The Euretics of Alice's Valise

Abstract

Marcel Duchamp's Valise provides an organizing vehicle for a demonstration/explanation of “euretics” as a mode of research and teaching. Euretics applies to educational practices the tendency of avant-garde artists to use theory generatively. Euretics extends this productive relationship between theory and practice by adapting experimental art strategies to the exploration of theoretical questions. The question explored here is the supplementary relationship of two theories of meaning—communication by code and evocation by inference. The interdependence of the two modes (semantics and pragmatics), as they might be exploited in making an assignment to a class or conducting a research experiment, is demonstrated by borrowing the “valise” project as a version of packing a form with heterogeneous contents. This valise contains the intellectual ingredients needed to compose a discourse on method (giving an account of the invention of a new method, the method of euretics itself).