B. Scholars wonder standards

B. Scholars wonder standards

In which a tangled bank of standards is discovered — their diversity is marveled at, then characterized by scholarship — a literature review is undertaken — an exemplary studier of standards is critiqued for whiggishness.

The first thing that an observer hears in the overlapping worlds of healthcare, telemedicine, and the internet is the demand for standards. Follow this thread out the door of the hospital and it becomes a ubiquitous background noise to every appearance of information and communication technologies. While such a demand is particularly constant in healthcare, it is not restricted to it by virture of some inherent difficulty in the nature of the enterprise or some congenital defect of its participants. Regardless of level or discipline or industry or specialty or place, informational complexity is fought with convention. In fact, telecommunications should represent the locus classicus of concerns with technical standards, and this includes mass production's interchangeable parts. Not only is communication at the heart of convention, but telecommunications is also the oldest example of international standardization— the International Telecommunications Convention— signed on May 17, 1865 (now known as the ITU, International Telecommunications Union, discussed in chapter H). This priorty will serve to justify a critique of Ken Alder's work, below, that relies on a notion of information technologies which is not only asssumed to be outside standardization, but outside of history.
A demand for standards is inherently intriguing, since at first it seems standards are something we have, not something we create. Standards serve progress of all kinds— from the growth of a company to scientific improvement— one needs to have objective measurements for comparison, and hence standards. In healthcare, however, this desire for improvement has as its emotional core the incessant frustration of cacophony— the noise of overlapping unstandardized (mis)communications (it is part of the constant perception that healthcare "lags" behind other industries [Kaplan87]). What the participants in these worlds are struggling with, however, is not simply a local problem of noise in an industry plagued by complexity. What this demand invokes is a specific historical legacy that connects invisible hands in theories with visible ones on keyboards in a culturally specific, but universal handshake. In healthcare, the diversity of standards is complicated by the use of that word to refer to standards of quality as well as standards of technical compatibility or conformance with regulations. The diversity of standards in healthcare will be deferred until section F, while this chapter offers a longer view of scholarship, selective, but hopefully highlighting the relevance of standards to the history, philosophy and social study of science

