POLITICS AND POETICS

EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL RANKED AT ONCE

MILA SORTIER

January 22, 2026

There is a particular modern superstition that insists experience must be domesticated through numbers, as though the world were a ledger waiting to be reconciled. This essay lingers in the unease beneath that impulse, tracing how ranking became our quiet civic religion and how its logic seeped into taste, memory, even affection. What emerges is less a diagnosis than a confession: We have mistaken measurement for attention.

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The culture of ranking has become the dominant aesthetic of our moment. Not the culture of lists specifically, though those continue to proliferate like seasonal allergies, but the broader, more pervasive impulse to order, sort, classify, quantify, evaluate, and hierarchize everything as though meaning lived somewhere amid the integers. Ranking has become our lingua franca, our shared superstition, the background radiation of contemporary taste. One no longer encounters a film, a book, an exhibition, or a piece of music without also encountering its score, its rating, its stars, its placement, its algorithmic heat index, its aggregated consensus. Experience now arrives pre-indexed, as though the world were a refrigerator door covered in gold-star stickers.

The absurdity of this is so obvious, it has become invisible. We move through the world like nervous accountants of our own pleasures, mentally grading what should simply be lived. A film is not allowed to be an encounter; it must be a four out of five. A book is not permitted to haunt; it must score at least a nine. Even the intimate—doctors, friendships, therapists—circulates under the tyranny of the rating system. Everything everywhere is all ranked at once. If Marcel Proust were publishing today, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) would arrive with a community rating somewhere between 4.2 and 4.6, depending on whether people found the madeleine chapter “relatable.”

This impulse is often framed as a convenience. Ranking provides clarity, saves time, cuts through noise. But its deeper function is psychological: It wards off uncertainty. To rank is to pretend that experience is manageable. It transforms the sprawling landscape of the culture into something like a spreadsheet—tidy, comprehensible, and gloriously falsified. It gives shape to what refuses shape, the way a corset gives shape to a human torso: with effort, discomfort, and a faint sense of historical embarrassment.

Where novels go not to be read but to be counted, weighed, and certified as culturally safe for public consumption.

Critics participate in this willingly. The position demands discrimination, or at least the performance of it. But ranking is no longer a tool; it has become a worldview. A review without a number now feels strangely incomplete, as if the critic had forgotten to declare their moral position. The unranked object seems vaguely suspicious. Ambiguity is interpreted as evasion. Aesthetic experience is acceptable only if it concludes with a verdict. The critic becomes an adjudicator, and the work becomes evidence in need of sentencing. Somewhere, a film cries, “I’m innocent! I was only trying to be seen!”

The most curious part of this phenomenon is its historical newness. Earlier generations of critics articulated taste through argument, sensibility, irritation, and enthusiasm, not numerical hierarchy. Pauline Kael never ranked her affections; she attacked or adored. Her criticism was electrical, erratic, full of lunges and reversals, propelled by the shock of encounter rather than the serenity of judgment. She understood that taste, when alive, behaves more like weather than mathematics. Kael did not compare McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) to The Godfather Part II (1974) to determine which was “better.” She responded to each on the terms of its own atmospheric pressure. To rank would have been, for her, a violation of the encounter—an insult to both the art and the self. Her writing was full of enthusiasms that contradicted one another, moments of rapture beside moments of disdain. She made a career out of insisting that criticism is not a form of management, a point that today sounds almost utopian.

Roland Barthes was even more suspicious of evaluation. The entire project of Mythologies (1957), and later The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and Camera Lucida (1980), rests on the assumption that fragments cannot be compared, only explored. He moved through culture like an archaeologist of sensation, brushing away dust to reveal what gleamed underneath. He had no interest in declaring one fragment “better” than another, because “better” belongs to an economy of judgment that was foreign to his enterprise. What mattered to Barthes was the punctum, the wound, the sting—the detail that pierces and unsettles. Such punctures cannot be ranked because they do not exist on a shared scale. They are private events masquerading as insights. For Barthes, to quantify was to betray. He would have rated the entire practice of ranking two stars out of five, and only for entertainment value.

