by Verena Andermatt Conley
The following essay is taken from Calibano #2 – Mephistopheles / Posthuman
After it famously bombed at its premiere at La Scala in 1868, today, a century and one half later, Arrigo Boito’s opera, Mefistofele continues to find international acclaim. Though its title puts emphasis on the devil, it is a musical adaptation of the legend of Faust, a scholar with an insatiable quest for knowledge who could not come to terms with human finitude. Faust was often compared to Prometheus, the god of Greek antiquity who stole the gift of fire from the Olympus to provide warmth and energy for common mortals. Unlike the mythic hero, Faust is said to have been a real character who lived in Germany around 1540. He was supposedly a shady character, known for his interest in sorcery, alchemy, lewd behavior and for making a pact with a demon who, in German folklore, was called Mephistopheles. His story appeared in print in 1592. In 1604 it inspired the poet Christopher Marlowe to produce a play, The Tragical History of Dr. Faust, that introduced some dignity into the shady character. Since that time, the Faust legend has travelled transnationally, as a story adapted to the theater, music, film and, of course, to opera. It can be said with reasonable certainty that it will continue to do so.
After Marlowe’s play, the biggest success came with Wilhelm Goethe’s Faust, published in two parts, in 1808 and, posthumously, in 1832. Goethe removed the link with Prometheus to focus on a Faust whom he cast as contemporary at the time the play was produced. Part I focuses on the protagonist’s bargain with the devil. Faust can overcome human finitude, regain his youth, enjoy unbridled erotic passions, and achieve happiness as long as he refrains from saying: “Verweile doch, du bist so schön!”(Stay a while, you are so beautiful!). Yet Faust does not encounter the bliss he hoped for. Reality turns out to be destructive: his love object, Gretchen, an innocent country girl whom he seduces, drowns the child born of their union and inadvertently poisons her mother. Faust’s visit to mythological Troy and the love of Helen, the personification of beauty, turns out to be nothing more than idealistic illusion. A character of his time who tries to overcome the division between classical and romantic strains of thinking, Faust realizes that life is made of disappointments. He wants more.
In Part II, the subjective element recedes in favor of a much broader theme: Faust becomes the despotic ruler of vast lands, but upon the sight of their dilapidated cabin that does not please him, murders its worthy old inhabitants, Baucis and Philemon. After ruling destructively, he repents and, with a visit from Cura (Sorge), he becomes a generous ruler whose subjects and lands, he anticipates, will finally flourish. Faust realizes that the essence of life is not just in the senses or in absolute power, but rather, in the taming of nature and of war, in the effort to make the world habitable and to find the right ways to do it. In a letter to K.J.L. Iken, Goethe wrote:
“The principal thing is that we should properly cultivate ourselves; the source from which we do so would not matter, if we did not have to fear the possibility of miscultivation by appealing to false models” (1827)
With Goethe, Faust’s dilemma in Part 1 takes an existential turn. In Part II the wisdom necessary to rule with care leads Faust to pronounce the fateful words. He muses on what kind of a ruler he wants to be:
“I wish to gaze again on such a land, / Free earth, where a free race, in freedom, stand. / Then, to the Moment, I’d dare say: / ‘Stay a while! You are so lovely!’ / Through aeons, then, never to fade away. / This path of mine through all that’s earthly. / Anticipating, here, its deep enjoyment, / Now I savor it, that highest moment.” (Part II, V, vi, l.11579-86)
If Part I is better known and more often read and performed, Part II conforms with Goethe’s time. Faust becomes the magnanimous and just ruler, a model for the nineteenth century, a century of revolution and nation-building. Faust praises freedom and existence on an earth reconciled to the human. In Goethe, by way of an existential transformation, the Faust legend shifts from a crafty old scholar, mean and deceptive, deserving of divine punishment, into a political ruler who overcomes selfishness and lack of care by acquiring the wisdom needed to govern equitably.
What then about Boito’s Faust? First, Boito – like Berlioz (1846), Gounod (1859), Liszt (1857) and Schumann (1862) before him – adapts the legend to music, specifically to an opera for which he even writes his own libretto. Lending to the opera a devilish patina, the title shifts emphasis from Faust to Mefistofele, implying the Fall of Man and the fact that acquisition of knowledge leads to loss of innocence. In accord with his time, Boito turns Faust into a romantic hero. If there are politics in the opera, they are subjective and gendered. If there is wisdom acquired, it is in the realm of personal governance and existential transformation. Faust has only a dream of being a good and just ruler. It is in the dream that he pronounces the fateful words, “Stay, thou are’t beautiful” (Epilogue).
