Notes To Literature

The late hour of their publication in Germany may prove propitious for these two books. Not only do they, like Proust, combine progressive elements with an authority of success that is rare in Germany these days. In addition, the tension in Valéry’s work anticipates that of contemporary art—the tension between emancipation and integration—by thirty years. At times Valéry arrogantly disputes his qualifications as an aesthetician (v. 12, p. 112). What he has in mind, of course, is the failure of academic philosophy to deal with questions of actual artistic production; in much the same way he disputes the objective competence of literary history (v. 12, p. 163). He is much too shrewd not to arouse the suspicions of a kind of resentment whose basis he fully understood: “When a man calls another man a ‘sophist,’ it means that he feels intellectually inferior. If we can’t attack the argument, we attack the arguer” (v. 14, p. 245). But his thought is primed by surrendering to the object without reservations and not by playing with itself. In the process, clichés disintegrate for him, although mediocre intellectuals customarily attribute the dismantling of these clichés to the vanity of someone who wants to be right at any cost. The ability to see works of art from the inside, in their logic as artifacts, things that have been produced—a union of action and reflection that neither hides behind naiveté nor hastily dissolves its concrete characteristics in a general concept—is probably the only form in which aesthetics is still possible. It proves its worth in the fact that Valéry’s formulations are scarcely vulnerable to any critique but one that continues their line of thought.

In the meantime the word “aesthetics” has taken on the slightly archaic tone that Valéry’s sensibility was the first to note in so much else, like virtue. As a theory that attempts to establish the laws of the beautiful once and for all—and the will to do so was not alien to Valéry, no matter how little he subscribed to it—aesthetics has become as reactionary as the solemn pathos associated with a conception of art that elevates it above empirical reality and society and into the absolute. Valéry inherited this pathos from Mallarmé, although his essay on Manet’s triumphal procession in the Pièces sur l’art [“The Triumph of Manet,” v. 12, pp. 105–14] also rises authoritatively above the phrase “l’art pour l’art” that is so simplistically ascribed to him. Valéry praises the painter and interprets him as someone whom Zola loved as much as Mallarmé did. But in the French avant-garde it has become customary to class Valéry with the reactionaries, and that will certainly be detrimental to his reception in Germany. According to Pierre Jean Jouve, Valéry belonged to the Baudelairean right-wing. What puts him there is his aristocractic classicistic cult of form with its sinister political implications. This represented one aspect of Baudelaire and in Mallarmé, according to Jouve, became divorced from the social-revolutionary impulses of Les Fleurs du mal. The left-wing Baudelaire, in contrast, led to Surrealism by way of Rimbaud. The Surrealists have given Valéry a bad name. A passage from Rhumbs, one worthy of Nietzsche, might be applied to him, and he will have to put up with it: “Our hatred inhabits our enemy, enlarges his depths, dissects the tiniest roots of his most intimate designs. We probe into him more deeply than into ourselves—and better than he probes into himself. He forgets himself but we don’t forget him. For we see him by way of a wound and there is no sense more potent, none that descries and magnifies more strongly all that touches it—than the sense of injury” (v. 14, p. 244). These books are not lacking in frankly reactionary material, from a bow to Mussolini as the “strong will that rules beyond the Alps” (v. 12, p. 219), to the presumptuous familiarity of his assertion that what was needed was “social conditions that allowed and maintained an aristocracy of wealth and taste, with all the courage of its own luxury” (v. 12, p. 215), or the deadly Moltkean satisfaction of “That delectable universe is not ours and, all in all, I think we should be glad of it” (v. 13, p. 188). Valéry was anti-political, like the Thomas Mann of the Reflections of a Non-Political Man. But he formulated his position in words that might have been written by Karl Kraus: “Politics is the art of preventing people from minding their own business” (v. 14, p. 183). It is easy enough to equate Valéry’s anti-political intention with the reactionary intention of the man of independent means. But the accusation would be too hasty. Valéry describes a political meeting:

Still, Valéry’s anti-political–political parti pris affects his artistic judgments as well. At such times he is not up to his own standards, as when he is impressed by “how…a painter could throw twenty characters onto his canvas or his fresco, in the greatest variety of poses; and…all round them was no lack of fruits, flowers, trees, and architecture…” (v. 12, p. 152). Since people don’t have it so good nowadays, we even find statements like this: “An exclusive penchant for what is new and merely new points to a degeneration of the critical faculty, for nothing is easier than to gauge the ‘novelty’ of a work” (v. 14, p. 11). Or: “Art knows no compromise with hurry. Our ideals are good for ten years! The ancient and excellent reliance on the judgment of posterity has been stupidly replaced by the ridiculous superstition of novelty, assigning the most illusory ends to our enterprises, condemning them to the creation of what is most perishable, of what must be perishable by its nature: the sensation of newness” (v. 12, p. 220). While it may be precisely the “attraction of the new” that becomes outmoded in works of art, those which lack such charms, which do not break through the routinized consciousness of their age through that charm—a consciousness to which the questionable confidence in the judgment of posterity also belongs—will scarcely live to grow old.