A Literature Review

The subject of standardization is as well studied as it is oft-invoked across disciplines. Can I offer a map? Yes. Shall it be in cylindrical, azimuthal or Mercator? Can I offer a measurement of standards? Yes. In metric or American, in what notation, with what tolerance? On whose time: daylight savings, Amtrak's, GMT? With which language, shall English Orthographie Dycktate thee Petioles of Truth, or shall charset=iso-8859-1?
Let's begin at the beginning. Year one. Or shall we forget this most fundamental standardization, the Christian Calendar, root of all teleological possibility, the innovation of Dionysius Exiguus in a year that he would only retrospectively imagine himself as part of: 525 A.D. (perhaps this locution already signals the connection between a linearized language and a standardized time, between memory and technology) Such an innovation, insignificant in itself (ultimately arbitrary perhaps) would not have been interesting without the subsequent systematic rise of Christianity in the west. The chronology we live by, the one that threatens us with judgement, Anno Domini, is perhaps the most insidious metric of domination by standardization. Even in acronymical terms, the standard betrays a concession that traverses religions: B.C. no longer references Christ, but instead, commonality, the common era, what is shared: B.C.E., just as C.E. resists particularistic domination even as it concedes the essential technical standard.
The end of history itself is theorized as a particular relation to time, a time that is universal for all who believe in it, across religion and history. And now, even for those who don't: today, for very different reasons we await the millennium beside a corps of engineers contemplating a judgement all too banal: Y2K. [Fischer99] Our standardized chronology, wantonly truncated by a COBOL Cabal, threatens us with all seven broken seals (or do we measure seals in binary? 111 seals?) of mundane mechanical failure, or perhaps worse. A self-fullfilled prophecy, a numerologist's nirvana. Dionysius Exiguus calculated a calendar for the age of a judgement day promised and always anticipated, now aged programmers offer the meek excuse that they never anticipated that the systems they built would still be in use come judgement day. Is it irony that this literalization of the calendar puts us at the mercy of a nature less natural than technical, at the mercy not only of cycles of the seasons, but the cycles of a processor? Or is it therapture.com?
The arbitrariness of the Christian calendar transforms a convenient measure into scripture. Millenarianism and fins de siecle have a technical connection to Christianity, even if the standard were neither decided upon by men, nor whispered to a prophet. Its existence signals a coordination of men and seasons whose cause is inessential to this very remarkable fact of agreement achieved through some means (whether force or faith). In fact, any given standard signals the existience of political and economic (and theological) strings of committees, institutions, governments, firms, markets, accidents, and laws that work to make obligation cohere to cooperation. A spectrum haunts this set-up, ranging amongst standards, conventions, customs, laws, regulations, perhaps even connecting up consensus[1] and common sense. Are Durkheim's social facts standards, connecting religion and standardization in the problems of spontaneous self-generation? And Geertz's culture? Hidden behind the bewildering swirl of seeming signs and actions? Historical, economic, anthropological, sociological approaches emphasize sides of an investigation of standards, conventions, and laws; each locates responsibility differently, but all aim at partially thematized political theory— a social theory that carries traces of a problem of cooperation, coordination, and allocation. Games, collective action, cake-cutting, dialectics of recognition, love and sharing, passion and spite— these are not the beloved tales of social theorists solely for their exemplary power, but because the problem of reaching across justification to make a decision and back again is a fabulously difficult and seemingly essential social theoretic problem.
Almost all questions of convention, if not exactly standards, reference a classic debate in the philosophy of language that generally begins in Greek: physis and nomos. Cratylus [Plato61] is the standard, by nature or by convention is less clear, for the problematic of nature and convention in language. The argument for nature inevitably rests on some version of etymology, onomotopoeia, or mimologism,[2] while the argument for convention stumbles on the impossibility of knowledge and the divinity of the world. The argument between Socrates and Cratylus picks through the nature of naming and name-giving, the relationship to legislation and to the justness and unjustness of names, engaging a familiar economy of the proper and property. A first reference to the relationship between knowing and owning that will reappear throughout this section.
Such a debate is never confined only to language; which is only another way of saying that the problem of language is never just one among others. Alain Boyer, in a brief article on "Conventions and Arbitrariness" [Hjort92] gives some familiar examples of the ubiquity of the concept from Cratylus to David Lewis [3]. Arbitrariness is the quintessentially semiotic intervention: motivation and unmotivation being the mysterious operators of nature against convention for semiotics, a secret manner of evading the metaphysical implications of the problematic of the foundation of legislation and the justness of naming opened up by Plato.
Boyer traces arbitrary to the latin abitrarius and the derivative arbitrator, to the third party responsible for deciding (I trace decide to the latin decidere, which retains some of its root cidere, to cut, and thus some of the violence necessary for the production of convention— I too reference nature in the form of etymology) and thus for originating a convention, even if that convention then becomes the very form of the natural [4]. Or, in fact, precisely because it does: the third party that decides a dispute, whether it be cutting a cake or coordinating the size of screw threadings, is ultimately arbitrary in a cosmological sense (though, I'm suppose ANSI would be alarmed to hear this said of their decisions about screwing). That is to say, its reasoning must either be ultimately unknowable— divine, maybe, or simply couched in a language of truth or efficiency masking the arbitray decision— or completely transparent to users and standardizers alike, in order to allow the arbitrary to be naturalized (in the case where convention is implicit, but references a deeper convention— truth, nature, tradition) or to allow it to remain always and radically open, subject to almost constant revision, having, as its essense, almost no force as convention at all (in the case where convention is explicit). No standard will ever be allowed to be arbitrary (in the sense of random), and yet its justification must be either forgotten (black-boxed, perhaps) or constantly referenced ("first principles" perhaps) such that it fails to appear as convention, and becomes natural unto truth. It is only by reference to the objectivity of a measurement, in the specific sense of its independence from a subjective being, that is, to a somehow shared agreement (an agreement that, among scientists and engineers, takes the form of a demand that it be called truth, and no less, and this truth is transcendental in both a secular and a religious sense) that an object is measured by a standard of some sort, that these difficulties are resolved[5].
