Permission Granted

Emma Cocker

This text is a reflective meditation on the power of a form of invitational yes that can be witnessed at play within certain art practices; an interruptive and potentially dissident species of affirmation that has a specifically inceptive function, for provoking a form of thinking and being differently.[1] This yes is an act of recognition, of being able to attest to or accept the existence of what had previously remained hidden or undeclared. It is the speech act of the witness whose testimony cannot deny what they have seen, that cannot be denied. Or else it can be experienced akin to the clearing at a film’s denouement when things suddenly fall into place; a flash of inspiration or illumination visualized as a light bulb being switched on, the Eureka moment of discovery or breakthrough. Yes signals a state of having found it, of having attained the telos sought. Yet, yes might also describe a gradual awakening or sensitizing towards that which has been ignored or unnoticed or has hitherto remained invisible; a sense of raising awareness or the finding of something that had not been consciously pursued. Another yes then, akin to the nascent clarity forming from within the mists of some dissipating fog. A form of affirmation that emerges hesitantly at first, where the declarative stalls to make space for a less than wholly certain yes, the slow ‘oh, yes’ whispered by the curious attending as events unfurl or are unraveled. This is a yes that requires some prompting, needing to be drawn out or persuaded, coaxed. Wavering at the edges of no, this yes requires the making of a commitment before knowing what that commitment will require. It asks for a leap before looking, a statement of conviction or of confidence made in the doubtful space before things have been fully resolved or worked through. Indeed, the yes of this particular text needed some provocation, some incitement; it had to be called. However, the call that invites or invokes the as-yet-unknown yes is not like the authoritative power whose permission sanctions only the already known or knowable, but rather operates itself as a form of affirmation. It is a hopeful yes that scarifies the ground, creating germinal conditions within which the unexpected might arise; it wishes to be surprised. The yes that invites rather than endorses is a rally cry, a call to action; it signals towards the possibility of an insurgent form of affirmation. Come on then! What are you waiting for!

My intent is not to focus on specific art practices as such, but rather to tease out different nuances of yes–saying that have been encountered within the context of my recent research practice as an art-writer. Operating under the title Not Yet There, my own writing and research explores how artistic practice can function as a space of rehearsal, for testing an ethics of refusal or of resistance; the aesthetic practice of conceiving of things differently, as otherwise. Drawing on my experience of encountering certain art practices and on conversations with other artists, my recent writing has often focused on exploring models of (art) practice and subjectivity, which resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved.[2] At one level, this enquiry has attempted to recuperate a critical and creative (even affirmative) potential within – seemingly negative – experiences or conditions such as failure, doubt, deferral, uncertainty, boredom, hesitation, indecision, immobility and inconsistency. Deployed skillfully within a practice such affections or afflictions have the capacity to be turned, divested of their psychological or emotional connotations and re-inscribed as resistant and dissident ways of operating against the terms of dominant societal expectations (and its standard templates of enforced performative purpose, progression, productivity). I am interested in how art practices offer methods or ‘tactics’ for conceiving of (and indeed living) life, or of being differently.[3] Certain art practices, it seems, present ways of testing out other possibilities for existing, by developing propositional frameworks within which to experiment with, prepare for and even work towards the formation of a radically dissenting, yet potentially affirmative, model of contemporary subjectivity. Art’s (often playful) interruptions are less about reshaping the world in any permanent sense, as destabilizing its logic a little, momentarily breaking the resentful and submissive yes of habit, hierarchy, homogeneity, hegemony. Artistic practice emerges as a site of investigation for questioning and unsettling the dominant order of the normative social structure through creative acts of rebellion and dissidence that, whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective, might still remind us that we have some agency, that we do not always need to acquiesce wholly and passively.

Through art, life is capable of being rendered plastic, of being actively shaped or re-made into something different to how it might habitually be. To conceive of life differently involves attending to the daily pressures that homogenize and control lived experiences, and to find new ways of rupturing these habitual and repetitive patterns. The making of ‘life into a work of art’ requires the rejection of prescribed and accepted cartographies of subjectivity in favour of a perpetual, daily and life-long quest for new modes of creative inhabitation not yet fully mapped out or declared known. Various theorists and philosophers have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s ‘style of life’ or ‘ways of existing’ might be produced or constructed differently to habitual expectation.[4]

