10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17381
This paper proposes a site-based methodology for the study of standards and standardisation. Rather than consider standards as a global phenomenon, or theorise them as a network of relations, their spatiality is rethought as an outcome of their ongoing enactment. Both the moment of a standard’s implementation and its supporting apparatus are opened up to genealogical analysis using the work of feminist philosopher Karen Barad. In particular, her concepts of “apparatus” and “iteration” forge a link between the particularity of “site”, and the circulation and materialisation of standards. By following such an approach, a multitude of heterogeneous agencies are revealed, and with them, the potential for change.
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James Merricks White
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Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
methodology
Rethinking the Spaces of Standardisation through the Concept of Site
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Scenarios
2018-01-29
2023-06-25
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
151-174
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James Merricks White
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17381
151
Maynooth University
2038-3460
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methodology
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Rethinking the Spaces of Standardisation through the Concept of Site
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17381/16240
8
                                                                           Scenario

Rethinking the Spaces of Standardisation
through the Concept of Site
James Merricks White
Maynooth University (IE)



     Abstract: This paper proposes a site-based methodology for the study of
     standards and standardisation. Rather than consider standards as a global
     phenomenon, or theorise them as a network of relations, their spatiality is
     rethought as an outcome of their ongoing enactment. Both the moment of
     a standard’s implementation and its supporting apparatus are opened up to
     genealogical analysis using the work of feminist philosopher Karen Barad. In
     particular, her concepts of ‘apparatus’ and ‘iteration’ forge a link between
     the particularity of ‘site’, and the circulation and materialisation of stand-
     ards. By following such an approach, a multitude of heterogeneous agencies
     are revealed, and with them, the potential for change.

     Keywords: standards; standardisation; spatial theory; site ontology; meth-
     odology.

     Submitted: May 12, 2017 – Accepted: October 2, 2017

     Corresponding author: James Merricks White, Rm 2.07 Iontas Building,
     Maynooth University, Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. Email:
     james.white.2014@mumail.ie



Introduction

    Standards are inherently spatial. They are spatial in their distribution.
Not everyone is affected by standards in the same way, nor has access to
the same standards for quality and care. What is common for the very
wealthy is often completely inaccessible to the very poor (Star and Lamp-
land 2009, 6-7). Standards are also spatial in the arrangement of the mate-
rials and behaviours they bring about. They are realised in the built envi-
ronment, embodied not only in physical forms, but in the social and eco-
nomic patterns of their interaction and use. Regular positions and juxta-
positions seem to sediment into a technological unconscious of preindi-
vidual gesture and habit (Thrift 2004).

TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
8 (2) pp. 151-174 - ISSN 2038-3460                2017
www.tecnoscienza.net
152                                                          Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

    The process of making something standard can be understood as a
spatial operation. Sometimes standardisation occurs accidentally, as when
apparently minor decisions and actions become the de facto way in which
something is done. Many standards however are intentional and are the
result of regulatory or voluntary adoption. Once a voluntary standard has
been published it must be circulated and implemented. This is usually
achieved through global markets, supported by promotional materials
and by a normative obligation to adhere to best practice (Mendel 2006).
But spreading a standard is not the same thing as ensuring that it is eve-
rywhere the same. In some instances, adherence self-regulates. This is the
case with the internet protocol, IPv4. A personal computer unable to ac-
cess the internet would be nearly useless – IPv4 is intrinsic to all multi-
purpose operating systems. Often however, it is necessary that conformity
to a standard be assessed independently. In the case of ISO 9001, the
dominant quality management standard, accredited third-party auditors
verify compliance. Complex institutional structures and practices have
been established to help assure that such voluntary standards are correct-
ly implemented (Loconto and Busch 2010).
    Given the diversity of standards and their modes of propagation, it is
important that their spatial effects be addressed materially and discursive-
ly. This paper uses the concept of ‘site’ to open up a new approach to the
spaces of standardisation. I begin by teasing out various connotations of
the word ‘standard’. Instead of offering a narrow and succinct definition,
I define a standard as any set of rules or values which produces effects in
the world. Having specified the field of analysis, I move on to the broader
context of standards and standardisation by briefly reviewing relevant his-
torical and sociological literature. In the third section, I reflect on how
the spaces of standardisation have been thought about. While the meta-
phor of ‘the network’ is important, I argue that it limits the kinds of agen-
cies involved in standardisation. I propose that the spaces of standards be
reconceived using ‘site ontologies’ (Schatzki 2002; Woodward et al.
2010). Next, drawing on the work of feminist philosopher Karen Barad
(2003; 2007), I describe one way in which this might be achieved. I argue
that Barad’s use of ‘apparatus’ and ‘iteration’ open up a way of linking
site to the empirical study of the circulation and implementation of
standards. A brief discussion of IPv4 and ISO 9001 follows, in which I
give an indication of the spatial and social perspective that would be em-
phasised in such an approach. By rethinking the spaces of standardisa-
tion, I hope that this paper will make a modest contribution to ongoing
efforts to develop social and cultural methods based on Barad’s thought
(Orlikowski and Scott 2015; St. Pierre et al. 2016).
White                                                                     153
1. In What Sense Standard?

