of the unreal. What poetry, as clearing projection, unfolds of unconcealment and projects ahead into the rift-design of the figure, is the open region which poetry lets happen . . .” (BW, 197). In this essay, Heidegger is already beginning to think about the poietic and Dichtung in terms of a topology of language, even if he does not yet call it by this name. Unfolding the “open region,” that is, the Lichtung or the clearing, the poietic dimension of art, puts our everyday world into question, displacing the usual ways in which we represent, know, do, or evaluate, as Heidegger remarks. It can decisively transform not only our relation to language but also our manner of being in the world. Heidegger idiomatically recasts the term Dichtung to describe this specific poietic capacity, and does so expressly in order to distinguish it from the cultural or literary senses of poetry and even from literature conceived more broadly. In this specific poietic sense, all art is “language,” that is, the event coming to word, opening up the clearing as the way of language. The poietic indicates, therefore, a different “language” of relating to being—through words and not just signs—relating that is at stake and at work in various arts. One of the crucial claims of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is that only when we can see past aesthetics, that is, past the metaphysical idea of art as an aesthetic object and/or a cultural product, it may become possible—Heidegger writes vielleicht, “perhaps,” in Über den Anfang—to discern this poietic momentum of art as opening up a distinct modality of relations, perhaps transformative with regard to the technicity constitutive of the modern being in the world. Heidegger’s Metaphysik und Nihilismus announces that this different “poietics” can emerge only when art in its metaphysical incarnations comes to an end. What this means is that the end of art comes to imply the possibility of a new sense of the poietic, with the emphasis displaced from representation and aesthetics to the question of the possible, of the “unprethinkable” and the emergent.
This notion of the poietic understood as a mode of revealing is then juxtaposed in “The Question Concerning Technology” with technicity, that is, with the revealing of being as availability. Technics and poietics constitute the two ways of revealing the actual in modernity: revealed in its poietic momentum, the actual is not simply “seen” as different from the ordinary but comes to be otherwise than when it is disclosed technically. To put it briefly, in the poietic mode, the actual is not constituted as available, that is, as the “standing-reserve” of resources ready to be ordered, manipulated, or produced through the multiple operations of power pervading modern technological society. Instead, the actual is disclosed poietically as essentially futural, open to possibilities and transformations, never fully present or at our disposal, and thus never truly reducible to what becomes available of