Gilles Deleuze asks, ‘What are our ways of existing, our possibilities of life or our processes of subjectification; are there ways for us to constitute ourselves as a “self”, and (as Nietzsche would put it) sufficiently “artistic” ways, beyond knowledge and power?’[5] For Michel Foucault ‘this elaboration of one’s own “life as a personal work of art” can be understood as the search for a “personal ethics” or “ethics of existence.”’[6] It is a critical operation that must be activated through the ‘practice of subjection, or in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of liberty’.[7] Alternatively, Félix Guattari asserts that, ‘one is not before a subjectivity that is given […] but rather facing a process of assuming autonomy, or of autopoesis.’[8] Here, subjectivity is produced through ‘processual creativity’.[9] In these terms, subjectivity is understood as a contingent state of being, or rather of becoming, that is actively and critically enacted by the individual. The experience of being is positioned as a continual process that is always happening in the present, whose terms need to be perpetually re-negotiated, re-worked or re-defined.

In The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau presents a more pragmatic guide to conceiving of ‘tactics’, a term he uses to describe ‘procedures’ for producing ‘everyday creativity’.[10] These ‘ways of operating’ asserts de Certeau, ‘constitute the innumerable practices by means of which users reappropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural production’.[11] He argues that these ‘ways of operating’ are not constituted separately from life, but already constitute the fabric of everyday life, ‘Many everyday practices (talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking etc.) are tactical in character’.[12] For de Certeau such practices signal towards those everyday moments where the dominant language and its products become appropriated and redirected towards other uses, recombined into new arrangements through acts of bricolage and improvisation, the practice of ‘making do’ or of poiēsis.[13] Alternatively, he conceives of ‘ways of operating’ as a form of wily or cunning manoeuvre, wherein the weak or perceived powerless assert control (power to, not power over): ‘clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, “hunter’s cunning”, maneuvres, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries.’[14] For the Greeks, argues de Certeau, such ‘ways of operating’ were described by the term, ‘mētis’. Mētis is a form of cunning intelligence associated with an attendant form of knowledge (techné) and a mode of time characterized by opportunism, the ‘right time’ (kairos). For Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, mētis harnesses the properties of dexterity, sureness of eye and sharp-wittedness. They describe it as:

(A) type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviour which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism […] It is applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting, and ambiguous, situations which do not lend themselves to precise measurement, exact calculation or rigorous logic.[15]

Mētis is a form of intelligence or judgment supple enough to work within unstable and shifting conditions; capable of seizing the opportunities made momentarily visible as the prevailing logic within a given structure or system yields. Within this model, the practice of developing new critical and creative ‘ways of operating’ is not simply one of refusal (of the old), but instead involves the task of looking for the gaps or loopholes within a system in order that they might be navigated differently. It is one of seeing a gap or loophole as a form of permission, and of then knowing how and when to act in response.

The project of practicing a life differently cannot be performed through critique or negation alone, for without the yes of affirmation there can be no way forward, no possibility of imagining another life, of re-making it as something other than how it already is. No only imagines things as not. It promises towards a gloomy future, whose resolution is only to refuse what has been before. Restraint. Withdrawal. Abstinence. Denial. However, change (conceived as the affirmation of the new or different) can only be affected if the turning away or refraining from one thing is simultaneous to the calling forth of or preparation for something other, perhaps as yet unknown. This essay then, necessarily points towards the interwoven relation between dissent and affirmation. It draws on my experience of working in collaboration or dialogue with other artists, in order to reflect upon those moments, emerging within an art or performance-based practice and perhaps within life more broadly, where dissent takes a distinctly affirmative turn, where the yes and no of a practice blur or become difficult to tell apart. Here, such inconsistencies are not reflective of some dithering inability to differentiate or demarcate between yes and no, but rather indicate towards the slipperiness of these terms, towards their lack of categorical stability, their interrelatedness. Rather than being forever bound in polar opposition, yes and no could be conceived in relatively neutral terms, where each has the capacity to negate and also affirm. Moreover, each word might find itself irrevocably folded into the terms of the other.

Consider the word, no. Look it up in any dictionary and you will be told of its negative connotations, how it functions as an interjection that only refuses, denies or seeks to cancel out. It is an utterance that stands in the way of things or that declines to participate; it is a form of obstacle or dampening down, like the stubborn voice of the party pooper or killjoy for whom the glass remains half empty, never half full. Or else it expresses nothing but a deficiency or dearth, a lack or absence, the failure of something to materialize. It is the response dreaded by the unrequited lover, the puncture wound by which a proposal gets let down or loses it verve. It is the final call that brings about an end, the cruel blow that nips things in the bud, the cut by which hopes and dreams and nascent possibilities are dashed and then wither. Functioning as a measurement, it is the marker of all that is nonexistent, missing or simply not allowed. When taken as an instruction or a rule, it is the governing voice of restrictive authority that tells us what not to do, which attempts to silence or stop us still in our tracks. Or maybe it is the calling out of the mother whose child’s hand draws too close to the fire. How quickly a term can turn. As a protective intervention no wishes to keep the other from harm’s way: it is an act of care or of responsibility; a pledge, a promise, or a commitment made. It is a way of stopping one flow of action in order to allow another to develop; an interruption based on being able to conceive an imagined future and the consequences of each individual act.

