Abstract
‘What’s the use?’ is the titular question of Sara Ahmed’s final book in her trilogy organized around following words like happiness and will in The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Willful Subjects (2014). The rhetorical question channels the frustrated chorus of those of us committed to queer, feminist, antiracist projects in the ongoing present of our political moment. This refrain, however, is not a despairing one. In Virginia Woolf’s The Years Peggy utters the phrase, disrupting a family gathering. In her reading of Woolf Ahmed proposes that this enquiry is part of ‘a feminist project of living differently’ (p. 3). To ask ‘what’s the use?’ in order to move towards living differently offers a rebuttal to the very different use of that question about use that is all too familiar in its weaponization against disciplines, knowledges, forms of expression, ways of being, and most of all, peoples.
‘What’s the use?’ smiles the neoliberal agenda. Justify yourself.
I am reminded of Ahmed’s critique of the revolutionary American slogan ‘Join or Die’ as a fantasy choice. ‘In order to have an institutional life, you might have to work to avoid institutional death’, she points out (p. 195). In 2002, Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies – the heart of British cultural studies most famously led by Stuart Hall – was axed for the allegedly poor research performance. I believe this is worth remembering as we brace ourselves to jump through the hoops of REF 2021, the latest iteration of that UK-wide assessment of all research that will determine resource allocation for the next several years. However, Sara Ahmed emphasizes that our contemporary neoliberal university is not a departure from the original goals of these institutions. Through attention to ‘use’, Ahmed gives us a far-ranging interdisciplinary analysis of the entangled development of utilitarianism, eugenics and education exercised against those in the colonies and the metropole. What’s the Use? joins other significant texts in the urgent work of reimagining higher education like Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013) and Kandice Chuh’s The Difference Aesthetics Make: On the Humanities ‘After Man’ (2019).
‘Use’ shifts from description to prescription, both intimate and social, practicality and potentiality. The book is divided into four chapters wherein Ahmed moves through three registers of critique: the everyday, genealogy of ideas and disciplinary apparatuses, and finally ethnographic descriptions of organizations and institutions. In ‘Using Things’, she theorizes use, uselessness, and the unusable through an archive involving a broken mug and an almost empty tube of toothpaste alongside Heidegger and Marx. Use is relation and activity: consider the tenderness with which she discusses her dog Poppy drinking from a puddle in conversation with Lucretius’ poem on the nature of things. This biographical method gives us a sense of her holistic and expansive form of enquiry into the material and moral dimensions of use. ‘Use is a frame’, she writes. ‘Frames of uses have uses’ (p. 46). Thus, she links together opposition to trans inclusive use of bathrooms, public lip service to accessibility, and the Lockean rationale for colonialism.
The nineteenth century is the focus of the second and third chapters. ‘The Biology of Use and Disuse’ troubles the usual contrast between Lamarck and Darwin through Lamarck’s law of use and disuse and ideas about inheritance which influenced Darwin’s revisions of The Origin of Species and later The Descent of Man. Ahmed draws our attention to Lamarck’s classed example of the blacksmith’s arm instead of the better known example of the giraffe’s neck in order to think about labour. Bodies, machines and manufacturing bring us to Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession as the conditions that constitute racial capitalism. The Darwinian discourse of use and its implicit value judgements build to what Ahmed calls ‘a eugenic conclusion’ (p. 102). The subsequent chapter, ‘Use as Technique’, furthers the discussion of the biopolitics of use by looking at the development of monitorial schools for working class English children that were first engineered through colonial policy in India. This history, Ahmed suggests, is a striking oversight in Foucault’s well-known engagement with Bentham since the utilitarian philosopher’s essay ‘Chrestomathia’ logically extends panopticism to school organization. The monitorial school method of distributing pedagogical authority and, therefore, consolidating identification with the colonizer, was a cheaper way of teaching greater numbers of students. This optimization of learning and life was key to the civilizing mission that deemed some knowledge as useful, and thus, to be widely disseminated, while other forms of learning were reserved for the elite few. Ahmed states, ‘Fatalism becomes functionalism: the lower you are in a class hierarchy, the more you are supposed to be determined by function – function as fate’ (p. 133). Here I hear anticipatory echoes of today’s cry, ‘What can you do with that degree?’
Ahmed hits close to home for those of us housed in institutions of higher learning. Indeed, ‘Use and the University’ is about my actual home institution: University College London. In the final chapter, Ahmed addresses the founding of UCL as a case study for the modern university, an institution founded as a secular, more inclusive alternative to Oxford and Cambridge born out of the confluence of historical actors like Bentham and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. And eugenics. Charles Darwin’s cousin Frances Galton coined the term ‘eugenics’, endowed funding for its research at UCL, and his disciples and collaborators were founding faculty at UCL. Galton’s name is still in use across campus. How does one grapple with social justice vis-a-vis the fraught cluster of initiatives and performatives under the legible banner of ‘diversity’ when one’s institution has inherited eugenics?
It is no coincidence, as she emphasizes, that in 2014 a group of Black British scholars held a panel at UCL entitled ‘Why Isn’t My Professor Black?’ Building upon On Being Included (2012), Ahmed discusses her further ethnographic research on the struggles of diversity of workers in such institutions of higher education. She shifts from walls as a key image for diversity to the operation of doors to think about complaint: what is opened or closed to you or by you. Collective work is needed, feminism as a support system is needed. As she concludes, ‘we have to find ways of not getting used to it without getting out of it, even if sometimes, for our own survival, our feminist survival, we need to get out of it’ (p. 196). I take a deep breath and nod.
Thanks to Sara Ahmed, the phrase ‘feminist killjoy’ is proudly claimed by many people I know – when I lived in another country I was even gifted a homemade button emblazoned with that identification. In Living a Feminist Life (2017), Sara Ahmed shares what she calls a killjoy survival kit. Apropos of her critique of the uses of use, we must be attentive to our uses of such a toolkit. In What’s the Use? she acknowledges her departure from her previous citational policy not to cite any white men: ‘A reuse is still a use, damn it!’ (p. 213). When citation is inheritance and functions as an index, if such names are to be used, it should not be a use to or for them but a queer use to and for others. In her introduction Ahmed invokes Audre Lorde’s dictum about dismantling the master’s house, but stresses we must know how that house is built in order to dismantle it. But what can we build instead? The conclusion overflows with citations of queer and feminist theorists, activists, creators who represent trans, Black, Indigenous and otherwise minoritarian insurgent genealogies of thinking and imagining. If use is a frame, Ahmed asks us collectively to queer our use of practices of citation to create frames through which we can envision other possibilities. She closes with a return to the image of queer use on the book cover, a postbox with a makeshift sign that asks that the postbox not be used because birds are nesting within – inviting us to ask what fledglings might take flight.