Boito, inspired by Richard Wagner, stays close to the traditional storyline he strategically simplifies. And like Goethe, he frames the opera in such a way that in a prologue Mefistofele announces to God that he will be able to claim Faust’s soul. Humans are weak. They are eager to transcend their finitude and indulge in the senses. In an epilogue, longing for a higher goal, Faust himself transcends this description and is thus redeemed. Mefistofele has to recognize himself vanquished.
Composed and written half a century after Goethe’s play, Boito’s libretto deals with human weakness, a desire to transcend human finitude, and find redemption through the realization, at the moment of death, of having made dubious existential choices, and a will to do good. The opera becomes a quest for the senses over reason or belief. When Gretchen wants him to be religious, Faust makes it clear, again, that the only God he serves are the senses. The existence of God is not important to him. He confuses what contemporary poet Carol Ann Duffy, dealing with the Faustian theme, described as “loving the life-style, not the life” (1999). The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake will not bring satisfaction, nor will the pursuit of knowledge without wisdom. He becomes aware of the destruction he has caused in reality and that the mythical dream of life with Helen is but an illusion. He dreams of becoming a just ruler of people: “Under wisest laws I wish that by thousands Nations and herds and cities and houses and fields arise.” It’s in this dream that Faust finds the hoped for calm that spurs a desire to eternalize the moment. Unlike Goethe, Boito appeals to a personal, vividly existential transformation in the dreams of becoming a ruler.
As Kierkegaard noted, because Faust is a historical idea, the story has to be adapted to each period in which it is related. Goethe’s rendering of the legend appealed to a culture that tried to reconcile classicism and romanticism in the turmoil of fledgling republics replacing aristocratic regimes. Written a decade before the publication of Nietzsche’s major books, at a time when God was put in question and science and technologies were on the march, Boito drew attention to what might be a life with meaning.
What would Faust’s story be today? Much of the nineteenth century canon focused on bourgeois morality in decrying the loss of innocence, the cost of experience, in musing on the fatality of death, in admiring the virtues of Greek myth, and in championing ideals of governance. Today, the gender roles in these works seem conventional, not in the least where the innocent virgin from the country is juxtaposed with the ideal goddess. Of late, however, readings of feminist orientation have done away with the stereotypes of Goethe’s eternal feminine or Boito’s praise of innocence. Almost forty years ago Donna Haraway published her much acclaimed Cyborg Manifesto, that concluded with the words, “I would rather be a Cyborg then a Goddess.” She would have been the first to rearticulate the Faustian bargain to fit an era conscious of sexual inequality in matters of gender. If, today, Goethe’s exemplary ruler is much needed but hard to find, the spiritual quest of Boito’s Faust is supremely difficult to adapt. The omnipresence of the senses has become commonplace in what Jacques Rancière calls “The Age of the Sensible,” in which aisthesis has replaced mimesis, and where, with the advent of romanticism, an aesthetic regime has superseded an aristocratic counterpart of times past. Gender roles are fluid, no longer clearly defined, hierarchical or bound by moral imperatives. What would Faust strive for today? Would he want to overcome his finitude? And if so, how?
If Goethe’s Faust aimed to become a good and just ruler, Boito’s analogue sought a mode of existence that would be based on self-worth, the result of an existential transformation. Yet today, modes of being are no longer what they were in the last two centuries, constructions of subjectivity have changed. Notably, in The Three Ecologies (2000), Félix Guattari argued that subjectivity is also historical: a certain subjectivity is associated with Greek theater, another with the Age of Courtly Love and feudalism. In collaboration with Gilles Deleuze, in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983) Guattari showed how Freud’s fabrication of oedipal constructions was one with capitalism and consolidated the powers of a ruling class. Guattari felt that humans (meaning Western humans) were at a remove from that type of subjectivity, in part under the influence of the techno-sciences, digital technologies, mass media and a neoliberal economy. Because of his pact with the devil—a pact that, especially in Boito, is also Mefistofele’s wager with God—Faust has recently also been seen as an avatar less of Prometheus than of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Prometheus gives humans an existential choice to use fire for good or evil. Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein as a mad scientist who wants to create life. Frankenstein transcends limits by creating a technological other whose violent behavior causes the death of those around him. Frankenstein and his creature are forever alienated from society. Faust, by contrast, is redeemed in both Goethe and Boito. Today, however, the important question is less that of redemption or if God exists, but of who has the better mode of existence on an ailing planet. And this mode cannot not be countenanced through technology that since 1818, the year Shelley published Frankenstein, is of unparalleled complexity. Technology carries a legacy synonymous with the destructive “other,” a force alienating humans that endangers life and the planet.