Whilst the yes of surrender can signal the passive and acquiescent acceptance of the seemingly inevitable, no is a defiant gesture of protest that refuses to give up or give in. It is the rally cry of dissent, the declaration that enough is enough, that a line has been crossed, that things have gone too far. The binary logic of opposites thus collapses in on itself. Here is the yes of the no, which is to inhabit the position of no in a way that allows, opens up or enables things to move forward, to move on. It is to occupy the position of no as a form of punctuation or of momentary pause, as a space of refusal and of potentiality. No stalls, taking time (back) to re-think or re-imagine the trajectory of future action. Look up a word in any dictionary but remember that definitions can be irredeemably imprecise, for meaning is never still, nor ever wholly certain. Like no, the meaning of the word yes might also be varied by its intonation, inflection or even volume; dependent upon the status or power of the individual that utters it and the context in which it is uttered. Yes is an expression of assent and of consent, of agreement and consensus. Yes, indeed. But could it also not speak of hesitation or curiosity or some trepidation even – yes? Or else the term might attest to the desire to contradict or work against the order of a previous limitation or constraint, where yes is the refusal of an already existing refusal, the refusal of refusal itself. This is a form of rebellious or dissident yes that is unwilling to be held bound by the negative authorization of the no. Here, perhaps, it might be possible to conceive of the no of the yes, a form of affirming refusal or a species of permission or provocation that advocates the possibility of being or behaving otherwise.

A dissident yes trips the logic that traps and renders the no of the naysayer void. Dissent is a form of protestation against normative or hegemonic ideologies (whatever they might be), the desire to break or escape from the pernicious stranglehold of conformity and expectation. Based on a practice of alterity, dissent sets itself in willful opposition to the sentiment or conventions of the majority opinion, the ascendant order. However, the dissident no finds that it is forever shackled to the terms of the authoritative no it attempts to beat. Habitually coupled with the preposition from, dissent is often defined by the thing against which it takes a stand or strives to differ. It is brought into existence by the very terms that it wishes to dispute or challenge, constituted by the logic of the same system that it simultaneously seeks to resist. Dissension necessarily involves some degree of contrariness, founded as it is, on the principle of not concurring or agreeing with the authority of dominant modes of naming and knowing. In doing so perhaps, it inherently plays into the sticky trap of binary relations where two partners are coaxed into the hold of a slow-playing conceptual waltz where one term will always lead and the other follow. The relationship between dissent and its oppressive antithesis is often symbiotic. Each is propelled by the power of their opponent’s resistance or reaction; every new manoeuvre conceived in tentative anticipation of the other’s next step. Each creates the momentum that keeps the other in play, the awkward choreography of an uneasy dance pair forever bound to and yet repelled by one another. Parallel energies pulling in opposite directions create the dynamic of rotation or revolution; the close coupling of two systems transferring force from one to the other and back again.

Against its resistant promise, no always delimitates twice. Firstly, as a voice of power it is that of authority and control, that of the rule-makers and legislators and morality police. Or else it is the blindfold of censorship and of intolerance, and of the not in my back yard. And then there is the no of the normative or of expectation, of convention and protocol; the restrictive no of Thou Shalt Not and of the nanny state and of the neighborhood watch. No is the wolf that masquerades in the guise of the consenting sheep, pretending that it knows what is good for us, keeping us on the straight and narrow. No is also consensus, for negation lurks in the resounding yes of endorsement and enforcement, the yes that affirms one thing whilst eradicating or excluding all else which differs or digresses or otherwise disagrees. This duplicitous yes (whilst meaning no) is sounded in the homogenous accord of dominant opinion which is multiple voices tethered to the tenor of a single note, the rule of equivalence and of conformity, of agreement without choice. Alternatively, there is the oppositional no that struggles against the logic of the dominant order, working contrary to the rule of hegemony and of the ubiquitous norm. Yet, to attempt to refuse or resist the authoritative no is to be like the fox, struggling to escape from the wired noose in which it finds itself ensnared. Every move against the wire only closes its hold tighter around the neck; every counter action builds further tension, for resistance always comes before control.[16] Indeed, the no of resistance can often be something of a predictable beast. Too easily, perhaps, can its strategies of negation and critique be second-guessed and folded back. Dissenting tactics are swiftly absorbed and redeployed as strategies of control and order; its methods scrutinized and mirrored back, manifold. Every refusal fuels another (refusal or refuting affirmation) back in return; an endless loop interminably unfolding like the inexhaustible volley played out between why and because. The revolution promised by refusal may never be exhausted but neither does it reach an end, for it is an impossible pursuit like that of the tireless dog chasing its own tail, like Sisyphus with his rock. Every no to every no prompts a ricochet of refusals, an infinitely reverberating echo of repeated negation that goes forever on and on and … on…on…on…on…on…on..ononononononononononononononononononono →[17]

