Abstract
Many educational philosophers have criticized the shift from lifelong education to lifelong learning. Gert Biesta, in particular, claims that learning individualistically promotes ‘learnification’, that is, a pernicious politics at the expense of relational educational experiences. While I endorse many of his critical points, I have argued that his theorization of learning overlooks conceptual nuance and semantic tensions. Ingerid Straume has also illustrated some such tensions by referring to Cornelius Castoriadis’ notion of politics. But, in this article, I wish to develop this critical discussion by examining Castoriadis’ conception of learning alongside Biesta’s. Pointing out ambiguities of learning, I conclude with a conception of learning as diversified and inclusive of anamorphic (transformative) possibilities throughout a person’s life, in tensed company with others and in a complex engagement with the cultural and socio-political milieu.
Introduction
Many educational-philosophical discourses concerning knowledge throughout life presuppose an important distinction between formal lifelong education and non-regulated lifelong learning. Lifelong education relies on teaching, typified forms and bodies of knowledge as well as specific recipients of diverse yet formally organized educational acts. Socially and politically, this notion is popularized, prominent, systemically favoured and managerially valued. Lifelong learning is more indeterminate and informal. It involves learning to learn through critical reflection on culture, history, nature and interaction in daily life. Thus, against current and popular tendencies to reify both education and learning by seeing them as secure paths to getting a good job, we may think of lifelong learning beyond collecting degrees and increasing one’s employability. In one of his interviews, Cornelius Castoriadis (2010) also evoked such a differentiation. He indicated the distinct and irreplaceable character of cultural, lifelong, non-formal learning by emphasizing that for the ancient Athenian even the walls of the city had an edifying value. This aspect of learning operates against the obsessive passion for order and regulation that often underpins expanded forms of organized education.
However, lifelong learning no longer seems innocent. It has also been co-opted by managerialism and subjected to market demands, logics and politics. Within philosophy of education, important critical arguments have been raised against the shift from lifelong education to lifelong learning. It is argued that we should complicate lifelong learning (Straume, 2011), revisit it (Guilherme, Steren dos Santos and Spagnolo, 2017) and possibly even discard it (Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Responding ‘to the growing emphasis on learning outcomes, life-long learning, and […] the learning society’, scholars turn ‘to alternative educational logics that problematize the reduction of education to learning’ (Lewis and Friedrich, 2016).
Gert Biesta has aired very influential and important ideas, radicalizing the above line of thought. He criticizes the replacement of education with learning and associates it with what he calls ‘learnification’, a politics of learning (Biesta, 2013: 5). He considers ‘the shift from “adult education” to “lifelong learning”’ a ‘prominent manifestation of the rise of this “new language of learning”’ (Biesta, 2013: 5). Though the latter has, at times, had empowering effects, ‘particularly where teaching was conceived in narrow, controlling and authoritarian ways’, it ‘has also had some less desirable consequences’. It has promoted the hegemony of the individualism that Biesta sees as intrinsic to the concept of learning: ‘“learning”, unlike “education”, is an individualistic and individualising term’ (Biesta, 2013: 6). As the title of Biesta’s (2015b) book Beyond Learning: Democratic education for a human future indicates, democracy should transcend rather than expand learning.
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. I hope to navigate away from current managerial and politically dubious glorifications of learning, while also steering clear from wholesale incriminations of learning (such as Biesta’s). Ingerid Straume (2016: 40) employs Castoriadis’ distinction between the political and politics to critique inter alia what she sees, rightly in my view, as Biesta’s contradictory reliance on the very learning that he condemns for theorizing democracy. 1 Straume convincingly argues that, despite his declared intentions, in his account of democracy, Biesta sacrifices the political to the social and that Castoriadis provides a better alternative. Straume (2011) has also used Castoriadis in a more head-on discussion of Biesta’s idea of learning. However, I will use Castoriadis’s philosophy differently, that is, not as a source from where to reconstruct a more appropriate conception of lifelong learning but rather as an ambiguous approach to learning that reveals: tensions in modern conceptions of learning that affect also Biesta’s account; and the need for a more complex conception of learning. Learning as such should not be conceptually limited and thereby reproductive of the semantic content that it has taken in modern and post-modern times.
Thus, after critically discussing Biesta and Castoriadis, I connect the idea of lifelong learning with my notion of the anamorphic 2 gaze that reflects, and makes common cause with, a periagogic outlook on space and time. I do not confine the periagogic to its original theorization in Plato, as I also use what I call Aristotelian ‘kinetics’ and ‘stasis’ as a kind of (and reformulated) techne tis periagogis authorized by a whole family of virtues. Thus, I employ ‘the art of periagogi’ in order to frame a normative surplus in the notion of learning that cannot be channelled into standard(ized) apotheoses of learning and can work to critique them. To unpack the conceptual and pedagogical reasons for such an endeavour, I briefly contrast the extracted conception of periagogic, anamorphic learning with Biesta’s notion of resistance and ‘emancipation without learning’ (Biesta, 2013).
