Public opinion and collective subjectivity: a conceptual approach

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the concept of public opinion at a theoretical level. It starts from the recognition of the importance of this concept for sociology and reconnects with older strands in sociology and neighboring disciplines which focused on it, such as social psychology and political science. In reviewing the literature, it collects its insights and endeavours to surmount its shortcomings, drawing upon the concept of collective subjectivity. It thus tackles the theorization of public opinion regarding varied levels of centering and intentionality, social interaction, individuals and sub-collectivities, as well as the dimensions of the constitution of collective subjectivities (hermeneutic-symbolic, material, of power and space-time). Finally, the paper discusses how permanence and change take place in what regards public opinion, pointing to the mechanisms related to social memory and creativity, as well as to rhythms of social development. Evaluative and political issues relative to public opinion as a decentred collective subjecivity are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Public opinion
• collective subjecivity
• multidimensionality
• space-time
• communication
• imaginary
• double hermeneutics

Acknowledgements

The research for this paper was supported by a grant from CAPES, of the Brazilian Ministry for Education, and developed in the course of a stay as visiting-scholar at the Sociology department of New York University. I would like to thank Jeff Manza for hosting me during this period and for his comments on the original version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

José Maurício Domingues holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He teaches at the Institute for Social and Political Studies of Rio de Janeiro State University (IESP-UERJ). He was awarded in December 2017 the Annelise Maier Research Prize from Humboldt Foundation for the years 2018–2023 as associate to the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and Berlin Free University. His books in English are Critical Theory and Political Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, forthcoming); Emancipation and History: The Return of Social Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2017/Chicago: Heymarket, forthcoming 2018); Global Modernity, Development, and Contemporary Civilization: Towards a Renewal of Critical Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2012); Latin America and Contemporary Modernity: A Sociological Interpretation (New York and London: Routledge, 2008); Modernity Reconstructed (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006); Social Creativity, Collective Subjectivity and Contemporary Modernity (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press and New York: Saint Martin's Press (Palgrave), 2000); Sociological Theory and Collective Subjectivity (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press and New York: Saint Martin's Press (Palgrave), 1995). He is also co-editor of Global Modernity and Social Contestation (London and Deli: Sage, 2015).

ORCID

José Maurício Domingues http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9729-9528

Notes

1. ‘Agenda-setting’ and ‘framing’, including ‘priming’, have specifically been seen as a crucial part of mass-media operations (Iyengar 2010, 75–80). This is the partly valid point of Luhmann’s ([1996] 2000, especially 3–6, chap. 14) conceptualization, when he points to the double creation of reality by the mass media – internally to themselves and to those that participate in the process of communication with them, ‘external’ reality being of little or no consequence. This is however by no means due to the inexorable differentiation of society and the constitution of closed, self-referential systems.

2. This surely relates to the general pluralization of social life in historic-evolutionary terms. It rests upon several mechanisms, including but without being restricted to ‘differentiation’, which is too much of a sociological ideology at this stage.

3. For the connection of collective subjectivity with the imaginary in Castoriadis, see Domingues (2000a, chap. 2; [2016] 2017), where interaction rather than individualism is emphasized and that magmatic character is further developed, with the non-identitary logic of the ‘unconscious’ (or ‘id’) brought to bear on the magma in an explicit way, beyond Castoriadis’ own indecisiveness in this regard.

4. Some, more recently, despite the popularity of the theory, constructed mathematical models that question and to a good extent deny its validity (Watts and Dods 2007). It was implicitly reaffirmed by Stimson ([2004] 2005, 10ff, 20ff).

5. Not only is communication intertwined with public opinion, its materiality is inextricably part of what it is, including how this connects to different types of interaction (of co-presence and at a distance), despite Luhmann’s ([1996] 2000, 2–3) reductive formulation, which moreover disregards the importance of the interaction between collective subjectivities since he was concerned with internal (autopoietic) processes.

6. For instance, a relevant handbook about the internet (Dutton 2013) does not address public opinion, with one superficial mention to it only in its index, although overall the articles’ assessment is that it is changing politics, though not necessarily in virtuous ways. Yet we can submit that with segmentation in social media perhaps contradictorily people seem to be less likely to refrain from expressing opinions for fear of being constrained or ostracized (the ‘spiral of silence’ effect), while, at the same time, desire to be on the winning side (the ‘bandwagon’ effect) may not have diminished. See Noelle-Neumann (1995).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Capes) of the Brazilian Ministry of Education.