Artistic Research Does #7 - 'Tactics for Not Knowing' by Emma Cocker

This research exposition is conceived in conjunction with the publication, Artistic Research Does #7 (2023), which presents a translation of Emma Cocker’s essay ‘Tactics for Not Knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected’, originally published in Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum, (eds.) On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, (Black Dog Publishing, 2013). See https://i2ads.up.pt/publicacoes/artistic-research-does-7/ In addition to the translation and re-publication of the original text, the revised version of ‘Tactics for Not Knowing’ in Artistic Research Does #7 offers two further interventions in the form of annotations. In one column of margin notes, Cocker shares additional reflections, referring to some of her more recent artistic research projects and collaborations that continue to resonate with the concerns of the original text. In parallel, a second column of margin notes comprises the titles of additional pieces of contiguous writing drawn from two collections of Cocker’s writing, The Yes of the No (2016) and How Do You Do? (2023). Within this online version these margin notes include hyperlinks that enable the reader to access these different thought-fragments of writing. Artistic Research Does is edited by Catarina Almeida, André Alves. Artistic Research Does is published by i2ADS – Institute of Research in Art, Design and Society is a R&D unit based at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP), financed by the Portuguese agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT).

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LIFE AS GYMNASIUM

The resistance of a body is not performed by trying to escape or refuse the terms of a situation but rather by rehearsing ways for transforming its affects, for performing the situation otherwise. Yet, years of schooling cannot be unlearnt overnight. Habits knotted into the sinew of a body take some effort to untie. The teaching of how one should be and behave is worn deeply in the muscle of both flesh and thought. It has been hard work getting the body to conform to the rules within which it is expected to operate. Long hours have been spent impressing upon it the error of its unruly ways. Social scripts pass down through generations. Every era rethinks the lines yet the story stays pretty much the same. Vocabularies alter, the order of the acts remain. The habitual choreographies of daily life are thus not easily rejected or refused, nor will they be undone with force or fury or through revolution alone. Discipline is undisciplined through discipline. Disobedience is a delicately honed skill. True improvisation still needs some rehearsal then, for unattended the body will always fall back quickly into comforting and harmonious rhythm. Conformity is an insidious lesson that creeps upon the body during the night in dream as much as when awake. Dissidence must become practised with the same rigour as conformity then, not just through the brief intensity of protest or revolt but according to daily and continual training. The spectacle of resistance is all too easily reabsorbed; the moves of dissonant bodies underscored with a sound track and sold back as late-night T.V. So practise quietly and lightly, defy by not making one’s resistance too visible, too assimilable. With practice a body can become pliant, not compliant. Choreograph a small part of every day against the conditions of expectation and convention. Make daily life a gymnasium within which to rehearse and play.

From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 29. Revised extract of a text that was previously published as ‘Experiments Along the Brink of I’, as part of the pamphlet Performing the City produced in collaboration with Sara Wookey and Bianca Scliar Mancini, (2012). Also published in Tripwire: Journal of Poetics, Issue 8, Cities, (Oakland, United States, 2014).

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