The politics of lifelong learning
Let me first indicate some of the political complicities of the shift from lifelong education to lifelong learning and of the managerial hijacking of the latter. Biesta traces the shift in question thoroughly and informatively but, for reasons of space and brevity, I glean the following from his account: for a long time, the idea of ‘lifelong’ had ‘been connected to the notion of education […] and not to that of learning. Even in the 1970s, the rise of interest in the “lifelong”, so to speak, was always connected to education’ (Biesta, 2013: 7). However, in the nineties, ‘the idea that lifelong learning is first and foremost about the development of human capital, so as to secure competitiveness and economic growth’, started playing a central role. For instance, Lifelong Learning for All, an influential document by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (see Biesta, 2013), ‘put a strong emphasis on the economic rationale for lifelong learning, which was itself understood in the rather formal sense as learning “throughout life”’. The document ‘presented the idea of “lifelong learning for all” as “the guiding principle for policy strategies that will respond directly to the need to improve the capacity of individuals, families, workplaces and communities to continuously adapt and renew”’. Adaptation and renewal were ‘presented as necessary in the face of changes in the global economy and the world of work’. Drawing textual evidence directly from the document, Biesta continues: ‘lifelong learning “from early childhood education to active learning in retirement”’ was ‘thus presented as “an important factor in promoting employment and economic development”, and, in addition to this, also in promoting “democracy and social cohesion”’. Breaking with previous documents and reports that made ‘a case for shifting the attention from social cohesion to democratic participation and from economic growth to human development’, the OECD document ‘went in the opposite direction’ concerning ‘economic growth, and saw democracy and social cohesion as compatible “agendas” rather than as agendas that are potentially in tension with each other’ (Biesta, 2013: 7). Gradually, as Biesta pertinently remarks, a politics of learning was developed whose key dimensions comprised the ‘increasing tendency to turn political problems into learning problems’. This shifted the ‘responsibility for addressing such problems from the state and the collective to the level of individuals’. Such a tendency is evident ‘in the rise of the economic rationale’ and in making individuals ‘responsible for keeping up their employability in rapidly changing global markets’. This blocks the question ‘as to why such markets should rule over the economy and over social and political life more generally in the first place’. Instead, ‘the issue is entirely defined as a question of individual adaptation and adjustment – as a matter of learning – and not as one of structural issues and collective responsibilities’ (Biesta, 2013: 8).
We live, then, in an era whose self-understanding and way of standing out as an epoch surpassing previous stages of human development is through the term ‘learning age’. Within such an intellectual and economic climate, it is no wonder that we are ‘surrounded by claims that learning is something inevitable, something we have to do and cannot not do’ (Biesta, 2013: 4). Thus, learning ‘should not only take place in schools, colleges and universities, but actually should go on throughout our lives, both extended in time (the idea of lifelong learning) and extended in space (the idea of life-wide learning – that is, learning which permeates all aspects of our lives)’ (Biesta, 2013: 4). The ‘ongoing individualisation of lifelong learning’ and its reformulation ‘as the acquisition of a set of flexible skills and competencies’ serve the ideological emphasis ‘on the need for individuals to adapt and adjust to the demands of the global economy’. There we may detect ‘the subtle but crucial semantic shift from “lifelong education” – a relational concept – to “lifelong learning” – an individualistic concept’ (Biesta, 2013: 7).
But why does Biesta deem learning thus? Here is his indirect answer: ‘“learning” is an individualistic and individualising term’, for ‘learning is, after all, something one can only do for oneself’, as ‘it is not possible to learn for somebody else’ (Biesta, 2013: 6). In addition, in English, ‘“learning” generally denotes a process or an activity’, which means ‘that the word “learning” is in itself neutral or empty with regard to content, direction and purpose’ (Biesta, 2013: 6). In other words, for Biesta, there is no normativity intrinsic to learning as such: ‘to suggest that learning is good or desirable – and thus to suggest that it is something which should go on throughout one’s life or which should be promoted in schools’ is meaningless unless you specify ‘what the content of the learning is’ and until you specify ‘what the purpose of the learning is’. This normative vacuity of the term ‘learning’ causes problems in educational settings since ‘the point of education – be it school education or the education of adults – is never just that students learn, but that they learn something and that they learn this for particular reasons’. Overtaking education, the individualism of learning shifts ‘attention away from the importance of relationships in educational processes and practices’ and makes ‘it far more difficult to explore what the particular responsibilities and tasks of educational professionals, such as teachers and adult educators, actually are’ (Biesta, 2013: 6).
