Oh Man! Aggrieved Masculinity, Silicon Valley and the new Far-Right
Lecture by Ana Texeira Pinto on offended masculinity, Silicon Valley and the new right-wing extremism, as part of the lecture series at the Institute of Fine Arts, organized by the Studio for Art and Time | Media.
After the instant success of The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler wrote a short book that ends with his famous eulogy to a calcified roman soldier whose body was frozen in the line of duty. The text does not conjure triumph or glory but a highly gendered image of duty and sacrifice: “We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of the Vesuvius died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from a man.” - Oswald Spengler (2002 (1931)) Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, University Press of the Pacific, Oregon.
In a moment when a great many political questions are articulated in the rhetoric of masculinity, the present talk would like to examine the codifications of excess and the codifications of stoicism via which male aggression accrues cultural capital, and by extension, economic value; how does culture map onto the body a gendered vision of control, resistance and redress; and the surge of revolutionary energy without a clear political content, defined solely by the idea that violence gives rise to the sublime.
Dr. Ana Teixeira Pinto is a writer and cultural theorist based in Berlin. She is a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg (AdBK) and a theory tutor at the Dutch Art Institute. Her writings have appeared in publications such as Third Text, Afterall, e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, and Texte zur Kunst. She is the editor of a forthcoming book series on the antipolitical turn to be published by Sternberg Press. Together with Kader Attia and Anselm Franke, she organized the conference and podcast series “The White West: Whose Universal,” which took place at HKW Berlin, and she was a member of the 2022 Berlin Biennial artistic team.
This project is a cooperation between the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.
