Certainty in an Uncertain World: Toward A Critical Theory of Opinion

Introduction

Amid the 2020 US presidential elections and the popularization of conspiracy theories around COVID-19, we are living in a moment when terms such as ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ circulate freely within the popular lexicon, with the latter named as the 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionary and ‘postfaktisch’ by the Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache. It is an environment where objective facts have ‘become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (OED). In these circumstances, which seem to be overwhelmed with distrust and falsehoods, it is vital that scholars seek to understand not just the constituent elements of public opinion and its relationship to the public sphere, but also the philosophical grounding of subjective opinion itself as a historically specific epistemological structure of social communication.

The following essay will draw on the Hegelian tradition of critical theory that has in unique ways unified an analysis of the nexus between socio-economic structures and epistemological frameworks. More specifically, it will be argued that we have to return to the idea of public opinion as found in the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel and the social theory of Theodor W. Adorno to better understand current structural transformations of the public sphere and its critical challenges for mass communication. Here the essay names opinion as a unique and historically specifically epistemological structure of self-certainty, characterized by an inalienable, proprietary form of individual belief which receives, it will be argued, social validation within what Adorno called the Halbbildung of industrial culture, a form of social consciousness cultivated by the spread of information and the development of economic imperatives.

How, it might be said, does thought lapse into ‘opinion’? It is an urgent question in a time when the world, with its modes of global interconnection and digital platforms, is so heavily structured by chaotic political debate and image proliferation. A skepticism toward claims about objective truth as a criterion of knowledge exemplified in hostility toward specialists and expertise in which popular appeals to emotion, ‘gut instinct’ and opinion, inaugurate an overwhelming and perhaps unprecedented relativism for knowledge. The growth of media punditry, demagogy, conspiracy theory and misinformation are all phenomena that speak to the increasing omnipotence of opinion as a sacrosanct standpoint for exercising knowledge about the world. The following essay will argue that the concept of opinion becomes a central and vital question for understanding, in this ‘post-truth’ landscape, current standards of instantaneous communication and modes of cultural transmission.

We will first offer some preliminary comments on the significance of the category of opinion today in relation to how scholars have addressed problems of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ within the public sphere. This albeit brief literature review will be followed by an examination of Hegel’s concept of public opinion, one saturated with its own inherent contradictions as part of the social dynamics of civil society. The essay will then turn to the historical significance of Hegel’s concept in light of Jürgen Habermas’ thesis on the structural transformation of the public sphere. The essay will approach its conclusion with an analysis of Adorno’s concept of Halbbildung, and how the category of opinion might serve as an index for a diagnosis of Halbbildung within 21st-century modes of mass communication.

A Balance Sheet

On one hand, we take the notion of opinion as the idea of being able to think independently, of owning one’s thoughts, with the idea of choice, preferences, or judging something one way or another. Opinions are thought to be inalienable and commensurably as valid as the next, even if blatantly delusional. On the other hand, it is said that public opinion can decide an election, destroy someone’s reputation, convict or exonerate the accused, or that politicians cannot democratically rule against it. Public opinion appears as an amazingly powerful socio-political actor. Yet, as an institution, public opinion is not simply a fact of nature or tangible artifact. Its constituent elements consist of systems of measurement by pollsters, public relations industries, market research and mass media. The literature on public opinion even sometimes suggests that it does not exist independently from these systems of measurement, that public opinion polls are not descriptive, but rather create what they claim to measure (Bourdieu, 1979; Igo, 2007; Krippendorff, 2005). Yet nevertheless, public opinion is an undisputed fact, albeit given great personification, a subject made from various measurement systems quantifying social and epistemological phenomena.

For nearly a century, the concept of public opinion has remained elusive for scholars and social scientists, with no consensus on a universal definition. This difficulty is compounded in the present moment with issues of post-truth, fake news, disinformation, and the observation that subjective belief seems to increasingly overwhelm objective fact and shape public opinion today. These challenges are approached by a number of different fields in the social sciences and humanities focused, for example, on problems of digital communication and its impact on the public sphere. Within communication studies, social media and digital technologies are frequently analyzed in terms of participatory communities, cooperation and democratic possibilities, on one hand (Castells, 2010), and surveillance, data mining and threats to privacy, on the other (Andrejevic, 2007; Fuchs et al., 2012). In addition, media studies, social informatics, and new media are exploring the production, distribution, and effects of semiotic systems and information technologies with empirical methodologies and the consequential political implications of such technological diffusion throughout society (Rogers and Niederer, 2020; Tsfati et al., 2020).

Other, more popular titles by journalists have been published in recent years characterizing the 21st century as a ‘post-truth era’ (Ball, 2017; McIntyre, 2018), one for which ‘bullshit’, for example, has emerged as ‘a greater enemy of the truth than lies’ (Davis, 2017; Frankfurt, 2005), while some authors dispute whether there is anything novel (Bufacchi, 2021; Vogelmann, 2018) or illuminative about the category of ‘post-truth’ itself (Finlayson, 2019), or that it is partly residual of the postmodernism of the 1980s (Haack, 2019).