Therefore, for Biesta, such operations of learning are no co-option of the notion of learning by managerial logics and logistics. Had he viewed learning as hijacked by individualism rather than as individualist per se, he would have promoted a reformulation of learning to free it from learnification. Instead, he wants to free teaching and education from learning (Biesta, 2015a). He conceptually incriminates learning as individualistic; hence he makes no room for a learning that is different from the standardized notion, not necessarily inherently complicit in individualism and thus redeemable from learnification. Still, he allows some normative differentiation, especially when learning is qualified as civic and placed within a subjectification frame (e.g. Cowell and Biesta, 2016: 433). But he takes a step back almost immediately, sometimes even in the very same paragraph. As a case in point, consider this passage: … to highlight these aspects of the politics of learning – that is, the political work which is being achieved through the notion and language and discourse of learning – is not to deny that there may be some good aspects to learning (although I am becoming less and less optimistic about this, precisely because of the problems outlined above), but to be aware that the language of learning, which fundamentally is individualistic, individualising and process-oriented rather than substantive, is not an innocent language, but actually a language which exerts a powerful influence on what we can be and how we can be – one that tends to domesticate rather than to emancipate (Biesta, 2013: 8–9, my emphasis).
In other words, we learn from Biesta to be more suspicious and aware of power mechanisms of learning. But we also learn, through going beyond Biesta, that, if we do not wish to discard learning wholesale, we must attach meanings to it that go against the grain. In my view, learning from Biesta exemplifies that learning is not a uniform, fundamentally individualistic, notion. That it is ‘learning from’, rather than ‘learning for’, does not make it less relational. Besides, learning for the sake of others depends on what one learns and on the significance of this learning-content for the way one relates to others. There is a learning that is as relational as education can be and I am interested in what this learning, so diverse and varied even for the very person that reads Biesta (or any other author whose work offers an engaging and informative perspective) at different occurrences, may consist of and of what order it may be. In a later section, I theorize it as a periagogic, anamorphic learning.
However, Biesta has, as we saw above, concluded that the language of learning is individualistic and he is not optimistic about this being reparably so. ‘But if this is so, what are the opportunities for resistance and what might learning still have to do there?’ (Biesta, 2013: 9). His answer involves break, rupture and an interruption of learning that often takes the rhetorical form of a language exalting phrases such as ‘emancipation without learning’, ‘against learning’ (see Biesta, 2005, for example), ‘teaching freed from learning’ and education ‘going beyond learning’. He writes that ‘a starting point for such interrupting is to resist the suggestion that learning is a natural process and thus something that simply “occurs” – as if beyond our control’. He then emphasizes ‘the importance of refusing the very identity of a learner and, more specifically, of a lifelong learner – a refusal that at the same time can expose and oppose the workings of the politics of learning’ (Biesta, 2013: 13, my emphasis).
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. Hence, I will not cover this ground here. Instead, let me turn to the assumption of learning not occurring as if beyond our control. Some learning(s) occur(s) and we have no control over it/them at that moment. 3 Still, this does not entail that we can never have a critical, reflective outlook over what we have learnt throughout our life-history or at some point in our life-span. There is some passivity in education and in learning, as Emile Bojesen theorizes it. There is a kind of learning from existence which exceeds structure (Bojesen, 2018: 929) and, as he writes, ‘can change us without us quite knowing how or in what way’. Even if (or when) such a change in ‘our perceptions, our sense of self, our internalised hierarchies of value’ occurs only ‘for a little while’, ‘this change is itself an education: a passive education’ (928).
Bojesen does not advocate this passivity as oppositional to ‘an active education’; nor does he claim ‘that passive education is in any way “better” or more important than active education’. Instead, he describes and outlines passive education/learning ‘as an education which occurs whether we attempt it or not’. With this theorization, Bojesen targets ‘forms of educational thought which, through fate or design, exclude the passive dimension, either within or outside of formal educational settings’. More deeply, he argues that ‘education does occur outside of formal educational settings’ and that, ‘contra Gert Biesta and his critique of “learnification”, we may gain rather than lose something by attending to it as education’ (Bojesen 2018: 928).
