Textdämmerung - by Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

The Abrahamic Metacritique

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Textdämmerung<br>On Arday, the EU, and How One Philosophizes with a Chatbot

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour<br>Aug 11, 2026<br>∙ Paid

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"Alles, alles, alles weiß ich, alles ward mir nun frei!… Ruhe, ruhe, du Gott!" —Brünnhilde, Götterdämmerung<br>Share<br>“For once to pose questions here with a hammer, and, perhaps, to hear as a reply that famous hollow sound…”<br>—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Both the Arday saga and the EU AI Act are episodes of the same apocalypse: for some time now, the principal function of text has ceased to be any meaning and has become merely its own production. Poststructuralism destroyed the innocence of reading by insisting that interpretation does not really recover meaning but produces it as an exercise of power. Texts survived this catastrophic collapse of our confidence in their meaning because they acquired other institutional and political functions that were increasingly independent of whether anybody actually found any meaning in them. The mere generation of text itself, the capacity to produce an authorized sequence of signs, has become the post-poststructuralist form of power. Thus we had an ironic moment in which poststructuralism annihilated the metaphysical privilege of the text to carry a determinate meaning recoverable by authoritative reading, while the institutions in which poststructuralism itself flourished radically expanded the material production of texts (publish-or-perish, metric-driven, jargon-saturated). The production of signs fully usurped the meaning of signs. We can’t decide meaning, but we can count output after all.<br>And now, we have lost the innocence of writing and the production of text.<br>As the Arday saga showed, the production of the text of a doctoral thesis, even if plagiarized, mediocre, inscrutable, and effectively unread, was nevertheless sufficient to perform the act by which academic authority and power were constituted (as Spiderman once said, with great power comes great funding). In other words, the mere production of text and documents is the instrument through which modern institutions of the mass-bourgeois society of the knowledge economy authenticate themselves. Credential textuality turned out to be the real constitutive core of academic authority, which then flows down to bureaucratic and professional authority. The production of text becomes the means by which power is acquired. Meaning had nothing to do with texts anymore. The institutional efficacy of text had become fully separated from its semantic efficacy, so that meaning stood to the textual credential roughly as the gold standard stands to a paper currency: remembered but irrelevant.<br>As a logical consequence of this, what mattered increasingly was not that the text be read, understood, or even be capable of sustaining any meaning. Most academic writing is unread, unchallenged, and unreadable meaningless jargon. Bureaucratic corporate writing is pure performative boilerplate of mind-numbing Davos talk. What mattered about the text was that it existed, that the doc had the proper format, and that its production certified the position of the person authorized to produce it.<br>AI’s mechanization of this process separates textual production from intellectual production, automates it and lowers its cost, at an unprecedented industrial scale. It thus threatens less the activity of real writing, which necessarily required real thinking, and I must insist, was rare anyway and much rarer than institutions pretended, than the monopoly over textual production, which was used as an official proxy of cognition and from which the considerable authorizing power of the cognitive elite of modern society is derived. AI very simply demystifies writing and text production by removing the need to pretend that the median output was the product of scarce intellectual labor.

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