Neoliberal legitimacy is secured by lifestyle knowhow rather than profit itself

Evidence

The formalism of the profit motive is then transmitted — but no longer in the cumbersome form of those religious doctrines whose role it supplants — to a kind of external nouveau riche public, which, from the age of the “organization men” of the 1950s to that of 1980s “yuppies,” has grown ever less shameless in its pursuit of success, now reconceptualized as the “life-style” of a specific “group.” But I also want to argue that it is no longer exactly profit as such that forms the ideal image of the process (money is merely the external sign of inward election, but fortune and “great wealth” are harder to represent, let alone libidinally to conceptualize, in an epoch in which numbers like billions and trillions are more frequently encountered). Rather, what is at stake is knowhow and knowledge of the system itself: and this is no doubt the “moment of truth” in postindustrial theories of the new primacy of scientific knowledge over profit and production; only the knowledge is not particularly scientific, and “merely” involves initiation into the way the system functions. But now those in the know are too proud of their lesson and their knowhow to tolerate any questions about why it should be like that, or even worth knowing in the first place. … This is the insider cultural capital of the nouveaux riches which includes the etiquette and table manners of the system; along with cautionary anecdotes, your enthusiasm — fanned into a veritable frenzy in cultural spinoffs like the cyberpunk corporate fiction already mentioned — has more to do with having the knowledge of the system than it does with the system itself. The social climbing of the new yuppie in-group knowledge now spreads slowly downward, via the media, to the very zoning boundaries of the underclasses themselves; legitimacy, the legitimation of this particular social order, being secured in advance by a belief in the secrets of the corporate life-style that includes the profit motive as its unspoken “absolute presupposition,” but which you can’t learn and question all at once, any more than you can mentally redesign a sailboat you are doing your first sailing in. Lenin’s theory of the bribery of advanced sectors of the working class thus needs to be replaced by a theory of status bribery and of the distribution of postmodern cultural badges, which is I suppose more or less what Bourdieu currently offers us — except that, as we have already seen, such concepts of “status,” evolved for the postmodern group, need to be sharply distinguished from the traditional sociological theories in which the concept of status was an alternative to the concept of class (and in which, therefore, a certain structure of the feudal ancien regime was being played off against an awareness of the originality of bourgeois society). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 755

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines how ‘status bribery’ and ‘postmodern cultural badges’ replace Lenin’s theory of working-class bribery — useful for the reader’s cognitive map of their own position.
• XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s cultural capital concept and to the reader’s interest in how aesthetic/cultural form expresses economic structure. — connects to: Satire can reveal everyday neoliberalism by exaggerating life-organizing trends — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 259; Neoliberalism is transmitted through everyday consumer encounters, not texts — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 431; Neoliberalism’s appeal lies in an esoteric knowledge reserved for the Elect — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 2148