Over the last century, technologies have expanded manifold. In addition to the industrial technologies that Heidegger addresses, there has been an explosion of digital technologies. Over three decades ago Gilles Deleuze argued that the last century witnessed a shift from ‘disciplinary’ societies, those in which Goethe and Boito wrote, to societies ‘of control’ (1995). He saw in digital information an insulant enemy that on the basis of the binary digit (the 0 and the 1) was completely changing the way humans function in the world. This shift, he surmised, would make it difficult to write books of philosophy the way they had for centuries. Yet in his Three Ecologies, today a mandatory reading in environmental studies, Guattari wrote in support of new technologies. Against deterministic oedipal-subjectivities that blocked humans from inventing and becoming, that forced compliance with gender roles like those in Goethe and Boito, he argued that digital technologies were making possible computer-assisted subjectivities. He saw them assisting humans in their tasks of everyday life, freeing them for more enriching and rewarding modes of experience. In other words, Guattari envisioned digital technologies enabling the creation of adventurous subjectivities vital for rich and rewarding lives. Borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential concepts of the en–soi (the in-itself) and the pour-soi (the for-itself), Guattari proposed an entity, open at once to the inside and to the outside, that would afford a gamut of lived and virtual experiences. In a world of computing that he saw increasingly animated by languages and signs, he urged his listeners to heed what he called “enunciative assemblages,” configurations of signs that would bring forward novel ways of existing, that would morph into a new “aesthetico-ethical” paradigm focusing on the senses and on ways of inhabiting the planet. Hardly based on empty commands ( what Deleuze called “order words,” or mots d’ordre), it would bracket scientific “truths” for the sake of implementing technology toward creative invention. It would open disciplines onto practices given to ask: what world is possible? In short, Guattari advocated the reinvention of the world, via digital technologies, fostering creation of kaleidoscopic subjectivities comprised of heterogeneous components. Complicating the Promethean theme and the myth of Frankenstein, Guattari borrowed from Walter Benjamin to posit that a reinvention of the world still needs to bear the imprint of its potter’s hand. In other words, technology requires an existential dimension in which attention to the materiality of humans and singularity are keynote:
“When information supplants the old form, storytelling, and when it itself gives way to sensation, its double process reflects an imaginary degradation of experience” (Guattari quoting Benjamin, 67).
Taken more by Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) in which replicants successfully infiltrate a capitalist society in ruins than by the alienation of Frankenstein, Guattari wrote a film script in the 1970s, titled A Love of UIQ, (Universe of the Infra-Quark) about an alien infiltrating a commune of marginals. An encounter with the alien takes place. The alien’s language disturbs standard closures and reductions of signs and forms in Hertzien communication systems. Guattari saw the possibility of transforming—indeed of queering—subjectivities and their environs with the help of technologies, yet without any loss of existential possibility. Digital technologies, he proposed, can help humans reinvent themselves by way of an ongoing queering that his words imply to be a mode, understood intransitively, of becoming. They would enable us all to trace new maps, new diagrams, new lines of flight. The nagging question is how? In an era he labelled Integrated World Capitalism, which he castigated for its degraded relations among humans and non-humans, Guattari took special aim at social structures, whose degradation he attributed to the appropriation (or capture) of subjectivity by mass media. Guattari did not live long enough to witness the advent of social media, of smart phones and now of Artificial Intelligence.
In his book, The 4th Industrial Revolution (2016), Klaus Schwab, the Founder of the Davos Economic Forum, saw society transitioning under the impact of technological transformations. Demarcating tipping points associated with moments when a specific technology is adopted by a large part of society, Schwab imagined a regnum of self-driving cars, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, and robotics that would be producing major shifts as of 2025.