Nowhere in Valéry can one see more clearly the compulsion to transcend, through antithesis, the kind of position all traditional philosophy clings to jealously than in his relationship to music. He called himself unmusical, if not anti-musical: “After a short time music gets on my nerves” (v. 14, p. 8). The man who praised the “powerful inspiration” (v. 3, p. 213) of a mediocre composer like Honegger described the opera-like characteristics of Racine, “whose tragedies Lully went so studiously to hear, and of whose lines and movements the beautiful forms and the pure developments of Gluck seem to be the immediate translations” (v. 7, p. 164), not realizing there were hardly “developments” in Gluck and that the primitiveness of Gluck’s formal structures would arouse his scorn if he encountered it in painting. Nevertheless, immediately thereafter he gives a description of bad habits in the recitation of verse that could apply word for word to bad musical interpretation: “The verse is broken up, or obscured; or, at other times, only its awkwardnesses seem to be retained: the actor stresses and exaggerates the frame and supports of the alexandrine, those conventional signs which to my mind are very useful but which are crude procedures if diction does not envelop and clothe them with its grace” (v. 7, pp. 164–65). So close was Valéry to music, and so far from it. At first he accepted the schema that places the visual, as the statically rational, in simple opposition to the flowing and chaotic character of aconceptual temporal art. He ascribes to painting, as opposed to poetry and music, an object-like positivistic moment. Hence his reservations about the magical effects of the image. Valéry the Symbolist sided with the Impressionists and not with Puvis de Chavannes: “Painting cannot, without a certain risk, set out to picture our dreams. I do not think L’Embarquement pour Cythère is the best Watteau. I find Turner’s fairy visions disenchanting at times” (v. 12, p. 146). It is not when art desperately protects its magical legacy but only when it renounces it through disillusionment that it can survive and make the transition to language, as which Valéry read it. This is the point to which his interpretation of Manet leads. Like Baudelaire, the “Naturalists,” with whom, in this context, he classes Manet, “have found (or rather…have introduced) poetry, and sometimes the highest poetry, in things or themes which until then had been considered base or insignificant” (v. 12, p. 109). But he was not as intransigently opposed to music as he was to false metamorphoses into music. At the very beginning of Rhumbs, in a remarkable parallel to Kierkegaard, he talks about the “philosophic ear” (v. 14, p. 169). Valéry himself had such an ear. As a lyric poet, the man who claimed to have no musical sense could not deceive himself about the fact that “the paths of poetry and music intersect” (v. 14, p. 211). “It was the age of symbolism: we were, each according to his disposition and poetic allegiance, quite bent on increasing, as best we could, the amount of music that the French language can allow in discourse” (v. 3, p. 214). But Valéry does not adhere to the synaesthetic program of Verlaine’s “Art Poétique”; instead, he analyzes his own contradictory experience. His quip, “Adding music to a good poem is like using a stained-glass window to light a painted picture” (v. 14, p. 214), is maliciously aimed at music.2 It falls short. Otherwise the quality of songs could scarcely be so dependent on that of the poems; rather than reproducing them, the songs settle into the empty spaces in the poems and help them out in their fallibility. On the other hand, the estrangement wrought in a picture by light coming through stained glass is not a bad image for the transfiguration of good poetry in a good song. And Valéry also acknowledges something Goethe did not want to say—his antimusical stance is a defense against a temptation to which he then succumbs after all: “My ‘unfairness’ toward music may perhaps be due to a feeling that something as powerful as that is capable of animating us to the point of absurdity” (v. 14, p. 219), capable of creating contexts of meaning beyond the rational: “Moreover, and above all, do not be in a hurry to reach the meaning” (v. 7, p. 165). Accordingly, Valéry’s postulate of a pure poetry that transcends the sense of language contains the criteria for a musician who knows what he is doing: “How shameful to set up as a writer without knowing the true nature of language, metaphors, vocables, shifts of ideas and tone; without a conception of how the work should be constructed in length or the conditions of its ending; hardly knowing the why and not at all the how! Well might the Pythia blush!…” (v. 14, p. 101). The yearning for meaning to vanish into verse is inherent in music, which knows intentions only in the process of their disappearance. Valéry notes the correlate to this in language: “Although the tone and rhythm are present to help the sense, they intervene only for a moment as immediate necessities and as aids to the meaning which they are transmitting and which at once absorbs them without an echo…” (v. 7, p. 163). What testifies to the contradictory unity of the two media is the fact that while in lyric poetry musical structures transcend language and its intentions, music comes to resemble prose in structure, the very prose from any traces of which Valéry wants to protect poetry. The aesthetics of the anti-musical sometimes sounds like an aesthetics of music: “All parts of a work should ‘pull their weight’” (v. 14, p. 105). This is exactly how musical terminology employs the notion of thematic work. Valéry’s unconscious accord with music often works to the credit of compositions he never heard. “When a work is very short the effect of the tiniest detail is of the same order of magnitude as the work’s general effect” (v. 14, p. 106)—that is the physiognomy of Anton von Webern. For the optical-crystalline Valéry, every art is ultimately transformed into the music he feared; not only is all art language for him, as in Benjamin’s early work, but there are “aspects, forms, momentary states of the visible world which can sing” (v. 12, p. 141). The poet’s gaze, sucking in colors and forms, discovers that song.

