Our guest for the second half of Locust Radio episode 15 is our very own Alexander Billet. Alex is a writer, artist, and editor at Locust Review. They join us in the virtual Locust studio to discuss the editorial for Locust Review 8, “The Utopia Principle,” which Alex took the lead on writing.
We discuss, in this episode: the materiality of utopia, love and anger, the revelatory aspects of apocalypse, an overgrowth of discourse without practice, the importance of demediating cultural and political strategies, interrupting capitalist disbelief, the primitive accumulation of a utopian imagination, the sublime differentiated totality of a future socialism, expressing the struggle in our art and writing, the social-existential reality of living without a reward in contemporary capitalism, Henri Lefebvre’s heterotopia, experimenting with utopia in art and left organizing, and how come nobody who is dead wants to work anymore?
Books and articles discussed: Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940); Alexander Billet, Shake the City: Experiments In Space and Time, Music and Crisis (2022); Bertolt Brecht, “A Short Organum for the Theater” (1949-1950); S.D. Chrostowska, Utopia in the age of Survival: Between Myth and Politics (2021); Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World (2021); Sam Dean interviews Mike Davis, “Mike Davis is Still a Damn Good Storyteller,” Los Angeles Times (July 25, 2022); Editorial, “The Utopia Principle,” Locust Review 8 (Summer 2022); Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009); Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (2013); Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (2014); William Z. Foster, “Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry” (1936); Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution” (1918); Herbert Marcuse, “An Essay on Liberation” (1969); Adam Turl, “Interrupting Disbelief: Narrative Conceptualism and Anti-Capitalist Studio Art” (2015); Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (2011).
Artists, art, and works discussed: Born Again Labor Museum (Adam Turl + Tish Turl); The Crystal Chain; Dysmorph Series (Laura Fair-Schulz); The Kinks, “Picture Book”; Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919-1920)
Our musical break was “Demonstration” by Omnia Sol. Our reading was Alexander Billet’s “Republic of Dreams” from Locust Review 8. The opening sketch was based on a story from the Stink Ape Resurrection Primer. Locust Radio is produced by Omnia Sol and Alexander Billet. It is hosted by Tish Turl, Laura Fair-Schulz, and Adam Turl. Music by Omnia Sol.
Subscribe to Locust Review for as little as $1 a month.
Submit work to Locust Review by e-mailing us at locust.review@gmail.com.