In the fields of the History of Science and the Social study of science, there has been a substantial quantity of work on the relationship of standards to the production of scientific truth, or experimental verification. Theodore Porter and Ken Alder's works stand out as strong examples of this work, attempts to explain truth (in the case of Porter) and mass production (in the case of alder) with reference to standards. In both cases, this focus leaves the very problem of convention— from arbitration to justification— untouched.
One of the most well known recent works on the production of scientific truth that deals with standardization is Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers. I choose this example out of others on objectivity because it Porter treats objectivity as an effect of standardization. Standardization per se is not his study, but rather the fact that the growth of science can't be told without a concomitant story of the growth of the bureaucracy of standards. Mechanical objectivity— rule-based validation— depends, obviously, on rules [Porter95]. But rules are not quite the same as laws, whose role is discipline and consequence— punishment. Rather, these rules are intended to conquer subjectivity first, distance and time next. Quantification is the means of achieving a result over which no individual has ultimate control. Yet, as Porter duly notes, objectivity and law are relentlessly identified with each other in the scientific and political culture of Europe and America. The rule of judgment must be countermanded by the rule of law. 'Trust,' is Porter's (and certainly not his alone) powerful name for the exergue of truth.
What Porter calls 'standardization' is different from the subterranean means by which techniques, practices, methods, tools, apparatus and training are transmitted via personal and institutional connections to constitute something that has come to be called "the scientific community," or "the scientific method. Much recent scholarship in the history of science has begun an investigation of these networks of learning and research techniques, either by reference to explicit contacts (in the form of schools, patronage or apprenticeship) or 'tacit knowledge' and the transmission of techniques through either direct training or laboratory experiment and communication networks. For Porter, all of this would be impossible without the sine qua non of agreed upon measurments: "The bureaucratic imposition of uniform standards and measures has been indispensible for the metamorphosis of local skills into generally valid scientific knowledge."(21) and "In this [social and natural scientists] were allied to the centralizing state and to large scale economic institutions."(22) The activity of standardization was rarely the subject of science, but always the limit point of the legitimacy of science.
Porter appeals to familiar problems of standardization, time-tables and maps in particular, reiterating the classic historical insights of E.P. Thompson [Thompson67] and Witold Kula [Kula86] — the imposition of the metric system in france, the struggles over the cahiers de doléance, the creation of electrical standards in the late 19th century and the development of national bureaus of standardization, trade groups and the intertwining of regulation and science[6].
"For most purposes, accuracy is meaningless if the same operations and measurements cannot be performed at other sites."(29) The conquering of distance made possible the expansion of science, and with expansion came legitimacy and power (though these are not the foci of Porter's study). Porter dwells on measurement as the core of standardization— the appeal to an authority other than human judgement; and even if every standard is somehow produced in judgement to begin with, this much is somehow forgotten (i.e. the arbitrariness of the decision is naturalized) by those who appeal to the standard.
This is a foundational explanation of how objectivity and standardization work together. Porter's title Trust in Numbers sums up the troubling relationship of truth and trust in the context of an endeavor (science) whose entire history is focused on relinquishing the latter in favor of the former. But Trust is no less mysterious for that, and Porter's description only shows the half of it. The difficulty through which standardization is achieved, its remarkable persistence, and its inextricable dependence on 'truth' for its legitimacy is left open for another history while Porter surprises the history of science with its secret political history of quantification.
Some of Porter's theory references Bruno Latour's work [Latour87], in particular, the concession that modern science is not a miracle of individual geniuses and a passive nature they unveil, but the result of the hard work of stabilizing conventions. Latour's work, along side the more politically engaged works of Donna Haraway, asks the hard questions about how something comes to be true, for whom, and why this is not only a philosophical conundrum, but a social one as well. In Latour's craw, standardization takes the form of agonism. Science, like politics, is just War by other means (as it also is in Lyotard's treatment, though it emphasizes the strategy of the game first). Allies, enlisting, recruitment, are the terms of Latour's investigation, and the result is a temporary stabilization based on the threat of exclusion or worse. Ultimately, Latour's interest is not in the empirical structures of standardization, nowhere referenced in his works because they are fundamentally arbitrary, and as such, uneccessary to a theory of action in which opportunistic actors enlist standards as needed in order to win arguments, settle disputes and make society durable. This is only a gesture to the depth of Latour's thought, however, and his counterpoint to this investigation would be a more thorough investigation of the concept of networks in his work, expecially as it relates to the historical and worldwide network called "the scientific community" and its uses of networks of communication and dissemination, including, most importantly, the internet and its kin.
The range of sources that could be included under a review of standardization and its relationship to science would include the following, at least: Simon Schaffer's work on late victorian metrology [Bud92] and measurement [Wise95]; Jed Buchwald's work on experimental standards [Buchwald94] [Buchwald89] and collected volume on standardization [Buchwald96]; Tim Lenoir's collection of essays about the institutions of science [Lenoir97]; Peter Galison on 'image' and 'logic' as two standards of proof [Galison97]; Norton Wise's collection of essays on precision [Wise95], Bob Brain's work on the graphical method [Brain99] and the standardization of language under the 19th century regime of writing [Lenoir98], Eugen Weber's work on the creation of the French state [Weber76], Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt [Mitchell88], Thomas Richard's Imperial Archive [Richards93]. In addititon, various social scientific studies from the tradition of Latour and SSK exist, exemplars are [Hanseth96], [Mallard98], [Hogle95].