Refusal does not necessarily bring about change, but only prompts new ways of keeping things the same. The downfall of one form of oppression brings another in its wake; one tyranny collapses as another burgeons. In order then, for dissent to truly refuse the terms of the system in which it finds itself ensnared and encoded, it must devise new rules, a new choreography or form of autopoiesis specifically for the purpose of going it alone, for breaking established pattern or protocol, for dancing solo. Self-determination affirms the imagining of things differently to what they are, not by refusing what already exists but of conceiving the future as otherwise. Rather than taking up a specific cause or position against something else, dissent has the capacity to be affirmative or constitutive (causal in and of itself), a critical and creative practice undertaken towards the production of new or unexpected ways of being in the world. Here, a shift occurs from being mobilized by external forces towards self-mobilization, towards causing oneself to act. Looking for other ways to inhabit the system, without being captured or constrained by it, requires that a given language or set of rules are no longer used to hold things in place, but rather become worked until malleable, bent back or folded to reveal other possibilities therein. Rather than operating only as tactics of resistance or refusal then, certain art practices appear to harness the potential of a dissident yes, signaling towards a form of affirmation that is contestational and interruptive, that invites the possibility of difference.

Certain art practices invite us to consider how we might perform every day, or perform the everyday, in ways that are resistant and affirming, poetic and political.[18] Their invitations urge us to do it, coerce with their let’s … [19] Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies operate as affirming prompts or triggers for everyday blockages or glitches; instructions for beating a creative block (the imagination’s no) by offering a set of cards containing a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock situation or dilemma. Other artists have used the instruction or invitation in a more ambiguous manner, where it is unclear whether they are to be actualized or imagined. Their invitations set up the tentative conditions wherein something might happen; theirs is an anticipatory gesture, always antecedent to something else.[20] In his essay ‘Orders! Conceptual Art’s Imperatives’, Mike Sperlinger explores the role of instructional practices in bridging between avant-garde performance works of the early 1950s and 1960s and conceptual art, identifying a number of artists (including Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, Yoko Ono) whose mode of operation involved the coercive gesture of an invitation or imperative. Exemplified by the work of Yoko Ono, Sperlinger notes how such instructional practices operate as a ‘series of prompts for the audience to break off from habitual ways of perceiving the world.’[21] Ono’s instructions from the 1960s, he argues, function as ‘thought experiments, where even if a course of action is being suggested it seems more like an invitation to follow a train of thinking.’[22] Certain propositions appear like scripts that could be acted out: ‘Bandage any part of your body. If people ask about it, make a story and tell. If people do not ask about it, draw their attention to it and tell. If people forget about it, reminder them of it and keep telling.’[23] Other invitations remain enigmatic: ‘Send the smell of the moon’.[24] In her Let’s Piece I, Ono presents a series of invitations for performing the everyday differently, collectively.[25]

LET’S PIECE I

500 Noses are more beautiful than
one nose. Even a telephone no. is more
beautiful if 200 people think of
the same number at the same time.

a) let 500 people think of the same
telephone number at once for a
minute at a set time.
b) let everybody in the city think
of the word “yes” at the same time
for 30 seconds. Do it often.
c) make it the whole world thinking
all the same time

1960 spring

Here, Ono presents a hypothetical scenario wherein the whole world is invited to participate in a single affirmative act, the event of thinking the word ‘yes’. Alternatively in her companion Sleeping Pieces she presents a playful model wherein it could become possible to act on one’s intentions, with the support of others.[26]

SLEEPING PIECE I

Write all the things you want to do.
Ask others to do them and sleep
Until they finish doing them.
Sleep as long as you can.

SLEEPING PIECE II

Write all the things you intend to do.
Show that to somebody.
Let him sleep for you until you
Finish doing them.
Do for as long as you can.