    Mores, manners, norms, habits, conventions, customs, traditions,
standards, codes, regulations and laws are often assumed to be discrete
and well-defined things. This is both a semantic and an epistemological
tendency. As Busch (2011, 4) observes, these divisions are mirrored in the
subject topics of academic disciplines. Anthropologists study customs and
traditions, sociologists focus on norms and habits, legal scholars study
laws, political scientists are interested in regulation, and so on. At a high-
er level of abstraction, science and engineering confine themselves to nat-
ural and technological standards, whereas the social sciences emphasise
those of a social nature. The various meanings of the word ‘standard’
challenge the independence of these terms however. Standards traverse
the social and the technological, the human and the nonhuman, and the
material and the meaningful, just as they encourage researchers to cross
the boundaries between academic disciplines and their topics of enquiry.
    The entry for ‘standards’ in the Oxford English Dictionary (2017)
speculates that the term’s use as an exemplar of weights and measures is
derived from its use as a military ensign. During battle, the king’s stand-
ard stood for the central point of organisation and command. Similarly, a
standard length is the object from which all lengths are obtained. Systems
of measurement and calibration can be understood as organised hierar-
chies of authority, at the apex of which sits the physical embodiment of
the measure (Crease 2011).
    Standards in the singular plural (as in high standards, or double
standards), signifies social norms of virtue or worth (Williams 1983, 298).
This is usually what is meant when people refer to a good living standard
or a minimum standard of housing. While efforts were made in nine-
teenth century France to codify a vital minimum level of subsistence for
workers (Simmons 2015), typically this kind of standard is implied. More
concrete are the standards of ethical practice adopted by professions.
Medicine is the most obvious example of this, with the swearing of the
Hippocratic oath, however it exists in other occupations as well. The pro-
fessionalisation of electrical engineering, for example, is historically asso-
ciated with the formal description and adoption of a standard of practice
in nineteenth century Britain (Arapostathis 2008). Explicit occupational
certification, as for accounting, is an instrumentation of this idea. Associ-
ated with this kind of standard are epistemic issues relating to the estab-
lishment of the authority of truth claims, as in the literatures on standards
for justification (Boltanski and Thévenot 2006) and evaluation (for exam-
ple Daston and Galison 2007; Porter 1995; Shapin and Schaffer 1985).
    A standard can also refer to something pervasive or well established
(such as a jazz standard or a de facto industry standard). This sense of the
word does not refer to any individual object, nor to a set of social values
or norms. It does not imply prefigurative documentation. Rather, it refers
154                                                             Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

to a class of things which are standard by virtue of their general circula-
tion and repetition. This adjectival use of ‘standard’ is spatial by definition.
    Putting these meanings together, I understand a standard to be any set
of rules or values which produces effects in the world – material and dis-
cursive, spatial and temporal, human and nonhuman, and social and
technological. This definition is broad and encompasses many customs,
codes, norms, regulations, laws and so on. Following Busch (2011, 26-27),
I find that common distinctions between standards for humans and
standards for things (and between private standards and public regula-
tions) do not hold up to scrutiny. Rather than assume or attempt to define
these as different, it is necessary to confirm their differences through
close empirical examination. Just as actor-network theory proposes an
analytical symmetry between human and nonhuman agencies (Callon
1986), so there is no reason to maintain an a priori distinction between
human and nonhuman standards.
    For pragmatic reasons, the two empirical examples I draw on towards
the end of this paper are voluntary standards. Voluntary standards are not
enforced by a sovereign state but instead are adopted by individuals, or-
ganisations and industries under their own aegis. They are also referred to
as technical standards or voluntary consensus standards: technical in the
sense that they are used to produce technological systems; consensus after
the method of their development. Voluntary standards are developed
through deliberation and consensus in specialised bodies (known as
standards developing organisations or SDOs) such as the International
Organization for Standardization (ISO), the International Electro-
technical Commission (IEC) and the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU) (Murphy and Yates 2009; Schmidt and Werle 1998). They
are published as carefully worded documents that describe objects, their
encounters and (tolerable limits for) their properties. Some successful ex-
amples of this type of standard include: ISO 1161, which describes the
design of corner fittings for shipping containers (Murphy and Yates
2009); ISO/IEC 7810, a standard specifying the width of credit cards
(Easterling 2014); and ISO 9001, the dominant quality management
standard (Furusten 2000; Gibbon and Henriksen 2011). The decision to
focus on voluntary standards, rather than standards in general, is in keep-
ing the tentative and exploratory nature of this paper. My aim is not to
expand the concept of standards so much as to forward a site-based
methodology for their analysis.


2. The Historical Geography of Standards

   Standards have both a history and a geography. Their spread is en-
twined with stories of measurement and precision, voluntary professional
White                                                                   155
associations, nationally-funded infrastructure projects, and the rise of
global audit and management practices.
    Research on the spread of metrological systems is largely historical in
nature, describing cultures of measurement and comparison, and key
moments in the acceptance of universal standards of equivalence (Kula
1989; Alder 2002; Bartky 2007; Crease 2011). In his story of the devel-
opment of the metre for example, Alder (2002) describes the efforts of
two French astronomers to accurately measure the distance between
Dunkirk and Barcelona, and so calculate the circumference of the Earth.
The universal metre was defined as one ten-millionth the exact distance
from the equator to the North Pole and later embodied by a length of
platinum stewarded by the International Bureau of Weights and
Measures. Taking a broader approach, Crease (2011) draws attention to
social conventions of comparison in China and West Africa, before fol-
lowing the story of the International System of Units through to contem-
porary efforts to tie measurement to universal constants. He describes
how the circumference of the Earth fell out of favour as a comparator,
superseded in the 1960s by the wavelength emissions of krypton-86 and
in the 1980s by the distance travelled by light in a fraction of a second.
    Addressing the emergence of technical standards are the histories of
precision in engineering (Wise 1995; Alder 1997) and the organisational
histories of the SDOs (Schmidt and Werle 1998; Murphy and Yates 2009;
Russell 2014). Prior to the 1920s, efforts to co-ordinate social and techno-
logical systems were referred to as programmes for uniformity or univer-
salism. The explicit turn to standardisation is linked to Fordism and the
Progressive Era in the United States (Russell 2014), and to post-war re-
construction in Europe (Murphy and Yates 2009). Nevertheless, many of
the practices involved in the development and implementation of stand-
ards can be identified earlier in the labour of machine technicians and
engineers. Pressure for precisely and consistently made instruments rose
gradually from the late eighteenth century, for use in both war projects
(Alder 1997) and civil infrastructure (Wise 1995). Formal standardisation
might be thought of as the concretisation of these tendencies into more
ardent political and economic agendas. Russell (2014, 64) emphasises the
leadership of the private sector in early such efforts in the United States.
Standardisation, it was declared in 1926, was “a step toward industrial
self-government” (Agnew 1926; cited in Russell 2014, 58) – a self-
conscious industrial society was believed capable of co-ordinating and
limiting its activities without state intervention. Elsewhere, standardisa-
tion is more directly connected to a push for market integration and
globalisation. In the 1970s, ISO expanded rapidly under the directorship
of Swedish civil engineer Olle Sturén. While he, like the Americans, be-
lieved in a values-driven economics, Sturén’s ambition was more interna-
tionalist. Co-operation with UN agencies, the European Economic Com-
munity and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade became a cen-
156                                                          Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

