[re-search] On the concept of Use. Praxis, Institutions, Common - Free Metropolitan University (LUM)

[paolo do]

The concept of use is obvious and, at the same time, enigmatic. We treat
this concept as a primitive notion: it explains many things, though, in
turn, it is not easily explained. There are perhaps good political and
philosophical reasons for not treating the notion of use as a premise or an
axiom. It is rather a complex and stratified notion, by no means obvious;
nor on the other hand is it something that should remain enigmatic. What
does it mean to use a building, a table, knowledge, a word, an ability, a
limited period time, or the time of one's life? In order to answer these
questions we should resort to philosophy of language, artistic experience,
critique of political economy, theory of institutions, anthropology. Many
lines of research should in fact converge on the "simple" word use.
First of all we shall consider how and why the issue related to the concept
of use has gained importance in relation to contemporary forms of life,
becoming an important element of the Foucaultian "ontology of actuality".
For some decades now, a growing attention has developed around resources
that are used and not consumed: knowledge, information, inventions,
enunciations etc.... These resources, so pivotal in the contemporary
production process, violate the principle of scarcity and the "zero-sum
game" principle, on which political economy is based. They clash with the
idea of private property, where consumption and use overlap (by treating
the usable resources as if they were consumable goods, to be consumed once
and only by one subject).
This is, in all evidence, the concrete, historical reason that explains why
use has become a key issue. A notion that is central for the critique of
contemporary capitalism, that allows to understand the global economic
crisis, to focus on the possibility of political institutions, institutions
that are no longer of the State, but common. This historical reason calls
for a radical and broad investigation that must focus on the notion of use,
a notion that is now becoming central. To clarify what use is, LUM aims to
develop a line of research that embraces different fields, with a seminar
composed of seven meetings that will be held at Esc, from February until
November 2014.


We will now look at some aspects of the term use:

a) First of all language is used, not consumed. As expressed by a
well-known and frequently trivialized preposition of Wittgenstein, the
meaning of words, of enunciations, is determined by their use. If it is
true, or at least plausible, that use determines meaning, we should ask
what the meaning of the term use is. Moreover, it is intuitive that use is
a term that connects the ability to speak to a form of life and, more in
general, to praxis. Therefore, understanding the semantic role of use
implies, conversely, understanding the connection between speaking and
acting.

b) Use-value in Marx. Unlike what is commonly believed, use-value is not a
naturalistic notion. On the contrary, it plays an important role in the
critique of political economy and in the explanation of the crisis. However
it is also true that in Marx the term use-value is ambiguous, in that it
refers also to consumable objects. To be precise, the only use-value is
labor power, or, more broadly, everything that has the qualities of life
and power.

c) Every institution is a crystallization of uses. As a crystallization, an
institution is itself used. Also, the institution sometimes organizes and
regulates uses that are very different from those of which it is itself a
crystallization. The production process based on use (of knowledge,
procedures, aptitudes etc.) and the mode of being of institutions are
analogous and commensurable. Nowadays, in the age of general intellect and
commons, production has an institutional quality and institutions have a
productive nature. The concept of use has many points in common with the
public non-statal sphere. Use allows to overturn the limits imposed on
institutions by their being conceived with the categories of law and to
reconsider an institution as a positive model for action, a creative source
for the social sphere. An institution is an open process, always renewable,
a sort of discontinuous-continuity. It is the space and time of a break and
of a re-combination, where customs (socially shared uses) and innovation
are intertwined.

d) Works of art (music, theater, painting etc.) are an exemplar model of
common use, a use that can be indefinitely repeatable. A substantial part
of contemporary art focuses on and displays the reflection on its own
usability-availability.

e) We do not only live, we also use our life. We use our time, our
pleasures, our talents. Use arises when the linguistic animal distances
itself from its own animality. Use, separated from consumption, concerns
life itself, the moment life becomes a problematic task, (or a means for
something else) and is no longer an end in itself. Use emerges in the care
of the self, in the technologies of the self (Foucault). The notion of care
is a valuable notion in the explanation of the term use.

f) The importance of use in the juridical field: usucaption, usufruct,
common law, civic use, conventions. Use subverts the traditional hierarchy
of sources of law and sheds light on the relationship between rules and
praxis (practices). This relationship is always regulated, though it cannot
be explained by resorting to these same rules that regulate it. Moreover
use allows, or rather imposes, to distinguish between a rule and a law.
Rules are inseparable from their effective use, they are incorporated in
this use, and cease to be rules when this corresponding use ceases. Laws on
the other hand transcend use, they exist independently from use. The
institutions of the multitude must be analyzed in connection to this
separation between rule and law. What founds them is the concrete case, a
precedent, not the abstract universal of law. The use of many different
uses, in other word its reproducibility (singular rule, and the singularity
of a rule).

g) An investigation of the limits of use is also fundamental: to fall in
disuse, to become obsolete, to abuse of..


PROGRAM
25 February
What does it mean to use? -Giorgio Agamben
14 March
Using life -Paolo Virno
4 April
Use and Law -Paolo Napoli
9 May
Use-value -Sandro Mezzadra
30 May
Meaning is use -Marco Mazzeo and Roberto Galaverni
10 October
Use, value, racialization -Denise Ferreira Da Silva
7 November
Use against Consumption -Federica Giardini and Anna Simone

http://www.lumproject.org

All the meetings will be held at Esc, Atelier Autogestito - via dei Volsci
159, Rome
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/re-search_listcultures.org/attachments/20140312/1724b198/attachment.html>