Valéry’s touchy attitude toward music, however, is relevant not only for a general differentiation of the arts from one another but also for their unity. A problematic Valéry was concerned with has recently become of central interest in composing: the relationship between chance, on the one hand, and integral construction, which carries the idea of the work’s autonomy, its independence of any specific receiver, to its ultimate conclusion, on the other. In the idea of the integral work of art, seamlessly enclosed within itself and bound solely by its immanent logic—an idea that follows from the overall tendency of the arts in the West to progressive domination of nature, or, concretely, to complete control over their material—something is missing. Art accommodates to the advances of a civilizing rationality and owes the historical unfolding of its productive forces to it, but at the same time it intends a protest against that development, a remembrance of what cannot be accommodated within it and is eliminated by it—the non-identical, to which the word “deviation” alludes. Hence art does not fuse perfectly with total rationality, because by its very nature it is deviation; only as deviation does it have a right to exist in the rational world and the power to assert itself. If art were simply equivalent to rationality, it would disappear in it and die off. It cannot, however, evade rationality unless it wants to settle helplessly into special preserves, impotent in the face of the inexorable domination of nature and the social ramifications of that domination and, as something merely tolerated by it, genuinely in thrall to that domination for the first time. The aesthetic metaphor for this kind of paradox is chance, that which is non-identical to ratio, the incommensurable as a moment within identity, a moment of rational lawfulness of a specific type—statistical lawfulness, something to which Valéry’s thoughts turn frequently. As chance, the form of subjectivity, alienated from itself, gains the ascendancy in the objective work of art, whose objectivity can never be an objectivity in itself but must be mediated through the subject despite the fact that it can no longer tolerate any immediate intervention by the subject. At the same time, chance proclaims the impotence of a subject that has become too negligible to be authorized to speak directly about itself in the work of art. Chance negates law for the sake of aesthetic freedom and yet in its heteronomy remains the opposite of freedom. Valéry confirms that, as though he were criticizing the contemporary dream of a music that would be totally determined and completely independent of the subject: “In all the arts—and that is precisely why they are arts—the sense of having become so out of necessity, something a work brought to successful completion must plausibly convey to us, can be evoked only through an act of free creation. The joining and ultimate harmonization of traits that are independent of one another and must be woven together is achieved not through a recipe or an automatic mechanism but by miracle or ultimately by effort—by miracle in conjunction with efforts borne by a will” (Pièces sur l’art, p. 1248). Chance is steered in accordance with this will, as it is in recent art, and subjected to the rationality of the whole. But chance also marks the limits of rationality in the material that rationality processes; except that the material has already been sucked so dry by rationality that its abstractness once more becomes equivalent to mere lawfulness, to the formal unity of the concept that chance opposes: the non-identical as identical. The estrangement from meaning that chance imports into every work imitates the estrangement of the age; through its unvarnished acknowledgment of the totality’s estrangement from meaning, chance lodges a protest against it. Valéry experienced all this. Like Mallarmé, he sympathized with chance without reservation or apology, splendidly unconcerned about the contradiction with his primary inclination, despite the fact that his whole pathos stems from the notion that the way the mind gains possession of itself is through the process of the work’s gaining possession of the mind. The constellation of these two moments is outlined in the essay in Pièces sur l’art on the dignity of artistic techniques that involve fire: “But all the fire worker’s admirable vigilance and all the foresight learned from experience, from his knowledge of the properties of heat, of its critical stages, of the temperatures of fusion and reactions, still leave immense scope for the noble element of uncertainty. They can never abolish chance. Risk remains the dominating and, as it were, the sanctifying element of his great art” (v. 12, p. 171). Valéry sets as much store by necessity as by what escapes necessity, and in chance he hopes to find the neutral point between the two. It is this moment in chance, the moment that is alien to meaning, a true threshold value in temps espace, that he associates with the Bergsonian temps durée, involuntary memory as the sole form of survival. For in the anarchy of history this memory is itself contingent. For Valéry this defines the dignity of chance. He writes of a ceramics exhibition: “Nothing more closely resembles our present resources of learning, our historical capital, than this collection of objects accidentally preserved. All our knowledge is, in the same way, a residue. Our documents are leavings which one age lets fall to the next, in haphazard disorder” (v. 12, p. 167). This salvaging, however, does not diminish Valéry’s distrust of the unmediated contingency of the process of artistic production, of what is too easy. The emphasis he puts on the resistance of materials, which brings chance into the work of art, stems from that same distrust of the contingency of mere subjectivity. “That explains why true artists resent the risk and vexation of too great a facility in any art where the material fails in itself to offer any positive resistance” (v. 12, p. 169). While chance, as something that eludes the artist’s control, may be incompatible with the already somewhat antiquated notion of the “act of free creation,” that incompatibility defines the question of how art is still possible.