In fact, Biesta’s work is also open to such a potential direction, if we set aside his declarative statements and if we think them through to alternative implications. In his Beyond Learning (2015b) Biesta took great pains to show that some educational notions allow us to avoid problematic assumptions such as the nature or essence of human beings and to turn attention to human existence. If he were consistent enough on this to expand his attack beyond anthropological to conceptual essentialism, he would also avoid the conceptual essentialism that lies within the incrimination of learning as such and the attribution of individualism to the conceptual nature of learning. His Arendtian account of natality and of how ‘newcomers’ might come ‘into presence’ (see also Biesta, 2019) has led him to what I see as a conclusion similar to that of Castoriadis or of Bojesen: that, as a public process, our coming into presence is political in the sense of ‘occurring in the polis’ (Biesta, 2019). In my view, our existence unfolds not just in the presence of others who are not like us but also in singular space and time involving unique ways of learning in passivity, receptivity, responsiveness, activity, criticality, self-reflexivity and even reactive rupture. All this can be read without entailing a wholesale incrimination of learning and an exaggeration of the educator’s role at the expense of the passivity of learning and the informality of the process and occurrence of learning through living in space and time. From such a perspective, learning and education occur without the natural spontaneity that Biesta justifiably condemns. To illustrate this, I draw, in the next section, on an example from one of Castoriadis’s interviews and critically discuss some related ideas from Castoriadis’ writings.
Castoriadis and learning
In a brief extract of one interview (in Greek-my translation henceforth), Castoriadis (2010) begins to discuss education with a negation: he claims that we cannot separate education from the total socio-political condition. To justify his claim he refers to Plato. Plato wrote, says Castoriadis, that even the walls of the city educate people. For Castoriadis, this is ‘a most important truth’. From then on he continues with an affirmation, which seems to chime with the notion of lifelong learning that learnification exploits and Biesta chastises: ‘a person’s paideia begins from one’s first day of life and ends with one’s death’. 4 This is for no essentialist or naturalist reason whatever. It is entirely because a human being is ‘constantly constructed’ (significantly for this article and for the anamorphic learning that I will theorize, the Greek term that Castoriadis employs is ‘dia-morphonetai’). Persons become constructed by all that surrounds them.
Castoriadis then asks a rhetorical question about what kind of construction an ancient Athenian had when walking through the city or attending drama and what the construction of the modern Athenian might be within the monstrous development of Athens in the last 40 years into a city of cement. I will not get into issues of elitism, romanticization of antiquity or of incrimination of modern urbanism but, to be fair to Castoriadis, and despite this sort of too uniform and non-nuanced elaboration at the interview, his whole work shows that he was hardly an apologist of ancient slave-owning and patriarchal society or an uncritical celebrator of ancient thought or of modern high culture. Besides, what is important here is that, regardless of how he evaluates various social constructions, he makes a valuable point about construction and learning as occurrences that derive from a kind of passivity and receptivity throughout life within a polis, a passivity and receptivity that, we may extrapolate, cannot be suspended all at once or critiqued and refused simultaneously as a whole. Such construction is a political event, and not the result of either formal education or naturalized processes of maturation. It chimes with Bojesen’s account of passive education as something that happens to us all, as we receive learning experiences passively every day. We may become attuned to this passivity, ‘realizing what is happening, affirming it, invoking it as part of our educational relations’ (Bojesen, 2018: 929).
Castoriadis contrasts this ‘learning from the walls of the city’ with the growing, detrimental emphasis within schools on measurement, success, preparation for profitable jobs, for earning money and for being competitive. But, certainly, the passivity of learning is not always good. The construction of the self within a polis secures social cohesion, which, as Biesta rightly remarks, is not always compatible and reconcilable with democracy or with the independence and subjective autonomy that precondition change. In critiquing conformist tendencies and the corresponding sense of learning, Castoriadis had, in some of his writings, come very close to Biesta’s dismissive rhetoric on learning. Echoing the broad tendency of French philosophy to extol rupture and radical break, Castoriadis, like Biesta, also spoke about going beyond learning (at least concerning specific normative issues): ‘the true questions of historicity are situated beyond “learning”, “rationalization”, “problem-solving”, and “progress”’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 384). But he parts company with Biesta on crucial points, some of which are singled out by Straume (2011 and 2016).
