The End of Violence and the Task of Aesthetic Education: From Karl Marx to Gayatri Spivak

We propose to investigate the role of education, an aesthetic education in particular, in the cultivation of a change of consciousness, understood through a Marxian perspective as a condition of possibility of a resolution of systemic violence. For the purposes of the present project, the myriad of forms of systemic violence will be analysed through a common denominator: the perpetuation of the separation of masses of people from the means and conditions of their own labour, as implied by the capitalist mode of production. We will follow Gayatri Spivak’s reading of Marx, in which she understands the Capital as a primarily pedagogical project, aiming at a change of consciousness needed for the advent of a revolution ending economic violence. While already present in Marx’s work, the idea of an aesthetic education countering violence has been expanded by a lineage of thinkers inspired by Marx’s work, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon and Spivak herself. By comparing their perspectives on the ways aesthetic education can alter sensibilities and desires, ultimately allowing for an unlearning of the desire for power that perpetuates capitalist exploitation, we will evaluate exemples and concrete possibilities of the application of their ideas in practice.