* Ella Belenky, Everything Eats and Gets Eaten, 2020, pen and collage on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm
_______________________________
I really loved reading the introduction to Sara Ahmed’s ‘What’s the Use?‘. Ahmed’s writing of “use” as both a relation and an activity resonates deeply in both my teaching and studio practice. Her analysis of how “we learn about objects from the objects they are near,” (Ahmed, p. 25) reinforces the idea that art and design are never neutral. They are always in conversation with the systems and structures that dictate their use.
Ahmed also suggests that what is useful to one (human or nonhuman) can serve as a hindrance or barrier to another. Reading the text through the lens of pedagogy helped me reflect on how institutions, particularly in education, determine usefulness through learning outcomes, assessment methods, and curricular structures that can reinforce power dynamics, inadvertently excluding alternative ways of thinking and creating.
However, the idea of “queering use” that Ahmed introduces offers a way to disrupt established norms. In my teaching, I hope to encourage students to redefine success for themselves through experimentation, repurposing found objects, and questioning the use of unsustainable materials and meaning-making systems. Ahmed’s reference to Henry Petroski’s The Evolution of Useful Things, where he replaces the conventional idea that “form follows function” with “form follows failure,” underscores how critical thinking and iterative processes create change.
This dual importance of both function and failure reminds me of Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan’s Acquiring Genomes, where evolution (form and use) is developed through both symbiosis and mutation. Margulis and Sagan’s argument echoes Donna Haraway’s exploration of relationality, where the boundaries between the natural and artificial, human and machine, blur. Haraway’s observation that “they acquired us, and we acquired them” highlights how acquisition – whether biological, conceptual, or material – carries both positive and negative connotations, shaped by context; that evolution is a matter of “eating each other and indigestion” (Haraway, 2011).
Semiotics also plays a crucial role in these discussions of use. The relationship between sign and signified is deeply embedded in how we assign meaning to objects, systems, and structures. Ahmed’s study of use can be read through this lens, connecting with Roland Barthes’ idea that meaning is constructed rather than inherent.
This way of approaching objects and their histories will continue to inform my teaching practice. By centering entanglement, Ahmed and others invite us to rethink the significance of use, care, and storytelling in shaping the world around us.
________
Bibliography:
Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s The Use? Duke University Press, p.pp 21-67.
Barthes, R. (1964). Elements of semiology. New York: Hill And Wang .
Haraway, D. (2011). ‘From Cyborgs to Companion Species’. UC Berkeley Events. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9gis7-Jads.
Le Guin, U.K. (2019). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota.
Margulis, L. and Sagan, D. (2008). Acquiring genomes : a theory of the origins of species. New York: Basic Books.