Valéry’s contradictions have a socio-historical side. Just as, following neo-Romantic custom, his essays on the Italian painting of the Renaissance, especially Veronese, pay homage to authority as such, to the grand airs and sovereign control that seem to have splintered into formlessness in bourgeois individualism, so Valéry may have suspected itinerant musicians of being frivolous people whose fleeting spectacle is no more stable, binding, reliably settled in space and immanent within order than the itinerants themselves. Not the least of Valéry’s ideals is that of an art that has divested itself of its vagabondage and its social odium, no matter how well sublimated it may be. In fact, however, this element of vagabondage, this lack of subjection to the control of a settled order, is the only thing that allows art to survive in the midst of civilization. But the purity of a thought that does not let itself be constrained by the ideology to which it has sworn allegiance does not stop even with this motif. As the child of a rational age, Valéry does not acknowledge the neat distinction between production and reflection in art. He is much too self-reflective to deceive himself about the fact that even artists who disdain economic considerations remain tied to the precarious status of the mind in the dominant society, with which they must comply even while opposing it. Artists today are intellectuals, whether they accept that fact or not, and as such they are what social theory calls “third persons”: they live on profit that has been diverted to them. While they perform no “socially useful work” and contribute nothing to the material reproduction of life, it is they alone who represent theory and all consciousness that points beyond the blind coercion of material circumstances. They are defenseless against the distrust both of the status quo, which they live on without serving it dependably, and its enemies, for whom they are nothing but impotent agents of power. Hence, as society’s painful nerve, they draw the hatred of the whole world down upon themselves. But if one is to defend them, it cannot be by praising the mind abstractly but only by expressing the negative element in them as well. Only when the ideological husk of their own existence falls away, only in a process of merciless self-reflection that would be the self-reflection of society as well, would they attain their social truth. Valéry contributes to this process. He incorporates into thought the flaw that mars all thought: “Without its parasites—thieves, singers, dancers, mystics, heroes, poets, philosophers, businessmen—humanity would be a community of animals, or not even a community, but a species: the earth would lack salt” (v. 14, p. 187). The same list of “third persons” could appear in Marx, someone whose name would hardly have crossed Valéry’s lips. Nor is Valéry unfamiliar with the connection between mind and mental production on the one hand and what the language of political economy calls the “sphere of circulation” on the other. “If the essence of tradesmanship is to buy with the intention of selling, then the artist or author who observes, travels, reads, and exists solely, or almost solely, with the object of producing—and putting his impressions on the market—is a tradesman. ‘He is not acquiring anything for its own sake,’ you say. But perhaps ‘acquiring for its own sake’ means nothing” (v. 14, p. 192). This man who firmly insists on the purity of the work for its own sake also understands how much the purity of an autonomous aesthetic owes to something heteronomous, the market. While petty artists drivel on about being creators and precisely by praising that status in ideological terms assure themselves of universal agreement in the marketplace, Valéry acknowledges the paradoxical relationship of the autonomous work to its commodity character. The autonomous work becomes something objective only when the producer does not stand in direct relationship to his experiences but instead objectifies them. Truth which has become estranged from itself becomes the acknowledged model of the absolute work. What in its own terms is originality and genius is in social terms a natural monopoly. One of those witty remarks that, as Nietzsche says, produce a just noticeable smile alludes to this: “ ‘What!’ a man of genius may have asked himself. ‘Am I really such a freak? Can it be that what seems to me so natural, a casual image, a self-evident observation, an effortless phrase, a fleeting recreation of my inner eye, my secret ear, my leisure hours, all these chance connections of thoughts or words—can it be that they make me a monstrosity? How strange is my “strangeness”! Am I no better than a curio? And if so, supposing there existed a hundred thousand men like me, would that be enough to make me pass unnoticed, without any change having taken place within me? Suppose there were a million like me. I should come to rank as a commonplace ignoramus, and my value decline to its millionth part’” (v. 14, p. 224). Such reflections culminate in an amazing identification of mind, self-alienation, and commodity character: “The more a consciousness is ‘conscious,’ the more foreign to it seems the man who has it and equally foreign its opinions, actions, characteristics, and sentiments. For this reason it tends to regard all that is most personal and private in it as ‘accidental’ and extraneous” (v. 14, p. 43). A pointed self-destructiveness is unmistakable here. As in Nietzsche, there are anti-intellectual motifs alongside daring attempts to rescue what is most vulnerable in the mind. We hear voices from the pre-fascist era: “The intellectual’s job is to juggle with all things under their signs, names, or symbols without the counterpoise of real action. That is why the intellectual’s remarks are startling, his politics precarious, his pleasures superficial. Such men are social stimulants, having the utility and dangers of stimulants in general” (v. 14, p. 188). But when it comes to the area of Valéry’s specific experience, artistic production, he has no room for this kind of humbug. Intuition, the trademark of the anti-intellectual, fares badly with him. He polarizes it into the two extremes of consciousness and chance and mockingly pins the yellow star of the “third person” on the very thing that finds official favor: “For poets it is, or should be, an intolerable image: that represents them as getting their best creations from imaginary beings. Mere mouthpieces—what notion could be more humiliating? Personally I have no use for it. I invoke no inspiration except that element of chance, which is common to every mind; then comes an unremitting toil, which wars against this element of chance” (v. 14, p. 241).