Yet rarely do these more sociological and empirical approaches to social communication and mass information incorporate the conceptual rigor needed when fundamental notions of truth are on the line. For this, the analytic tradition of contemporary epistemology has responded with the virtue of precision and has actively produced a number of important debates on the so-called ‘post-truth’ condition. Here, where the very idea of truth seems to be in crisis, emphasis has been placed on questions of epistemic norms, ideals, and beliefs (Bernecker, Flowerree, and Grundmann, 2021; Cassam, 2019), rhetoric (Fuller, 2017), trust and the philosophy of science (Marmot, 2017; Oreskes, 2019), issues of realism (Asay, 2020), relativism (Baghramian and Coliva, 2020), and speech act theory (Finlayson, 2019), as well as modes of counterfactual or fictional reasoning (Williamson, 2021) and in the fields of the philosophy of language (Marques, 2020) and meta-ethics more generally (Brown, 2019).

However, despite the variety of such philosophical approaches, a common thread emerges over disagreements on what it means, in the face of terms like ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’, and subjective prejudice and belief generally, for propositions to be either true or false. Here the philosophical debates remain largely internal to varying frameworks of epistemology, a staple of the analytic tradition generally, and seldom approach the question of how epistemological patterns might be symptomatic of larger social transformations. Instead, frequently employed are functional, non-experiential and non-contradictory conceptions of truth with which to assess falsehoods or misinformation, all with external criteria for measuring propositions. With a preponderant emphasis on epistemology, a perspective emerges for which philosophy ought to resolve contradictions by producing true and valid argumentation. Regardless of its subject matter, truth becomes stripped of socio-ontological meaning and emerges as a thoroughly formalistic exercise for evaluating propositions, or within a series of hypothetical thought experiments or metalinguistic disputes, not socially and ontologically substantive, but abstract and procedural, often lacking examination on how epistemological standpoints relate to historically specific developments of society. In fact, it could even be contended that debates so embedded within the schematics of epistemological frameworks – including those that fall under the field of social epistemology which tends to aggregate individuals into collective agents – are often devoid of an operative concept of society itself.

Within existing philosophical debates, epistemic subjects tend to be examined as relating to the world in a purely cognitive fashion, a perspective that falls short in attempting to describe and make sense of social transformations. More specifically, an exclusively analytical focus can obstruct situating knowledge within a wider social totality. It is in identifying the way in which contemporary philosophical debates over the seemingly increasing importance of subjective opinion fail to integrate both a holistic conception of society and how epistemological issues ought to be understood as bound to social structures, that the present essay seeks to make an intervention. The problem of overwhelming self-certainty is not strictly an issue of, for example, ‘epistemic vices’ (Cassam, 2019), but one for which epistemology itself ought to be construed as symptomatic of a broader social ontology. Indeed, contemporary philosophical debates through stringent epistemological modeling, under the guise of conceptual clarity, often obscure the complexities of real, historical social experience.

None of the literature described above situates contemporary problem of post-truth, disinformation, and digital communication within a broader social ontology of opinion itself, both as a development of the public sphere within the 21st century (Seeliger and Sevignani, 2021) and as a distinct epistemological structure of self-certainty characterized by an inalienable, property-like form of individual belief. Here it can be suggested that a social ontology ‘opinion’ constitutes both a distinct and historically specific epistemological structure and a central index for social and political transformations. It can therefore be asked how the form of generating, holding, and communicating an opinion is changing in the first decades of the 21st century, a period in which, on one hand, the processing of information through digital communication must keep pace with an endless stream of algorithmic echo chambers that allots little room for pause and reflection (Nguyen, 2020), and on the other, authoritative structures within the classical liberal public sphere have broken down (Habermas, 1989). In sum, while there remains growing new research from the tradition of analytic philosophy into contemporary problems of ‘fake news’ and ‘post-truth’, opinion as a distinct epistemological structure reproduced through dominant social media of communication and information is yet to receive specific attention.

It is for this reason that we turn to Hegel’s concept of public opinion, a category explicitly riddled with contradiction and, as will be demonstrated, part of the antagonisms of civil society itself. In a word, returning to Hegel’s idea of public opinion helps us understand that current crises of mass communication are not accidental, but rooted in essential tensions within the very concept of a modern public opinion as an institution specific to capitalist society.

Both Respected and Despised

Hegel’s works often begin with a description of everything his philosophy isn’t. Here, modes of thought that adhere to overtly subjectivistic worldviews and belief systems, or what he sometimes calls ‘picture-thinking’ [Vorstellens], are chastised for failing to give their claims proper social validation and objective truth. Hegel has a problem with identifying what is true with mere feeling, opinion or conviction, a position he holds from both his critique of German Romanticism and post-Kantian philosophy, as much as from the accelerating political and social issues inaugurated by a developing modernity. Truth reducible to subjective and arbitrary will, to caprice and without philosophical reflection, set, in his view, a corrosive standard for ethics, politics, and thinking itself. Hegel tackled the forms of thought specific to modernity and its developing social formations, including the heightening role of individuality with such developments and sought an alternative against what was perceived to be a detrimental over-reliance on subjective opinion. As he writes in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ‘public opinion has been a major force in all ages, and this is particularly so in our own times, in which the principle of subjective freedom has such importance and significance’ (Hegel, 1991: §316A).