Even James Baldwin, who possessed one of the most severe and exacting critical intelligences of the twentieth century, never resorted to the language of scoring. His prose on film—particularly on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and The Exorcist (1973)—is surgical in its clarity and devastating in its certainty, but never numerical. Baldwin’s objection to bad art was moral before it was aesthetic. He saw these films not as competitors but as mirrors of the American psyche, distorting or clarifying the nation’s self-understanding. Ranking them would have been beside the point. A film was either complicit or revelatory, cowardly or brave, evasive or honest. Baldwin measured art against the world, not against other art. One shudders to imagine him on Letterboxd.

What unites these critics is not simply brilliance, but an allergy to quantification. Their work is rooted in the belief that criticism is an interpretive, not administrative, pursuit. They wrote to complicate experience, not to contain it. They sought to deepen the work’s mystery, not to flatten it into a value assignment. From their perspective, ranking would have been a category error: the imposition of an inappropriate metric onto something that by definition resists metrics.

Because nothing says “art” like quantifying influence with the precision of a quarterly earnings report.

Ranking as we know it is not criticism at all, but the bureaucratization of response. It converts the critic into a middle manager of culture, a specialist responsible for maintaining the spreadsheet of taste. It replaces the unpredictable drama of encounter with the predictable choreography of evaluation. It treats aesthetic experience as something that can be processed by the same mechanisms that govern restaurant reviews and credit scores. It is the triumph of paperwork over perception.

The shift from argument to ranking mirrors a larger cultural drift from judgment to administration, from insight to classification, from sensibility to sorting. Today’s critic is expected not to reveal, but to organize; not to wrestle with a work, but to place it; not to risk enthusiasm, but to distribute approval in appropriate proportions. The ranking becomes a surrogate for reflection, an insurance policy against ambiguity. It allows the critic to outsource vulnerability to the safety of the number, leaving feeling to the comment section.

In this sense, the contemporary ranking system is not merely silly but symptomatic. It expresses a deep cultural mistrust of subjectivity. The number reassures us that we are not alone, that our feelings can be validated by consensus, that our aesthetic risks can be hedged by collective approval. It promises certainty where criticism once offered provocation. It transforms the critic from a companion in thought to a regulator of taste. A strange promotion.

This is why returning to writers like Kael, Barthes, and Baldwin, and to the broader company of mid-century critics who preceded the managerial turn in cultural discourse, feels almost shockingly liberating. They remind us that criticism was once an art form in its own right: volatile, partial, unruly, allergic to bureaucracy. They remind us that to think about art is to inhabit its contradictions, not to neutralize them. Above all, they remind us that the critic’s task is not to rank the world, but to see it. A task that, especially today, borders on the subversive.

Even genius must queue: the great couture census, where style is finally made legible through numbers.

This shift is most obvious in film culture. A film now enters the world already shadowed by its aggregated score, which then becomes the lens through which it is watched. A 92 suggests virtue; 83, danger; 61, failure; 48, train wreck. The numbers function like a weather system, determining the atmospheric pressure around a film before anyone has seen it. One does not encounter a film; one encounters the average of other people’s numerical encounters. The film itself, somewhere underneath, tries to wave.

The arbitrariness becomes clearer when films that are structurally unrankable—formally unstable, ethically ambiguous, deliberately abrasive—receive dutiful numeric treatment. A three-and-a-half-star rating assigned to something like Beau travail (1999) or In the Mood for Love (2000) or Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) is not merely insufficient; it is meaningless. It is like rating love or grief. Yet it persists, because ranking has replaced reflection.

Literature suffers a lesser but similar fate. Readers, overwhelmed by abundance, turn to rankings as a surrogate for judgment. The “best” books are those that appear at the top of year-end rundowns, which in turn reflect not literary vitality but the geography of publicity cycles. The result is a strange, almost medieval system of aesthetic taxation. Books released between September and November enjoy higher ranking potential, while books released in February or June fall into the shadows no matter their brilliance. To read according to rankings is to inherit an arbitrary temporal bias masquerading as literary consensus. Even the monks of the scriptorium would raise an eyebrow.

The art world pretends to be exempt from this nonsense, but only because it uses a different vocabulary. Museums speak of “major” exhibitions and “significant” works. Galleries describe artists as “important,” “essential,” “vital”—all synonyms for being, in the unspoken ranking, near the top. The market completes the picture: Auctions deliver numbers that critics secretly despise but quietly obey and promptly publish. The ranking here is concealed behind price, visibility, and the gravitational pull of institutions. The hierarchy is not announced; it is enforced with a delicate handshake and a PDF preview.

