Keynote Lecture: The World Ends, Masculinity Endures

I det forberedende arbeidet med forestillingen Male Fantasies av Pia Maria Roll og Mohamed Mohamed har Ana Teixeira Pintos essay Male Fantasies: The Sequel vært en referanse for Pia Maria Roll. I september utgir Pinto en ny bok, The World Ends, Masculinity Endures, hvor Pinto tar utgangspunkt i begrepet «cyberføydalisme» og spør hva som skjer når borgere gradvis gjøres overflødige, og hvilke ideologier som legitimerer denne utviklingen. I den forbindelse har vi en keynote lecture av Ana Teixeira Pinto og etter forestillingen blir det en samtale mellom Pinto, Roll og hennes kompani.

The World Ends, Masculinity Endures av Ana Teixeira Pinto
In this talk, I argue that, contrary to what proponents of terms like “cyber-feudalism” suggest, when we speak about the dawn of a new cyber-feudal era, we are not really describing the end of a specific mode of production. Rather, we are witnessing the retreat of the state’s most socially integrated facet. Cyber-feudalism, as I understand it, names the moment when the majority of the population, no longer relevant to the primary mode of accumulation, can be disposed of. This, I contend, is what underlies the ongoing assault on political and civil rights: without incentives to sustain their populations as members of a political community, states will seek to suspend the rights they had previously granted, and this is the stage we are now in.

Trump’s murderous alacrity, his use of maximum brute force with a minimum of justification, violence that is technically precise yet morally illegible, open contempt for international law, and absolute impunity, are the epiphenomena of this transition. The cruelty is not the point; the cruelty is the affect. The point is to unmake citizens and govern the rightless as wards.

When states abdicate the work of sustaining populations, they leave a void—not only in material provision but in meaning. That void, I argue, must be filled by an ideology capable of naturalizing the notion that neglect is not a breakdown but a restoration of order.

If cruelty is the affect, artificial intelligence the infrastructure, and the unmaking of citizens the political project, then my central claim is this: masculinity, understood as an ideological formation, is what performs the ideological work and supplies the moral grammar for this transition.

Taken together, cruelty as affect, masculinity as grammar, the unmaking of citizens as project, and artificial intelligence as infrastructure constitute the ideological and material apparatus of an emerging new mode of governance, and it is these coordinates that this talk maps out.

● Ana Teixeira Pinto er forfatter og kulturteoretiker. Hun er professor i kunstteori og digitale kulturer ved HGB Leipzig og redaktør for Sternberg Press' bokserie On the Antipolitical. Tekstene hennes har blitt publisert i publikasjoner som Third Text, Afterall, e-flux journal, Hyperallergic, Ibraaz, artforum og Berlin Review. Hun var medorganisator for HKW Berlins konferanse- og podkastserie The White West, og medredaktør for den påfølgende publikasjonen Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity (Sternberg Press/MIT).

Keynote Lecture foregår på engelsk.