WHERE DOES A BODY BEGIN?
BIOLOGY’S FUNCTION IN CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM (2023)
by Meltdown Your Books
This is a limited run printing of a book entitled "Where does a body begin? Biology's Function in Contemporary Capitalism", written anonymously by the infamous "Meltdown Your Books" a.k.a "S.R.", who has written this book as a part of her Ph.D studies in Evolutionary Biology (with a focus on Mathematical modelling).
The book's title "Where does a body begin?" asks a question that begins to reveal some of the issues faced in the field of Biology, namely the difficulty with which contemporary Biology has in determining the limits of the body, or rather what constitutes the body and what doesn't: where, precisely, is the body? Where does it begin?
The book begins with an anonymous contribution from one of our closest affiliates, i0 xen0, our favourite transsexual post-doc whose dissertation work also considered the philosophy and history of science and the use of computational modeling in scientific practice, has constructed a contents page in prose that aims to help the reader find a comfortable position with which to begin reading the text. This introduction is framed around a question that is equally as interesting as the book title: "When is a body?", and as this title implies, the piece dwells on the idea of the temporality of the body through a look at such ideas as Kairotic time and bodily seasons.
We are presenting here a very fun, yet rigorously peer-reviewed and intellectual work from a Ph.D scholar who has a renowned sense of humor and a unique voice, that is supported by another fantastic artist and thinker from another universe. To cap it off, the book is illustrated by Rachel Lillim, whose visual style is so compelling and intense that it helps everyone see the work for what it is: otherworldly, playful and queer, but deadly serious and radical at the same time. It's a biology text about the body put together by a team of those who are, by and large, under-represented in the field.
CONTENTS
• When is a Body? Preface by i0 xen0
• Chapter 0: Introduction
• Chapter 1: Ontology
• Chapter 2: Utility
• Chapter 3.0: Cybernetics I: An Ontological Order
• Chapter 3.5: Cybernetics II: A Political Order
• Chapter 4: Systems Biology
• Chapter 0.00.1: Postscript: Neural Networks and AI
BIOS
Meltdown Your Books (MYB), the pen name, was made as a portmanteau of the seminal essay Meltdown by Nick Land, and the landmark film Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets by Shuji Terayama. I chose the name, almost 3 years ago now, to reflect the political and digital black hole I saw hovering at the edge of contemporary media experience, and to present my work without the muddy veneer of personal identity. It has remained, since its inception, an anonymous project in only the loosest terms. The dedicated could always find my real identity, and some have, and so its anonymous character existed primarily as an element of presentation. Its anonymity existed to emphasize its deindividuated character. The things I discuss and emphasize under the MYB label are not items with definitive characteristics, they are collective experiences. MYB is something I cherish beyond self.
i0 xen0 is an artist, writer, and transexual based in Berlin. It has an academic research background in science and technology studies; its visual and performance art focuses on how people understand and imagine the internal structures and processes in their bodies, including through technologies of voluntary and involuntary bodily surveillance. All aspects of i0 xen0's academic and artistic work are informed by embodied contemplative practice. Its multidisciplinary research on how people collectively comprehend hormonal experience has been published with HumDrum Press, and contains practical invitations for individual and collaborative building of body knowledge (http://bask.guide/hormones). The content, framing and spirit of i0 xen0's foreword on MYB's book owes much to Ellen Samuel's "Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time" (2017).
DETAILS
• Authored by Meltdown Your Books
• Prefaced by i0 xen0
• Edited by Nicholas E. Powers
• Illustrated by Rachel Lillim
• CAT #BECOMING003
• ISBN: 978-9925-8118-4-7 (Print)
• ISBN: 978-9925-8118-5-4 (Digital)
• 11 x 18cm, Softcover, 111 pages
• Second Edition, October 2024
TO BE CITED AS
Meltdown Your Books (2024) Where Does a Body Begin? Biology’s function in contemporary capitalism. Berlin/Nicosia: Becoming.
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