The Work Of The Mind

In this first lesson Valéry announces with all the solemnity of a shibboleth a dictum he had coined years before in the Cahiers, “L’œuvre de l’esprit n’existe qu’en acte” (the work of the mind exists only as act), by which he means two things. There is the obvious first meaning: a piece of music exists only when performed, a choreography when danced; a painting needs to be looked at, a poem to be read or read aloud.

But for Valéry it also means that the centre of interest is always situated some way upstream of the poem, the painting or the score, in the transformation and response, triggered by an initial stimulus, in the body of the artist himself. The stimulus may be a contrast of two colours, a disposition of planes in a landscape or a repeated sound, all of which excite a response in the creative mind. Insisting on the idea that an organism seeks a return to equilibrium after receiving a stimulus, Valéry often describes this process in the mind (the “act” described above) as an imbalance to be corrected, a symmetry to be restored or a dissonance to be resolved. For the artist the work of art can be the means by which a return to equilibrium is brought about.

Valéry attempts to give an ordered “map” of what he called the “implexe”, essentially a physiological reflex translated onto the conceptual and image-making plane of the mind. His ambition is to produce an esthétique généralisée, just as Einstein, whom he knew and admired, had produced a theory of general relativity.

Stephen Romer, TLS