performative cuff

Dear all, 

What is a performative cuff? 

Isn’t a cuff always performative? In a sense that it is a doing that a cuff initiates: a change of direction or a reorientation. I am drawing here from Austin’s notion of performative utterance. 

This utterances are utterances eventful as they affect on and  effect  people ( Austin is quite anthropocentric). He differentiates between performative and constative utterance. The later is an utterance that  can be judged by being  truth or false such as mathematics ( 2+2=4). 

A performative utterance to say something is to do something. A marriages for example. For Austin, in saying, yes, one  gets married. One “transforms” oneself in a sense that one is not anymore the person that one was before. One’s last name might change or the tax status. Further, the saying is often not enough, it is accompanied by a behavioral sets which make a performative function. To get married, one has to fulfill a ritual which is somehow scripted. A performative is never true or false, but happy or unhappy. A wedding ceremony  is unhappy if the priest pretends to be a priest, one of the partners is already married or minor, is not really in love and do on. A performative utterance is often conventional ( if it wants to be happy) This brings me to another philosopher who draws on Austin and who coined the term performativity: Judith Butler.  For Butler gender roles are not given, one has not a gender, rather it is a constantly doing. One is not born a as a male subject, one does masculinity.

But what again is a performative cuff? 

A cuff seems always to be performative as it is a doing. However, in going with Butler idea of performativity a cuff is a performative which cuffs, in a sense that it stabilizes, that it fixes people into a position. You are cuffed into a specific gender role. Here, of course I am straying away from the rather positive notion of cuff as reorientation. Rather, I am gesturing towards  the German word for cuff which is Manschette which is also a technical term which denotes an envelope  which has the task to stabilize, protect or to separate. 

But Again: what is a performative cuff? 

Maybe a performative cuff is a cuff that that undoes a cuff? I am thinking here with Deleuze’s essay “What is a Dispositif?,”  where he suggests that a dispositif (appartus) binds and stratifies but at the same time opens  a line of flight which  offers the possibility to undo its binding force. 

A performative cuff is a line of flight. Each time we oriented oneselfves we might have the possibility  to re-orient onselves. Reorientation is inscribed into the orientation.

I am thinking of Steve Paxton’s Small Dance, a movement practice in which one stands and attunes to ones reflexes. One observes the process of balance to find out that there is no still standing that there is always movement, always a small dance happening. 

I am attaching some exercises by the Swedish Choreographer Efva Lilja from her small book 100 Exercises for a Choreographer and Other Survivors. Her exercises are performative cuffs, I think. They  invite for detours in our daily strolls.