tral responsibility of ISO (Murphy and Yates 2009, 20).
    Empirical studies on standards are broad. For example, research has
been published on standards for construction (Ben-Joseph 2005; Talen
2012), the environment (Tollefson et al. 2008; Bresnihan 2016), financial
services (Porter 2005; Vestergaard and Højland 2011), food and agricul-
ture (Dunn 2003; Bingen and Busch 2006), governance (Barry 2001; Hig-
gins and Larner 2010), healthcare (Bowker and Star 1999; Timmermans
and Berg 2003), information systems (Schmidt and Werle 1998; Galloway
2004) and management (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000; Ponte et al.
2011). Beyond these explicit examples, it is often the case, as Timmer-
mans and Epstein (2010) have argued, that standards skulk in the shad-
ows of many areas of sociological study.
    In keeping with the examples of IPv4 and ISO 9001, I want to de-
scribe in a little more detail some of the literature on standards for infor-
mation and communications technology, and their use in the normalisa-
tion of bodies, behaviour and social organisation. For Schmidt and Werle
(1998), Group 3 facsimile standards, developed at ITU in the 1980s, pre-
sent an opportunity to explore where formal standards originate, how
they are negotiated and the kinds of political, economic and technical
pressures they must bear. Technical standards are co-ordination technol-
ogies, the authors argue, ordering and interfacing not only the machinery
of exchange but also the stakeholders invested in their development. For
Galloway (2004), the internet protocols TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol) and DNS (Domain Name System) are indica-
tive of the distributed but nevertheless selective forms of cultural produc-
tion inherent to the present political economic regime. This is reflected in
the nominally open manner in which the protocols are developed and in
the logics of control which they exercise. While on one level TCP/IP dis-
tributes the provision of web content, on another DNS bundles-up and
recentralises the grammar by which that content is accessed. In addition
to these two examples, there is an extensive literature describing the his-
tories of telecommunications and internet standardisation (see for exam-
ple Abbate 1999; DeNardis 2009; Russell 2014).
    In an important work, Bowker and Star (1999) establish an agenda for
the study of standards for nomenclature and categorisation. Memorably,
they describe the apparatus of race classification in apartheid South Afri-
ca and the trajectories and torques it imposed on people’s personal and
professional lives. The programme pioneered by Bowker and Star is aug-
mented and extended in Timmermans and Berg’s (2003) The gold stand-
ard and in the edited collection Standards and their stories (Lampland
and Star 2009). Additional works assembled by Brunsson and Jacobsson
(2000), Higgins and Larner (2010), and Ponte, Gibbon and Vestergaard
(2011) have advanced an organisational and governance perspective on
process standards. Since the success of ISO 9001 in the early 1990s,
SDOs have increasingly sought to use standards to formalise and promote
White                                                                   157
management systems. While this might be thought of as a renewed push
for industrial self-government, present-day organisational standards are
conditioned by 30 years of globalisation and neoliberal policy experimen-
tation (Busch 2011; Easterling 2014). This is less about actively under-
mining state power than it is about resetting its appropriate boundaries
and behaviours.
    The impressive breadth of historical and empirical research on stand-
ards is emblematic of their reach into social, political and economic life.
Any theory of standards and standardisation needs to be sensitive to their
social, spatial and temporal context.


3. Thinking about the Spaces of Standardisation

    Empirical work on standards and standardisation often operates with-
in an implied scaffolding of absolute space. Space is regarded as a frame-
work of co-ordinates against which global, decontextualised standards
touch down in local settings. This is referred to indirectly through uncrit-
ical use of concepts such as location and distance (and through the use of
metric or imperial units). While this approach is usually adopted prag-
matically, its underlying assumptions have been challenged by the critical
social sciences. Since the 1970s human geographers in particular have ex-
plored the many ways in which space is produced, first through the dia-
lects of capitalist production (for example Harvey 2006; Smith 2010) then
by way of postmodern and poststructural experimentation with relational
ontologies (for example Soja 1989; Crang and Thrift 2000). What these
accounts share is an appreciation of space as an ongoing process, and a
sensitivity to its role in social and political difference.
    Rather than approach standards as an end product or established fact,
this shift encourages a reconsideration of standards as unfolding phe-
nomena. The word ‘standardisation’ is used to specify the process or
practices by which something is made standard. In this section, I discuss
two broad phases of poststructural thought on the spaces of standardisa-
tion. The first uses the metaphor of ‘the network’ to rethink the relation-
ship between society and technology. The second has sought to advance
spatial topologies in different terms. My preference for the second ap-
proach opens up a discussion of site ontologies.
    Originating in science and technology studies in the mid-1980s, actor-
network theory brackets off the ontological problem of the global and the
local by focusing on the spatiality of relations. Standards are not de-
scribed according to location and distance, but connective geometry. An
arrangement of interacting actors is perceived as a relational network,
which at a different scale of analysis might in turn be perceived as an ac-
tor. By following and describing actor-networks, practitioners hope to
obtain appreciation for the complexities of the material world. Four con-
158                                                         Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