1960 winter

Ono’s invitations do not present the details or logistics of such an occurrence (the where and where of the event); but rather remain propositional ‘thought experiments’. The invitation that is to be imaginatively performed is particularly resonant because there is never any real way of truly telling whether, and indeed how, it has been realized, what changes it might have brought about. However, within Ono’s oeuvre there is always the possibility that her invitations could be actualized, if only by an individual or disparate few (rather than by the whole world in unison). In his essay for the exhibition catalogue, do it, Bruce Altshuler reflects on Ono’s instructional works arguing that, ‘An important aspect of such work is the tension between ideation and material realization, for while these pieces seem to be created by being imagined, as instructions for physical action they stake a further claim in the world.’[27]

Instructions can be nurturing or protective, pedagogical or didactic, authoritative or legislative. Too often there is a sense that they are offered by a ‘knowing’ authority where they are seen as something that you should do for your own good (thus containing a sense of both threat and promise). Unlike the authoritative instruction, art’s invitations remain hopeful rather than assured. If art offers an invitation towards thinking and being differently, then to say yes is to elect optionally and voluntarily to play by its rules of engagement. According to Deleuze, ‘it’s a matter of optional rules that make existence a work of art, rules at once ethical and aesthetic that constitute ways of existing or styles of life’.[28] To play life like a game is to accept its rules for the pleasure of exploiting their loopholes, as points of critical pressure or leverage against which to work. Rather than being surrendered to with passive and acquiescent obedience, the rules or instructions of any game should be approached consciously by one’s own volition, modified or dismantled once they begin to stifle action or no longer offer provocation. The affirmation invited is necessarily ethical rather than obedient, it is to be actively undertaken rather than passively endured. Rather than abandoning responsibility by being told what to do, the personal act of decision-making prompted by the invitation, reaffirms a sense of agency by allowing the individual to choose whether, in fact, they are interested or perceive any value in the experience that is being offered. For Sperlinger:

The first claim made on us by any instruction is to decide how literally we should follow its terms – with the imaginary extremes being protocol, on the one hand, to be followed to the letter, and pure play on the other, with no suggestion that it is to be actually carried out.[29]

The invitational yes is a provocation towards thinking; it draws attention to the capacity for individual decision-making (for optation, variation and permutation) within the terms of any given instruction. For Sperlinger, Ono’s invitational yes or let’s ‘attempt to capture the hesitation between speculation (“imagine if …”) and command’; where they are often issued as ‘injunction(s) to perform the impossible’, in the ‘modality of wishing’.[30] He states that ‘Wishing and hoping are the germinal forms of almost all of her instructions, in a way that cuts across their character as instructions – impossibility is often their precondition.’[31] Here, the invitation is less about provoking a specific or determined form of action, as the catalyst for an open-ended imaginative act. Sperlinger suggests that, ‘because of the ineliminable gap between an order and its execution, instructions always pose the question of plausibility.’[32] In one sense, artistic and poetic practices afford and are afforded a certain kind of license. Colloquially speaking, artistic license is used somewhat pejoratively to describe a distortion or even ignorance of fact, or the abandonment of the conventions of grammar or language at the artist’s discretion, for certain effect or for the preservation of the rhythm of a statement made. Artistic license is a practice of adding and of omitting details, of not accepting things as given, but rather of seeing life itself as an infinitely malleable material for producing unfamiliar proximities and unexpected relations. Art requires its audience to suspend their disbelief, it asks them to imagine things as if. To imagine things ‘as if’ is to momentarily suspend the logic of negation, to quell the skeptic’s desire to refuse or refute. It is to inhabit the hiatus between how things are and how they might yet be.

The permissions granted by an authority operate as the obligatory criteria and conventions of a given context, the delicately honed social and societal dos and don’ts that designate entry into or participation within a specific social grouping or territorialized zone. Here, both the yes and the no are used as strategies of control and order, of keeping things in their place. Gaining the authority’s consent or clearance is to have been accepted or be deemed acceptable, to fit the bill. It is to have met expectations or to have made the grade. However, acceptance always requires a reciprocal turn since to be accepted is to also accept the conditions of one’s inclusion, and to abide by its terms. Here, permission is contractual and conditional; its terms are set and are easily breached. Art’s yes however is one of permitting, indeed provoking, other ways of operating critically, differently to the permissions granted by authority and the academy (whose terms operate as a set of requirements or rules). For theorist Irit Rogoff, certain art practices operate as ‘interlocutors’, which ‘provide a bridge to the next step for thought’.[33] Art, she asserts, ‘chases me round and forces me to think things differently, at another register and through the permissions provided by another angle.’[34] The permissions offered by art practice are different she argues to those of theory. For Rogoff practice grants:

