Soggetti all’algoritmo: l’habitus clivé tra padronanza critica e imperativo della resa = Subjected to the Algorithm: habitus clivé between critical mastery and the imperative to deliver

Abstract

Subjected to the Algorithm: habitus clivé between critical mastery and the imperative to deliver. The article analyses the impact of LLMs within the university field by situating their adoption in a late-modern society dominated by social acceleration and performance pressure. Within this framework, the contemporary subject appears historically predisposed to embrace devices capable of providing cognitive relief, reducing the temporal cost of action, and shortening the process that separates question from answer. Generative AI is therefore interpreted not as a mere technical tool, but as a transformative technology which, in the context of university study, may operate both as a support for knowledge and as a prosthesis for performative survival, fostering forms of cognitive delegation and the externalisation of interpretive activity. Field, capital, and habitus provide the conceptual tools for investigating the pedagogical role of LLMs as it emerges from their use. The analysis of seven focus groups with university students reveals the emergence of a habitus clivé, marked by an internal tension between an orientation towards mastery and an orientation towards performance. Algorithmic capital is located within this fracture, understood as the unequally distributed capacity to query, verify, and critically govern the machine without surrendering the knowledge-making process to it.