Paul Valéry’s reception in Germany—and he has not yet really been successfully received here—presents special difficulties because Valéry’s claim rests primarily on his work in lyric poetry. It goes without saying that lyric poetry cannot be transposed into a foreign language in anything remotely like the way prose can; certainly not the poésie pure of Valéry, the disciple of Mallarmé, which is inplacably sealed off from all communication with a hypothetical readership. It was Stefan George who said, correctly, that the task of a translation of lyric poetry is not to introduce a foreign writer but to erect a monument to him in one’s own langauge, or, in the turn Benjamin gave the idea, to extend and intensify one’s own language through the incursion of the foreign literary work. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of the intransigence of his great translator,* the historical material of German literature is unimaginable without Baudelaire. The case of Valéry is altogether different; moreover, Germany remained essentially closed to Mallarmé as well. If the selection of Valéry’s poems that Rilke tried his hand at did not succeed in doing anything like what George’s great translations did, or Rudolf Borchardt’s Swinburne translations, the fault does not lie solely with the inaccessibility of the originals. Rilke violated the fundamental law of all legitimate translation, fidelity to the word, and when it came to Valéry he fell back into a practice of Nachdichten, or free rendering, that neither does justice to the original nor rises to full internal freedom through strict replication of the model. One need only compare Rilke’s version of one of Valéry’s most famous and in fact most beautiful poems, “Les Pas,” with the original to see what an evil star presided over the encounter.
Now, as we know, Valéry’s work consists by no means only of lyric poetry but also of prose of a truly crystalline variety that walks the fine line between aesthetic form and reflection on art in a provocative fashion. In France there are highly competent judges, André Gide among them, who accord even greater value to this part of Valéry’s production. In Germany the prose too, aside from Monsieur Teste and Epaulinos, is scarcely known. If I discuss one of the prose works here, it is not simply to request for the well-known name of an author whose work is unknown something of the response he should not need to ask for, but to use the objective force inherent in his work to attack the stubborn antithesis of committed and pure art. That antithesis is a symptom of the disastrous tendency to stereotyping, to thinking in rigid and schematic formulas, that the culture industry produces everywhere and that has long since invaded the realm of aesthetic reflection as well. Production threatens to become polarized, with the sterile administrators of eternal values on the one side and on the other the poets of catastrophe, with whom one sometimes feels that the concentration camps suit them just fine as encounters with the void. I would like to show the kind of historical and social content that is inherent in the work of Valéry, work that forbids itself any kind of shortcut to praxis; I want to demonstrate that insisting on the formal immanence of the work of art need not have anything to do with praising ideas that are inalienable but damaged, and that a deeper knowledge of historical changes of essence is revealed in this kind of art and the thought that feeds on and resembles it than in utterances so adroitly aimed at changing the world that the burdensome weight of the world they want to change threatens to slip away from them.
The book I have in mind is readily accessible. It appeared in the series Bibliothek Suhrkamp and its German title is Tanz, Zeichnung und Degas [English Degas Dance Drawing].1 The translation is by David Paul. It is engaging, even if it does not always reproduce the painstakingly achieved grace of Valéry’s text with the profundity the text requires. In return, the element of lightness in Valéry, the arabesque-like quality, and its paradoxical relationship to the extremely weighty thoughts is preserved; at least the terrors of unintelligibility do not emanate from this little volume. One envies Valéry’s ability to formulate the subtlest and most complex experience in a playful and ethereal way; this is the program he sets for himself at the beginning of his book on Degas:
Just as a half-idle reader will scribble in the margins of a book, producing—as absent-mindedness or the pencil dictates—tiny figures or vague branch work around the mass of print, so I propose to follow my own fancy in writing around these drawings by Degas. My text to these illustrations may be left unread, or read discontinuously, since the connection and relationship between it and the drawings is of the loosest and least immediate kind. (5)
This ability of Valéry’s cannot properly be reduced to the Gallic talent for form which is always brought in to fill the gaps, nor even to his own exceptional formal talent. It is nourished by his indefatigable drive for objectivation and realization, to use Cézanne’s term, which does not tolerate anything obscure, anything unclarified or unresolved, and for which outward transparency becomes the criterion of inward success.