The permission to not cover all the bases all the time, permission to start in the middle, permission to mix fact and fiction, permission to invent languages, permission to not support every claim by the proof of some prior knowledge, permission to privilege subjectivity as a mode of engaging in the world and its woes, permission to be obscure and permission to chart a completely different path of how we got here, at this very moment.[35]

Art’s permissions are less about containment as liberation and of spurring on; they invite that the line is crossed, that expectations are willfully flouted. Art’s permissions usher towards a state of yielding or of giving leave, of slackening the contours that demarcate how a given situation is constructed and codified in order to invite in the possibility of something new or unexpected. Here, art practices the principles of more or less, of deficit and excess. Expectations can be disappointed through the practice of inefficiency, of deliberately failing or somehow falling short. They can also be exceeded, surprised.

For Rogoff, the encounter with art practice affirms another way of working, an alternative method for thinking things through. Its permissions sanction a different modus operandi, which might in turn produce knowledge(s) that remain obtuse or impenetrable, insensible or unrecognizable according to the terms of those more authorized or dominant epistemologies and encyclopedias. Here then, art might offer the permission for another kind of knowing, which for cultural theorist Sarat Maharaj is a ‘kind of knowledge that operates against itself – an always slippery yet confrontational process of daring to touch what can never be entirely known.’[36] Maharaj notes how the Sanskrit term vidya means ‘knowledge’ as in the phrase ‘to see-know’.[37] He uses the term avidya to describe the ‘indeterminate, xeno-zone between knowledge/ignorance’.[38] Avidya is not the opposite of vidya, but rather for Maharaj, refers to a state of suspension or ‘semi-freeze’ in which ‘systematic knowledge is neutralized … but not entirely annulled.’[39] He argues that art operates in a similarly interstitial space; it affirms the possibility of a mode of knowing that exists between knowledge and ignorance, it operates between what is known and unknown, between certainty and uncertainty, even between the terms of yes and no.[40] Certainly, the encounter with art practice permits or affirms new ways of thinking and working through its example, however art’s radically affirming potential lies in its capacity for producing something that cannot be wholly recognized and repeated. To produce the experience of something truly new, art’s affirmation has to move beyond the yes of recognition, towards a vertiginous state of not-knowing. Here, the chiming of the yes must become discordant or disjunctive; resonating awkwardly with what had hitherto been thought, rupturing the known by affirming the possibility of something else beyond its terms, beyond the limits of existing epistemological maps.

Certain art practices have the capacity to bring about the event of or encounter with something incomprehensible or unrecognizable, which might in turn be constitutive of something else or other, whilst simultaneously blocking or thwarting the path of (re)cognition or capture. This affirmation of the incomprehensible (of true difference or heterogeneity) can be thought of as art’s promise, its potential to produce the elusive simultaneity of the ‘that’s it’ with the ‘what’s that’. For artist, Ben Judd this experience can be described as a ‘blind-spot’, where:

There is this thing that you are experiencing but you can’t quite see it or it is slightly out of your vision … there is a set of experiences that are coming together to form one experience, and I have never had that combination of experiences before, so I don’t know how to describe it … It is almost so new that I can’t quite see it.[41]

For Gilles Deleuze, ‘the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model, from an unrecognized and unrecognizable terra incognito.’[42] Simon O’Sullivan argues that certain (art) encounters move beyond representation and recognition to produce an event of simultaneous rupture and affirmation wherein, ‘our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted. We are forced to thought.’[43] Following Deleuze, O’Sullivan asserts that, ‘an object of an encounter is fundamentally different from an object of recognition. With the latter our knowledges, beliefs and values are reconfirmed … An object of recognition is then precisely a representation of something already in place’.[44] The encounter does not only disrupt the familiar; it creates an interval or gap into which something else – a new refrain – might emerge. The yes of the art encounter is less a form of confirmation that simply validates and represents the terms of existing experience, but rather an inceptive form of affirmation that invokes or calls forth the experience of something beyond the terms of recognition and representation, which cannot be adequately described within the terms of what has already been declared known. As O’Sullivan asserts:

The encounter then operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently. This is the creative moment of the encounter that obliges us to think otherwise.[45]

