In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent

2. Faust’s and Heidegger’s Technology: Building as Poiesis

2. Faust’s and Heidegger’s Technology: Building as Poiesis the impersonality of Faust’s final goal is most adequately described not by Mephisto, whose representation of Faust’s discontent extends only to the latter’s sensuous desires (‘‘No pleasure sates him, no happiness is enough’’ [Ihn sättigt keine Lust, ihm gnügt kein Glück] [Faust II, V.11587]), but by the later observations of a philosopher who does not appear to have had Faust, among Goethe’s works, in mind. In his unsurpassed analysis of the ‘‘challenge’’ to nature and people posed by ‘‘modern technology,’’ the replacement of natural historical relations with new ‘‘built-in’’ norms, Heidegger reveals the aim and lure of Faust’s building project at its core. Technology, the material interruption and transformation of organic, or self-regulating , physical processes, permits the energy naturally expended by those processes to be extracted, contained, channeled, stored. Heidegger states and responds to the question posed by technology as follows: What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. . . . The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it. . . . The hydroelectric plant is set into the current of the Rhine. It sets the Rhine to supplying its hydraulic pressure, which then sets the turbines turning; this turning sets those machines in motion 45 46 ‡ goethe’s timelessness whose thrust sets going the electric current for which the longdistance power station and its network of cables are set up to convey electricity. In the realm of the interlocking processes pertaining to the ordering up of electrical energy, the current of the Rhine also appears as something ordered up. The electric plant is not built into the Rhine River like the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is built up into the power plant. What the river is as current now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. . . . The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a posing, in the sense of posing a challenge. Such challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, the unlocked is transformed, the transformed is stored up, the stored up, in turn, is distributed, and the distributed is switched around anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching around are ways of revealing . . . Who carries out the challenging posing through which what we call the real is revealed as standing reserve? Evidently man. To what extent is man capable of such a revealing? Man can, indeed, conceive, form, and carry out this or that in one way or another. Yet man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which, from time to time, the real shows itself or withdraws.16 16. Heidegger, ‘‘Die Frage nach der Technik’’ [The Question Concerning Technology], pp. 14–17. For the original German, see the continuation of this note in the Appendix. Although no reference is made to Faust in this watershed essay, which, in keeping with Heidegger’s writing on material things in relation to Being, contemplates particular objects or constructs rather than invoking mythical or literary narratives in its analysis, Heidegger does explicitly cite, and importantly incorporate, in ‘‘Die Frage’’ a neologism from the Wahlverwandtschaften. Treating Goethe’s language much as he would Parmenides’, Heidegger highlights Goethe’s introduction, in the ‘‘Novelle’’ within the novel, of the ‘‘mysterious word’’ [geheimnisvolle Wort], ‘‘fortgewähre’’’ (roughly, ‘‘to grant permanently’’) used instead of the customary ‘‘fortwähren’’ (to endure permanently ). Heidegger proceeds to include the inserted particle of Goethe’s new term in his own novel designation of the enduring essence of technology, ‘‘Ge- faust’s and heidegger’s technology ‡ 47 What does it mean to remove energy from its material source, transform it into a new medium that can be channeled at will, hold it ab situ, and implement it in the execution of action with which it would otherwise have nothing to do? Technology, the artificial decontextualization and transfer of power, effects a break with biological time and place...