If the word ‘quality’ often suggests luxury or superior workmanship, it also has that other, vaguer sense of marking something characteristic but hard to define, a type of atmosphere or character. Where ‘quality objects’ in the first sense have to be free from flaws or deficiencies, the second type of quality only intensifies with the passage of time and the process of wear; entropy and changing fashions can invest even the most anonymous and banal objects with irreproducibility and textural richness, making them cherishable.
And this sort of quality is, often, a texture thing; an appealingly fuzzy or prickly surface, a lived-in feel. Built-in obsolescence and the frictionlessness of digital interfaces have only enhanced our appreciation of the distinction that blemishes and irregularities can lend an object. The result, perversely, is that we end up buying new, ready fucked-up denims or overpriced thrift cherrypicked from Oxfam, or else downloading pristine FLAC files of songs retrospectively supplemented by synthetic tape hiss or vinyl crackle over high-speed fibre optic connections.
Critics have been quick to point out some of the forces at work here – how the old/cheap is used to connote authenticity, how the redemption of the naff often amounts to little more than the flaunting of cultural capital. Angela McRobbie notes that ‘the apparent democracy of the [second-hand clothing] market, from which no-one is excluded on grounds of cost, is tempered by the very precise tastes and desires of the second hand searchers ‘, while Simon Reynolds, in a response to his Wire colleague David Keenan’s recent, sort of contentious attempt to corral a bunch of bands making ham-fistedly lo-fi, ambivalently nostalgic music into a genre, insists ‘there’s a literally economic aspect to this subliming of kitsch’, whereby hipsters mandate that ‘whatever can be found cheaply in yard sales and thrift stores’ is cool, a claim essentially underwritten by their ample trust funds, good cheekbones and investment of countless idle hours in combing the subcultural canon for cute but(/because) defunct stylistic tics.
This is all true, but I think there’s more to be said about the role of feel (in both senses of the word) in all this. Touch remains an intimate sense, one that is both essentially unbroadcastable (at least at present – researchers in Tokyo have already developed tactile holograms that synthesise the feel of a raindrop or ping pong ball using ultrasound) and weirdly resistant to language. The warping and decay on the records Keenan is trying to lump together isn’t just a matter of making stuff sound old; insofar as crackle used to index the record’s decay (how near it was to being ‘played to death’) its addition to these records does that, but – like the birdsong, wave sounds, ambient conversation or TV dialogue also buried in these tracks’ mixes – it also suggests someone sitting concretely somewhere and listening to this stuff, a specific time/space/situation.
The more I try and get a handle on this stuff the more I find myself defaulting to one particular reference point: my collection of cardigans. I love these because they’re really richly textured – patterns and reliefs, bobbles, plastic or wooden buttons and toggles, holes – and really noisy – shot through with flecks or skeins of other colours, segmented into various clashing patterns – and because they’re big and all-encompassing and overtly subject to gravity. Synthetic and referential high street cardigans can’t compare, seeming, relatively, to embody our culture’s cynicism, wastefulness and morbid hatred of accidents and particularities, somehow. Seeing music laid out visually in a program like Audacity it also seems notable that older songs are more sticklebacked – modern compression and production mean contemporary stuff often looks nearer to a solid oblong; more compact, blunter teeth, smoother.
Given this, Reynold’s use of ‘sublime’ seems kind of apt; back in the proto-Romantic day, Burke opposed sublimity to the pristine symmetry of beauty, characterising it as rougher, vaguer, immense and enveloping – which, if you stretch it right out or turn it right up, the weft of a cardigan or a cassette tape’s veils of static can be. I’ve talked before on Murdofleur about our apparent desire, culturally, to find sustained pleasure and comfort in basically exhausted media by scaling them up, looking for capillary micro-seams in them that have yet to be fully strip-mined. In one sense it seems more than a little regressive (back then I called it autistic – and that was without having known about Temple Grandin’s hug Machine!) but, given our resource-strapped state maybe maximizing our quality per quantity yield is just best practice.
Temple Grandin: no article is complete without her! Love the post Rob- I trust you are painting your fitted kitchen units with a toungue and groove pattern.