Throughout his philosophy, Hegel criticizes various epistemic patterns of overwhelming self-certainty. Here the notion of self should be emphasized. Indeed, Hegel’s critique registers a new type of interiority or subjective Innerlichkeit that tends toward the irreducibility or primacy of subjective experience. This can be seen in his wordplay with the category of opinion: die Meinung is more than anything Meinige (Hegel, 1995: 12). Akin to my property, it is the immediate manifestation of my particularity and individuality. I need not provide any reasons for my opinion and even if I am demonstrably wrong, no one can take it away from me.

Yet Hegel’s critique of subjectivism is not just an epistemological problem for grasping the objectivity of truth and avoiding solipsism. When it comes to the question of public opinion, it also becomes a manifestly political problem. Specifically within Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel examines the social function of public opinion as the mediation between the particular individual members of civil society and the state. Yet the modern state is for Hegel characterized by the principle of subjective particularity. As he writes: ‘the right of subjective freedom [. . .] is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age’ (Hegel, 1991: §124R). With this emergent reverence for subjective individuality, a problem appears for how to think the relationship between the particular and the universal, that is, the individual and the state in such a way as to retain the respective rights of each. Indeed, for Hegel, the objective universality of the state and subjective particularity – namely, the freedom of individuals to express private judgments – are somehow mutually constitutive. In fact, the modern state has its importance precisely because it upholds and realizes the principle of subjectivity (Hegel, 1991: §260).

The mediating force between individuals and the state is of course civil society. As a sphere that mediates the universal and particular, it allows individuals to pursue their own self-interest and in so doing, fulfill the universality of the state. Individuals within civil society give to the state its legislative power through representatives and deputies. Yet for Hegel, civil society is also a sphere of social antagonism. Within civil society we discover conflicts of particularistic interests, with individuals seeking to realize their self-interest at the expense of the social whole. In words of Jürgen Habermas: ‘Although it was the natural basis of the juridical condition, the privatized sphere of commodity exchange and of social labor threatened to break apart on account of its immanent conflicts’ (Habermas, 1989: 117). Here an antagonistic system of needs, mediated by commodity exchange, destroys liberal pretenses of political harmony.

It is within this phenomenon that Hegel introduces the concept of public opinion, itself derivative of the same inherent tensions of civil society:

Formal subjective freedom, whereby individuals as such entertain and express their own judgements, opinions, and counsels on matters of universal concern, makes its collective appearance in what is known as public opinion. In the latter, the universal in and for itself, the substantial and the true, is linked with its opposite, with what is distinct in itself [dem für sich Eigentümlichen] as the particular opinions of the many. This existence [Existenz] [of public opinion] is therefore a manifest self-contradiction, an appearance of cognition; in it, the essential is just as immediately present as the inessential. (Hegel, 1991: §316)

Public opinion manifests an unstable push and pull between private and public interests, a tendency toward social disintegration, toward a retreat into particular interests and private points of view – we might say an inherent contradiction of civil society itself. For Hegel, the regime of opinion necessarily entails a mixture of the true and false, subject to arbitrary will and indexical of an aggregate of isolated individuals without inner and universal cohesion.

Yet even with this danger, Hegel views public opinion as a great source of legislative power. In fact, the sovereignty of the state is grounded by its constitution, whose legislative power comes in part from the force of public opinion and a free press, through political discussion and deliberation and through the publicity of an assembly’s proceedings, an important means of civic education. Civil servants, representatives, and deputies of the estates can hold their assemblies in public, providing ‘a great spectacle of outstanding educational value to the citizens’ (Hegel, 1991: §315). For Hegel, public opinion is thus not simply the aggregate of individual, private opinions, or even the majority viewpoint, but rather the right of every individual to publicly express their views on public issues, thereby influencing legislative politics itself and, at least ideally, to establish a forum by which ‘one ingenious idea [Gescheitheit] devours another’ (Hegel, 1991: §315).

Despite this importance, while upholding the centrality of subjective freedom, as a phenomenon of civil society public opinion still gives expression to tension and contradiction. Within public opinion, the universal and true coalesce with their opposite, as ‘the particular opinions of the many’ (Hegel, 1991: §316). It is for this reason that Hegel can name public opinion as ‘a manifest self-contradiction’ (Hegel, 1991: §316), a unity of the essential and unessential. It thereby restores to the political sphere the arbitrariness of ‘common sense [des gesunden Menschenverstandes]’ (Hegel, 1991: §317) in all of its epistemological impulsiveness and subjectivism. As Hegel makes clear: ‘With public opinion, all the contingencies of opinion, with its ignorance and perverseness, its false information and its errors of judgement, come on the scene’ (Hegel, 1991: §317). The circulation of falsehoods, for example, is not then a deviation from the concept of public opinion, or that problems of misinformation simply befall the realm of public opinion from without. Such contemporarily pressing problems are connected to public opinion’s inherent tendency to give room to a manifold of opinions. Public opinion must as such contain both truth and endless error, a combustible mixture of both reason and irrationality. Falsehood here becomes a necessary, rather than contingent, determination of public opinion. On the whole, it is for this reason that Hegel describes public opinion as that which ‘deserves to be respected as well as despised’ (Hegel, 1991: §318).

