What is Quality?

Trilogy on Quality-Infrastructures-Games

I’ll give a try, with loose strokes to poke at the concept of Quality. My purpose here would be not so much to define quality, as to bring attention to it and potential usefulness of it when it comes to meaning making in everyday life. Somehow one doesn’t hear the word much these days. Maybe because its so self-evident for most, or maybe because the system we live in predominantly is optimizing for something else.

Thinking about Quality, I’ve been mostly inspired by Robert M. Pirsig’s novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I’ve been thouroughly and utterly influenced by his writings.

So What is quality? Where do we find quality? First thing that pops to mind is the basic distinction between the work well done and the sloppy work. We call the former full of quality. Usually the attributes of quality work are attention and care to details. There is a functional elegance fullfilled. If I hand wash stain on my trousers, if I construct a table, if I make a clay cup, we usually judge first if it fullfills the function well. Does the table stand and is able to hold things? Can the cup hold the water, etc…

We might construct a beautiful baroque like, amazingly coloured cup, but if it leaks, well then its a low quality cup (maybe still, a high quality conceptual art object that comments on the theme of functionality). Likewise, bare functional organization isn’t enough as well. There is a layer that we enjoy and sometimes call it a style, a variation, a character,an ornamentation (or maybe we should call it after Bataille: AN EXCESS!!) - all these features that make a functional object into a real living breathing material thing with its unique traces of materials, of its makers’ handprints, etc.

What follows then, is that quality seems to be found between the harmonic resonance of what Pirsig would call surface qualities and the rational (structural functional) qualities. Interestingly, another favorite thinker of mine: Hofstadter uses very similar concepts of Surface and Essences speaking more about the process of cognition, but uncannily resonating with Pirsig here.

Hofstadter’s point is that any concept can have infinite variations. A concept - Cup, can have thousands of variations.. Various sizes, various colours, various materials, various designs. But also this, particular cup with particular history or that particular cup with its stories, etc.. But if we spend enough time in the world of cups, we inevitably start noticing similarities and start finding analogies and give birth to groups,families, clusters of cups (we expand and enrich the conceptual landscape which is interlocked with real world patterns landscape, which in itself is interlocked , if you are an idealist leaning, to a qualities pattern ‘ideal’ landscape of archetypes and gods and Substance and the Real.

For Hofstadter there is an essence of a cup, which does not mean something fundamental. It just means there is a stable structural-functional skeleton which we can recognise even unconsciously as a cup. That happens, because we’ve been grown in a culture with cups, and we’ve been makers, users, maintainers, fixers and breakers of them. Thats why we can dream cups, and we can see cups in the clouds.

What does that have to do with harmony between rational and surface qualities? Well, because it is analogous. The beauty of surface qualities is akin to the aesthetics of the visible, perceptible. Think of a beautiful face, a gorgeous looking instrument, beautiful mountain scenery. Its the appreciation of the skin. And surface qualities usually but not always are the outside trace of essential qualities or rational qualities. We don’t feel that something is quality if that two do not harmonize. On one hand if supposedly beautiful exterior conceals sloppy interior, we call it cheap, butaforic, hidden incompetency and what not. On the other hand, think of mass produced cups. One is supposedly exactly and ideally made to specifications, and each is like the rest. The sameness has conquered. The function is there, but we usually save the word “quality” for something else.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of quality is the act of being involved in doing, making that results in quality things, actions, relations. Pirsig uses a special word for that: enthusiastic. It stems from “en-theo” to be immersed in God or maybe more precisely in the Christian lingo - holy spirit. Think of all the situations where you have been engrossed in doing something, making something, fixing something, and you where so into it that everything was just flowing. It was a fit with your capabilities your experiences and the challenge or context you faced. You and the world fitted at those moments like a hand and a glove. Note that it doesn’t have to be a ‘making/doing active mode’. One can experience oneself being a glove with the world also more ‘passively’ . Think of all the experiences where you felt that feeling of being in the right place at the right time. Or Feeling that I belong here with my full essence I am part of it. I fit in fully. So it doesn’t have to be in an active mode of production or use. It has aspects of it that are more experiantial of just being.

Pirsig also says that Care and caring are the inner side of Quality. Care and Quality is according to him the same thing looked from different perspective. Thus actual caring is more primary to quality than having skills to make something (or so do I postulate). And this reveal one more aspect of our initial question what is quality: the care put in is important to us. But its also why its so hard to measure and track it. One needs to have an intimate knowledge and witness of someone being enthusiastic in order to appreciate the care aspect.

Imagine your receive a beautiful hand made cup. Now imagine i tell you that that cup was made by a craftsman who barely noticed that cup being made. In fact, he has made so many of these cups that he just stamps them out unconciously with one hand, while the other switches tv channels.

And on the other side of a spectrum: think of yourself or someone you know making your theirs first cup. Its going to be functionally, and aesthetically on the surface clumsy, but it will have this utmost care given while it was made. We have a saying: she put all her heart into it.

So it seems that quality has something to do with this tripatriate aspect of it: firstly, the surface variations and the uniqueness of its ‘face’. Secondly, the structural-functional organization and the beauty of its relational whole and the way it serves a purpose and the way its plugs into wider structural-funcitonal wholes and assemblages and the way it gathers within itself materials and modules, parts, techniques, methods, institutions, cultures, etc, etc.

And the third aspect being care-full; attending or what social-anthropologist Tim Ingold calls corespondance with the thing, the object, the world and you; for a time being becoming one resonating correspondance. And maybe Pirsig was right that that is one of those moments and ways to participate in God (or larger wholes than yourself)

Next I will be looking at concepts of Infrastructure and Games/Play.