Influence, ranked: a reminder that the art world’s true medium has always been the leaderboard.

Music reveals the comic futility of ranking perhaps more than any other art form. Songs enter the world not as objects of contemplation but as algorithmic predictions. The “Top 50” list is not a mirror of taste but a mechanism that shapes it. A track becomes “popular” because the platform wants it to be popular, and the ranking serves as proof. Meanwhile, the music that rewires actual lives—the obscure, the intimate, the strange—remains unranked and therefore nonexistent in the public imagination. The emotional life of the individual becomes illegible to the collective simply because it cannot be computed. We are left with a culture in which heartbreak is measured in streams.

The logic of ranking has expanded even beyond culture into domains that should be immune to quantitative thinking. Cities are ranked. Universities. Friend groups. Tourist destinations. Life experiences. “50 of the Best Feelings in the World” is an actual headline written by an actual person. Even emotions now appear in descending order, as though misery could be assigned a percentile and nostalgia a letter grade.

At the heart of this is a crisis of trust. We no longer trust our own encounters, so we outsource judgment to numbers. The ranking provides not only guidance but reassurance: others have liked this, others have seen this, others have confirmed its value. It offers a form of companionship. The ranking is a crowd, a chorus, a collective murmur saying, You are not alone in this experience. Or, less generously, We are all confused together.

History, updated quarterly, because nothing ages faster than a definitive list.

The logical conclusion is that nothing is ever allowed to stand on its own. A work is always compared against something else—another film, another novel, another painting, another year. We evaluate comparatively because evaluating feels absolutely too exposed, too vulnerable. Ranking is the armor we wear against the risk of genuine enthusiasm. We avoid the embarrassment of saying “I loved this” by saying “4.3 stars.” We are in a moment in which the only stable ideology is comparative evaluation. Ranking has replaced religion as our shared metaphysics. The algorithm has replaced the oracle. To desire is to rate; to feel is to sort; to understand is to place. A hierarchy for every heartbeat.

The psychological effect is subtle but corrosive. When everything must be compared, nothing can be loved without self-consciousness. One adores a novel but also wonders where it “sits” relative to other novels. One is moved by a film but immediately thinks of how it might be positioned within the annual race for significance. The experience is shadowed by the specter of its ranking. Pleasure becomes strategic. Affection becomes guarded. Even disappointment becomes performative.

What remains unranked begins to seem illegitimate. The painting that moved you privately but received no public acclaim begins to feel like a guilty secret. The book discovered by accident in a secondhand shop feels wrong, as if it lacks the pedigree of consensus. We no longer trust the unverified. Aesthetic solitude begins to feel like error. We await the score that will tell us what we felt.

There is, however, a quiet form of resistance available, and it lies in the unrankable. Works that defy categorization, that refuse neat evaluation, that embarrass the impulse to order, reintroduce disorder into the cultural bloodstream. They remind us that art is not a competition but a field of intensity. They reveal that meaning often arrives askew, sideways, unmeasured. They cannot be indexed; they must be met.

The most honest critic offers not rankings but confessions: This moved me, this irritated me, this stayed with me, this dissolved. Not declarations of authority but traces of experience. Judgment without hierarchy. Encounter without system. A star rating of one’s own trembling. Indeed, what makes culture worth living with is precisely what cannot be arranged: the stray, the provisional, the fragmentary, the out of season, the inexplicable. The things discovered by accident. The things that contradict one another. The things that do not add up. The secret affinities that resist explanation.

Wanderlust, now algorithmically optimized: adventure reduced to a sanctioned itinerary.

In the end, the mania for ranking expresses a longing for certainty in a world that continues to resist it. It is an attempt to force coherence onto an incoherent time, to domesticate chaos through numerical fiction. It is touching in its way, anxious, hopeful, mostly misdirected. Perhaps that is the most generous ranking one can give it.

Mila Sortier (born 1953 in Whanganui, New Zealand) is a writer preoccupied with the unstable lives of hierarchies and the quiet neuroses of supposedly objective systems. She studied epistemology and information theory at Victoria University of Wellington, focusing on classification systems that collapse under their own logic.

Cover image: The modern oracle: a pictographic theology in which a fruit decides the fates of entire careers.