Let me briefly deploy Castoriadis’ own oscillations as concerns learning. In one of his works (1997: 378), Castoriadis characterizes ‘imitation and learning’ as ‘highly animalistic traits’ that are not ‘proper to [the hu]man’. 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. He then normativizes imagination as proper to humanity and destructive of learning (rather than allied in any way to it). Castoriadis writes: ‘proper to [the hu]man’ is ‘the destruction’ of imitation and learning; ‘the malignant, as if cancerous, growth of the imagination without regard to functionality shatters these two apparatuses and subjects their debris to nonfunctionality (representational pleasure overtaking organ pleasure)’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 378, my emphasis). But how does imagination grow? His drastic opposition of imagination and learning reintroduces a biologism and organicism through the back door and, more, normatively exalts imagination without asking whether imagination can grow into such a force without learning and without imitation (both, learning and imitation in their diversified conceptualizations that allow them some normative ambiguity). Nor does he consider the growth of imagination working for a rupture that may be far more gruesome than the establishment that it disrupts.
Castoriadis differentiates animal learning from human learning as follows: ‘animal learning relates to a proper world that is given once and for all and on the basis of “subjective” apparatuses also given once and for all’; by contrast, human learning ‘concerns only the functions of the human as “pure animal”’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382 my emphasis). He illustrates human learning with ‘gripping, standing erect and walking, etc’, adding this caveat: ‘in so far as it might be legitimate to separate them in an abstract manner from the rest’. What might the rest be, especially if we consider that Castoriadis has already told us that human learning is only about purely animalistic functions of the human being? However, based on his further statement that ‘the essential feature of human “learning” does not concern a proper world given once and for all’ but relates ‘to another social-historical world, to other societies’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382), we extrapolate that, in addition to learning to walk, to stand, to grip, etc., learning is also about becoming adept at the culture and idioms of one’s specific lifeworld. But, more, and in tension with Castoriadis’ condemnation of learning to the conformism and predictability of the human ‘as pure animal’, people also become versed in other cultures, often in break (relative or radical) with their own, and thus also learn to expand their imaginative reach and to transcend their lifeworldly givens.
For Castoriadis, the human is by logical necessity a constructed and not merely a biological being. But, having limited learning to biological functionality, he is then led to opposing learning to constant human reshuffling and constructed worldliness: ‘if human behaviour were only learning, one sees neither why nor how one would ever have exited from the “first society”’. He employs the ‘existence of history and the diversity of societies’ as proof that forces us to ‘recognize as essential to the human this capacity for creation that makes it invent new forms of behaviour, as well as to receive, should the case arise, the new’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 383). Unsurprisingly (given how he has defined learning), Castoriadis disconnects learning from any receptivity of the new. ‘Receiving the new has nothing to do with any sort of learning’, for, ‘such reception amounts, at minimum, to a massive and sudden modification of the already established “subjective” mechanisms’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 383). 5 For Castoriadis, the passivity (and quasi-naturality) of construction that heteronomously leads to social cohesion is not countered by a learning irreducible to reproductive adaptation to the existent. Instead, it is countered by the malleability of the human being: malleability is essential to the human being and ‘permits it here to learn Bamileke culture and there Florentine culture’ and, without it, ‘there would be no history, no different societies’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382 my emphasis). However, in my view, this malleability is the anthropological substratum, the precondition, for construction beyond adaptability. It permits precisely to learn something different, but it does not produce by itself any transformation (let alone a desirable one), without a diversified notion of learning (such as the undertone of the word ‘learn’ that I have italicized in the citation concerning one’s learning foreign cultural material and transcending the boundaries of one’s own lifeworld).
I believe that Castoriadis, as it will also become evident later when I turn to another of his works, deep down maintains a more diversified rather than uniformly biologistic and incriminated (devalued) sense of learning. 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).
Indeed, polemics motivated Castoriadis’ position and, possibly, sealed the fate of learning within the above passages: in a subtle and unwitting textual operation, learning per se became identified with the notion that Castoriadis’ opponents engaged. But things get more complicated in the following remark that personalizes his opponent as an adherent to the idea of the learning process: ‘One tends, sometimes, to present the whole of the history of humanity as a cumulative “learning” process across generations and social forms’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382). Significantly, Castoriadis next contests the ‘true’ character of the learning that his opponent values by inserting the word ‘alleged’ and by placing learning within quote-marks: ‘It is almost fated for this viewpoint to interpret this alleged “learning” as a more or less successful form of “problem-solving” and to connect the latter with a “process of rationalization”’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 382–383, my emphasis). Thus, Castoriadis not only offers an important critique of the cumulative effect attributed to learning and of the developmentalism beneath such interpretations of learning, but he also makes room for a more diversified way of approaching learning.