ceptual considerations of standards as networks are introduced: Latour’s
(1990) immutable mobiles; O’Connell’s (1993) approach to metrology;
Callon’s (1991; 1998) irreversibility and stabilisation; and Loconto and
Busch’s (2010) discussion of a tripartite standards regime. By presenting
them in this order, I follow a shift in emphasis from the standardised ob-
ject to the standardising apparatus.
    The immutable mobile is Latour’s materialist answer to an epistemo-
logical question: how is it that observations cohere and harden into fact?
The example with which he introduces the concept is instructive (Latour
1990, 24). Traced in the sand, a map of a coastline is able to convey the
information necessary for safe sailing. It selectively draws together the
relevant relationships in a manner legible to individuals of different cul-
tural backgrounds. But with the rising tide the map is washed away. For a
map to convey its information through space and time, it needs to be
written on paper, thus becoming both immutable and mobile. Rather
than explain the establishment of facts using method, evidence, argument
or social standing, Latour is interested in the materials and representa-
tions deployed to assemble allies to an idea. His ultimate purpose is to
disclose the mechanics of scientific practice – its mundane activities
which are so often taken for granted. Law and Mol (2001), in their explo-
ration of the concept’s topology, insist that immutable mobiles are situat-
ed between two spatialities: regional space, which prioritises location and
relational co-ordinates, and network space, which is concerned with con-
nection rather than position. For them, it is immutability in network
space that confers the potential for mobility in regional space. The ap-
plicability of the immutable mobile to standardisation has been seized
upon by Collier and Ong (2005).
    In an eclectic paper, O’Connell (1993) extends the concept to help
explain how systems of measurement and comparison are established.
Unlike Latour, he is not interested in the persuasiveness of immutable
mobiles so much as the communities of conference and exchange that are
put into operation around them. O’Connell argues that metrological
practices are stabilised “by establishing the authority of a particular rep-
resentative, circulating it, and assuring that comparisons are made to it”
(O’Connell 1993, 165). His point is that a standard is both particular and
(in aspiration) universal, embodied within an indivisible object but con-
structed as a singular authority through the ubiquity of its relations. The
appearance of universality is achieved through circulation and implementa-
tion.
    Even more interested in the stabilisation of practice is Callon (1991),
whose theorisation of techno-economic networks encompasses standards
and standardisation. Considered as a set of heterogeneous actors bound
by the intentionality of their productive methods, Callon’s conceptualisa-
tion is used to explain how science and technology result from interac-
tions between a large number of diverse components. While the paper in-
White                                                                            159
troduces many interrelated terms, I am particularly interested in ‘irrevers-
ibility’ and ‘stabilisation’. As networks become larger and enrol ever more
numerous and diverse components, they resist mutation and change. If
this proceeds far enough, a ‘codified metrology’ can emerge.

Normalisation makes a series of links predictable, limits fluctuations, aligns actors
and intermediaries, and cuts down the number of translations and the amount of
information put into circulation. It operates by standardising interfaces – that is,
by standardising and constraining actors and intermediaries (Callon 1991, 151).

In such a network, the variety of action performed by any one actor is
limited. It becomes docile and predictable, constrained by the norms of
the network. The irreversibility of individual practice implies stabilisation
of the whole. This has implications for how standards are conceived. Em-
phasis is placed less on the circulation of a particular fixed actor (the
standard), than on the relational fixity of a set of interactions.
     Intrigued but not fully convinced by actor-network theory, Loconto
and Busch (2010) set out to elaborate the politics of the institutional ap-
paratus of standardisation. Through a discussion of the activities of the
SDOs and national accreditation bodies, the authors disclose a tripartite
standards regime consisting of standards-making, certification and ac-
creditation. The deliberate act of standardisation is thus brought into re-
lief: “Standards are the values against which people, practices and things
are measured, while standardization is the process of making things
standard” (Loconto and Busch 2010, 526). Callon’s language of techno-
economic networks is drawn on to signify the relations at play. Standard-
ising devices are held to co-ordinate and constrain the range of activities
available to actors in what is ostensibly a form of irreversibility. But the
resulting stabilisation is more explicitly political than what Callon intend-
ed. The network is reconfigured as “a market economy, rather than a po-
litical or moral economy” (Loconto and Busch 2010, 527) – the space it
affords is calculative and coterminous with neoliberal ‘governance at dis-
tance’.
     While these four approaches to standards and standardisation are
subtly different, they share philosophical ground. All are materialist, em-
piricist and adopt a relational ontology in which the boundaries between
objects blur. Accordingly, the language of absolute space gives way to a
description of the geometries of association. ‘Global’ and ‘local’ are re-
placed by ‘network’, and connection is explored in terms of character and
intensity, rather than location and distance. In this way, standardisation
comes to be understood as a stabilisation of object-relations. This is evi-
dent in the immutability of Latour’s immutable mobiles and in the irre-
versibility of Callon’s techno-economic networks. Although this work is
an important corrective to more fixed spatial imaginaries, two issues point
to its limit. First, in prioritising connection, something of the presence of
160                                                                Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

things in the world is lost. The vitality of matter is always at risk of being
overwhelmed by the stabilisation of its relationality; the agentive potential
of the chance encounter is lost. Second, and following on from this, is a
tendency to bifurcate space into relational and material planes. This oc-
curs when actor-networks are made to touch the world, as when Law and
Mol (2001) theorise the topology of immutable mobiles as both regional
and networked. The problem of the global and the local returns in a new
guise.
    Other approaches to standards have attempted to work through this
problem without networks. Three are worth discussing: technological
zones (Barry 2006), global assemblages (Collier and Ong 2005), and site
ontologies (Woodward et al. 2010).
    The technological zone challenges the opposition between national
territories and the deterritorialised flows of capital. Barry (2001; 2006)
defines it as a space within which technical practices have been brought
into alignment. In other words, the technological zone is a space pro-
duced by the adoption of common standards. This is a distinctly political
space, conceived in relation to nation states and transnational corpora-
tions. But the term evades most apprehensions of territories, markets and
networks.

