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<p>Now available for advance ordering and/or free download…<br>
<br>
<b>A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons</b><br>
Giovanni Marmont<br>
</p>
<p><img moz-do-not-send="false"
src="cid:part1.iWm4lCCm.02Q44GYP@gmail.com" alt="" width="200"
height="300"></p>
<p><br>
<i>What if study was not about learning, improvement,
accreditation? What if use was not about intentionality,
function, ownership? </i><br>
<br>
<i>A Studious Use</i> 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, <i>A Studious Use</i> 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.<br>
<br>
“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 <i>For a Pragmatics of the Useless</i><br>
<br>
“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 <i>The Design Politics
of the Passport: Materiality, Immobility, and Dissent</i><br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Giovanni Marmont is a university worker currently
based in Edinburgh, Scotland. <br>
<br>
PDF available freely online: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1647"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=1647</a><br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Release to the book trade 1 March 2026<br>
<br>
<br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
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