Ken Alder

Ken Alder's article "Making things the Same: Representation, Tolerance, and the end of the ancien regime in France," [Alder98] is a rich starting point for the question of standardization. Drawing on Theodore Porter, Bruno Latour, and the "social construction of technology," Alder compels technical description to enrich two very storied stories: the politics of the French Revolution and the technology of the industrial revolution. In his telling, the tale revolves around riflings. The bores and balls of the French industrial system make exemplary drawings for imaging the vicissitudes of interchange and standardization. Parts is not just parts.
Dissenting from "the usual response" (499) to support what "historians have shown"(500) he finds the origin of (mass?) mechanization, not in post-fordism, nor even with Ford, but with the French Revolution. "Making things the same" is his clever tag for the focus on identity in artifacts and representations. "Things" help this historian insist on identifiying new origins for old stories. His two fold goal is to depart familiar theoretical narratives of production for more aggressively historical ones, and yet to do so without giving up the drama of politics and ideologies that inform the boring drawings of French guns. This laudable goal is a corrective to economic speculation and to the bogeyman of American History of Technology: technological determinism. However, in setting sights, Alder's curious anachronism surprises: "Long before the advent of the computer, material artifacts were being produced in conjunction with techniques and representations ('information technologies') that were themselves subject to a process of standardization.(500)" Things and representations were standardized together, artifacts have politics, as do their representations, so that the co-negotiation of things and representation demands a rich focus on the political stakes of the time.
"The technology that results from this process...is both the bearer of political values and can in some sense be called 'objective' {emphasis in original}" (503) Objectivity is a political value that can (Alder believes Porter here) coordinate research in order to standardize the representation of natural phenomena. Science needs number plus communication to contact truth, objectivity and standardization relate in a dialectic, and it is Alder's goal to get inside this dialectic and show exactly how truth is its sublation. Alder claims the 'thick description' of Geertz to make a strong case for the interpretation of things as manipulative of, constrained by, or effective of representations (according to the workings of both political and technical constraints— but what constrains, nature or convention?). These representational tools— in this specific case, mechanical drawing tools and manufacturing tolerance tools— are called by Alder 'information technologies.'
On the one hand, this amounts to a deep disavowal of the problematics of representation, including the specificities of language and communication and the familiar vicissitudes of the metaphysical imputation of voice as the measure of presence [7]. Language and meaning, the loci of interpretation, and the core of human judgement in matters of standardization, are here reduced to just another technology. This is an anachronism, to be sure, but one no worse than a thousand other texts that now impute theories of information and communication to all aspects of human history, and at the limit, give nature itself the structure of information [8].
On the other hand, it is equally a mystification of what 'information technologies' are today. That words are now things (software), yet somehow retain something of the problematic of representation (software needs comments— interpretation— in order to be understood by humans, or code specifically designed for translating code from one language to another, or from one machine to another; all of which can be standardized at some level or another), is obscured in the reduction of information technology to drawing and measuring tools. Speech and writing still inhere in things, while action has become more disembodied and thing-like than ever. No compass and pencil ever achieved quite the unheimlich qualities of the telephone and phonograph, for instance [9]. And the combination of pencil and compass, or telephone and phonograph in the internet (software plus communication) demands an attention whose focus is not only representation, but— and this should excite Alder— the structure of war and revolution itself. In Alder's case the war is background for standardization of weaponry, offering constraints on negotiation. It is the source of political beliefs about objectivity and standardization— not, as Clausewitz might suggest, "standardization by other means." Friedrich Kittler [Kittler97], on the back of this other hand, insists that all war is nothing more than a competition amongst technologies: "War, as opposed to sheer fighting, has been for a long time an affair of persuasion." (117) These techniques of persuasion that wars intend are enhanced, even replaced by technologies of communication and control. Kittler