This might make it all the easier to take offense when a philosopher talks about a book by an esoteric poet about a painter obsessed with craft. I prefer to discuss this reservation at the outset rather than to provoke it naively; the more so in that the discussion opens up an avenue of access to the subject matter itself. I do not consider it my task to express my views on Degas, nor do I consider myself capable of doing so. Those of Valéry’s ideas that I want to discuss all go beyond the great Impressionist painter. Yet they were achieved through the kind of proximity to the artistic object that only someone who himself produces with the utmost responsibility is capable of. Great insights into art come about either in utter detachment, deduced from a concept undisturbed by so-called connoisseurship, as in Kant or Hegel; or in absolute proximity, the attitude of the person behind the scenes, who is not an audience but rather follows the work of art from the point of view of how it is made, of technique. The average empathic connoisseur, the man of taste, is now and probably always has been in danger of missing works of art by degrading them to projections of his own contingency rather than subjecting himself to their objective discipline. Valéry provides an almost unique example of the second type, the person who knows about the work of art through his métier, the exacting work process, but in whom this process is immediately so felicitously reflected that it turns into theoretical insight, into that good universality that does not leave the particular out but rather preserves it and drives it, with the force of its own movement, to cogency. Valéry does not philosophize about art but breaks through the blindness of the artifact in the windowless, so to speak, activity of form-giving. In this way he expresses something of the obligation incumbent on every self-conscious philosophy today: the same obligation whose opposite pole—the speculative concept—was reached by Hegel a hundred and forty years ago in Germany. In Valéry the principle of l’art pour l’art, taken to its ultimate consequences, transcends itself, true to the maxim from Goethe’s Elective Affinities that everything perfect in its own kind points beyond its own kind. To carry out the spiritual process that is strictly immanent in the work of art itself means to overcome the blindness and bias of the work of art. There is a good reason why Valéry’s thoughts keep circling around Leonardo da Vinci; in Leonardo, at the beginning of an era, the same identity of art and knowledge was posited, in unmediated fashion, that in Valéry at the end of an era found its way through a hundred mediations to a magnificent self-awareness. The paradox around which Valéry’s work is organized, a paradox which makes itself felt again and again in the Degas book, is none other than that the whole human being and the whole of humankind is intended in every artistic utterance and every piece of scientific knowledge, but this intention can be realized only through a self-denying division of labor ruthlessly intensified to the point of the sacrifice of individuality, the self-surrender of the individual human being.
I am not arbitrarily inserting these thoughts into Valéry: “What I call ‘Great Art’ is simply art that demands the employment of all of a man’s faculties, to produce works which invoke and bring into play all of another man’s faculties for their comprehension” (78). With a somber glance from the historico-philosophical standpoint, and perhaps with Leonardo in mind, Valéry demands the same thing of the artist:
At this point, many a one may exclaim, What does it matter? But for my part, I believe it matters considerably that the work of art be the act of a whole man. But how is it that what was once considered so important should nowadays be considered negligible, as a matter of course? An amateur, a connoisseur of the days of Julius II or Louis XIV would be astonished to learn that almost everything he held to be essential in painting is today not only neglected, but is radically absent from the painter’s considerations and the public’s demands. In fact the more refined the public, the more advanced it is, the further away is it from the ancient ideals I was speaking of. But in this way we are withdrawing from human completeness. The whole man is dying out. (76–77)
It remains to be seen whether the expression “whole man” [in the German translation Adorno is discussing, Vollmensch] is the appropriate translation for what Valéry meant; in any case, Valéry’s aim is the undivided human being, whose capacities and modes of response have not been ripped apart, alienated from one another and congealed into valorizable functions in accordance with the schema of the social division of labor.