Zones are not structures, territories or regions, but discontinuous spaces of circu-
lation and regulation. They are not bounded by continuous borders but inter-
rupted by shifting restrictions and blockages and points of conflict. (Barry 2001,
41)

Technological zones can be thought of as a kind of topology. They can
overlap or enfold one another. Depending on their intersections with
state and corporate spaces, they entail both technical uniformity, and so-
cial and political differentiation. While Barry (2001) maintains that zones
are not fixed but always in process, demanding constant maintenance and
reconfiguration, they are nevertheless path-dependent (Barry 2006, 242).
    More open to disruption and dysfunction is the concept of the global
assemblage, as set out by Collier and Ong (2005) in the introduction to an
edited collection on the problem of global phenomena to anthropology.
Here, the word ‘global’ refers to the capacity for something to be derac-
inated, transported across social and cultural fields, and take root in a
new contextual milieu. This is not understood as a social operation, but
rather a technical one, dependent upon material infrastructure, and ad-
ministrative values and practices. A global assemblage then, is the space
of interaction between a global form and the context in which it is articu-
lated. To call such context a locality however is a mistake. Rather, an as-
semblage is understood as contingent and multiple; a coming together of
agencies. It is therefore irreducible to a single logic. As the authors put it,
“the term ‘global assemblage’ suggests inherent tensions: global implies
White                                                                    161
broadly encompassing, seamless, and mobile; assemblage implies hetero-
geneous, contingent, unstable, partial, and situated” (Collier and Ong
2005, 12). A global assemblage can thus be understood as the site
through which contradictions between the global and the local play out.
     In an effort to rethink the spatiality of social movements, McFarlane
(2009) pushes back against the ‘global’ in global assemblage. While he
understands that Collier and Ong want to avoid confining assemblages to
a particular scale, he nevertheless feels that the concept evokes the scalar
hierarchy of the global and the local. As an alternative, McFarlane uses
the awkward prefix ‘translocal’, by which he means to signify multi-sited
formations through which things occur.
     This position dovetails nicely with Woodward, Jones and Marston’s
(2010) call for ontologies of the site. Briefly stated, a site ontology is an
approach to the description and interpretation of bodies in action and
connection (Schatzki 2002). It is neither interested in elaborating encoun-
ters between discrete, ready-formed objects, nor in attempting to uncover
deeply hidden explanatory forces. Rather, site ontologies focus on materi-
al practices and orders of meaning imminent to unfolding events. Social
and spatial interpretation is conducted with a light touch, leaving open
the possibility for unexpected political impulses and effects. While actor-
network theory, particularly in early permutations presented here, em-
phasises stabilisation, site ontology takes seriously the challenge of pro-
pinquity, slippage and happenstance. Important to the argument I have
been pursuing, space is not considered external to the site but an expres-
sion of its internal logics. Site ontologies therefore undermine the mediat-
ing qualities of space (whether construed as a static scaffold, a network
configuration or a zone of operation), preferring to reconfigure such ef-
fects as an outcome of enactment. Put differently, in this approach the
spaces of standardisation do not exert a power which extends beyond the
act of their performance.
     The spaces of standardisation have been thought of in a number of
ways. The most intuitive is as process in which something global or tran-
scendental affects local circumstances. In opposition to this, I have pre-
sented a handful of poststructural attempts to denature the integrity of
these spatial concepts and think beyond them. Actor-network theory has
long granted the spaces of standardisation critical attention. While I find
its interventions important, I have argued that limits to the metaphor of
‘the network’ curb the potential for political agency. In an effort to open
up a new analytical perspective, I have introduced the notion of site on-
tologies, in which space is conceived as emergent with phenomenal en-
actment. While this philosophical disposition has great potential for re-
search on standards and standardisation, little has been done to develop
what this might involve.
162                                                               Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

4. Towards a Baradian Approach to Standards Research

    In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007) elaborates a
metaphysics dedicated to the realism and naturalism of entangled agen-
cies. The primary ontological unit in her philosophy are phenomena, un-
derstood as “relations without preexisting relata” (Barad 2007, 139).
Within a phenomenal enactment, the intra-action (i.e., interaction within
a manifold) of enmeshed posthuman agencies resolve into objects, agents,
materials and meanings. For Barad, performative action precedes indi-
viduation, subjectification and their attendant physical, social, spatial and
temporal apprehensions. Agency is understood as preindividual (Dol-
phijn and van der Tuin 2012). Surfaces, properties and identities are not
inherent to objects but the result of an agential cut applied to an entan-
glement of relations. Thus, Barad positions the constitution of phenome-
na prior to the familiar structuring binaries of western thought: nature-
culture, subject-object and ontology-epistemology.
    Because of the primacy it affords the performative event, Barad’s real-
ist philosophy can be referred to as a site ontology (see also Barad 2012).
Barad does not use the term site however, preferring to approach spatiali-
ty through the concept of the ‘spacetimematter manifold’. The term ‘man-
ifold’ originates in the mathematical field of topology and here signifies a
non-Euclidean, multidimensional space of relations. For Barad, matter
and meaning are assembled within the manifold, their complex connec-
tions and disjunctions expressed in an imbroglio of twists, knots and
breaks. She describes the spatial arrangement using the metaphor of
bread dough:

