What's the Use: On the Uses of Use by Sara Ahmed (review)

Designated third in a trilogy, What's the Use: On the Uses of Use, from prolific theorist and activist Sara Ahmed, extends the projects of The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Willful Subjects (2014) into a theoretical survey of use. Critically yet playfully teasing out the implications of use in political and academic spaces, in rhetorical and biological texts, Ahmed discloses the useless as the willful killjoy—the queer, the laborer, the racialized.

In her Introduction and Chapter 1, Ahmed traces the kinetic network of use, working through definitions and eventually concluding that, with some exceptions, use incites more use, compounding its own definition and power through repetition. "The more a path is used, the more a path is used" (41; emphasis in original), writes Ahmed, and "deviation is hard. Deviation is made hard" (42), a statement foreshadowing the final chapter on queer use. Ahmed also considers the rhetoric of function as it operates in racial capitalism, how markets stratify communities into useable or nonuseable parts (47). It is important to note that she also consults disability studies, in that the used path is often inaccessible to an invisible many—those inhabiting a world not designed for them. From "in use" and "out of use," "overused," and "used up," Ahmed proceeds synonymously through use, offering readers a substantive foundation from which to investigate its academic, economic, and material underpinnings.

Although Chapter 1 explores the varying utterances and implications of use, with Ahmed locating her theory in the everyday and as preoccupied with things (e.g., a backpack, a bathroom door, a postbox), Chapter 2 moves into a historical, biological accounting of use. Here, Ahmed surveys the work of Jean-Baptist Lamarck and Charles Darwin to expose how use was mobilized to explain biological origins. From their texts and the subsequent influence of their work, Ahmed delineates the body as archive and somatic history, as holding traces of past use. Bodies, Ahmed argues, function as strange temporalities wherein what is not used or no longer used still lingers. It is here that Ahmed points out the emergence of eugenics in biological science, calling attention in particular to how use is endorsed as strength and productivity, and therefore embedded with a moral presumption that engenders racial violence.

In Chapter 3, Ahmed maintains focus on the body as she translates varying techniques of use (e.g., utilitarianism) to how those techniques govern bodies (104). Taking up questions of class and affect, Ahmed connects usefulness with happiness and virtue, evincing the ways capitalism baits us with happiness by moralizing productivity. To idle then, Ahmed explains, is to cease to function, is to cease to be (134). Likewise, just as an economics of use promises prosperity, the university replicates the model, Ahmed argues, through neoliberal multicultural programming, programming that imitates equity while retaining white, hetero-sexist power structures. Ahmed's early chapters coalesce in Chapter 4, wherein she presses forth questions of policy, the uses of diversity, and the material realities of being marginalized, minoritized, and racialized in a space where deviation is made hard. She returns to her feminist killjoy as interloper in the continuities of abuse (184). And it is in this chapter that Ahmed includes several testimonies from those in the academy, graduate students and full professors alike, who have experienced sexism and racism as the used path, whereon deviation is hard if not impossible.

Ahmed concludes What's the Use by attending to the queerness or queering of use. She cautions that queer use does not signal new beginnings but the reinvestment in what's worn and weighty (227). Returning to temporality, Ahmed urges readers to linger and not get to the point (206), a perhaps tenuous charge when cultural precarity threatens the body's delay. However, when Ahmed resists teleological containment she also resists the linear drive toward product and profit, as insisted upon by industrial capitalism. "If using...