In 2023, the sudden explosion of AI, not only in medicine and specialized fields, but in all of society and everyday life with chat GPT, GPT4, the convergence in visual, audio and multi-media domains, took everyone by surprise. Added to social media and web3, among others, the consolidated further an impact that some hailed as the posthuman turn (N. Katherine Hayles 1999; Rosi Braidotti 2013) and others decried as “capture” (Brian Massumi 2013; Marc N. B. Hansen 2016). Where Hayles and especially Braidotti saw the liberating aspect of a posthuman condition, Massumi and Hansen claimed that it spelled doom insofar as technologies are always coopted by what they refer to as the “culture industry” and ever more virulent forms of capitalism. With capitalism, Guattari’s adventurous subjectivities are reduced to subjects of interest. Now in the business of inventing surplus life for increased value and profit, capitalism intervenes for Massumi (2018) at levels of bare life so that invention and innovation become difficult, if not impossible. In other words, as Goethe had argued, it is not the source but the model that is the problem, not the technology but the use to which it is (unavoidably) put in the regime of capitalism that, both paradoxically and integrally, it also helps to reinvent. Massumi and Hansen see capitalism capturing and coopting digital technologies for profit in all areas, from architecture, education, the arts and fashion to the manufacture of food. Technologies are hyped and glorified, deployed neither for human enrichment nor for the production of singularity but for reductionist ways of labelling, circulating and consuming. Digital technologies, implemented to discourage heterogenesis, stand at the antipodes of singularity, creative autonomy or any kind of queering outside the prescribed affects of capitalism. For Massumi and Hansen, they destroy social relations and relations with the environment. Following their destruction of singularity, they lead us to believe in a certain eternity from which finitude has been banished. It is the inverse of the Faustian theme: Faust does not have to ask to make time stand still. It has already been made to stand still.
Today’s Faust is a “techie” striving to separate himself from the earth and to think that tech will take care of everything. His wager is one of achieving complete immateriality, and not a trace of materiality. Nonetheless, it goes without saying that humans, be they post-humans or post-humanists, cannot live separated from the earth entirely or stake their savior on technological innovation. Unlike the dilemma that plagued Boito, the question is not whether God exists or can save, it is rather, who has the better mode of existence? And this question carries in it a sense of urgency. Humanism has been unmasked for generating capitalism, colonialism, the domination of minorities, and the destruction of nature. Humans have also been shown to be no longer at the top of the great Ladder of Being, but among many creatures who live entangled with one another. It is technologies that have revealed to us all the qualities of matter and materiality while they have also shown that humans are part of the world from which they thought they had exited. Technologies do not as much reveal a Heideggerian mystery than processes and assemblages of which humans are scarcely conscious. They have shown that the world is a vibrant continuum, and consciousness is but the tip of an iceberg piercing its placid surface. Today, if Faust as techie would strike a bargain with Mefistofele, it would be to become immortal and completely immaterial. He would want to be moving through a smooth space of capitalism without encountering the slightest turbulence. He would most likely choose not to redeem himself by becoming a politician, an occupation that has lost its aura and become near impossible in today’s multipolar world. He would want to become one of the tech rulers.
To redeem himself, no longer bathing in an aura of hype and destructive competitiveness, he would have to take care to reintroduce quality, and not quantity, in everyday life. Having no God to save him, he would have to discover for himself how to do away with the destruction he has caused. He would come back to Goethe’s sentence in his letter to his friend: It is not the source of knowledge; it is the model that is of concern. And the model here is an economic model, and with it comes the construction of a subject of interest. Faust would have to go beyond this template and realize, as Jussi Parikka has insisted (2015), that in using electricity technologies cannot be operative without oil and batteries fabricated from precious metals extracted from the earth often without regulation. Far from being immaterial, as they are now deployed, new technologies contribute to global warming and desertification that, in turn, drives people from their habitat and makes them undertake perilous migratory journeys. Because of accessibility, the technologies also privilege some parts of the world population at the expense of others.
Today’s Faust who thirsts for knowledge does not have to renounce the overarching potential of technology. He (the pronoun is deliberately chosen) has to learn to think of his impact on human and non-human lives and on the state of the planet. Goethe speculated on Greek and Latin models of culture, on combining classicism and romanticism. Today’s Faust has an entire globe, replete with multiple sources, histories, and stories, to consider. Because it is universally known that today’s capitalist model is destructive, Faust will have to deviate toward others. To quote the poet Mary Ann Duffy once more: He cannot simply adopt a life-style; he needs a life. The better mode of existence will keep humans and non-humans alive in pondering how to live with technologies, to construct computer-assisted subjectivities, all the while thinking of the material components and their consequences. It’s a question of retaining singularity, of being aware of finitude and fragility, and of caring for the ambient world. However, not from top down: Faust cannot simply morph into a charismatic ruler. Today, the chorus wants to sit at the table as well. Overcoming his desire for immateriality, Faust has to deal with care, that is, an ethos, a political commitment, and cultivate a practice of becoming.
Verena Andermatt Conley writes and teaches in the Department of Comparative LIterature at Harvard University. She is currently working on relations of ecology and technology. Her books include Ecopolitics The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought; Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World Space in French Cultural Theory; Rethinking Technologies (ed); a creative memoir, The War Against the Beavers; a novel, Cree: To Believe in the World. Author of many articles and book-chapters, she is finishing Care Tactics, forthcoming 2025.
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
*The cover image was created by Merzmensch using Midjourney and DALL-E 3
