quality, part 1
I've been thinking about quality, by which I mean not just a given thing's degree of excellence but the whole notion that the thing can be said objectively to be good or bad, and that its goodness/badness can be accurately assessed.
Caveat lector: this train of thought began and ended at the vidding station, but in between it stopped at outposts of British and American literature, both canonical and un-, from a couple of different centuries. Don't say I didn't warn you...
Recently, I've been seeing a number of vid recommendations that despite being very short (and often poorly spelled) nonetheless use language like "great editing!", "fantastic song choice!", "brilliant timing!" and so forth. I've watched a couple of the vids thus recommended, and was left with the impression that I must have gotten hold of the wrong vid, because the editing (or song choice, or whatever) was not fantastic. It was terrible. Not, I would contend, "in my opinion" terrible; just plain unvarnished terrible.
This phenomenon interests me for two reasons.
First: it suggests that (as elynross pointed out when we discussed this elsewhere) the people who are making these recommendations believe that critical/technical language is the best way to justify liking a vid. Such a belief makes sense, of course; most of us have been trained to value objective assessments of quality (as opposed to mere "feelings"), and many of us defend things we like on this basis. In this case, though, the recommenders have picked up on (to quote elynross) "the vocabulary of critical valuation" without internalizing the values that that vocabulary represents, and so they mimic the language without understanding (or, possibly, caring) what it's supposed to be indicating.
Second: it perpetuates the devaluation of purely subjective liking (without evaluating, ranking, or criticizing), in which we can like things "just because." I very seldom see recs that say "I love this vid because it features lots of shots of my favorite couple kissing, and they're all set to my very favorite song." And yet? That's clearly what a lot of vidwatchers do like and respond to and value and seek out. And there's nothing wrong with that.
The devaluation of subjective liking bothers me for two reasons. (Man, I am just stuck on the two reasons thing today.)
First: subjective liking and critical evaluation are not mutually exclusive. I love critically evaluating things (you'd hope so, given that I've arranged to do it for a living). I like evaluating books and vids and CDs and student papers, thinking about (and discussing with others) what they do and how they work and whether they work well, thinking about how each one, as a text, relates to other texts. I think that's fun, and yes, I am at one with my geekitude, thank you very much. But! I reserve the right to like things that I can't critically defend. I cannot, for example, assess The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as great literature, and frankly I don't care. It's hilarious and it makes me happy. (I also reserve the right to not like texts or authors - Dickens and Defoe, I'm looking at you - that I have nevertheless committed to writing dissertation chapters on.)
Second: the fact that subjective liking and critical evaluation are not mutually exclusive does not mean that the two categories can or should be collapsed. One can make a case for the value of a text on the basis of its quality, or on the basis of one's own feelings about it, and both assessments might be valid, but they would not be made the same way, and they certainly would not have the same meaning to someone else. If I downloaded and watched a Buffy/Angel vid because a rec led me to believe it's thematically interesting and technically brilliant, and in fact it's just "Buffy n Angle 4 eva!!!!", I would feel cheated and cranky - not because "B/A luv!" is an invalid thing to rejoice in, but because it's not an interest I share, and I cannot bring to the vid the native enthusiasm that it requires.
Thinking about my own fannish productions in this light: I'd argue that some of my vids can be assessed in terms of either mode, and some are only good for subjective liking. You can like "Come On" because femslash = yummy, or you can be basically unmoved by it but nonetheless impressed by, e.g., that one section with some pretty nifty editing, or you can like it and think it's well done (and of course you can also dislike it and/or be completely unimpressed, but hey, it's my LJ and I don't have to talk about that). "The Space Between," on the other hand, isn't worth much if you aren't feeling the B/S luv and/or if you can't deal with Dave Matthews Band. I'm not fishing for compliments here; "Space Between" is not a wholly terrible vid, and I know it. I still enjoy watching it, because a) I am a pudding-hearted sap and b) I love that song (a fact that may, for some of you, wreck my music-reviewing credibility). But nobody familiar with good vidding would say it's among the best of my vids, or even that it's more than competently done. Which is fine with me; it's the first vid I finished, and it was the best I could do at the time. Welcome to my learning curve.
Having just established that I believe quite firmly in the concept of "quality" as something distinct from "personal prediliction," I'm now going to question that concept.
Quality is not, in fact, an objective or neutral term. In literature, for example, whether a text is considered "of good quality" has often had a lot to do with the class, race, gender, and/or political position(s) of the author; to pick one painfully obvious example, college courses in "American literature" have a very uneven track record of including (much less prioritizing) works by African-Americans, despite many of those works' historical and literary importance to the development of our national literature (not to mention their intrinsic interest). Or, in less obviously politically charged cases, a text's (lack of) "quality" may have to do with changing cultural preferences about genre; truepenny explained this a few weeks back in terms of the devaluation of Seneca and Titus Andronicus. I happen to dislike Titus Andronicus about as much as I dislike David Copperfield, but I'm supposed to at least acknowledge one as a masterpiece, whereas the other is one of the Shakespeare plays we're allowed to write off as "early" and sweep under the literary rug; that difference in critical valuation has less to do with "quality" than with contemporary ideas about what Literature should look like.
Of course, politics and genre are themselves intertwined. Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, has been severely devalued in the last hundred years because it's part of "sentimentalism," a subgenre in which authors (usually women) attempted to produce political action via deeply emotional responses to characters and situations. Ann Radcliffe's novels are seldom taught in 18th c. British lit classes, even though they were widely read and respected at the time, because a) the Gothic as a whole has been devalued in the intervening centuries, and b) Radcliffe (aside from being a woman herself) wrote in the Female Gothic mode, which has been designated "less interesting" than the Male Gothic mode... Okay, I need to switch topics before I start frothing at the mouth.
So, circling back around from literature to fannish productions, I'm wondering: what do our standards of quality (for those of us who prioritize that sort of thing) imply in their inclusions and exclusions? I don't think my criteria for quality in vids are particularly political, but then plenty of lit profs don't think their definitions of literary canon have political implications either. What is at stake in the way we distinguish a "good" vid from a "bad" vid, an interesting vid from one that is less so, etc.? How do we make those distinctions, and what does it mean when we do? Who gets to decide, and how, what constitutes the criteria for critical valuation and what it means to fulfill those criteria?