constantly slides the needle across this record, unable to keep it from skipping, insisting that culture is no more than a diversion from the progess of war, and that the war's apotheosis is the struggle between media: "wars of persuasion culminated and ended in persuading the enemy that traditional secret services and not computers had gathered the most vital information. Thus the name of man and the title of intelligence are pronounced, proclaimed, and published only in order to better veil machines 'At some stage,' wrote Alan Turing, 'we should have to expect the machines to take control" (127). Alder's approach, far less fanatic, lets war stand as event and background, without insisting on its connection to persuasion and its role as an arbitrator's arbitrator, as a struggle to decide which technologies are superior, and by that, which nation. However, revolution, especially the French one, as Alder recognizes, was a much more difficult background against which to forge this contraction of society and technology. But it is this question of origins that grows a third hand on my reading of this article.
On the third hand, in the emphatic statement that this is "the story of the origins of 'making things the same'"(500) [emphasis in original] Alder sets t equal to zero. It is perhaps appropriate to see in the confluence of networks and software that are called "information and communication technologies" some remarkable traces of an original standardization (that of "modern technology") which, when properly historicized, will help order the stories of both history and economic development. In this Alder insists that his is the story of "the rise of modern technological systems out of the demise of the corporate order of the ancien régime, and the crucial importance of information technologies in that transition." (505)
Thus can "modern technology" be historicized. Yet in the same breath, "information technologies" rise from the ashes of a fallen determinism to provide a new ahistorical wedge by which representation may be trapped in things and tutored; the perils of thought and mysticisms of interpretation avoided, in favor of an ever more hypostatized archive of things and documents that do not resist the steady hand of the historian. Alder's mistake here is to let the representations of which he so carefully explores the detail, suggestiveness and unruliness become nothing more than complement to the riflings and barrels, to historicize development of technology by reference to representations represented by him as "information technologies." In short, information technology is neither modern nor ancient, but outside history.
Nothing suggests that "information technology" can be abused in this way. Or, by reference to the extremism of Kittler, this use of "information technology" does not go far enough in the direction of formalism. Kittler's insistence that meaning and presence are nothing but the accidental effects of a technological war of media whose apotheosis is the bit, or his implications that culture is an epiphenomenon of media, are often haunted by the hermeneutic crises and by the inevitable necessity of writing and books. Alder, on the other hand, simply stops at the point where information technologies can be either cure-all or excuse, where historicization (of information) is abandoned in order to supplement another historicization (of 'modern technology').
Despite overwhelming detail and convincing narratives, it is thus difficult to believe Alder's subsequent assertion: "I provide my own thick description: a detailed case example of how identical artifacts and the instruments which made them possible emerged as the negotiated response to social conflict among parties with diverse understandings of artifacts— and can thus be understood as the outcome of a historical (rather than a logical) process. (505)" Difficult to believe because we have already noticed that information technologies are treated here as something less than or more than 'historical' (if not precisely 'logical'). But this certainly does not dismiss or damn his point, only make it more obscure. On the one hand, his historical stories will serve well as example and genealogy [10], and yet, methodological atavisms will prevent us from understanding the particular configuration of things, words and actions that Alder claims to describe thickly, much less the 'information technologies,' or the internet and its standards (which, granted is not Alder's focus, but nonetheless appears as background to the argument). There is no glimpse here of the mechanism of standardization, only an appeal to politics and negotiation as a corrective to purely technical descriptions of the development of technology. Somehow, even though we may learn from this thick description of the French revolution, somehow there must be a way directly encounter the problems of representation in standardization as it has changed from the French to the information revolutions.
What, then, is the difference between standardization then (mechanization, as the origin point for standardization in the History of Technology) and standardization now? Perhaps an example is needed.