What is especially apparent in such formulations but in fact defines the rhythm of Valéry’s thought in general is what the official history of philosophy would call the opposition of rationalist and irrationalist motifs. The status of those motifs, however, is the opposite in France of what it is in Germany. In Germany it is customary to class rationalism with progress, and irrationalism, as a legacy of Romanticism, with reaction. For Valéry, however, the traditional moment is identical to the Cartesian rationalist moment, and the irrationalist moment is Cartesianism’s self-criticism. The rational-conservative moment in Valéry is the dictatorial civilizing moment, the autonomous ego’s avowed power to control the unconscious. “Morning brings a sloughing off of our dreams, dispelling all that has taken advantage of our negligence and absence to proliferate, clutter us up; natural products, dirt, mistakes, stupidities, terrors, obsessions. The beasts go back to their dens. The Master is back from a journey; the witches’ sabbath is put to rout. Absence and presence” (v. 14, p. 171). Now as ever, such domination is justified in Cartesian terms, on the basis of clara et distincta perceptio. Even Valéry’s doubts about definitive answers, doubts that are the catalyst for his irrational deviations, are gauged in terms of such definitiveness: “But our answers are very seldom correct; most are feeble or quite off the mark. So well do we feel this that in the end we turn against our questions—which is all wrong, since they should be our point of departure. What we ought to do is to draw up within ourselves a question antecedent to all others, which inquires of each in turn what value, if any, it may have” (v. 14, p. 226). Cartesianism overturns itself through the driving force in its own methodology—doubt:

So complex an issue is Valéry’s conservatism. For all his aversion to the administered world, he refuses to hide behind invectives condemning decadence and perversions. What befalls reason, human beings as its bearers, and the subject, is the very principle of reason: “The thinking mind is brutal—no concessions. What, indeed, is more brutal than a thought?” (v. 14, p. 256), or even: “What’s vilest in the world if not the Mind? It is the body that recoils from filth and crime. Like the fly, the Mind settles on everything. Nausea, disgust, regrets, remorse are not its properties; they are merely so many curious phenomena for it to study. Danger draws it like a flame and if the flesh were not so powerful would lead it to burn its wings, urged on by a fierce and fatuous lust for knowledge” (v. 14, p. 39). In Valéry pure mind confesses its own untruth. Its complicity with the abominable, however, is nothing but a legacy of violence, the violence that for centuries it has allowed to be perpetrated on everything that exists in subjugating it to the principle of its own self-preservation. In Valéry the mind has become tempered enough to look its own secret in the eye.

Valéry is not blind to the culture industry’s crimes or its social basis: “The manufacture of machines to work miracles provides a living for thousands of people. But the artist has had no share in producing these wonders. They are the work of science and capital. The bourgeois has invested his money in phantoms and is speculating on the downfall of common sense” (v. 10, p. 162). But his critique remains ambiguous. It does not armor him against a banality that he elsewhere takes as the index of untruth: “In short, nearly all the dreams of humanity, as found in the fables of various types—flying, deep-sea diving, apparitions, speech caught and transmitted, detached from its time and source, and many strange things that no one ever dreamed of—have now emerged from the impossible, from the mind” (v. 10, p. 162). He forgets to add that, as in fairy tales, the fulfillment of its wishes has never yet proved to be a blessing for a humankind that remains under the spell of renunciation despite all its downpayments on utopia. According to Valéry, “Louis XIV, at the height of his power, hadn’t the hundredth part of the authority over Nature, the means of amusement, of cultivating his mind, or of providing it with sensations, which are today at the disposal of so many men of moderate station” (v. 10, p. 163). Such comparisons are risky. It is hardly possible to compare happiness across different eras. But one would like to believe that the pleasures of the Roi Soleil somewhat surpassed those enjoyed in front of the television screen. In 1928, when Valéry set down these ideas, it may not yet have been possible for Europeans to see where the consumer culture was heading. Certainly the course the world has taken since then has refuted Valéry’s glorification of “the young man today” who can fly where he likes, sleep “every night in a palace” (v. 10, p. 163), take on a hundred different ways of life, and transform himself into a happy man at every moment. For the hundred forms of life no longer hide the skeleton of their standardized unity. Nor are they at all the native realm of the person on whom they are forced; his happiness is merely a subjective caricature of that realm, and often not even that. The unity of art and science was not to be had as cheaply as Valéry sardonically imagines. To be sure, he regarded the technical utopias of the futurists and the constructivists, rather than the juste milieu of radio and cinema, as models of rational art. “A fine book is above all a perfect machine for reading, whose specifications can be defined quite precisely through the laws and methods of physiological optics; at the same time it is an object of art, a thing” (Pièces sur l’art, p. 1249). Klee christened a famous painting of his “Zwitschermaschine,” a twittering machine.