This impression becomes intensified when he further uses conditionals concerning learning being cumulative and problem-solving: if the human ‘is defined by learning, and if this learning is cumulative, what are we to make of the immense regression and massive losses that characterize Western history from the third to the tenth centuries CE?’ And, ‘if this learning is a learning of “problem-solving”, one ought to be able to define what are the problems that are posed in general, everywhere and always, to humanity and in what their solution would consist’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 383). Elsewhere (1991), Castoriadis offers concrete illustrations of the historical record being inauspicious concerning facile progressivist-cumulative conceptions of learning. ‘Learning, we are told once again today, is the basic motor of human history’. To this, Castoriadis responds with the sardonic laughter of history at exemplary cases of the human having, ironically and sadly, not learned at all: ‘considering the ease with which people “forget” psychoanalysis, ethnology, prehistory, history’ and ‘two world wars, gas chambers, the Gulag, Pol Pot, Khomeini, and so on and so forth – we must concede that learning is not a motive force, not even a secondary one, for contemporary reflection in this domain’ (Castoriadis, 1991: 33–34).
In another interview, Castoriadis’s notion of learning parts company with Biesta’s, as it becomes diversified to contain a clearly affirmative sense. Instead of considering learning as a purely animalistic adaptation mechanism or an instrument of a conservative institution; and instead of pleading for teaching without learning or for going beyond learning, Castoriadis writes: ‘if the teachers are not capable of inspiring children with love both for what they are learning and for the act of learning, they're not teachers’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 318). 6 So, what will happen in a world ‘without learning’ (the affirmative one)? For Castoriadis, this would be a world where the adaptive and profit-making sense of learning would have triumphed: ‘without that, one may possibly exit from high school like some kind of exam fiend, but not as someone open to the world with a passion for this enormous dimension of human existence that is knowledge’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 318).
Castoriadis had elsewhere incriminated learning in a way reminiscent of how Biesta also has, so much more recently, done so. Let us remember how Castoriadis had endorsed a biologistic conception of learning: he chastised the tendency ‘to make learning play the role of a central category’, and worse, ‘of a deus ex machina that would miraculously’ bridge ‘the gap between the animal world and the human one’. For Castoriadis, learning cannot answer ‘the question of the new’. For, ‘learning - like its cousin, adaptation - as important and ineliminable as it might be, is a biological category’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 381). Still, he wrote that, ‘in strictly biological terms’, what ‘the notion includes’ is both evident and infinitely enigmatic, as it ‘refers immediately to philosophical questions, those that a philosophy of the living being’ should elucidate. And then Castoriadis set an investigative task: ‘one could contribute something to the understanding of the human domain if one began to specify what differentiates human “learning” from animal learning’. He considered this task as pending (‘I do not think that this has yet been done’) (Castoriadis, 1997: 382), but, as we have seen, he made some steps, there (1997) and elsewhere (2005), towards indicating how human learning might be. Some of his steps reflected a biologistic conception of learning, but, at some point, he moved toward a more nuanced sense of learning that not only avoided a wholesale incrimination of learning and of knowledge but even rejected drastic and needless dilemmas of either uncritically glorifying or discarding learning.
As textual proof of this, in the remaining part of this section, I cite a relevant passage. The interviewer of Castoriadis mentioned ‘two opposing groups: those who would opt for rote learning and those who would tend more to develop the person and the citizen’; the latter ‘would be obliged to sacrifice knowledge and the transmission thereof’. Castoriadis’ response is most informative. ‘For my part, I reject this dilemma’. Those who endorse it do not balance ‘well the two components’. In his ‘opinion, teaching is of course educating within an institutional framework’ and assisting ‘students to acquire their autonomy; but it is also getting them to love knowledge and the process of its acquisition, which cannot occur without learning things’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 322-3). Without a positive sense of learning that is not adaptive, the person’s autonomy is impossible: ‘I don't see how one can form students as autonomous beings, in the true and full sense of the term, if these beings don't learn to love knowledge, therefore if they don't learn. It's almost a tautology’ (Castoriadis, 2005: 323).
Learning as anamorphic and periagogic
Some learning(s) may operate adaptively and quasi-biologically, and there is no space or reason here to explore in what sense or to what extent this might be the case concerning each instance of acquiring knowledge. Some learning(s) may contribute to the reproduction of society and the heteronomy of subjects and some may even enforce or rationalize the worst complicities. However, sometimes, some learning(s) effect not just any transformation but the kind of transformation that draws the human world into something better. Such has, for instance, been the case of learning to question patriarchy and empire, to contest the supposed naturalness of slavery, superiority of the white, rich and educated, etc., and to reject the assumption that the human rightfully rules over the environment. Such is also the case of learning to turn a more discerning eye to reality, not to stay content with the feats stated in the previous sentence, namely, feats of learning to combat blatant and glaring pathologies. Valuable and lifelong then is also to learn how to detect and combat subtler pathologies. Of importance is also to learn more positive and affirmative tasks, going beyond the diagnostic logic of spotting evils to eradicate them with no attention to whether the new that aspires (supposedly or truly) to draw us into something better is truly worthy.
