Studious Use : Designing From The Undercommons

What if study was not about learning, improvement, accreditation? What if use was not about intentionality, function, ownership? A Studious Use invites readers to reconsider the habitual logics and material priorities at play in practices of both study and use. It examines their potential and actual interplay, unravelling the ways in which these are at once shaped by and reproductive of broader social, political, and cultural currents. Here Giovanni Marmont explores how a seemingly inoffensive commitment to the terms of individuation, as a manner of understanding and organising the world first and foremost as an aggregate of separate entities, carries with it profoundly harmful implications. With an eye toward the unseen possibilities of social life, he proposes an alternative mode of engagement with and through artefacts - studious use - predicated instead on our general, shared, practical indebtedness. Through a blend of theoretical critique, philosophical inquiry, and experimental design practices, A Studious Use offers a rethinking of sociality not as a coming together of independent, if interacting subjects and objects but, rather, as a primary, undirected, ongoing collective experiment.