22 November 2010: "The Negrofication of Pitchfork and the Death of White Man's Indie"

This post is about instrumental reason. Trying to capture the ineffable aspects of ontic quality as a quantity that can drive a variety of econometric models and undergird a process of rational-choice analysis has long been a hardy tool in the capitalist arsenal, conjuring a seemingly empirical fact out of more or less thin air and then passing it off as hardened wisdom, as a realistic willingness to face cold facts rather than namby-pamby intangibilities, which, as all MBAs know, are no basis for a firm to make its investment decisions going forward. Carles takes an ironic stab at the mania for quantification so palpable among the thought leaders of high capitalist reason.

"Life is all about numbers."
-probably some smart person / business person / mathematician

Carles will not even grant authority to the purveyors of this line of reasoning in jest. They are only "probably" authoritative, even on their own ideology. Clearly Carles has in mind this trenchant passage from Dialektik der Aufklärung:

The standardization of the intellectual function through which the mastery of the senses is accomplished, the acquiescence of thought to the production of unanimity, implies an impoverishment of thought no less than of experience; the separation of the two realms leaves both damaged. A consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small.

Such stupidity has, in Carles's lucid opinion, afflicted the fatally compromised tastemakers at the popular-music weblog Pitchfork, who has become too explicit in their transformation of the fool's gold of aesthetic quality into the cold cash that can be derived from an accredited numeric rank. "I never thought I'd live 2 see this day a 10.0 on a new album," Carles admits, as this threatens to undermine the credibility of the entire ranking racket, establishing putative achievement of perfection as passé:

this will lead to a 'reactionary sect'
creating 'even more backlash' [via hits] for the Pitchforks
But also
It might get 'rlly boring'
And no1 will even care any more

The perfect score reveals a perfect vacuity, the total triumph of the administrative "muse" over the negative dialectic requisite for the apperception of aesthetic accomplishment within a society brutalized by commodified expression. The Pitchfork review is an act of aesthic terrorism, attempting to reduce the listening capabilities of its readership to that of an unthinking lizard, to a creature that can only respond when prodded from the outside, and then only with an instinctual recoil. To return, as Carles intends his readers to, to the relevant passage from Adorno and Horkheimer:

The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is transferred by rationalized modes of work to the human capacity for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians. The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard

The consequences for Pitchfork readers is plain: the apotheosis has been achieved, their marching orders issued. The holy number has been drawn, and no experience can exceed the current one in significance: "It might make us think that life is worth giving up on
[via having 'no identity'/no reason to 'go on']," Carles notes, pointing not only to the nihilism incipient in the quantification, but to the depersonalization, always implicit in making art commensurate with data, but now explicit, heralding a grand social order of remorseless efficiency in which every being, and every experience and every feeling is reducible to a number. Carles captures the dystopian subjectivity resulting from having all experience being integrated to the same numeric scale:
"My life is totally different
My life is totally the same"

The lapse into totalitarianism that comes in the wake of such regression, when all capacity to distinguish moral qualities without recourse to numeric data, is plain. When we can only hear rankings, when we must be stand and be counted, when we must relentlessly count, and tally the score, when we can only wonder about what our own number must be, the human spirit will have finally capitulated to the unleashed forces of dominative instrumental reason that adheres in no single man but dominates them all as a free-floating, omnipresent force that animates institutions across the social matrix.

Carles links the regression to an emerging racist order, which he sardonically salutes with these grim words evocative of the Nüremburg rallies: "An important day, a celebration of greatness."

But the hostility of this quantifying gesture is not merely an assault on the thinking ability of the weblog's readership, not merely an invitation for fascism. The perfect ranking from Pitchfork also implies the perfected ignorance and passive receptivity of the critic himself. Ultimately Carles is able to inspire hope by dismissing the critic, acknowledging his ranking gesture as a self-consuming artifact, one which annihilates him as it establishes his notoriety and authority:
"it seems like this is 'the defining moment of his journalistic bloggy life'
Even though I don't know anything abt him
And possibly will never know anything more abt him"
Nothing remains to be known; he has admitted to having had a perfect aesthetic experience, which can only mean that he can no longer experience anything. Power relies on the withheld threat, the unrealized pleasure, the iron fist of unimaginable deprivation wrapped in the velvet glove of promised jouissance. The reviewer surrenders that position by forwarding a number which in his operant scale is more than a number, thereby short-circuiting it. He strains for a quality through quantity, even having already dismissed quality, but the specter of sensuousness can only haunt his words, terrifying them in return for the terror he sought to inflict on his audience by evoking completeness. The cult of death. Full knowledge, the forbidden fruit. Perfect understanding, a perfectly told lie.

Carles declares his contempt for the reviewer by mocking his pretensions to perfectibility: "there is 'no where to go' now that I have experienced perfection" To paraphrase Adorno in another context, there can be no poetry after Kanye.