Today it is difficult not to think of or act upon learning without recourse to psychological categories, theories and established facts. Critical theories of education have frequently called attention to the fact that psychological discourse has brought with it a tendency of decontextualization. Thus, instead of referring to particular contents, aims and contexts of learning, psychologized discourses of education stress the ubiquitous, dynamic and processual nature of learning. In a pedagogized society anything can potentially become a learning experience, and learning has thus become somewhat of a floating signifier. This also seems to reflect a transition in the forms of governance which Gilles Deleuze (1992) describes as change from enclosing and institutional forms of discipline to modes of control which are becoming increasingly mobile and freed from any fixed meanings. Thus it seems that the metaphysics of decontextualized processes form a significant part of the present day conditions of possibility for both the psychological discourse of learning as well as the dominant form of educational governance. In my paper I will trace the emergence of the decontextualization and processualization of learning in some of the classical texts of Hermann Ebbinghaus, Ernst Meumann and Edward Lee Thorndike. By using Foucaultian and Deleuzian analytical frameworks, I will focus on the ways that the meaning of learning has become operationalized in psychological discourse. In The Order of Things (2002), Michel Foucault notes that with the emergence of human sciences, the conditions of scientific knowledge were no longer based on representation, which enlists and classifies the visible traits of objects, but instead, they pointed towards the depths of the human body – its hidden processes, forces, functions and expressions. The problem which the nascent experimental psychology faced in the late 19th century was how to make the invisible inside of Man amenable to empirical observation end experimental control. This was also a challenge of demonstrating that psychology actually had its own genuine object of research. (Danziger 1990, 20-26, 142-145.) Psychology of learning solved this problem by operationalizing its object. In other words, the concept of learning was to refer only to the standardized and stabilized operations and tasks which the test subject executed in any given experiment or test situation. This operationalism also constituted a specific temporal structure to experimental knowledge production. As Hannah Arendt (1958, 295-297) notes in The Human Condition, with the birth of modern sciences, the general categories of knowledge no longer referred to fixed essences and attributes of being, but instead, dynamic processes and modes of progress (see also Whitehead 1979). In the same way, research on learning also focuses on life processes which become inscribed into the structure of human behaviour that is made to unfold and develop in a standardized temporal series. This way, psychological discourse of learning does not refer to any particular faculties of the human mind, but on the standardized and visible performances of the human organism.

Foucaultian and Deleuzian analytic framework for analyzing the historical a priori (i.e. conditions of positive knowledge) of educational discourse and the problematizations of educational governance.

I argue that the operationalization of learning was not just a clever way of untying an epistemological Gordian knot, but an event where the nascent psychological discourse of learning became tied to the techniques of disciplinary power. (cf. Crary 1990) It is the procedures of temporal serialization and spatial distribution of behavioural processes as objects of research that psychological discourse of learning shares with disciplinary technology (Foucault 1977). This symmetry makes it easy for psychological discourse and practices to traverse and to be applied in all kinds of practical contexts and institutions. Today's critical discussion often tends to emphasize major paradigm breaks, ruptures and revolutions in pedagogical knowledge and politics. Nevertheless, I suggest that an analysis of classical texts in the psychology of learning is also relevant to the notions of decontextualization of present-day pedagogical discourses and governmental problematizations of learning.