But Degas, whose insatiability in his demands on himself is equivalent, according to Valéry, to this idea of art, is depicted by Valéry as the extreme opposite of a universal genius, despite the fact that as we know, the painter not only sculpted but also wrote sonnets over which there were memorable controversies with Mallarmé. Valéry says of him:
The sheer labor of Drawing had become a passion and a discipline to him, the object of a mystique and an ethic all-sufficient in themselves, a supreme preoccupation which abolished all other matters, a source of endless problems in precision which released him from any other form of inquiry. He was and wished to be a specialist, of a kind that can rise to a sort of universality. (64)
According to Valéry, this kind of intensification of specialization to the point of universality, the congealed intensification of production organized in terms of the division of labor, may contain the potential to counteract the deterioration of human capacities—what would be called “ego weakness” in current psychological terminology—that Valéry’s speculation is concerned with. He cites a statement made by Degas at seventy: “You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there’s no point in working” (64). Valéry interprets this as follows:
There speaks a real pride, an antidote to all vanity. The artist who is essentially an artist is like a player forever harried by new combinations of the game, haunted nightly by the specter of the chessboard or the cards alighting on the baize, obsessed with tactical images and solutions more living than real ones.
A man not possessed by a presence of this intensity is an uninhabited man: an area in the void.
No doubt love, ambition, or a thirst for lucre can powerfully fill up a lifetime. But the existence of a positive aim, the awareness (implicit in such an aim) of being near or far from it, of realizing it or not, reduces those passions to the status of the finite. Whereas the longing to create some work revealing more power and perfection than we know we possess, indefinitely removes that aim, which eludes and stands counter to our every living moment. Each step forward makes it more beautiful and more remote.
The idea of completely mastering the technique of an art, of achieving the freedom to employ its means as confidently and as easily as we do our limbs and our senses in their ordinary functions, is one which inspires a few men to infinite determination, struggle, practice, and agony. (64–65)
And Valéry summarizes the paradox of the universal specialist: “Flaubert, Mallarmé, in very different kinds and styles, are literary examplars of the total consecration of a lifetime to the total demands which they invented and conferred on the art of writing” (65).
Permit me to recall my statement that Valéry, the notorious artiste and aesthete, is granted deeper insight into the social nature of art than is the doctrine of art’s immediate utilitarian application in practical politics. That is confirmed here. For the current theory of committed art simply ignores a fact that irrevocably governs an exchange society, the fact that human beings are alienated from one another and that objective spirit is alienated from the society it expresses and regulates. This theory wants art to speak to human beings directly, as though the immediate could be realized directly in a world of universal mediation. But it thereby degrades word and form to a mere means, to an element in the context of the work’s effect, to psychological manipulation; and it erodes the work’s coherence and logic, which are no longer to develop in accordance with the law of their own truth but are to follow the line of least resistance in the consumer. Valéry has relevance for us today, and is the opposite of the aesthete which vulgar prejudice has stereotyped him as being, because he opposes the claims of a nonhuman cause to an overly hasty pragmatic spirit, and does so for the sake of what is human. That the division of labor cannot be banished by denying it, that the coldness of the rationalized world cannot be dispelled by recommending irrationality, however, is a social truth that has been demonstrated most emphatically by fascism. It is through more, not less, reason that the wounds dealt the irrational totality of humankind by the instrument that is reason can be healed.
Valéry did not naively take up the position of the isolated and alienated artist, nor did he abstract from history, nor deceive himself about the social process that terminated in alienation. Against those who have taken up residence in private inwardness, against the cleverness that often enough fulfills its commercial function by feigning the purity of someone who keeps his eyes to the front, Valéry cites a wonderful statement by Degas: “Another anchorite who knows the train times” (93). With full rigor and no admixture of ideology, as ruthlessly as any theoretician of society, Valéry expresses the contradiction between artistic work and the current social conditions of material production. As Carl Gustav Jochmann did in Germany more than a hundred years ago, he accuses art itself of archaism:
It sometimes seems to me that the labor of the artist is of a very old-fashioned kind; the artist himself a survival, a craftsman or artisan of a disappearing species, working in his own room, following his own homemade empirical methods, living in untidy surroundings; using broken pots, kitchenware, any old castoffs that come to hand…. Perhaps conditions are changing, and instead of this spectacle of an eccentric individual using whatever comes his way, there will instead be a picture-making laboratory, with its specialist officially clad in white, rubber-gloved, keeping to a precise schedule, armed with strictly appropriate apparatus and instruments, each with its appointed place and exact function…. So far, change has not been eliminated from practice, or mystery from method, or inspiration from regular hours; but I do not vouch for the future. (19–20)
One might call Valéry’s ironically presented aesthetic utopia an attempt to remain faithful to the work of art while at the same time, by changing its modus operandi, freeing it from the lie by which all art, and especially lyric poetry, is distorted under the prevailing conditions of technology. The artist is to remake himself into an instrument, to become a thing himself if he does not want to succumb to the curse of anachronism in a reified world. Valéry formulates the process of drawing in this sentence: “The artist approaches, withdraws, leans over, screws his eyes up, his whole body behaving like an instrument of the eye, becoming entirely a means for aiming, pointing, controlling, reducing to focus” (38). With this, Valéry attacks the extremely widespread conception of the work of art that ascribes it, on the model of private property, to the one who produces it. He knows better than anyone that it is only the least part of his work that “belongs” to the artist; that in actuality the process of artistic production, and with it the unfolding of the truth contained in the work of art, has the strict form of a lawfulness wrested from the subject matter itself, and that the much invoked creative freedom of the artist is of little consequence in comparison. Here he concurs with another artist of his generation, similarly consistent and similarly discomfiting, Arnold Schönberg, who in his last book, Style and Idea, develops the idea that great music consists of fulfilling the obligations the composer incurs with virtually the first note. In the same spirit, Valéry says: “The truly strong man in any sphere is the one who most clearly realizes that nothing is given, that all must be made and paid for; who is uneasy when he fails to find obstacles, and so invents them…. For such a man, form is grounded in reason” (68). Valéry’s aesthetics is governed by a metaphysics of the bourgeois. At the end of the bourgeois era, he wants to purge art of its traditional curse of duplicity, to make it honest. He demands that art pay the debts in which every work of art becomes hopelessly entangled when it posits itself as real without being real. We may question whether Valéry’s and Schönberg’s conception of art as a kind of exchange process is the whole truth or whether it is under the spell of the very state of existence that Valéry’s conception prohibits complicity with. But there is something liberating in the self-consciousness of its own bourgeois nature that bourgeois art finally achieves when it takes itself seriously as the reality that it is not. The closed character of the work of art, the necessity of its giving itself its own stamp, is to heal it of the contingency which renders it unequal to the force and weight of what is real. It is in the moment of objective obligation, and not in a blurring of the boundary between the two domains, that the affinity of Valéry’s philosophy of art with science, and not least his kinship with Leonardo, is to be sought.
Valéry’s pointed contrast between technology and rationality on the one hand and mere intuition, which must be overtaken and surpassed, on the other, and his emphasis on process as opposed to the work that is finished once and for all, can be fully understood only against the background of his judgment on the broad developmental tendencies within recent art. He sees in that art a retreat of the productive forces, a surrender to sensory receptivity—in short, actually a weakening of the human powers, of the subject as a whole, to which he relates all art. In Germany, the words of leave-taking he devoted to the poetry and painting of the Impressionist period can be most readily understood if one applies them to Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, of whom they unwittingly provide a description:
A description consists of phrases that can generally be put down in any order; I can describe this room in a series of statements whose sequence is almost of no importance. The eye can wander at will. What could be truer, more natural than this go-as-you-please, since…truth itself is accident?…
But if this latitude, and the habit of facility which goes with it, becomes the dominating factor, it gradually dissuades writers from employing their ability for abstraction, just as it reduces to nothing the slightest necessity for concentration on the reader’s part, in order to win him over with immediate effects, rhetorical shock tactics….