Imagine putting drops of colored dyes into a piece of bread dough. As you knead
the dough, the dyes spread out in different patterns of entangled lines and surfac-
es. But this process is too tame… the changes are all continuous and the dough
maintains its topology. So break off some pieces and reattach them to different
areas and continue kneading. Take a different kind of dough and make a different
manifold with different lines, surfaces, and volumes of colour. Intermingle the
dough pieces: new entanglements form, new possibilities emerge. (Barad 2007,
439, note 85)

As an event takes place, the manifold is cut, producing the subjects, ob-
jects, spacings and timings so familiar to everyday experience. Materiality,
spatiality and temporality are all a result of the expression of the mani-
fold.
    Within a Baradian framework, the context of a standard is ap-
proached as a ‘material-discursive apparatus of bodily production’. This
wordy concept needs unpacking. First, the hyphenation of the ‘material’
and the ‘discursive’ acts to recognise their ontogenetic entailment and
mutual irreducibility: “Neither discursive practices nor material phenom-
White                                                                    163
ena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. Neither can be explained
in terms of the other. Neither is reducible to the other” (Barad 2007,
152). For Barad, it is important to appreciate the agency of matter in pro-
ducing effects in the world. Second, where Foucault (1980, 194) used
‘apparatus’ as a way to map out the discursive and nondiscursive practic-
es which give statements meaning, Barad uses the term to encompass the
Foucaultian apparatus and the apparatus of the scientific experiment.
Barad asserts that all scientific experimentation enlists intangible and of-
ten unanticipated cultural relations (such as the knowledge and experi-
ence of the technician, the most recent outcome of funding applications
and the general mood in the laboratory), and that broader social norms
and practices are historically interwoven with the vitality and dynamism
of matter (that it would be a mistake, for example, to discuss gender
without acknowledging the constitutive potential of human bodies, re-
productive technologies and health care institutions). Again, the purpose
is to acknowledge the mess of agencies swept into the manifold. Third,
‘bodily’ is used generally. It refers in the first instance to human bodies
and other individuated physical bodies (including those of nonhuman
lifeforms, technical instruments, land masses, etc.), but also might be ex-
tended to cover cultural and social bodies (e.g., bodies of text or the body
politic). It is intended, following Foucault (1977), to foreground the sites
on which power works, but following Haraway (1988), to emphasise the
ontological and objectivist ambition of the concept. In summary, the ‘ma-
terial-discursive apparatus of bodily production’ is the imminent struc-
ture which iteratively configures the agential cut made to the manifold. It
includes discursive practices but is broader than them, also encompassing
the productivity of nonhuman agency and the manifold on which these
things go to work.
     To bring Barad’s apparatus in closer alignment with a study of stand-
ards it is necessary to drill down on another concept she deploys: ‘itera-
tion’. For Barad, bodies are continually materialised and identified
through the repetition of their formative practices. This is encapsulated
by ‘iterative citationality’ which is borrowed from Butler (1993), who in
turn adopts it from Derrida (1974; 1988). Iteration is not simply the repe-
tition of the same. Rather, it signifies the difference or modification en-
tailed in repetition. While an iteration necessarily carries something of the
same, such that it can be recognised, it nevertheless opens up the possibil-
ity for something new (Cuddon 2013, 373). Derrida understood this prin-
cipally as an operation of words and concepts. Thus, in speaking we cite
previous utterances and conceptualisations. But through Butler and Bar-
ad, the term takes on new meaning. Specifically, it refers to the working
and reworking of power on bodies, and to the configuration and recon-
figuration of cuts on manifolds. As such, the historicity of matter in its
enactment is brought to the fore.
     Having laid the groundwork, it is possible to move on to a discussion
164                                                        Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

