ADORNO ON IDEOLOGY AND PSYCHOLOGY

"The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare, is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such." Adorno, Minima Moralia para.71

If Adorno is here correct, it means psychology is conditioned by logical considerations (as that logic interprets the objects presented to it). To "decay" the authority of "logical evidence" means to poison the well against it so that it no longer has any bearing on psychological conclusions. Even if evidence is presented to the psyche that evidence is rendered irrelevant a priori, which is to say, ideology eradicates resistance by preconditioning the psyche against relevant opposition, against that which has the power to obliterate it. In this way ideology establishes itself without ever having to justify itself.  

Pre-psychological conditioning has to do with environment, but there is another sense in which it has to do with biology. It seems Adorno here speaks of it, as to what psychology will permit in terms of influence. The power ideology exerts over human beings in this sense, is explained by its control over the categories that condition judgment: ideology vitiates to condition the categories which condition everything else.

If the decay of "logical evidence" is what accounts for the "magnetic power" of ideology over humans (and not psychology) then this facet is a foundation which preconditions psychology. It is not "the decay of logic," but the preconditioing of the human psyche (poisoning of the well) against the objective consideration of logical evidence... in other words, thought is rendered irrelevant, incapable, deceptive, untrustworthy, suspect, before it even has the chance to exercise itself as thought, as critique, as cross examination of appearance, before it even begins to ponder the evidence, be it conceptual or concrete. 

..."logical evidence" is a reference to polemical thought which refutes the authoritarian premisses of ideology. If this process of thinking is not permitted, because ideology has preconditioned psychology, then no matter how shallow or easily refuted, ideology will remain without the possibility of falsification, because the preconditioning will not permit the process of thought.

"The castration of perception, however, by a controlling authority, which refuses it any desiring anticipation, thereby compels it into the schema of the powerless repetition of what is already familiar. That nothing more is actually allowed to be seen, amounts to the sacrifice of the intellect." Minima Moralia, para.79       

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