Within Hegel’s framework, if it works in the way intended, the public sphere would suspend dominating external authorities, expand the freedom of subjective expression, and yield a deeper form of shared legitimacy and truth. In its current state, however, it fails in all three regards: it does not allow for a truly subjective expression but merely for the display of avatars of individuality; it does not manage to let truth emerge from falsehood but remains stuck in the realm of mere opinion; and it does not manage to actually bracket external authorities. Rather, opinion stands under the implicit algorithmic power structures of contemporary digital platforms of communication.

A Structural Transformation

To historically evaluate what is in fact Hegel’s idealization of public opinion, it is necessary to isolate the unique publicness of public opinion. We refer here to Habermas’ (1989) seminal The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and how a social realm of individuals able to express privately developed positions publicly is distinctive to the 18th-century emergence of bourgeois society. For Habermas, the development of a commercial mass circulation press, paralleled by the reorganization of political parties, state bureaucracy and the emergence of public relations industries and special interest associations, together within a more general period of capital accumulation, has, throughout the 19th century and specifically within France, Germany, and England, brought to a close the institutions of social exchange, deliberation, and communication characteristic of what might be called the high liberal period.

Habermas traces the development of the public sphere under such immense changes through the index of public opinion and follows the breakdown of the distinction between the public and private spheres through the world of letters. Rational-critical debates and discussions of private people in salons, coffee-houses, and reading societies were for Habermas gradually replaced by a mass public of cultural consumers. A reading public that debated critically about matters of culture and politics, in which, at least theoretically, everyone was entitled to judge through free choice and changing preference, eventually yielded to a realm of consumption that dramatically altered both the form and content of public opinion. A ‘pseudo-public or sham-private world of cultural consumption’ (Habermas, 1989: 160) came to define the inner life from which opinion circulated. Here it can be argued that Habermas’ thesis on the emergence of a domination of ‘nonpublic opinion’ or ‘manipulative publicity’ (Habermas, 1989: 177-178) ought to be reassessed under the conditions of social communication in the 21st century. It is through such a historical development that a critical theory of opinion – as part of the critique of society – should proceed. Some scholars even maintain that a new ‘structural transformation’ is in fact taking place within the perimeters of 21st-century modes of communication and opinion circulation (Seeliger and Sevignani, 2021). Yet only at the end of his study does Habermas describe the contents of opinion, mediated through the culture industry, as having reached ‘a post-literary stage’, in which a form of opinion has emerged characterized by ‘ready-made, flexibly reproduced, barely internalized, and not evoking much commitment’. Such ‘mere’ opinion is described by Habermas as per se ripe for research (Habermas, 1989: 246). A critical theory of opinion therefore follows Habermas’ injunction and asks what happens to public opinion in a 21st-century environment of mass social media and investigate those areas in which the changing functions and contemporary social ontology of subjective opinion are in force.

Fundamental to the social changes described by Habermas was the way publicity, as a constitutive principle of public opinion, underwent immense transformation. Exemplified in parliamentary deliberations, public opinion required publicity to keep itself informed, a guarantee between critical public debate and democratic and legislative governance. Yet through mass media and the emergence of advertising and public relations agencies, a shift in the principle of publicity occurred that registered a transition from a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that merely consumes it, a web of social communication unraveled into acts of individual reception without the institutional power and support that had at one time ensured an interconnectedness of sociable contacts as a substratum of public communication. In contrast, with today’s dominant platforms of social media, we find immediate interconnectedness and a perpetual thirst for publicity without the institutional stability of critical debate characteristic of an idealized public sphere, a perpetually circulating forum of hyper-subjectivized opinions communicating without accountability under a spectacular staged display (Debord, 1995), or what Habermas calls ‘an opinion climate’ of mass preference rather than public opinion (Habermas, 1989: 217). Any absolute distinction here between a public and a private opinion, characteristic of 19th-century theories of public opinion, loses all sociological and institutional girding (Sennett, 1978).

To now transition to the critical theory of Adorno, we might inquire whether the meaning of public opinion – which presumed the existence of a public capable of engaging in deliberation guided by well-informed citizens clear about their own interests – changes alongside the tendency today for publicness to undermine its own principles. The virtues of public opinion seem to be premised, through the classical liberal model, upon the existence of a coherent and discernible object: an autonomous and rational individual within a free and rational society, educated in its own interests and capable of gathering together information to arrive at its own conclusions about the world. It is hardly controversial to ask if such an idealization has in fact failed to materialize. That is, with the development of the capitalist mode of production and its industries of mass media and communication, accelerating in the 1920s, we can ask whether the normative, institutional and economic bases of public opinion undermine the very idea of a public of autonomous individuals capable of determining their own opinions? In different terms, it is the same question posed by Hegel’s self-contradictory concept of public opinion.

Beyond Habermas’ diagnosis of a structural transformation, within the work of Adorno – particularly his writings on public opinion as a development of mass society – we find a deeper analysis that integrates the social and epistemological dimensions of that transformation more fully. Important here is Adorno’s sociological and philosophical writings on the way in which commercial forces ‘monopolize information and color it according to its interests’ (Adorno, 2005a: 121), thereby cultivating forms of consciousness and epistemological structures adequate to dominant media and commodified platforms of circulating information. Pertinent here is also Adorno’s observation that there exists a common ontology between public opinion and market forces, an affinity illustrated through the way in which the methodological history of public opinion research emerged in tandem with the methodological approaches of market research (Adorno, 2005a: 120; Igo, 2007). For Adorno, mass media is both a medium for the expression of opinion and itself an organ of public opinion. This follows Adorno’s thesis that there has been a conflation of the public as a consumer of information with the audience as consumer of entertainment. Such a thesis becomes explicit within a single concept found in Adorno’s writings of the late 1950s: Halbbildung. It is through such phenomena that we can offer an investigation of Halbbildung for the 21st century, one in which the inalienable and interchangeability of ‘opinion’ now dominates within dominant forms of social communication.

A Contemporary Theory of Halbbildung

At least in the Anglophone world, the term Halbbildung has received a bad reputation. ¹ It is a category that seems to exude a condescending and aloof attitude of cultural elitism and conservatism. Yet what Adorno calls sozialisierte Halbbildung goes well beyond, for example, an alleged cultural or educational inferiority of certain social groups. Instead, it is a concept that traverses society at the level of the whole, a form of social consciousness – or as Hegel would say, a form of spirit – nourished by the spread of information and the development of economic compulsion. This form of subjective social consciousness clings to forms of industrially produced culture ‘as an inalienable right’ (Adorno, 1993: 16; see also Adorno, 2005a). Here individuals and industrially produced culture mimetically accord in a lauded freedom to express opinion, that is, most overtly, to like or dislike. Although most starkly registered as a rudimentary beginning for social media communication, this ‘ticket-thinking’ permeates society as a whole, stereotypical ‘substitutes for knowledge’ as rigid dichotomies of, for example, ‘good or bad’, ‘yes or no’, or ‘us or them’, that provide ‘intellectual security’ without the reflective resources to ‘find [one’s] way in the dark’ (Adorno et al., 1950: 663-664; see also Adorno and Horkheimer, 2002: 170). Here, it can be said that opinions are ‘hailed as the ruling forces of the enterprise towards which they are directed’ (Adorno, 2009: 273). Yet within this framework, individuation of opinion is only to accord with the repetitive mechanisms of distributing standardized material, or what Adorno refers to as ‘plugging’, or ‘the literal repetition and inexorable representation of endless sameness’ (Adorno, 2009: 299). The success and popularity of a particular product or opinion derives directly from the phenomenon of repetition and ‘[i]ts fame is only the sum-total of these very announcements’ (Adorno, 2009: 307). Although Adorno is predominantly referring to television and radio, contemporary platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are 21st-century algorithmically organized media by which we might explore how Halbbildung operates today, in which the developing technological standards democratize participation simply as a result of the proliferation and extension of a cultural schematism.

With these developments, it can be argued that the relation between culture and cultivation, as invoked by the root of Halbbildung – Bildung – has undergone profound and rapid transformations, even over the last decades. Historically, most notably through the German Idealist tradition, the notion of Bildung had a meaningful relationship to both broader social structures and forms of individuality, to ideas of a developmental journey, maturity and even psychological sublimation. For example, the genre of the Bildungsroman, as it can be extracted from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, but also Schiller and Goethe, presents models of youth where, in the case of works of art, profound encounters come to transform one’s identity, a process of maturation and cultivation that alters the course of one’s experience of the world, or better we might say, establishes the conditions of possibility of experience itself. Although residually romantic, it is not so outlandish to suggest that an intensive study of, for example, Proust or Flaubert, the human figure through Giacometti or the transition of a musical canon from the Renaissance to the Baroque – that such aesthetic experiences could be given a lifetime of consideration and would dramatically transform us, that they in all likelihood could set in relief the contours of who we become, exceeding mere necessity and a petrified self-identity and, with strenuous effort and distanced reflection, initiate a journey of development, personal change, maturity, and cultivation through the autonomy of the object.

This is the idea of Bildung: that works of art and culture are at once spiritual resources for the injunction to go beyond the world as it exists in its bare facticity, beyond our presupposed assumptions and attitudes, to something new, to cut our moorings. Yet in a world where adaptation has become the singular mandate for self-preservation, indeed a life-or-death affair in which industrial culture is produced to hollow out any basic sense of having an ‘inside’ and liquidating, in the words of Kant, the courage to think for oneself; in the technological directive of replicating empirical reality and a priori categories of perception, to the exercise of just recognizing the always already familiar; and a subjectivity perpetually overwhelmed by real and constant anxiety, by heteronomous forces – such patterns of reducing experience to the schematism of the commodity and the world it has cultivated, impels us to inquire into the very possibility of Bildung as such.

It is with this uncertainty that we turn to the question of Halbbildung and the role of opinion formation and expression therein. For Adorno, the concept of Halbbildung does not purport to include all peoples and classes indiscriminately. Rather, it gives shape to a tendency, or a physiognomy of a spirit or age, one marked by industrial standardization and starting in the early 20th century but accelerating in the 21st. The Halbbildung of the present moment elicits a form of comprehension that requires a quick and observant mind, yet one that simultaneously debars thinking, so that fleeting facts are not missed. In a word, a primacy of alertness is necessary, even if in a state of perpetual distraction and vacant attentiveness. Within such an environment, culture need no longer evoke literature, visual art, or even moving images on film. Instead we think of YouTube, live streams, podcasts, tweets, playlists, serial television, twitch streams, pop songs, shareable ‘content’, or entertainment franchises. Culture here affronts us in an endless stream of consumption without ever really digesting anything. We need only keep up.

Halbbildung thus requires from individuals only the bare minimum, most often in the extolled freedom to express opinion, that is, again, to like or dislike. It could even be argued that opinion is the epistemological structure adequate to Halbbildung in the present moment, which ‘substitutes subjective illusions’ (Adorno, 1993: 18) for the power of objective reality. If historically culture ‘was supposed to benefit the free individual’ (Adorno, 1993: 19), opinion was supposed to be that individual’s resultant well-informed expression, position, and means of communication. Yet what we find today is the inundation of industrially produced cultural goods and information for which, as a result, opinion comes to form the mode by which Halbbildung receives social verification and validation. To have an opinion without becoming excessively opinionated, at once both proprietary and inalienably mine, even if blatantly delusional, is today facilitated and reproduced through media of digital communication. In this contemporary context, received opinions are frequently parroted and pandered through self-images, distanced irony, and malleable avatars. Colloquial expressions, easily replicable phrases, gifs, memes, images, and videos together seem to encapsulate, as units of imitation and cultural transmission, a new standard of communication. The opining subject here adopts the standpoint ‘of being in charge, of having a say, of conducting oneself and considering oneself as an expert’, what Adorno states as the link between Halbbildung and collective narcissism (Adorno, 1993: 33).

Opinion presupposes a particular kind of subjectivity, one characterized by a sovereign epistemic standpoint. It is within this framework that a newfound anti-intellectualism and distrust of expertise, skill, and authoritative knowledge emerges and gains momentum. The layman’s opinion must receive as much validity as the trained specialist and the latter’s pedigree is in fact cause for suspicion. Yet an excessively confident reliance on our own opinion, whose standpoint, regardless of its content, is increasingly perverted into a claim of omniscience – to have an opinion on everything – is at once also a form of social objectivity, the epistemological expression of Halbbildung. Culture as Halbbildung here becomes hypostatized, a form of subjective spirit – in the Hegelian sense – that has emerged as overwhelmingly self-certain. It is through this social epistemology that opinion emerges as a ‘glass house misconstrued as freedom’ (Adorno, 1993: 19). But as a form of social objectivity characterized by subjective certainty, opinion is more centrally a social relation: a form of communicable knowledge not simply anchored to a particular statement or judgment satisfied to remain housed within the mind of a private consciousness. Opinion instead depends on a nexus of relations to other people, social practices and activities, and fundamentally upon how our relations are reproduced within society. It is here that what Adorno elsewhere called ‘the naked subjective moment of opinion’ (Adorno, 2005b: 123) is not to be interpreted literally, as merely the dissolution of the objective world, especially when considering how predetermined our behavioral response patterns have become when we, for example, register a like or dislike. Opinion mining, sentiment analysis, or what is called digital trace data ‘has made it possible to mine everything from social interactions on microblogging platforms like Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr to product reviews, Foursquare check-ins, and geo-tagged Flickr photos in search of raw data that can be converted into sentiment’ (Guber, 2021: 1107), which is then algorithmically fed back to users for structuring the information perceived. The result is that opinion increasingly appears homogeneous and impersonal, that is, not of one’s own, no longer anchored to specific individuals but as existing autonomously over individuals as personifications of a statistical and numerical scale.

The scenario described above is not the consequence of the fallibility or stupidity of the opining subject, nor the consequence of nefarious propaganda systems orchestrated by an elite. If there is any incoherence to subjective opinion, it is the objectivity of incoherence within the dominant channels of information flow and digital communication. Although beyond the scope of the present essay, it would be fruitful here to examine empirical studies that, for example, correlate differences of reading media and their psychological and psychobiological effects. It has been reported that in comparison with printed books, digital platforms yield higher levels of reader dislocation, distraction and visual fatigue alongside lower levels of narrative coherence, literary comprehension and even various social and emotional skills, such as empathy (Mangen and Kuiken, 2014). The ergonomics of page-turning, browsing, text navigation, spatial bookmarking and other sensorimotor contingencies, grounded within the fixed and concrete medium of the printed page, are lost in the intangible and virtual medium of digital literacy, sources which are overwhelmingly overtaking other outlets for the processing of news and other information. With the printed page, readers kinesthetically navigate their way through the text, whether through the tactile paper or the spatio-temporally fixed cues of a periodical’s entire length and structure. ‘To this effect, the fixity of text printed on paper supports reader’s construction of the spatial representation of the text by providing unequivocal and fixed spatial cues for text memory and recall’ (Mangen et al., 2013: 66). It is an experience of visual and tactile cues that cultivates reading comprehension. None of this takes place when reading on a screen for the absorption of information, where the intangibility and transient quality of a digital text displayed hinders the representation of spatial information (Gerlach and Buxmann, 2011). Furthermore, scrolling has been known to hamper reading comprehension by imposing spatial instability (Piolat et al., 1997).

On the whole, through digital platforms, we find here a ‘diminished sensory salience of the modality of written text’ (Mangen and Kuiken, 2014: 151), which is often accompanied by higher levels of stress and exhaustion (Wästlund, 2007). This is the empirical framework for the processing of information and, ultimately, the circulation of opinion. The concern here is that with the increasing omnipotence of on-screen reading, which as studies demonstrate, is best suited for ‘fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes’ (Ackerman and Goldsmith, 2011: 29), the ability to reflect, cultivate, and articulate opinion is saturated within an environment socially and technologically hostile to such capacities. At one point, these capacities were said to be necessary for an autonomous individual as a prerequisite for robust and well-informed public opinion. Undermining the liberal model, the condition of a cultivated consciousness postulated by contemporary society is in reality denied, specifically the possibility of everyday autonomy (Crawford, 2020). The positive form of this denial, or rather its social validation, is what constitutes the circulation of opinion today. Halbbildung asks the individual to uphold the bare minimum of autonomy simply by having an opinion. In a word, ‘fast and shallow’ becomes the universal schematism and source for generating and articulating opinion within a 21st-century Halbbildung.

A Violence of Topicality

The truth of subjective autonomy depends on that subject’s ability to resist both its own illusions and a hypostatized objective reality, a social situation that contains within it a congruence between delusional beliefs and well-informed opinions (see Adorno, 2005a and Giannakakis, 2019). An adherence to bare facticity and the inflation of subjective certitude are two poles within the social objectivity of Halbbildung. It is as such not a matter of simply disentangling facts from opinions, so characteristic of analytic epistemology. A fetish for ‘matters of fact’ presented emphatically as that which has been irrevocably accomplished, deserving of admiration, and complete in itself is as reified a standpoint of certitude as the opining subject narcissistically grasping the environment as an unalloyed extension of itself. Whether one uncritically adopts one or the other, either the naturalization of facticity or its dissolution into an opinionated subjectivist bias, the end result within contemporary Halbbildung is the same failure to provide adequate subjective terrain and psychological resources for critically assessing and exercising judgment upon the present, when what is known no longer has any meaning. As Adorno thus inadvertently describes the contemporary landscape of digital opinion circulation:

Experience – the continuity of consciousness in which everything not present survives, in which practice and association establish tradition in the individual – is replaced by the selective, disconnected, interchangeable and ephemeral state of being informed which, as one can already observe, will promptly be cancelled by other information. (Adorno, 1993: 33)

A certain violence of topicality can be here introduced: most people have little time for the deliberation required for something like the cultivation of Bildung. The ephemeral nature of information today – arising spontaneously and disappearing imperceptibly, and through the technological determinations of an economy of attention – must be designed as short-sighted and arresting, the latest abruptly replacing the old, for which ‘each day is a new reality’ (Patterson, 2008: 36). There is literally no time to process the information received, and the platforms of information, as well as the information itself, increasingly come to reflect that reality. Everything must be compressed into very short messages, slogans, or hashtags, while fashioning a limited vocabulary to somehow give description to a complicated world. With the increasing omnipotence of on-screen reading and writing, again, best suited for the ‘fast and shallow’, the ability to reflect, cultivate, and articulate opinion is saturated within an environment socially and technologically hostile to such capacities. The term ‘speed-reading’ is itself indicative of a society under such duress. In all cases, it is a furious pace that triumphs, a victory of speed. In sum, for Adorno, Halbbildung ‘despite all enlightenment and the spread of information, indeed with their help, has become the dominant form of contemporary consciousness’. (Adorno, 1993: 16)

There is immense fatigue in constantly having to have an opinion on everything. Yet almost everywhere is the incessant flood of information pronounced as a crucial resource and integral benefit for democratic societies. In the words of Jonathan Crary, ‘[t]hat every service or product should be accessible “on demand” presupposes a reality unmoored from spatial, material, or temporal constraints’ (Crary, 2022: 62). With regard to Adorno’s sociological and philosophical writings on the way in which commercial forces ‘monopolize information and colour it according to its interests’ (Adorno, 2005a,b: 121), cultivating forms of consciousness and epistemological structures adequate to dominant media and commodified platforms of circulating information, it is worth pausing to ask whether an excess of information has ever meant better decisions (see Gigerenzer, 2007 and Ramonet, 1999). ² Here the difference between Bildung and Halbbildung might not be empirically self-evident. It could be argued that excessive information in fact cripples faculties of judgment, and that the facility of access and shortcuts, or sheer overwhelming quantity, what in another context Clement Greenberg would have described as a form of kitsch (Greenberg, 1986), liquidates the distance necessary, for example, for trust, seduction, anticipation, aesthetic contemplation, and fantasy. It is through distance that one lingers and undergoes cultivation per se. Yet a society that incessantly venerates the indispensability of transparency and immediate accessibility for both communication and information, no less than the circulation of capital, must renounce distance as a hindrance. In the words of Annie Le Brun, ‘nothing has the right to appear inaccessible anymore’ (Le Brun, 2008: 108). Even if there are still worthwhile and politically meaningful discussions to be had online, the merits of communicated opinions are structurally evaluated solely in terms of the velocity and quantity of information exchanged and circulated, thereby accommodating discourse to the expedient contours of an attention economy which is also at once a pretext for liquidating distance and shrinking the space of lived experience.

There are psychic costs of such technological adaptation, even if it seems to bring empowerment, security, and a state of being in the know. In terms of psychic life, we might call this a ‘crisis of internalization’ (see Benjamin, 1977, 1978). It was only by internalizing externality that the subject gained the capacity for real psychic conflict and thus for critical evaluation. But with an onslaught of Halbbildung, processes of internalization are curbed. Individuals are immediately seized by a social power, resulting in a stunted form of psychic development, or a weakening or rigidifying of the ego as a loss of inner tension. This is relieved by the culture industry and its Halbbildung, and with it the recourse of having an opinion as both a mode social integration and self-preservation as means of deformed sublimation. As such, the objective compulsion to have an opinion is not simply an ideological self-deception, but the necessary epistemological correlate to a damaged individuality. On the whole, the social and psychological consequences and implications of a critical theory of opinion could not be greater.

A Marketplace of Ideas

The framework of Halbbildung for the processing of information and circulation of opinion highlights a contemporary crisis of social communication and the public sphere that dramatically exceeds the problems identified by Hegel, Habermas, and Adorno, none of whom could have anticipated, for example, the way most typographic composition now takes place on computers and phones, utilizing software that will try and finish your sentences for you. Nevertheless, the critical tools offered by Hegel, Habermas, and Adorno provide crucial philosophical and historical insight and sociological foundation with which to comprehend problems of social communication and the present crisis of public opinion.

While there remains growing new research into related contemporary problems such as ‘fake news’, opinion as a distinct epistemological structure reproduced through dominant media of news, political debate and information is yet to receive specific attention. Both Hegel and Adorno stand as central and timely resources for constructing a strong interdisciplinary foundation by which we can evaluate the problem of opinion as a development within modern society. Both thinkers elicit different philosophical, social, and historical dimensions which together solidly ground, with a conceptual weight often missing from contemporary political analysis and opinion studies, the contemporary prevalence of opinion as an increasingly deafening feature of both public life and the cultural climate.

Moving beyond the notion that public opinion is simply the aggregation of individual opinions held by citizens who make up the public (Glynn et al., 2004), it is crucial that scholars retain the philosophical significance of public opinion, specifically as riddled with contradiction on the difficulty of reconciling the particular with the universal. Such a challenge is however not merely an esoteric exercise or antiquated philosophical paradox. Rather, we should ask how epistemological patterns might be symptomatic of larger social transformations, not just hypothetical thought experiments, abstract and procedural without a relation to historically specific developments of society. It is in this way that philosophy ought to situate contemporary problems of post-truth and disinformation within a broader social ontology of opinion itself, both as a development of the public sphere within the 21st century and as a distinct epistemological structure of overwhelming self-certainty.

The question of opinion and the problem of self-certainty ought to be grasped as symptomatic of larger social transformations, part of historically specific developments of a contradictory society dominated by exchange relations. With regard to how it is that forms of social consciousness become modeled upon market forces, the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1983), particularly his Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, offers crucial insight into the correlation between forms of thinking and the formal and social contours of exchange relationships. Sohn-Rethel describes the activity of exchange as a ‘practical solipsism’ – the reciprocal exclusion of private ownership. It can only be suggested here that the privation of opinion – inalienably ‘mine and not yours’ – develops in accordance with the forms of exchange characteristic of capitalism: ‘opinion’ becomes the privation of exchange relations converted into epistemological form. As Sohn-Rethel writes:

The principles which concern us here belong to the form of interrelation of commodity exchange, not to the psychology of the individuals involved. It is rather this form that molds the psychological mechanisms of the people whose lives it rules – mechanisms which they then conceive of as inborn, human nature. (Sohn-Rethel, 1983: 42)

The point here is not to define the substance or content of opinion as categorically differentiated from, say, a belief or any other form of thought or epistemological operation. It is rather to situate the form of an opinion within certain determinations of social communicability. In this way, what an opinion is, is inextricably linked not just to its articulation, but also to the historically and technologically specific media and platforms available. Such an observation helps to give clarity to the lie that opinions are strictly ‘one’s own’, rather than, in essence, social relationships under the guise of both a certain ideology of solipsism and a society tending toward the complete liquidation of individuality. It is in this way a critical theory of opinion ought to confront the context of contemporary platforms of digital communication, and how the exchange of opinion increasingly adopts the characteristics of market exchange, with competing opinions aiming to overarch one another and, as comparable to a branding strategy, pandering to common denominators of interchangeable colloquial expressions.

A critical theory of opinion for the 21st century is what this essay has sought to foreground by providing a few preliminary materials, specifically by following Habermas’ historical diagnosis on the structural transformations of the public sphere and in the emergence of a staged and manipulative principle of publicity, alongside Adorno’s theory of Halbbildung as the framework of industrial culture and its subjective internalization as constitutive of the relationship between mass media and the communication structures of opinion processes. A critical theory of opinion aims as such not simply in attaining sociological clarification on the concept of public opinion, but further, by integrating elements of Hegel’s philosophy on epistemological patterns that rely on excessive self-certainty and forms of socialized thought characteristic of the privation of bourgeois civil society, to comprehend our own democratic society from the perspective of one of its central categories of individual autonomy.