Maria Esposito '22
Project Mentor:
- Derek Ford, PhD
Project Abstract:
Aesthetic Encounters Beyond the Present: Historical Materialism and Sonic Pedagogies for Resisting Abstraction
Basing ourselves on Marx’s method of historical materialism, this article builds on Marxist literature on capitalist abstraction and focuses on the struggle for differentialization. This amounts to a critique and, more importantly, an affirmation: elements of the future exist in the present. This is a future in which the force of capitalist abstraction is overcome through a new social order. This is not only a political struggle, but a pedagogical one as well in that it involves distinct educational logics with particular subjectivities, spatialities, and temporalities, which are elements of communism that exist in the present. The pedagogical gesture developed here is one of desubjectification, through which we encounter the world and ourselves as unknown and mitigate against capitalist individualism and abstraction. In the end, we suggest that sound education offers one such path.