This sheds light on Valéry’s theory of time. It refers directly back to Baudelaire, to the cult of death as le Nouveau, the new, the unknown pure and simple, the sole refuge of spleen, which has lost the past and for which progress bears the stigma of eternal sameness. In a Kierkegaardian paradox, utopia cloaks itself in the X: “We take refuge in the unknown. We hide in it from what we know. On the unknown hope stakes its hopes. Thought would die out with the end of indetermination. Hope is a mental activity that promotes ignorance, transforms a solid wall into a cloud; there is no skeptic, no Pyrrhonian so destructive of logic, reason, probability, hard facts, as is that incorrigible demon, Hope” (v. 14, p. 179). But Valéry subjects even this murky point to analysis. He defines it as a moment, a unique fulfillment, as the differential that rises a little bit above the lost past and the hopeless future. Valéry’s passion for Impressionism is focused on the immortalizing of the moment through artistic techniques that elevate presence of mind to the highest virtue of the spirit: “Genius is an instant flash. Love is born of a glance and a glance is enough to kindle lifelong hatred. If we are worth anything it is only because we have been, or have the power to be, ‘beside ourselves’ for a moment” (v. 14, p. 180). The extreme opposite of this idea is the bourgeois concept of the abstract labor-time in terms of which commodities are exchanged. Idiosyncratically, Valéry opposes the emergence of an age without time:

For Valéry’s aesthetic experience, the subject’s strength and spontaneity prove themselves not in the subject’s self-revelation but, in Hegelian fashion, in its self-alienation. The more fundamentally the work detaches itself from the subject, the more the subject has accomplished in it. “A work endures insofar as it is capable of looking quite different from the work the author thought he was bequeathing to the future” (v. 14, p. 114). Valéry has cutting criticisms for something too weak to objectify itself—for mere intentions, for what poets think in connection with their works or put into their works without it becoming emancipated from the author and eloquent and cogent in itself. “Once a work is published its author’s interpretation of it has no more validity than anyone else’s” (v. 14, p. 109). Valéry, in whom the poetic and the philosophical faculties fostered one another as in hardly anyone else, hated “philosopher-poets” who confuse “a seascape painter with a ship’s captain” (v. 14, p. 214). “To philosophize in verse was, and still is, to try to play a game of chess according to the rules of checkers” (v. 14, p. 235). The counterpoint to Valéry’s self-reflections on works of art is provided by something extremely hard to grasp for someone who approaches works of art from the outside: the fact that they do not belong to their author, are not essentially likenesses of him. Instead, with the first movement of conception, the author is bound to that conception and to his material. He becomes an organ for the accomplishment of the work’s desires. “For every work is the work of lots of other things besides an ‘author’” (v. 14, p. 201). The force of artistic production is one of self-extinction: “Even in prose we are continually obliged to write things we did not want to write but which are wanted by what we did want to write” (v. 14, p. 102). In the end, the accepted notion of the creative artist is corrected through antithesis:

Among the ideals of Valéry’s self-reflected, refracted classicism are the somewhat stuffy attributes of ripeness and perfection (v. 14, pp. 210–11). In fact, however, the exemplary works are by no means those which are complete and perfect but rather those in which the conflict between the goal of perfection and its unattainability has left the deepest marks. Valéry sees something like this in archaic works: “Long epic poems, when they are things of beauty, are beautiful in spite of their length, and then only in parts…. There are no ‘pure’ poets at the outset of a literature, any more than there are ‘pure’ metals for primitive artificers” (v. 14, p. 213). Like Nietzsche, Valéry is aware of the degree to which order, the canon of classicalness, is wrested from the chaotic by force; “the terrestrial world,” he said, “gave [the ancients] the impression of being very little regulated” (v. 14, p. 116). Accordingly, “ ‘impure’ is not a reproach” (v. 14, p. 213). “It is impossible to construct a poem containing only poetry. If a piece contains nothing else, it is not constructed; not a poem” (v. 14, p. 103). This works to the credit of modernity. “What surprises one about the extravagances of the literary revolutionaries of yesterday is always their timidity” (v. 14, p. 198). And in fact, today the works of the generation of Schönberg and Picasso reveal themselves to be permeated with elements that work against any pure consistency and thoroughgoing construction; they are permeated with residues of what they have rejected. But that does not diminish their quality. The authenticity of such products might well have its substance precisely in the conflict between what has been and what has not yet been; the New rubs up against that substance and increases its potency. Works from the decade prior to the First World War have more of this tension than do the more harmonious works that came after the Second World War, and it permits them to survive; the loss of tension in so much of what came later might be a function of its own consistency. Despite this defense of what is not stylistically unified, however, permanence, the bourgeois residue in his thought, was for Valéry a truth conceived on the model of possession, equivalent to order. As the sole power human beings are given “over events,” in comparison to which their direct actions accomplish nothing, “imposing order” is for him, as for all classicists, “godlike” (v. 12, p. 117). He supports his classicism with the powerful argument that the customary distinction between classical and romantic styles is not adequate to grasp a successful work of art.3 “The difference between the romantic and the classical writer is a very simple one; it is the difference between the man who does not know his trade and the man who does. The romantic always becomes a classicist once he has learned his craft. That is why our Romantics ended up as Parnassians” (v. 14, p. 120). For him, the order that confers permanence is called form. Through Valéry’s critique of all content, even an intellectual content that is the philosophy the work intends, form moves to the center of his aesthetics. But its concept remains a weak one. “One is led to the form adopted by a desire to leave the smallest possible share to the reader—and by the same token to leave oneself the least possible scope for arbitrariness and uncertainty” (v. 14, p. 105). True as it is that every artistic form mastered exercises a constraint on the recipient, a constraint that is experienced as the authentic element in the work of art, that alone does not guarantee its quality. It is Valéry himself who insists that the aesthetic concept of form involves no consideration of the receiver or the producer. But he does not face the issue squarely, perhaps because if he did the metaphysics of art would be threatened. “Form,” he said, concurring with a stale formalism, “is per se bound up with recurrence” (v. 14, p. 105). As though even in his time the most authentic works of art had not sought their formal law in the exclusion of the external and regressive formal techniques of repetition; as though he did not write a few pages later: “The mind cannot endure reiteration” (v. 14, p. 111). An academic concept of form is the only one he can effectively contrast with an alleged craving for innovation. “Therefore fetish-worship of ‘the new’ is incompatible with a concern for form” (v. 14, p. 105). Form that revolts against that parody of form, the academic exercise, can hardly be distinguished from obsession with the New. But Valéry shows himself to be in league with neoclassicism in that he justifies externally established forms, without regard to the immanence of form in the internal laws of the individual work. The person who does not want to owe anything to anything but genius is seduced by a masochistic pleasure in types of form that exercise a heteronomous and unlegitimated authority. He is smitten with the charms of an ambiguous contingency masked as law, charms which would quickly be consumed, leaving the ashes of boredom. Many things in the Rhumbs could stand in Stravinsky’s musical poetics: “Rhyme has the great advantage of infuriating the simple people who naively think there is something under the sun more important than a convention. They have an innocent belief that an idea may be ‘deeper,’ more durable than any convention” (v. 14, p. 102). Both objectively and in terms of its literary genesis, Valéry’s aesthetic objectivism is carried by a subject that knows itself to be irrevocably alienated from the substantiality of forms and nevertheless retains a need for them. The subject points to them as a means of discipline, a difficulty art must provide for itself in order to become perfect—as though artistic practice had not made itself all too comfortable using such techniques. Valéry is led astray by the arbitrariness of a subjectivity that is no longer essentially bound to those forms, nor capable of constituting form from within itself, through the labor and efforts Valéry never tires of demanding, that is, through a self-immersion unconcerned with models and past social agreements. In this frame of mind Valéry praises—with a touch of provocative irony—the poetic form that more than any other arouses the suspicion of being mere mechanical clatter:

Even Valéry’s neoclassicism, however, is not without its leavening. As we know, in terms of artistic strategy, the whole neoclassical movement in France was a counter-attack against Wagner. The order called for was to resist the intoxication, the obscure mingling of the arts, the German proclivity for the superlative (v. 14, p. 202). Valéry subscribed to this platform as a poet as well, in his plan for the musical drama Amphion, which was finally set to music by Honegger after Debussy proved uncooperative. Not only the Greek material but the idea is neoclassicist. It is based on Valéry’s sharp distinction between the arts, something that negates Wagnerian music drama from the start. In his own development Valéry experienced it as the distinction between architecture, his first love, and music; but he did not let the matter rest with that distinction, nor with copies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century styles. In his medium, language, which for him was something musical and not a medium of conceptual signification, he kept faith with architecture. What inspired him was the fact that the two kinds of art are related in that they neither imitate nor designate anything tangible. He addresses this coincidentia oppositorum:

The Baudelairean-neoromantic motif of synaesthesia is sublimated here. Sounds and fragrances no longer blend in the evening air; instead, separate entities are synthesized by virtue of their rigid separateness. That too would be incompatible with a dogmatic conception of form. Valéry’s devouring consciousness, a consciousness that does not stop at any fixed definition, explodes that notion by interpreting art as a language in its own right. Art is imitation, but not of something material; rather, it is mimetic behavior. In the name of such imitation, even the aesthetic category that seems to be purely subjective, the category of expression, becomes something objective: it becomes the imitation of the language of things themselves. It is bound up with the work ridding itself of any likeness to objects: “Poetry is an attempt to reproduce or restore by means of articulated language those things or that thing which cries, tears, caresses, kisses, sighs, and so forth struggle obscurely to express; and which objects seem to try to express with all in them that has the appearance of life or (presumably) design” (v. 14, p. 97). Musical terminology has something closely related to this in the performance indication espressivo, which depends neither on what is expressed nor on the subject expressing it. As a metaphysics of mimesis, Valéry’s aesthetics gropes toward its most extreme formulation at the end of the essay on the dignity of the arts of fire: “The arts of fire might thus be the most venerable of all, deriving directly as they do from the transcendent operations of some demiurge” (v. 12, p. 172). Art is an imitation not of what has been created but of the act of creation itself. This speculative idea is at the root of Valéry’s provocative, decidedly alexandrine view that the process of artistic production is also the true subject matter of art: “Why, after all, should the making of a work of art not be considered a work of art in itself?” (v. 12, p. 180). Like almost no other theory, this one destroys the illusion of the work of art as an existing entity. Precisely as an objective entity, the work of art is transformed into a becoming, whereas the vulgar notion conceives it as static and attributes its dynamic moment to the artist’s presumed act of creation, while for Valéry the artist is extinguished in that supreme imitation. This paradox can be explained by the fact that Valéry’s objectively oriented aesthetics, which accepts the work as a mimesis neither of something external nor of something internal, the author’s soul, is touched less by the “direct pleasure” that works of art give him “than by the ideas they suggest to [him] of how they were made” (v. 12, p. 178). To follow Valéry’s abyssal passage about the prehistoric person who, “must have been the first to run his fingers absentmindedly over a rough vase, and feel inspired thereby to model another, made to be caressed” (v. 12, p. 172), art might be the imitation of creative love itself. As imitation of a creative act rather than of solid objects, art comes to stand in contrast to nature: “We feel certain desires that nature is unable to satisfy, and we have certain powers that she has not” (v. 13, p. 187). Thus Baudelaire’s paradis artificiels come into their own, mimesis of something that precedes objectness, through an artistic freedom exempt from the spell of objects. This theory of imitation connects the ideal of l’art pour l’art with the notion that art’s resemblance—no longer a resemblance to any thing—is a function of its immanent form. “It is useless to look for likeness above all else: it ought, on the contrary, to result from the convergence of observation