This particular creative method, which is legitimate in principle—and which has given birth to many fine works—leads, like the misuse of landscape, to a diminution of the intellectual element in art. (76)
And shortly afterwards, in still more basic terms:
Modern art tends almost exclusively to exploit sensory sensibility at the expense of our general or affective sensibility and our capacity for construction—for accumulating our best efforts and using the mind to transform things. It has a marvelous flair for arousing the attention, and for exploiting every means to that end—intensification, contrast, the startling, or the enigmatic. It can capture, by the subtlety of its means or the audacity of its execution, certain very valuable effects: states of extreme transience or complexity, irrational values, inarticulate sensations, resonances, correspondences, intuitions of shifting depths…. But these things are bought at a price. (77)
Only here does the full objective social truth content of Valéry become apparent. He posits the antithesis to the anthropological alterations that occur in a late industrial mass culture steered by totalitarian regimes or by giant corporations, a culture that reduces human beings to mere receptive apparatuses, to nodal points of conditioned reflexes, and by doing so paves the way for a situation of blind domination and a new barbarism. Art, which Valéry holds up in response to human beings as they are, has as its aim fidelity to the human being’s possible image. The work of art that demands the utmost from its own logic and its own coherence as well as from the receiver’s concentration is for Valéry a figure of the subject who is aware and in control of himself, a figure of the person who does not capitulate. It is no accident that he cites enthusiastically a statement of Degas opposing resignation. His work as a whole is a protest against the deadly temptation to make it easy for oneself by renouncing all happiness and all truth. It is better to be ruined attempting the impossible. The art he is preoccupied with—tightly organized, seamless, and rendered completely sensory precisely through its conscious force—is hardly capable of realization. But it embodies a resistance to the unspeakable pressure exerted on what is human by what merely exists. It acts as the representative of what we might one day be. Not to become stupid, not to be lulled to sleep, not to go along: these are the social stances sedimented in Valéry’s work, a work which refuses to play the game of false humanness, of social complicity with the denigration of the human being. For him, to construct works of art means to refuse the opiate that great sensuous art has become since Wagner, Baudelaire, and Manet; to fend off the humiliation that makes works of art media and makes consumers victims of psychotechnical manipulation.
We are concerned here with the way in which Valéry, labeled an esoteric, is right, socially; with that in his work which concerns anyone and everyone, even though and precisely because he disdains to chime in with anyone. But I anticipate an objection, and I do not want to dismiss it lightly. One may ask whether after what has happened and what continues to threaten us, art itself is not utterly overvalued in Valéry’s work and his philosophy; whether for that reason he does not belong after all to the nineteenth century, whose aesthetic inadequacy he perceived so keenly. Further, one may ask whether, despite the objective turn he gives to the interpretation of the work of art, he did not, like Nietzsche, impose a metaphysics of the artist. I will not attempt to decide whether Valéry, or for that matter Nietzsche, overvalued art. But in closing I would like to say something about the question of a metaphysics of the artist. Valéry’s aesthetic subject, whether it be himself or Leonardo or Degas, is not a subject in the primitive sense of an artist who expresses himself. Valéry’s whole conception is directed against this notion, against the enthroning of genius that has been so deeply entrenched especially in German aesthetics since Kant and Schelling. What he demands of the artist, technical self-restriction, subjection to the subject matter, is aimed not at limitation but at expansion. The artist who is the bearer of the work of art is not the individual who produces it; rather, through his work, through passive activity, he becomes the representative of the total social subject. By submitting to the requirements of the work of art, he eliminates from it everything that could be due simply to the contingency of his individuation. Also intended in this kind of representation of the total social subject, of the whole, undivided human being which Valéry’s idea of the beautiful invokes, is a state of affairs that would cancel out the fate of blind isolation, a state of affairs in which the total subject would finally be realized socially. The art that achieved self-awareness as a consequence of Valéry’s conception would transcend art itself and fulfill itself in the true life of human beings.