BECOMING THE CAUSE
Rather than taking up a specific cause against something else, dissent has the capacity to be 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 mobilised by external forces towards self-mobilisation, towards causing oneself to act. 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. It is 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. 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. It makes no sense then to try to make sense of a practice hell bent on thwarting the logic of consensus. It would be at odds with the idea of dissent itself to pin down individual moments of rebellion or sedition within a broader genealogy (political, theoretical or otherwise). Dissent resists such familiar strategies of organisation and classification, for it perceives in them a nascent orthodoxy. 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.
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 10. Revised extract of a text that was previously published as a pamphlet entitled Yes of the No, commissioned and published by Plan 9, Bristol as part of The Summer of Dissent (2009).