A Writer Looking for His Writing Scene: Paul Valéry's Procedures in His Notebooks around 1894

Abstract

ArgumentThe famous Cahiers of Paul Valéry cannot be reduced to a single scientific discipline, a specific philosophical tradition, or a literary genre. For today's reader these notebooks constitute a format sui generis, one very often characterized by an "observation of a second order": in the Cahiers Valéry uses writing, drawing, and calculating not only for purposes of argumentation; he also pays attention to the significance of such writing, drawing, and calculating processes for the production of knowledge. It is particularly the practice of notetaking and sketching in Valéry's notebooks that documents, rehearses, or questions the medial and instrumental conditions of both scientific research and artistic production. This is especially true of the early stages of the Cahiers in the years beginning around 1894 when Valéry was intensely searching for notation systems that would be conducive to his research interests. At the time the problem of how to write (as well as calculate and draw) was intrinsically bound up with the way he established his notebooks as a specific scene of writing. By closely examining a number of pages from the early notebooks I hope to show that the emerging regulation of Valéry's writing in the Cahiers results from simple operations that are noted and repeated by the writer until they gradually become procedures. What Valéry's Cahiers show us, however, is that procedures do not always work in favor of a final synthesis, but may also give rise to a format of eternal beginning. In the following I will present some of the constitutive procedures found in Valéry's early notebooks, procedures that range from a tentative gathering together and simple forms of recursion and variation to the rehearsing or invention of symbolic or graphic forms of notation.