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the yes of the no

my favourite book last year was the yes of the no. i stumbled across it on a bookstand at greenbelt festival run by beam editions. i keep buying it and i keep giving it away. even at greenbelt i bought one as a present for spomeone but went back the next day and bought a second because i realised i wanted it too so the person might never get the present if i didn;t get another! i think i have bought 7 or 8 so far. emma cocker is an artist, writer, professor of fine art. i don;t know much about her but i do know it is a gorgeous book – beautifully presented. it is a series of short reflections, or postures or provocations all reflecting on how to act in the world. it’s poetic almost, meditative in tone. the yes of the no is about dissent or resistance as a positive act. the first few reflections begin there but then it moves into other ways of inhabiting the world or being. i was reminded of de certeau’s classic practice of everyday life book and his suggestion of tactics and making do. maybe it’s a book of tactics and making do? i was reminded of it because i found myself pitching it as a suggestion in tacoma when i attended the ‘gower street book club’. my pitch was runner up. (the novel james by percival everett won which i subsequently bought and read in one day – totally recommend that too)

to give you a flavour, and i hope this is not taking a liberty here are a few lines i have lifted out of a couple of the early pages on the yes of the no or dissent

dissent…

a defiant gesture of protest that refuses to give up, give in.

the declaration that enough is enough

opens up or enables things to move forward, to move on.

a critical and creative practice undertaken towards the production of new or unexpected ways of being in the world. 

a form of protestation against normative or hegemonic ideologies 

the desire to break or escape from the pernicious stranglehold of conformity and expectation.

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. 

involves some degree of contrariness

resists familiar strategies of organisation and classification, for it perceives in them a nascent orthodoxy. 

looks 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. 

i have blogged about dissent before riffing on newness

when i was searching for more information on the book i stumbled across it being fully shared as a pdf on academia.edu – i signed up and got emailed the pdf so that’s an option too it turns out. i think the physical book is a beautiful object in itself so will probably be buying more.

i have been meaning to blog about so many books that i have not got round to doing, so i’ll do my best to add a few short reviews in the next week or two.

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