10 September 2009: "Does my life ‘make more sense’ now that PitchforkMedia.coms have reviewed the Beatles?"

This post is about convertible securities. Contemplating the purpose of rating the reissues of the long-playing albums by the pop-music group the Beatles, Carles notes that these ratings create a vertiginous comparability among otherwise unlike items from different cultural periods. The numeric rating for the records as imposed by the self-appointed critics (a will to power Carles impishly mocks: "My mind is free / I am a music critic / I honestly believe that my ‘taste in music’ is a direct reflection of the ‘best music’ in the world") renders a false exchangability akin to the way money functions in the world of commodities. The ratings, in a sense, begin to function as currency, as prices, and the value of a rating point, like currencies, float between publications and time periods. A "9" in Pitchfork in 2007 is quite different from a "9" in Spin or even a "9" in 2009. The problem is that points are inconvertible; ratings are not liquid. The records do not circulate to make the value of the ratings realizable. Carles notes that this means a kind of Bretton Woods for ratings systems is required:

it is our duty as ‘die hard music fans’
who are the most ‘culturally connected’ ppl in the world
to find out which albums are better than others
and create a forum for like-minded people to rally around them

Such an international governing body might in theory establish rates of conversion for the various aesthetic quantification modes.

But until then, we are in the dark, blindly wandering in search of comprehensible standards. The ratings have putative value but are in effect and in practice worthless. Carles is caustically sarcastic about this state of affairs: "My perception of the world finally makes sense. Like I finally ‘get’ music history since I can compare the Beatles to modern indie hits." In fact the attempt to compare these objets d'art in terms of inscrutable numbers makes the task of criticism Sisyphian.

As Marx writes of money in Capital, "the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value ... is inherent in the price-form itself." This creates an ambiguity where the number was a critic's attempt to fix a value. Carles draws the inevitable conclusion about how the attempt to complete the item being rated with its rating only makes the item more uncertain: "Just searching 4 perfection. Not all albums were created equally." The false equivalence implied by ratings prevents any thorough understanding of a given work's value. It merely adds another symbolic layer to decode, another occasion for méconnaissance.