[Minorcompositions] A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons

[Minor Compositions]

Now available for advance ordering and/or free download…

*A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons*
Giovanni Marmont


/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.

“How do practices dispossess us? How does use reorient the very question 
of function and form? Where else can it take us beyond our-selves? In 
this compelling engagement with use-beyond-use-value, Marmont takes us 
on a journey to a non-binary account of use that refuses the limited 
account of any marketable claim. Instead, it moves use toward the 
surprise of constellations as experimental as they are quotidian.” – 
Erin Manning, author of /For a Pragmatics of the Useless/

“Beautifully written, intellectually generous and politically sharp, 
this is a stellar work of design studies. Marmont politicizes the 
often-depoliticized notion of ‘use’ within design discourse and 
practice. If taken seriously, this rare gem in the current landscape of 
design theory can potentially expand the horizons of what thinking and 
acting mean by and within designing.” – Mahmoud Keshavarz, author of 
/The Design Politics of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent/

*Bio:* Giovanni Marmont is a university worker currently based in 
Edinburgh, Scotland.

PDF available freely online: https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1647

Advance pre-orders for the book will be taken during November 2025 (to 
be shipped in December). Anyone who pre-orders the book directly from 
Minor Compositions will be sent a special barcode free version of the book.

Release to the book trade 1 March 2026


-- 
Minor Compositions. Publishing the unruly, the radical, and the yet-co-come.
https://www.minorcompositions.info

Linktree of all our stuff:https://linktr.ee/minorcompositions
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