What lies within Gert Biesta’s going beyond learning?

Reclaiming learning

“…But, is just any powerful influence homogeneously and uniformly guilty (qua the opposite of innocent) of pernicious effects and complicit in undesirable realities? After all, as I argue elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2020), one learns by reading Biesta. Is this learning complicit or is it, perhaps, one of the few instances where Biesta might consider becoming optimist about the good aspects of learning?…”

“…I have elsewhere (Papastephanou, 2020) argued out my objection to ‘refusing the very identity of the learner’ and claimed that we may refuse some enactments of the learner identity, not the learner identity as such. In addition, I have pointed out that the assumption that we can always jump out of identities is as individualistic (or even more so) as the kind of learning that is for the sake of one’s own self.…”

“…Viewing learning as a ‘functional apparatus’ that fails to differentiate the human from the animal he commits himself to a time-honoured yet dubious operation of defining the human in exceptionalist terms, namely, by the human’s evaluative opposition to the animalistic. Still, he importantly accommodates the constructed (through learning and imitation) in his onto-anthropology, instead of defining human naturalness in biologistic terms through, say, breathing and digestion or organicist maturation, as Biesta does (see Papastephanou, 2020). However, Castoriadis also confines learning to a specific kind of human construction, one that is uncritical and passive qua reproductive.…”

“…What he wholesale tarnishes above as adaptive-conformist is ultimately a very specific, modern and hegemonic sense of learning: ‘now, theories of learning – and, more generally, conceptions of history based upon them – offer nothing capable of elucidating this malleability’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382, my emphasis). But, instead of contrasting to such theories another, more complicated, account (and reality) of learning, he exclusively resorts to imagination (radically opposed to learning) just as Biesta does when placing emancipation in the similar position of a normative, redemptive and transformative force (Papastephanou, 2020). Castoriadis singularizes imagination in such a position as follows: ‘in contrast, an elucidation of the socialization of the psyche on the basis of the imagination and of the imposition on the latter of the each time given institution of society’ makes it possible ‘to view the entirety of the phenomena [societal change] within a framework that renders it, in principle, comprehensible’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382).…”

“…Biesta’s critique is very significant. However, I see in it (Papastephanou, 2020) an infelicitous identification of the concept of learning with the current conception of learning that the politics of learning disseminates, as if the current conception captured the absolute meaning of learning with no semantic surplus, no remainder, no ambiguities and no tensions. I will not repeat this argument here but, keeping it in view, I will deploy my own response to the above dire straits.…”