of methodology. Barad advocates a kind of social analysis referred to as a
‘genealogy of the material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production’
(Barad 2007, 451, note 25). For the most part, her use of ‘genealogy’ ad-
heres to the method developed by Foucault (see Dreyfus and Rabinow
1983). It is necessary to mark two key differences however. The first per-
tains to her posthuman performativity. The second to her conceptualisa-
tion of power.
     The weakness of genealogical accounts, according to Barad, is that
they tend to overemphasise epistemology. By focusing on the ways in
which things in the world are known, rather than the things themselves,
human and nonhuman agencies are collapsed into a concern with repre-
sentation. Materiality is thereby rendered flat and unresponsive. This
plays out differently in the work of Foucault and Butler. When Foucault
discloses a productive apparatus it is too steeped in the realm of meaning
(Barad 2007, 65). The body does not push back against the iterations of
power inscribed upon it. While Butler is better on this front, opening up
a discussion of the agency of bodies, according to Barad (2007, 145) her
genealogy is too anthropocentric. The attention given to the production
of human bodies crowds out the nonhuman from the performative event.
     An approach more balanced than Foucault’s or Butler’s would refuse
to give preference to human agency over nonhuman agency and meaning
over materiality. Barad (2003) theorises this as ‘posthumanist performa-
tivity’. Two strands of feminist thought are being drawn on here. While
the origins of the concept of ‘performativity’ can be traced to J. L. Aus-
ten’s theory of speech acts, wherein an utterance consummates an action
(Sedgwick 1993) – “I now pronounce you husband and wife” – Barad is
more explicitly citing Butler (1990; 1993), whose focus is the association
between the performativity of gender and the production of sexed bodies
(Barad 2007, 413, note 39). Over the last two decades, the term has been
used widely to signify the effects of a set of ideas, logics or discursive
practices (Butler 2010). As such, performativity allows genealogy to move
beyond representation into a description of things in their becoming. The
posthumanism evoked by Barad is inflected by the antihumanism of Fou-
cault and the cyborg imaginary of Haraway (1991). It refers not only to a
deconstruction of liberal notions of the human subject but to a positive
statement on the kinds of things that are able to act. For the posthuman-
ist, agency must be extended to matter in all its forms and not be limited
to human (or to ecological) life (see also Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013).
To adopt a posthuman perspective on performativity then, is to perceive
material phenomena and meaningful effects as the outcome of action
amongst a complex and heterogeneous mess of agencies.
     Before she can fully advocate for a Foucaultian genealogy, Barad
needs to account for the operation of power. This is achieved, in part,
through her discussion of the monograph Producing Workers: The Poli-
tics of Gender, Class, and Culture in the Calcutta Jute Mills (Fernandes
White                                                                     165
1997). This ethnographic study explores in detail how structures of class,
caste and gender are cited and enacted. Sociological forces are not held to
be transcendental to the affects and practices of the workplace but imma-
nent to them: expressed in positions and activities; marking bodies in
overlapping and interpenetrating ways; reworked by the meanings and
representations with which they are understood (Barad 2007, 229). Fou-
cault’s interpretation of power is thus used to reset the terms of the struc-
ture-agency debate. Rather than act in an all-encompassing and repressive
manner, structure is brought into the manifold as force relations or social
alignments (see also Wartenberg 1990). Power does not stand above (or
before) things and events. Instead it refers to the sedimentation of
(re)iterated agential cuts and to the breadth of effects that are thereby
produced: “the forces at work in the materialization of bodies are not on-
ly social, and the materialized bodies are not all human” (Barad 2007,
235). Barad approaches power as a Foucaultian but is interested in open-
ing it up to nonhuman agency and to an analysis of (ontologically flat) so-
cial structures. Thus, in conducting a genealogy of workers in a jute mill,
the material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production which condition
powerful effects in the workplace are subjected to the interpretive analyt-
ics of Foucault’s method.
    As human agency is always already caught up within the manifold,
there is no possibility of standing outside. The researcher is entwined
with their object of study; indeed, they are produced through their intra-
actions with it. To see, listen and reveal are all deeply ethical activities.
Similarly, Barad is careful to assert that the manifold is open-ended in the
sense that there remains the possibility for political change. Human agen-
cy is only part of any one mattering but it is a part. In every phenomenon
there is an opportunity to effect when, where and how the agential cut is
made. But that potential is not boundless. Rather, Barad (2007, 147) en-
visages a field of possibilities and impossibilities, a multiplicity slowly
configured and reconfigured through reiterative enactment. In becoming
political subjects, we affect the objects and relations with which we are
co-constituted, an act which in turn affects subsequent iterations.
    To summarise, the suitability of Barad’s metaphysics to the study of
standards rests on three theoretical moves. The first is the foregrounding
of the site of enactment. Rather than depend upon spatial metaphors ex-
ternal to the event of a standard’s implementation, space is conceived as
an ongoing process. This rejects the static co-ordinates assumed by the
majority of standards research but exposes a rich mix of productive agen-
cies. There is a risk that by fixing analysis upon the moment at which a
standard is implemented, how the standard came to be is ignored. Stabili-
sation could become of greater significance than circulation. But this risk
is diminished by the second move: acknowledging the importance of iter-
ation to the process of standardisation. By recognising that standardised
practices cite previous articulations and instantiations, this trap is avoided
166                                                         Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

and the historicity of a standard is fully exposed. But iteration involves
‘the same’ as well as ‘the different’, just as standardisation does entail
some form of repetition. Hence, with the third move, the stabilisation of a
standard is understood through Foucault’s conceptualisation of power.
Standards are not inherently powerful but can become as much through
their circulation and implementation. A widely-adopted standard can
thus be thought of as an alignment of discursive and nondiscursive prac-
tices or a sedimentation of the cuts made by an apparatus of bodily pro-
duction.
    Standards are not only the rules and values which bring order to a
messy world, but also must include the more-than-human context
through which those standards were developed and are continually
brought about. As such, the event of a standard’s implementation should
be approached as an ontologically transgressive entanglement of
presences and absences, materials and meanings, and natures and cul-
tures. It is only through iterative enactment that this apparatus acquires
the power to enforce the neat categorization of things. Thus, Baradian
analysis entails a description of the materialities and meanings of a stand-
ard’s site of implementation, combined with a genealogical interpretation
of its conditioning apparatus.


5. Rethinking IPv4 and ISO 9001 through the Concept of
Site

    Robust genealogy demands patient and detailed description. Given
the space remaining, it is impossible to fully achieve this here. Neverthe-
less, I want to give an indication of the spatial and social perspective of
material-discursive genealogy. IPv4 and ISO 9001 serve as my examples.

5.I. The Site of the Internet

     When a data packet is sent between two computers using the internet,
it is structured according to a document published by the Internet Engi-
neering Taskforce in 1981: Request for Comments (RFC) 791. In this
document, expectations for the metadata contained within a data packet
are described. What to include, what to leave out and how many bits to
allocate each data field were all debated in the months preceding the pub-
lication of the RFC. This was further conditioned by the expertise of en-
gineers working on the internet protocols, their institutional and organi-
sational affiliations and the generous funding programme afforded them
by the National Science Foundation (DeNardis 2009). The result is a text
that is seldom read, but exceedingly powerful. According to a Baradian
approach, whenever IPv4 is enacted, RFC 791 and its history (including
White                                                                      167
the politics of its development and dissemination) are cited and enfolded
into the site.
     While the internet is commonly perceived as a network, Barad’s met-
aphysics open up an alternative perspective. Whenever data are sent us-
ing IPv4, the protocol and its context, conceived as an apparatus, coa-
lesce with the particular agencies of the data packet – the bits which code
for it, the computer hardware which supports it, the cables between its
origin and destination, the desires initiating its transmission and the par-
tial meanings it carries. All of this is bound together into a relational knot
(what I refer to as a site and Barad a spacetimematter manifold), only to
resolve into the signal, its spatial arrangement, its timing and its cultural
associations. Construed as such, the internet is less a network than an
outcome of the citation and realisation of IPv4 and the other internet pro-
tocols. In this inversion of the usual spatial logic, the network is interpret-
ed as a performative spatial effect of continuous and ongoing materialisa-
tions.
     But what is the purpose of this inversion? First, it reveals the variety
and heterogeneity of constitutive agencies. The internet does not arrive,
stable and fully formed, at a site of encounter. Rather, it is produced from
a multitude of material and discursive agencies. Second, the Baradian in-
version allows – on a theoretical level, at least – a wide ranging discussion
of constitutive relations, and social and political outcomes. In the exam-
ple of IPv4, the infrastructural trajectories are so well established that
what occurs seldom deviates from what is expected. The field of possibili-
ties is so narrow that the protocol and its context appear to fall away. To
inventory them as I have begun to do seems speculative, if not pedantic.
Nevertheless, a strength of Barad’s metaphysics is in the way this back-
ground is brought into view.

