What is a Cuff?

This course will look at the cuff in relation to the fold and the pocket. We will engage speculatively, aesthetically and conceptually with this problem, the breadth of our inquiry enveloping discourses as wide ranging as contemporary artistic practice, art history, architecture, environmental science, speculative fiction, philosophy. The issue will by necessity lead us to complex interdisciplinary questions. For instance: does architecture have cuffs? Where are cuffs in the sidewalk? How does movement cuff? Or, what is at stake in creating a cuff-less sculpture, or garment? While this may seem silly, the cuff is a very interesting concept in that it promotes (is this what a cuff can do?) a change in direction in the resolution of a work. How might we think of this environmentally? Affectively? Students will be encouraged to deepen their own artistic practices by exploring where the cuffs are occasioned in their work and to work closely with other students in the class to invent what else a cuff can be. In the midst, we will read about the use of folds in baroque architecture and fashion, the place of pockets (and containors) in the contemporary imagination and how the role a cuff plays may change the way we think.

Theoretically, our work will also take us across the history of philosophy in an exploration of concepts that explore changes of direction or supplementarity, as well as work in speculative pragmatism. These include Jacques Derrida on the supplement, Marcel Duchamp on the infrathin, Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault on the concept of the outside, Gilles Deleuze on the fold, Erin Manning on the more-than, Brian Massumi on the feedback of higher forms, Roland Barthes on the punctum, Tim Ingold on the line, Bernard Cache on inflection, Jean-Luc Nancy on the knot.