Poor Chris!

Quality is inherently a rhetorical measurement, which shows me another reason why I keep my definition of rhetoric expansive: if rhetoric describes a relation of signals (to me) that get us somewhere else than where we initially were, a judgment of quality does exactly this. Let me try to elaborate that to make sense of it myself:

1)      If I am working from an assumption that rhetoric is a relational force of signals, then the ability to identify Quality in any object means its appearance/properties/functions have sent me a signal of favorability.

2)      My favorability of anything is partially contingent on the intertextuality of ideas that preceded me, with an incalculable amount of other factors, like embodied knowledge and environment, which are not wholly contingent on constructions that preceded me (rather, these are factors that comprise the present).

3)      Then all of these factors combine to make a web-like structure that is inherently relational as they all fuse at some point in my mind or consciousness—that relationality has to be rhetorical.

4)      The contingency of Quality on rhetorical relationality is evidence as to why Quality can be something more than just what you like: it takes in consideration a relation of factors that will be to various degrees of our liking or favorability.

I am struck by Anjeli’s comment that “the best way to analyze Quality is through its manifestations,” because I see where she is coming from, and then I think about what makes me curious, and I always go back to the complex relations that have helped construct our perception of a manifestation to start. I think an example that comes to mind for me to explain this whirl-wind of trying to define Quality through its manifestations and the ideology behind them, is the characterization of Chris and his father’s relationship in Zen.

I find myself deeply frustrated with the way Pirsig N. seems to interact with his son—cold, calculated, and unconscious of the damage he is creating. One of the narrator’s tactics to deal with Chris’s annoying nature is just get calmer and calmer—a sort of unattached, non-committed nodding at his son’s foolish thoughts and actions. But no one seems a clearer mirror image and manifestation of the narrator’s blindness than his son. Chris seems like the tangible metaphor for all the mental masturbation our narrator goes through—sorry, not tryin’ be creepy incest-ual or anythin’. Chris climbs a mountain, and his father calls him an egotist, despite the fact the mountain wasn’t Chris’s first choice to climb in the first place. What I get from these scenes is that the author is (hopefully intentionally) asking us to think about the way we project our fear, short-comings, and even self-loathing onto others. Chris’s insatiable curiosity is a manifestation and reflection of his father’s philosophical influence, and yet, the narrator, for all his calculated patience, doesn’t seem to have the slightest empathy for his son’s musings. From his misunderstanding of his own nature, he projects misunderstanding and impatience onto his son, who becomes a manifestation of the missed rhetorical construction of personality the narrator could be exploring about himself, without harshly judging someone else for being just like him. So when Anjeli says we can examine Quality through its manifestations, I wonder if that is what our narrator is doing, just unconsciously to the extent that it creates even more tension between him and his son because he is not catching it “sooner”—aka pre-manifestation. But then I go back to the infamous observation problem where once we examine what built the manifestation we lose sight of the manifestation, and vice versa. I guess I don’t think either is inherently more important, and that both are valuable in different stages of a thought experiment about what constitutes Quality.