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Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Question of the Day: How Do You Define Quality?



Yesterdays post got me thinking about Quality. Yes, "capital q" Quality. For those of you that don't know me, I enjoy my philosophy from time to time, and one of the best books I've been re-introduced to over the last year is Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There is a section in that book (and really the whole book is a mediation on the Quality) that got me thinking about yesterdays question about assigning star ratings/grades to films. Troy mentioned in the comments yesterday that he liked the letter grade system, but the hardest part for him was deciding on a system where the grade or ranking meant something to him. More thoughts after the jump...

This is interesting because it gets me thinking about how each of us define quality, or as Pirsig refers to it: Quality. Allow me to take detour into the field of education for a moment: As a teacher (getting my masters in teaching right now, but I'm technically already a teacher) I seek to rid the classroom of rankings -- of invented letter grades and hierarchical structures that do nothing but make the students think that if they get an A, they must be "getting" the material. An "A" doesn't always prove that they are turning in quality work -- their work may not have any Quality at all -- it may just mean that they are fulfilling the requirements to get an A grade. Of course, a lot of this falls on the teacher and how they can get their students to think outside of grades and more in line with what they are learning instead of what they need to do in order to get the A.

Quality, and what it does or does not entail, is an interesting thing. In the passage I'm about to share with you Pirsig is talking about a teacher named Phaedrus who taught in the ancient hills that Pirsig and his son have just passed through on their motorcycle journey. He speaks of Phaedrus’ two distinctions of quality: the first being a more organic, creative phase that could not be defined. This was, to no surprise, the most fun and enjoyable idea of Quality because there was no rigid attempt at defining the term. The second idea of Quality is more due to rigid critical thinking, and because of this Phaedrus created a hierarchical listing of Quality. But I want to return to what Pirsig pontificates in the chapter prior to this…his musings on the topic of Quality are precisely the type of thinking that seems relevant to what some critics try to pin down as "quality films" with star ratings or letter grades. Pirsig writes:

Quality…you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is. But that’s self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There’s nothing to talk about. But if you can’t say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others…but what’s the “betterness”?...So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction. What the hell is Quality? What is it?


Well...what the hell is Quality? What elements help you identify what a Quality film is? When we watch a film how is that we know what we're watching is Quality?

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