Utopian Substances in and Beyond the Soviet Empire

The utopian imagination that accompanied the Bolshevik revolution and the early years of Soviet rule sought to substantially transform not only ideas and relations between people, but the very material substance of the world as a whole. Thanks to the work of Christina Kiaer (2005) and others, we have been acquainted with things-as-comrades in constructivist theory and practice for some time; more recently, Mieka Erley (2021) has uncovered the transformative meanings of “Russian soil,” while Maya Vinokour (2024) has highlighted the system of liquid flows underpinning Stalinist poetics.

By “utopian substances” we mean substances like soil, cement, steel, coal, cotton, gas, gold, oil, plastics, radio waves, and radium (among others) which were seen as transformative of human relationality with nature and society alike.

This seminar will seek to chart the migratory patterns—literal, liminal, and literary—of such substances around the imagined topography of the Soviet empire and beyond it, exploring comparative cases of utopian substance-thinking in other parts of the world. In so doing, we aim to develop a shared inquiry into the historical, aesthetic, and critical folds of substance in its relation to elemental utopian possibilities and to labor, which Marx calls the “common social substance of all commodities.”