The profit motive becomes invisible second nature through its universalization

Evidence

But I want to argue that if anything, Adorno and Horkheimer’s intuition of the ideology of the thing is even more profoundly true today than it was then. For that very reason — its very universalization and interiorization — it is less visible as such and has been transformed into a veritable second nature. To try to represent and visualize the boardroom and the ruling class is uncool because it involves an old-fashioned commitment to content in a situation in which only form as such — that most formalistic of all types of law or regularity, the profit motive (which clearly outweighs even such more vivid ideological slogans as “efficiency”) — counts, and in which the commitment to form, the tacit presupposition of the profit motive, is assumed in advance and not subject to reexamination or to thematization as such. This Occam’s razor clearly shears away a great many henceforth metaphysical topics of conversation once indulged by earlier generations in a less purely functioning capitalist system, and can, indeed, be characterized as a certain end of idealism constitutive of the postmodern. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 754

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names ‘second nature’ interiorization as the mechanism by which ideology becomes invisible — a load-bearing concept for the chapter’s claim that only form, not content, counts in postmodern cultural logic.
• ADDENDUM: The interiorized-profit-motive as second nature parallels the sacrificial-debate’s account of how violent logics become tacit background assumptions rather than stated commitments.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that postmodern ‘commitment to form’ over content is itself the most formalistic type of regularity — the profit motive — is dense and paradigm-shifting for how to read culture after late capitalism.
• XREF: connects to: Quality-of-life discourse masks the profitability motive underneath. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 427; Technical rationalization hides who benefits from the machinery. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 689; Ricardo’s comparative-advantage case targeted profit, not welfare. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 391