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Diss Belief: Review of Extreme Islam and Hatred of Capitalism

Oct 15

L.A. Weekly, March 2002

If you pick up Extreme Islam expecting to have some easy yuks at the expense of Muslim fundamentalists, you may be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong. Adam Parfrey, (in)famous for his Apocalypse Culture collections and for publishing the complete works of Anton LaVey, is an equal-opportunity blasphemer, an infidel of the first order. And he comes out shouting with his opening essay, excoriating Muslim scholars (and, by implication, the Western mainstream in general) for pussyfooting their way around the violent exclusivity explicit in the Koran. (“Slay them wherever you find them . . . fight the idolators utterly . . . Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and his messenger have forbidden — who do not practice the religion of the truth.”)

So, yes, parts of Extreme Islam simply expose fundamentalist Islamic, and a smattering of relevant Orthodox Jewish and fundamentalist Christian texts to our examination, and invite us to re-experience the same fears, and the same sense of superiority, that have already been drummed into us by the media. But fortunately, as with the Apocalypse Culture books, there are other, deeper currents also at work here. Sure, Parfrey plays the cynical ringmaster once again pulling back the curtains to give us a glimpse at that most perverse aspect of humanity — the things people manage to believe. But the attentive reader won’t be wearing that self-satisfied smirk for long. Extreme Islam contains essays that will (or at least should) render you serious, humbled and even a bit sympathetic.

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The Machine-Baby Interface

Oct 14

Wired, 1998

Cloning may still be a few years away, but in Cyborg Babies: from Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, a collection of essays edited by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit (Routledge, 1998), we see how technology is increasingly intervening in every aspect of birth and child rearing.

Several authors, the most notable being Sherry Turkle and Mizuko Ito, examine the complex relationships that evolve around in-vitro fertilization and surrogate motherhood, and coin terms such as “techno-semen” (the offering of an artificial insemination donor). Ultrasound imaging, abortion, biotechnology, electronic fetal monitoring, fertility drugs, amniocentesis, techno-toys for tots, and anesthesia are also hot topics deconstructed in essays that are one part medical reporting, one part Foucaultian culture theory, and two parts futuristic medical anthropology.

R.U. Sirius recently spoke with Davis-Floyd and Dumit about their book and their views on technologically assisted birth and childhood.

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Aliens Out To Get Us

Oct 13

Published on Wired.com, June 1998

The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead held that some things actually “undergo the formality of occurring.” For instance, in this actual phenomenological world, people either are, or are not, being abducted by space aliens. People either are, or are not, being subjected to sexual abuse by satanic cults. Lee Harvey Oswald either did, or did not, assassinate JFK.

It’s not clear if Jodi Dean, author of Aliens In America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Cornell University Press, 1998), would agree. What is clear is that Dean is far more interested in deconstructing the context of our extraterrestrial- and conspiracy theory-obsessed culture than in adding her thoughts to the extraterrestrial-question mix.

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Sex Machine: David Cronenberg Interview

Oct 13

Wired, May 1997

Director, writer, and cinematographer David Cronenberg has constructed a career around visions of bodies in transition – focusing variously on disease, gynecology, drug addiction, and the scope of physical mutation.

In 1992, he dared to film one of two “bibles” of cyberpunk bohemia: William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. Now he’s taken on the other: Crash, by J. G. Ballard. Ballard’s strange and disturbing 1973 novel revolves around atrophied, affectless citizens who attempt to locate meaning and erotic pleasure in automobile crashes.

Fetishizing crippled flesh, hard metal, and the emotional distance of his characters, Cronenberg has created a film distressing enough to upset journalists at Cannes (where it won a special jury prize) and his distributor, Ted Turner, who declared it “really weird.” In the words of Ballard, “The film goes farther than the book I wrote. What is so powerful about it, and its performances, is that they start where the book ends…. It’s one of the best films on sexuality, violence, and the motor car.”

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