In these terms, the yes of the art encounter affirms the incomprehensible or unknown, that which cannot be wholly recognized. Here, art’s yes is truly an affirming force, with the will to produce something beyond the terms of the encyclopedia, beyond what is already deemed known. The experience of something incomprehensible or unrecognizable refuses to be assimilated by habitual ways of thinking, its incompatibility thus has the potential to force new thought. The capacity of art to produce true heterogeneity or the new in turn reveals the limits of existing systems of classification, jeopardizing the authority and proposed omnipotence of these nominal modes of capture by creating an anomaly that momentarily exists outside or beyond their territorializing grasp. The rare encounter with true incomprehensibility within an art practice forces the witness into a choice or decision: to turn away or dismiss the unrest created by this experience, or to attempt to commit allegiance to the terms of its disquiet, by acknowledging the critical, even transformative, value therein. Here then, art’s affirmative or inceptive potential needs to be affirmed. For if the yes of art practice promises towards the potential of an unknown otherwise, its audience must place their faith in or be receptive to this encounter. We, as the potential audience, are called to bear witness to art’s attempts at conjuring something new, something unlike. In return, we are asked to believe, to hold back our desire to measure (indeed refute and contest) that experience by the terms of what we already know, but rather to conceive of new names, to invent new languages; new ways of saying yes.

