and correlation of their actions, and anticipate to a degree other people’s actions … [P]eople transfer this accustomed method to various other facts of experience with the goal of achieving an “explanation” of them that provides “understanding” and anticipation.⁵⁹

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⁴³ Alexander Bogdanov, 1923 [2016], The Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines, translated by D.G. Rowley, Leiden, NL: Brill.

⁴⁴ Alexander Bogdanov, 1919 [1925], A Short History of Economic Science, London, UK: Communist Party of Great Britain, pp. 379, 380, 387.

⁴⁵ V.I. Lenin,1898 [1964], “Book Review: A. Bogdanov, a Short Course of Economic Science,” pp. 46–54 in Lenin: Collected Works, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

⁴⁶ Michael M. Boll, 1981, “From Empiriocriticism to Empiriomonism: The Marxist Phenomenology of Aleksandr Bogdanov,” The Slavonic and East European Review 59 (1):41–58.

⁴⁷ Alexander Bogdanov, 1923 [2016], The Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines, translated by D.G. Rowley, Leiden, NL: Brill, pp. 46, 56, 62, 206, 107.

⁴⁸ McKenzie Wark, 2015, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, London, UK: Verso, p. 5.

⁴⁹ V.I. Lenin, 1908 [1947], Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing, pp. 34, 38.

⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 85, 233, 163, 51, 121, 234, 147, 234, 223, 35, 86, 371, 336.

⁵¹ Robert C. Williams,1986, The Other Bolsheviks: Lenin and His Critics, 1904–1914, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, p.138.

⁵² McKenzie Wark, 2015,Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, London, UK: Verso, pp. 57–58.

⁵³ Alexander Bogdanov, 1923 [2016], The Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Outlines, translated by D.G. Rowley, Leiden, NL: Brill, p. xiii.

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 215.

⁵⁵ Ibid., pp. 211–12.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 210.

⁵⁷ Ibid., p. 62.

⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 222.

⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 63.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 34-39. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Alexander Bogdanov’s "Philosophy of Living Experience" §0.2.9a