In other words, some learning(s) – entirely dependent upon knowledge of things – work for an ethico-political vision rather than for subjective adaptation and societal reproduction. Their lifelong significance does not rest in offering measurable qualifications that primarily benefit the self and alleviate societies from the burden of taking measures for justice. Ethico-politically significant learning(s) could thus be described as anamorphic, as having an anamorphic effect on the learner. In art, anamorphic is an image that, though not noticeable from a conventional perspective, becomes meaningful when viewed from unexpected optics and de-stabilizes the subject’s confident gaze (Papastephanou, 2017). For instance, in Renaissance paintings, 7 the anamorphic skull, elongated and distorted, required a unique perspective in order to be viewed correctly. In addition to being a memento mori, a lesson in human finitude and a reminder of one’s mortality, it can also be viewed, with a more periagogic, discerning eye and in the years’ hindsight, as a reminder of the “skulls” of Europe’s “others” within and across borders that still remain hardly visible (Papastephanou, 2017). Thus, to a confident Europe that measures successful learning in terms of anodyne knowledge acquisition, the anamorphic image can also be a political lesson in taking the historical responsibility that has never been assumed. Anamorphic then can be the lifelong learning of those ethico-political debts that European time-and self-consciousness still represses and forgets. If Bildung is morphe, form, the anamorphic as re-forming is the learning that invites a re-shaping of Bildung.
“The first step in deciphering an anamorphic composition consists in relinquishing one’s ordinary perspective” (Kenaan, 2002: 69). 8 Indeed, it is only the first step in the case of anamorphic learning too. There is no guarantee that any transgression, any shift of perspective, delivers on its own the normative (ethico-political) goods that we may hope for. One may relinquish one’s ordinary perspective for a more blinkered one. The further steps that one needs if one is to go anamorphic involve judgment, criteria, knowledge (even of the encyclopaedic kind), virtues and a periagogic eye. The latter is a skilled eye, though not in the conventional sense of “skill”. Its skill is owed to one’s having learnt to move one’s gaze in different directions, to let the eye wander (peri-agogē, roaming) and be fixed or averted there where things attract re-view, re-vision, or abandonment of a fixation.
I have argued elsewhere (Papastephanou, forthcoming) that, in an Aristotelian sense of eudaimonic being-in-the-world, living well presupposes the metaphoricity of a kind of kinetics/statics and a periagogic eye. Let me associate such metaphoricity with learning(s) that may work for the good that lies in some dia-morphoses (constructions) that may also be anamorphic, transformative of the self and of society in normatively worthy directions. Some learnings (perhaps most learnings) are not just adaptive to and reproductive of the existent (without this making them homogeneously and unqualifiedly good). They are more complex in their normative and regulative role. This complexity can be illustrated, I argue, through the kinetics (metaphors of movement) that we encounter in Aristotle’s Topica (Top. 160b34–161a2). There, as Olav Eikeland (2008: 219) pertinently discusses it, kinetics concerns Aristotle’s method of inquiry and argumentation and learning to produce new scientific knowledge and truth. I develop his point further to indicate that we sometimes learn to seek a path (poros) out of perplexities or impasses (a-poriai), to proceed (porevein) in time by steering clear or going through difficulties (dia-porevein) and sometimes passing them happily (eu-porevein), thinking that our searching eye may now rest. But such kinetics should not be limited to scientific issues. It is also relevant to ethico-political issues (indeed, to anything learnable or worthy of investigation or transmission). Some learnings, both within classrooms but also, within the walls of a ‘city’ and within the whole world (whenever it is accessed or accessible), involve acts and habits of diaporevein and euporevein and simultaneously cultivates them. Though, in their inexorable specificity, such learnings are beyond prescription, perhaps even beyond any safe illustration/exemplification, they are crucial for educating the self and the city (up to the whole world) to be moved and to rest more reflectively. For, an education that is worthy of the name requires learning to make kinesis (movement, in the mechanical but also in the political sense) and stasis (again, in the Greek polysemy of mechanic pause, stopping, but also of stance, attitude and even of political sedition) synergize in a mutually corrective and re-directive manner.