[1] This essay considers the power of the invitational yes as one of ‘power to’ or even ‘power with’ in contrast to a form of ‘power over’. Permission Granted extends the ideas of a short pamphlet, ‘The Yes of the No!’, that I produced following a writing residency at the artist-led project Plan 9 in Bristol, during their Summer of Dissent, 2009. The original text of ‘The Yes of the No!’ has also been published in this issue of Drain. ‘The Yes of the No!’ was originally conceived as a piece of creative prose within the context of an art project, however, there are necessarily some points of overlap and shared language between the two texts.
[2] Many of the ideas developed within this essay have emerged through conversation and collaboration with artists including Open City (Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday), Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, Steve Dutton and Steve Swindells, FrenchMottershead, Vlatka Horvat, Ben Judd, Brigid McLeer, Terry O’Connor, Nikolaus Gansterer and my colleagues within the Still Unresolved research cluster at Nottingham Trent University.
[3] Here, the term ‘tactic’ might relate to the manner in which it is used by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (discussed later in the essay).
[4] I would like to thank Simon O’Sullivan for his recommendations and critical advice with regard to these various philosophies of subjectivity.
[5] Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Life as a Work of Art’, Negotiations: 1972—1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 99.
[6] Foucault, Michel. ‘An Aesthetics of Existence’, Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. L. Kritzman (London: Routledge, 1990), 49.
[7] Foucault, 1990, 50.
[8] Guattari, Félix. ‘Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse’, The Guattari Reader, ed. G. Genosko (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 195.
[9] Guattari, 1996, 198.
[10] de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), xiv.
[11] de Certeau, 1984, xiv.
[12] de Certeau, 1984, xix.
[13] See specifically de Certeau’s chapter, ‘Making Do: Uses and Tactics’, 29 – 44 in The Practice of Everyday Life. Arguably, Michel de Certeau’s practice of ‘making do’ shares many of the properties of ‘minor practice’ as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari in ‘What is a Minor Literature’, Kafka Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
[14] de Certeau, 1984, xix.
[15] See Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3—4.
[16] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that ‘resistance is actually prior to power’ where the effectiveness of Empire or global capitalism is not produced by it, rather as a response or rebound to the powers of resistance. See Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 360.
[17] This repetition draws to mind the verbal reiterations within Bruce Nauman’s work such as the repeated utterance of ‘no’ in Clown Torture, which is discussed in Max Weintraub’s ‘Lack, Alas’: On Clowns, Doppelgängers and the Economy of Representation’ in Drain, in the issue Horror Vacui, 2007. However, my version exploits the indeterminacy produced through written rather than verbal repetition, where ‘on and on’ (onononon) soon slips out of sync to be ‘no and no’ (nononono): repetition becomes inevitable refusal.
[18] The notion of ‘performing the everyday’ can be effectively read through the prism of Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), whilst that of ‘performing every day’ might be considered against the social analysis of Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1959).
[19] do it is the title of an exhibition and publication conceived and curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 1997, and organized and circulated by the Independent Curators Incorporated (ICI), New York, which brought together over 30 instructional art works and actions within a single exhibition. The majority of the works operated as forms of invitational yes, provoking forms of being or behaving differently to habitual expectation. Included in the do it exhibition was the work, Ten Commandments for Gilbert and George, which inverted the restrictive tone of the biblical commandments through a series of playful affirmations:  ‘I. Thou shalt fight conformism; II. Thou shalt be the messenger of freedoms; III. Thou shalt make use of sex; IV. Thou shalt reinvent life; V. Thou shalt create artificial art; VI. Thou shalt have a sense of purpose; VII. Thou shalt not know exactly what thou dost, but thou shalt do it; VIII. Thou shalt give thy love; IX. Thou shalt grab the soul; X. Thou shalt give something back’. See Gilbert & George in the publication do it (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1997), 78. The invitational form of Let’s refers explicitly to the instructional works of Yoko Ono.
[20] I explore how the invitation is used by certain artists for producing an emergent form of social assemblage or temporary collectivity (a model of being together based on an individual’s capacity for being responsive to another’s call), in my essay, ‘R.S.V.P. — Choreographing Collectivity through Invitation and Response’, in a special issue of the online journal, rhizomes (see www.rhizomes.net), entitled Hives, Tribes, Assemblages: New Collectivities (Spring, 2011).
[21] Sperlinger, Mike. ‘Orders! Conceptual Art’s Imperatives’, in Afterthought: New Writing on Contemporary Art (Rachmaninoff, 2005), 11.
[22] Sperlinger, 2005, 9.
[23] Conversation Piece (or Crutch Piece) can be found in Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A Book of Instructions and Drawings (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), not paginated. Grapefruit was originally published in a limited edition of 500 copies by Wunternaum Press in Tokyo in 1964.
[24] See Ono, Grapefruit, np.
[25] See Ono, Grapefruit, np.
[26] See Ono, Grapefruit, np.
[27] Altshuler, Bruce. ‘Art by Instruction and the prehistory of do it’, in do it, exh. cat. (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1997), 24. The catalogue was published in conjunction with the exhibition do it, conceived and curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
[28] Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Life as a Work of Art’, Negotiations: 1972-1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 98.
[29] Sperlinger, 2005, 8.
[30] Sperlinger, 2005, 9.
[31] Sperlinger, 2005, 11.
[32] Sperlinger, 2005, 12.
[33] Rogoff, Irit. ‘Academy as potentiality’, http://summit.kein.org/node/191. Accessed 22nd November 2010.
[34] Rogoff, ‘Academy as potentiality’.
[35] Rogoff, ‘Academy as potentiality’.
[36] Maharaj, Sarat. BAK/Blog, February 19, 2007, www.bak-utrecht.nl, cited by Anthony Huberman, ‘For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there’, exh. cat. (Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and Culturegest, Lisbon, 2009), 100.
[37] Maharaj, Sarat. ‘Xeno-Epistemics: Makeshift Kit for Sounding Visual Art as Knowledge Production and the Retinal Regimes’ in Documenta 11 (Platform 5, Kassel 2002), 79 cited in Anthony Huberman, 2009, 28.
[38] Maharaj, 2002, 79 cited in Huberman, 2009, 28.
[39] Maharaj, 2002, 79 cited in Huberman, 2009, 28.
[40] In Plato’s The Symposium (‘The Drinking Party’) both the philosopher and Love inhabit this middle position between ignorance and wisdom. Diotima explains to Socrates thus: ‘The truth of the matter is this … no one who is wise already pursues wisdom. But neither do ignorant people pursue wisdom or desire to be wise … No one desires what he does not think he lacks’. Socrates responds, ‘But who then are those who pursue wisdom, Diotima, if they are neither the wise nor the ignorant?’. To which she replies, ‘It is those who are between, and Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is love of the beautiful, so Love must be a philosopher, and a philosopher is in a middle state between a wise man and an ignorant one.’ See Plato The Symposium (‘The Drinking Party’), trans. Seth Bernadete (University of Chicago, 1993), 39—41.
[41] Judd, Ben, from Emma Cocker. Beyond Belief —In Conversation with Ben Judd, in the online journal soanyway (see www.soanyway.org.uk ) and also /seconds (see www.slashseconds.org).
[42] Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia University Press), 136 cited by Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke, in ‘Introduction: The Production of the New and the Care of the Self’, in Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (eds.) Deleuze, Guattari and the Production of the New (London: Continuum 2008), 1.
[43] O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1.
[44] O’Sullivan, 2006, 1.
[45] O’Sullivan, 2006, 1.

Emma Cocker is a writer and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Recent essays include Over and Over Again and Again in Classical Myth/Contemporary Art (Ashgate Publishing 2010) and in Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel/MIT, 2010); Performing Stillness: Community in Waiting in Stillness in a Mobile World (Routledge, 2011), Distancing the If and Then; in Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Research, (Springer Verlag, 2011), The Restless Line, Drawing in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, (I.B. Tauris, 2011).
See http://not-yet-there.blogspot.com/