Philosophy: From the Factory to the Enterprise and the Psychopolitics

Abstract

The incorporation of the public university to the logic of the company and the market, as well as the consequences that this has implied for the educational programs in philosophy, have been denounced from different instances, such as the Philosophical’s Observatory of Mexico. For example, under this logic, it is denounced that philosophy is at risk of disappearing, the philosophy should be valued in its possibility of forming citizens, etc. However, paradoxically, this logic has also defined many teaching practices and research practices that imply "benefits" for teachers, such as bonuses and financial support. This situation makes it difficult to denounce the situation of philosophy, so a way of analysis that accounts for this paradox is required. For this reason, the objective of this work is to define and propose a psychopolitical analysis of the public university and, therefore, of the educational programs in philosophy that it houses, under the lineage of an enterprise; this way will allow us to explain the paradox mentioned above.             To characterize the link between the enterprise and the university, we follow two perspectives: first, the discussion about the relevance of educational programs in philosophy (university-labor demand); and, second, we describe the notions of university-social responsibility, university-quality and university-evaluation. We define these notions through a brief documentary investigation. This research shows us that the philosophy is subject to: 1) the standards of the ISO brand, 2) the diagnosis of its social and, eventually, ecological impact, 3) the canons of quality, efficiency, products and services, 4) the suggestions of the International Labour Organization, and 5) the demands of the market, among other characteristics described in this work. Subsequently, to characterize how teachers have reproduced the company-university’s link, we return to these results together with the notions of factory and enterprise and of psychopolitics, proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Byung-Chul Han, respectively.               To conclude we made a prospective reflection to suggest some actions that allow us to face this logic: first, we propose to make more diagnoses about the guidelines and practices that are tracing the path of development of universities; and second, we propose an extension of the graduation profiles in the educational programs of degree in philosophy, this through the characterization of new professional fields and practices of philosophy.