and action as they build up in the total form a continually increasing quantity of observed relations between the parts. It is in the nature of good work that it can always be pushed further toward precision without any change of intention or of points of reference” (v. 12, pp. 181–82). For Valéry, works of art become the more similar to one another the more thoroughly their own form is developed and brought to completion: “likeness” is only “in relation with the more general principle and aim of the art” (v. 12, p. 182). It is not named and it appears in disguised form, but his image is the act of creation, and the work of art ranks the higher the more it resembles that act, the more, one might say pleonastically, it resembles itself. “Was aber schön ist, selig scheint es in ihm selbst” [“What is beautiful seems blessed in itself” (Eduard Mörike)]—that is utopia in its aesthetic form. Utopia, pure possibility, is the aim of the movement of Valéry’s thought. “In my thoughts I try to come to terms with all this magical power of the sea by telling myself that it never ceases to show me what is possible” (Pièces sur l’art, p. 1335). It is only through blind obsession with itself and not by means of a clear-sighted intention directed toward something that would be more than itself, that the work of art becomes more than it is. Its resemblance to itself turns it into language. Only in this resemblance to language does all art have its unity. Its idea is as different from propositional language as aesthetic resemblance is from resemblance to things. The very incommensurability of languages points to this level: “There are doctrines which cannot survive translation into a language other than the original; once translated, they lose the magic, the discretion, the consecration by use and wont that have been theirs since the time when they were crystallized in words reserved to them and veiled in mystery” (v. 14, p. 43). In the conception of nonobjective resemblance, the neoromantic cult of nuance comes into its own theoretically: “The beautiful demands perhaps the slavish imitation of what is indefinable in things” (v. 14, p. 240) reads the finest sentence in Rhumbs. The indefinable is the inimitable, and aesthetic mimesis becomes a mimesis of the absolute by imitating this inimitability in the particular. This is the locus of its utopian promise: “Pay attention to this subtle continuous sound; it is silence. Listen to what one hears when one no longer perceives anything” (Rhumbs, p. 656).

Valéry’s utopia passes into Proust’s: “There is a woman selling flowers under the big porch of the public building just across the road; flowers that transmit messages, thoughts of love, to every passer-by. What will never happen, what can never be, has a fragrance of its own, scents the air” (v. 14, p. 173). This utopia is the object of the thinker’s yearning for a form of thought freed of its own coerciveness. “How splendid it would be to think in a form one had invented for oneself!” (v. 14, p. 228). Thought’s unlimited and wearisome labor has as its aim the disappearance of that toil in fulfillment. Intellectual exertion has as its aim the abolition of the force of self-imposed laws (v. 12, p. 136). Valéry’s drive for self-mastery is insatiable, and his theory of art wants to extend autonomy to the point where only contingency opposes it: “It isn’t ‘novelty’ or ‘genius’ that appeals to me, but full possession of oneself” (v. 14, p. 224). But this ideal transcends its own subjectivism. “A man bent on his work says to himself: ‘I want to be stronger, cleverer, luckier than—Myself’” (v. 14, p. 20). The subject’s unlimited power of disposition over itself signifies its sublation into something objective. The work, which imitates the language of things as the likeness of the act of creation, requires the authority of the producer, whom the work then subjugates in turn. Thus for Valéry the work becomes a punishment as well: “ ‘And for thy chastisement thou shalt make very, very beautiful things.’ This is what a God (definitely not Jehovah) really said to Man after the Fall” (v. 14, p. 229). But Valéry does not want to make common cause with punishment. It undermines, he says, once again speaking in Nietzschean tones, “morality, since it provides a calculated compensation for each crime. It reduces the horror of the crime to the horror of its penalty; in a word, it absolves. Thus it treats crime as something measurable, marketable—one can haggle over the price to pay” (v. 14, p. 50). Valéry, the thinker, understands that as calculation thinking itself is defiled: “ ‘What has most value should cost nothing.’ And also: ‘We pride ourselves most on that for which we are least responsible’” (v. 14, p. 100). Thus, in thinking, thought’s very principle, domination itself, is revoked. The man for whom everything hangs on his power as an artist denounces works of art for exercising power: