A Critical Theory of Opinion
Eric-John Russell
Terms such as ‘post-truth’ circulate within a lexicon in which objective truth has “become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (OED). In these circumstances, it is vital to understand subjective opinion as a historically specific epistemological structure. In my presentation, I explore the figure of the opining subject as a form of subjectivity necessary to contemporary digital landscape, where a compulsion to have an opinion on virtually everything reigns.
Opinion presupposes an individuality entailing a proprietary claim, epitomized in Hegel’s wordplay Meinung ist mein. Here, opinion appears as the manifestation of my particularity, seemingly irreducible to any external standard. I need not provide reasons for my opinion; even if demonstrably wrong or delusional, it remains mine. Opinions may be expressed, shared, or altered, yet in form remain registers of our very sense of self. To deny that one’s opinions are one’s own would appear as an absurdity, or at least elicit an individuality under great duress.
How, then, does thought lapse into ‘opinion’? This question acquires urgency within the globally interconnected world of digital platforms, where caustic political debate is mediated through emotionally charged and fragmented forms of communication. Skepticism towards objective truth, hostility towards expertise, and appeals to emotion and ‘gut instinct’ all seemingly contribute to an unprecedented epistemological relativism. The proliferation of media punditry, demagoguery, conspiracy theories and misinformation testifies to opinion’s growing authority as a sacrosanct standpoint for judging the world.
Opinion, once a benchmark of individual autonomy, increasingly appears as its opposite: as a parody of the judging subject, bestowing upon the individual an image of fortified self-containment fashioned in and through a disjointed and episodic digital environment of group uniformity and technological schemas. With a critical theory of opinion, my aim is to provide new insight into how the certitude of opinion has become ever more pervasive form of thinking an uncertain world.
Eric-John Russell holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in London. He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at Universität Potsdam. His first book, Spectacular Logic in Hegel and Debord: Why Everything is as it Seems, was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury, with a preface by Étienne Balibar. He has also published articles in Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Critical Sociology,Hegel Bulletin, Theory Culture & Society, Science & Society, Jahrbuch der Internationalen Georg-Lukács-Gesellschaft, and Radical Philosophy, as well as in numerous edited volumes. He has also translated Jamie Semprun’s Précis de récupération into English for MIT Press and sections of Foucault’s 1954-1955 lectures on anthropology for CRMEP Books. He is currently under contract with University of Chicago Press to translate a selection of writings by Theodor W. Adorno. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Marx & Philosophy Review of Books and founding editor of the critical theory journal Cured Quail. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain in Brussels under the ERC project “BildungLearning,” with focus on a critical theory of opinion.