Conference Program

This paper proposes that the incorporation of artificial intelligence into higher education constitutes a figurational transformation whose implications for democratic knowledge production remain theoretically underspecified. Drawing on Norbert Elias's figurational sociology and the concept of technological re-enchantment developed in relation to Weberian rationalisation theory (Císař Brown, 2025), the paper argues that AI integration is restructuring the interdependence figuration of the university in ways that generate a structural form of epistemic dependence incompatible with the reality-adequate knowledge production Elias associated with civilising processes and functional democratisation.

The argument consists of three pillars. First, it examines how Elias's concept of reality congruence, and the graduated detachment it requires, presupposes a figuration in which the transmission and validation of knowledge remains at least in principle reconstructable by participants. Second, it analyses how AI systems, through their subsymbolic architecture and recursive optimisation logic, produce what is characterised here as a structural explanation deficit: not contingent ignorance remediable through better pedagogy, but a constitutive opacity that renders epistemic submission a rational adaptation rather than an aberration. Third, it considers what this means for the Eliasian question of functional democratisation: specifically, whether higher education can continue to produce the capacity for autonomous, self-regulating epistemic judgement on which democratic participation depends when the figuration of knowledge production is being reorganised around interfaces rather than understanding.

The paper is careful to avoid technological determinism: the structural conditions described are products of specific developmental choices rather than inherent properties of AI as such. Nevertheless, it argues that these choices have produced a figuration whose civilising and de-civilising implications deserve sustained sociological attention.