Abstract

This article theorizes a late-capitalist conjuncture in which legitimacy is increasingly manufactured at the intersection of two regimes that are often analyzed separately: an aesthetic regime that binds subjects through seduction and livable selfhood, and an audit regime that binds them through evaluation, commensuration, and the procedural authority of numbers. Reworking Walter Benjamin’s “capitalism as religion” as an operator rather than a master key, the paper argues that contemporary capitalism can be specified as an aesthetic religion in a strict sociological sense: a cultic grammar whose rituals of verification continuously authorize what counts as credible, comparable, and real for consequential purposes. The central mechanism is audit power as veridictive semiotic governance: commensuration stabilizes hierarchies, hierarchies are operationalized as incentives and sanctions, and subjects are returned to themselves via continuous feedback loops. Methodologically, the argument is interpretive and theory-building but evidence-facing: it anchors the model in documentary cultural analysis of audit artifacts (rankings, scoring schemas, dashboards, accreditation protocols) and uses the governance of mental health and neurodiversity as a limit case that renders the “turning of signs into social being” institutionally observable. The payoff is diagnostic: specifying boundary conditions under which measurement coordinates versus consecrates.