Adorno on Freud, the Constitution of Immanence and the Affective Underpinnings of Cognition

Throughout his work, Adorno lays out how, in his view, our sense of social reality much like our sense of self are woven into what he refers to as a context of immanence. Following the diagnosis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example, as the Enlightenment collapses onto itself at the beginning of the 1940s, this complex of immanence turns into a context of delusion that gives way to hallucinatory forms of political antisemitism. Moreover, in the same work, and later, Adorno never ceases to stress how capitalist dynamics are imprinted on the individual’s alienated sense of self; or how a sustained exposure to the products of the culture industry atrophies the imagination, trapping the individual in the present of capitalist reality. The question I want to examine in this paper is the following: according to Adorno, how does the constitution of immanence and the way our selves are woven into its fabric affect our cognitive economy? I will argue that a significant part of the answer he proposes turns on his critical appropriation of a set of Freudian insights into social psychology. On my reading, what is at issue for Adorno is the way the cognitive economy of the individual is tied to their affective and broader psychological equilibrium. More specifically, what Adorno tracks is how individuals struggle to emancipate their thinking from hard-wired defense mechanisms that drive cognition and motivate the constitution of immanence in the first place.