We sometimes learn to notice how reality limits our leeway of claims and to find compelling the things that bind us to truth 9 (e.g. we learn that whether a genocide happened or not is not a matter of our solipsistic preference and taste). Plato’s bios theoretikos and art of periagogē concern an attentive eye that is not the curious look at reality that is currently celebrated in educational circles that connect lifelong learning with the ever-curious subject (Papastephanou, 2019). Instead of reflecting political apathy or self-regarding indifference to public life, bios theoretikos enables a more distant, critical view of the polis and its conventions. For Aristotle, it is crucial for the citizens to acquire this view in order to avoid polupragmosunē, that is, the kind of curiosity that makes engagement with politics serve imperial ambition and meddling in other cities’ affairs (Papastephanou, 2019: 8–11).
Conclusion
Aristotle disliked curiosity qua expansionist, imperialist polupragmosunē and qua periergia (idle, scopic study of things with no concern for the ethico-politics involved in such study) (Papastephanou, 2019). His desire for knowledge (and thus his implicit notion of learning) assumed a different attention to things. 10 Bios theoretikos and bios politikos as ways for diaporevein and euporevein correspond to diversified temporalities: one must learn that there is time for an active and engaged eye and there is time for averting the eyes from public life. This requires a richer, lifelong education/learning (agogē): diversifying the kinetics of the eye enables us to extract from Aristotle a peri-agogē, a turning around of the gaze, directing it at what should be seen yet it is not (Papastephanou, forthcoming). Not peri-ergia but a more thoughtful desire for knowledge and an artful peri-agogē may enhance an anamorphic lifelong learning. A more critical, ‘periagogic’ outlook may make our learning from the walls of the city less adaptive and more anamorphic. But this is only a possibility, one that is kept alive through awareness of periagogic diversification, and there is nothing inherently redemptive in destabilizations of the confident eye, not even in diversification.
Now let me finish with a very brief contrast of my account of learning with that of Biesta’s. Biesta wants to go beyond learning and, having incriminated it wholesale, maintains a uniform and un-ambiguous conception of it. Though Castoriadis’ conception seemed to converge with Biesta’s, I have shown that Castoriadis, despite oscillations, presupposes a more qualified and diversified sense of learning. I have attempted to spell out a concept of learning that is more comprehensive, as it contains qualitatively diverse manifestations. I have indirectly defended the brittle unity of learning in its various modalities, in its many faces. This unity is thankfully ruptured when one modality of learning acts correctively to another. But this unity allows us to use the term ‘learning’ both when the acquired knowledge is largely adaptive and also when it is transformative toward something justifiably good. I have named the latter learning ‘anamorphic’ and indicated its dependence on peri-agogē. Though my handling of the gaze and of the kinetics of the eye in a critical way may resemble other approaches in favour of destabilizing the confident gaze, my notion of peri-agogē is very different from such works on many points (e.g., mine does not celebrate rupture, resistance or the new, the unknown or the unknowing and it does not normativize kinetics against stasis). Such points would need, however, much discussion well beyond the confines of this article. Therefore, in awareness that the differences from other approaches may not be at first sight visible, I have used the anamorphic and peri-agogē here only in their relevance to the plea for a nuanced conception of learning. They are not used as a thoroughly argued out alternative either to theories of the gaze or to theories of learning.
Biesta states ‘that the school should not just be a function of society but also has an important duty in resisting what society desires from it’ (Biesta, 2015c: 1).I agree in principle, but, to his latter, aphoristic claim I raise the following objection: is what society may desire from school always (and uniformly) to be resisted? Are all social desires bad? Can we decide all this without a diversified sense of learning, of learning to judge and of learning to judge our learning to judge? In connecting emancipation with resistance to the politics of learning, Biesta argues ‘that to give up the notion of learning does not mean to give up on the idea of emancipation’. For him, ‘emancipation without learning’ resists the politics of learning and ‘becomes emancipation as transgression’ (Biesta, 2013: 13). By contrast, I have tried to sketch a more complicated picture and to maintain that, instead, of incriminating learning wholesale and discarding it, we may need the nuanced and peri-agogic kinetics that enables the anamorphic look at the conventional, modern and uniform conception of learning (Biesta’s included) that allows us to discern some learning as anamorphic.
Anamorphic learning, as I have theorized it, is learning to view critically conventional collective ways of viewing the world. Peri-agogē involves the required interplay of kinetics and statics of the eye, enabling learnings that, instead of being merely adaptive, work for the expansion of our imaginative reach. There is nothing inherently normative in such expansion, and, sometimes, adaptive learnings may be preferable to transformative or destabilizing ones that are regressive or reactionary. To be adapted or to be resistant are transitive notions always dependent on what you adapt to and what you resist. As for the concept of learning, what it resists, or so I have argued, is the conceptual essentialization of the modern conception of learning. I have theorized the concept of learning as diversified and inclusive of anamorphic possibilities throughout a person’s life, in tensed company with others and in a complex engagement with the world.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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