5.2. The Power of (Re)iterative Quality Practices

    ISO 9001 is used to establish quality management systems. Firms
seeking compliance are required to formerly document their quality prac-
tices and show proof of their adherence to them. The standard does not
define how a firm should go about producing products and services, but
offers an adaptable set of management principles to help expose and reg-
ularise existing business processes. Effectively, it creates a paper trail, ex-
tending the reach of auditors to include the activities of industry, along
with its outcomes.
    Given its flexibility and its focus on process rather than performance,
the event of ISO 9001’s implementation is difficult to isolate. The stand-
ard is most obviously cited in the initial formulation of a firm’s quality
documents. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to limit ISO 9001 to a
realm of representation. It makes more sense that the standard should be
described as operating in a fragmented, multiple and incomplete manner.
168                                                          Tecnoscienza - 8 (2)

I therefore understand any business practice for which a formal docu-
ment exists to also be an enactment of ISO 9001. Certainly, the agency of
the standard within such a site will always be partial; its ability to struc-
ture and order outcomes will depend on the circumstance. But the power
of ISO 9001 is to be found not in the paper trail it produces, so much as
in the ubiquity, frequency and subtlety of its effects. As such, a Baradian
analysis of the standard draws attention to the molecular and accumula-
tive manner in which power operates.
    Through its many sitings the historicity of ISO 9001 is continually
brought to bear on the present. This includes both the development of
the standard and the steady intensification of its use. ISO 9001’s text orig-
inated as a mid-1960s quality standard to promote multilateral contract
sharing and outsourcing between NATO nations (Gibbon and Henriksen
2011). From here, it was adopted by the UK Ministry of Defence and
found its way into British Standard (BS) 5750:1979, before being dis-
cussed at ISO in the mid-1980s. The ascendency of the logic of quality
management is more general than this and has been linked both to the
presence of US management consultant W. Edwards Deming in post-war
Japan (Murphy and Yates 2009, 72; Busch 2011, 129) and to the backlash
against Japanese industry’s later incursion into Western consumer mar-
kets (Higgins and Hallstrom 2007). Whether by one route or another, the
discursive and nondiscursive practices of quality management were long
in circulation before the publication of ISO 9001 in 1987. Nevertheless,
the sense of objectivity and authority granted by the ISO has legitimised
the culture of quality assurance (Mendel 2006).
    Perhaps a word of caution is in order. There is a risk of overplaying
the distinct agency of ISO 9001 when describing the rise of quality man-
agement. Many structuring dynamics are implicated in the material-
discursive becoming of quality practices, not the least of which is the ne-
oliberal urge to maximise market information through a regime of quanti-
fication, calculation and accountability. While material-discursive geneal-
ogy reveals these broader cultural trends, emphasis ought to remain on
their operation within the site (i.e., their intersections with ISO 9001 and
other local agencies to bring bodies and subjectivities into being). The
particular attraction of standards is that they help disclose the shape and
intensity of such functions of power. Rather than understand quality
management as a transcendental ideology, a Baradian approach breaks it
down into a series of practices which, through repetition, rework what
can be meaningfully said and done.


Conclusions

    This paper has argued for a reconsideration of the spaces of standard-
isation using a site-based methodology based on the work of Karen Bar-
White                                                                          169
ad. Rather than conceive of standardised objects as moving and interact-
ing in space, it has advanced a position in which space is produced along-
side material enactment. Standards are thus understood as an ongoing
achievement of powerful apparatuses. By rethinking standards through
the concept of site, they are opened up to a diverse range of material and
discursive agencies.
    My sample of what a Baradian material-discursive genealogy of a
standard would involve is limited in two respects. The first is the brevity
of these accounts. Genealogy involves the slow and patient description of
material, social and historical associations. What I have presented does
not try to achieve that. The second is the pragmatically bounded ap-
proach to standards. I consider voluntary standards to be a subset of what
the concept of ‘standard’ entails. As such, the need remains to both offer
a thorough genealogy of a voluntary standard and to attempt to flesh out
how the methodology might be extended to standards in general. The
purpose of this paper has been to lay the groundwork for how this might
be achieved. Nevertheless, from the two examples presented, I hope to
have shown that the methodology offers an interesting perspective on the
spatial forms of dispersed infrastructure, and on the shape and intensity
of power in cultures of corporate auditing and management.

Acknowledgments
    My thanks to Claudio Coletta, Aphra Kerr, Rob Kitchin, Udo Krautwurst,
Francesca Musiani and Annalisa Pelizza for their feedback and support. The re-
search for this paper was provided by a European Research Council Advanced
Investigator Award, ‘The Programmable City’ (ERC-2012-AdG-323636).


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