Thingful Time

Futurist Chrontology and Socialist Chronization in Early Soviet Russia

Bibliographic Data

ID21974836
AuthorsSerguei Alex Oushakine (Princeton University, corresponding author), Serguei Oushakine (0000-0002-6758-2135, Princeton University)
Year2026
Volume15
Issue6
Pages124
Publication date2026-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueArts (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0752 • E-ISSN: 2076-0752
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/arts15060124
OpenAlexW7163048200
LanguageEN
References cited28

This study examines how early Soviet culture sought to render time perceptible, governable, and politically productive by translating Futurist “chrontology” into socialist “chronization.” Taking Aleksandr Kusikov’s 1922 polemic on the Berlin journal Veshch (Thing)—edited by Ilya Ehrenburg and El Lissitzky—as its point of departure, it reconstructs a “third-way” Futurism shaped by postrevolutionary transit and exile, in which anticipatory futurity was inseparable from an intensified orientation toward materiality, technique, and constructive making. Against the backdrop of modern heterochrony—where “times” proliferate and synchronization remains contested—the essay traces how Soviet actors devised new units, comparisons, and pedagogies for living in a temporally unstable present. Two case studies anchor the argument. First, the League of Time (1923–1925) promoted multiscalar time-management practices through campaigns, memos, and didactic graphics that treated clocks, routines, and efficiency as instruments of socialist subject-formation. Second, illustrated children’s books translated variegated temporal sensibilities into a pedagogy of images, making futurity legible via “thingful” traces that recoded the past as a catalogue of obsolete objects. Chronization thus appears as an ambitious cultural technology for producing a planned, dynamic, and productive socialist way of being. By foregrounding work, visualization, and material comparison, these projects converted temporal uncertainty into actionable, collective everyday socialist practice

Constructive · Foregrounding · Futurist · Ilya · Socialism · Vanguard · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Soviet and Russian History

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