1. Perhaps Habermas vs. Lyotard, in their mini-non-argument over consensus and dissensus, over the impossibility of some final ground of meta-agreement would be a starting point for the investigation of consensus and dissensus as a question of implicit and explicit standards. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 [1981] and [Lyotard84].

2. See Gerard Genette, Mimologiques [Genette76].

3. Lewis is at the intersection of game theory and analytic philosophy, and with lovely anglo-american clarity exhausts the problem of convention in a cybernetic-monadic world. It is a perfect illustration for both economists and philosophers and its influence is widely felt. [Lewis69] It is most likely to be criticized by Chomsky-ite evolutionary theories that would never accomodate an impossible animal such as "innate conventions".

4. A process Derrida berates Searle and kids Austin about in Limited Inc. [Derrida88].

5. On this problematic see Bruno Latour, Science in Action [Latour87], also, Paul Feyerabend, Against Method [Feyerabend75].

6. 20th century America and France have seen the most vigorous experimentation with the standardization and professionalization of scientists and engineers. In many ways, this focus relates directly to the more circumscribed realm of the history of Science that has focused on the rise of probabliity (Lorraine Daston's work on classical probability [Daston88], the two volume collection of essays on the probablistic revolution [Kruger87], Ian Hacking's Taming of Chance [Hacking90]), which is the trajectory that Porter followed in moving from a history of probabalistic methods [Porter86] to a question of probability as a means of measurement adequately mediating between the incorrigibly objective and necessarily subjective. The history of risk and insurance also follows this path, both in the history of sciece from Daston, et al. and from the French historigraphical school initiated by Foucault, including [Ewald86], [Donzelot94], [Poovey98], [Burchell91] etc.

7. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena [Derrida73] and Of Grammatology [Derrida76].

8. The information revolution. The information society. Infomap, infoculture, infoplex, infopreneurs; daily neologisms grind the edges off of this concept. Geoff Bowker [Bowker94] suggests that the excluded middle of the equation between current economic structures and the nature of life that is so commonly solved by information is actually that of organization work. Essential to understanding the myth of the information revolution is the "infrastructural inversion" which comes down to the recognition that the world must first be ordered by control and then it can be perceived as having the same structure as information. Such a recognition is crucial for escaping the ideology produced by the dogma of information, but still fails to approach the no less long-standing historical and contemporary problems of control and organization by standardization, or more problematically for most theorists: the problem of spontaneous organization.

9. This is the appropriate point to reference Avital Ronell's study of the telephone, schizophrenia and the metaphyics of disembodied— telepresent— speech [Ronell89]

10. In particular,
a. the centralization of military production. The important figure of the "artillery inspector" (508) whose role covered both quality assurance and anti-corruption (that no deals outside the centralized system might be made). Simultaneously a way of controlling "precision and uniformity" and creating loyalty through detailed standards.
b. The very perceptive focus on the necessity of going beyond images as two-dimensional images to "follow the efforts of engineers to translate their images into physical objects" (511).
c. Points to a similar problematic in French engineering, projective drawing, as that explored by Diane Greco, with respect to structures and explanatory frameworks. Alder calls it 'epistemological mistrust that exists between the inner eye and the external world".(513)
d. The fate of Gribeauval's Tables de construction, specifically, the claims that they 1) had the force of law, and 2) that they where unpublished until after the revolution because "publically validated representations would make it difficult for the artillerists to alter their designs as circumstances changed. These observations bring Alder closest to articulating the difficult problem of the collective legitimacy of a standard (as opposed to the individual problem of trust), which might affect the speed of a collective response.
e. Mechanical authority— the Porter version of things— as the appeal to something external to the untrustworthy other, or self, works to the advantage of both parties, as long as they understand how to argue with it (and here again, we catch sight of the inadequacy of a concept like 'information technologies' in this context, since it is one thing to point to the co-negotiation of standard representations and standard things, and to point out how mechanical authority was a boon to both parties, but it is still yet a mystery how one learns to argue with standards? What infinite regress of meta-standards finally determines this political struggle?) (523-4). "The price of standards is eternal vigilance." (528)

Last Modified 11-Sep-99 9:01 PM ckelty@mit.edu

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	B. Scholars wonder standards In which a tangled bank of standards is discovered — their diversity is marveled at, then characterized by scholarship — a literature review is undertaken — an exemplary studier of standards is critiqued for whiggishness. The first thing that an observer hears in the overlapping worlds of healthcare, telemedicine, and the internet is the demand for standards. Follow this thread out the door of the hospital and it becomes a ubiquitous background noise to every appearance of information and communication technologies. While such a demand is particularly constant in healthcare, it is not restricted to it by virture of some inherent difficulty in the nature of the enterprise or some congenital defect of its participants. Regardless of level or discipline or industry or specialty or place, informational complexity is fought with convention. In fact, telecommunications should represent the locus classicus of concerns with technical standards, and this includes mass production's interchangeable parts. Not only is communication at the heart of convention, but telecommunications is also the oldest example of international standardization— the International Telecommunications Convention— signed on May 17, 1865 (now known as the ITU, International Telecommunications Union, discussed in chapter H). This priorty will serve to justify a critique of Ken Alder's work, below, that relies on a notion of information technologies which is not only asssumed to be outside standardization, but outside of history. A demand for standards is inherently intriguing, since at first it seems standards are something we have, not something we create. Standards serve progress of all kinds— from the growth of a company to scientific improvement— one needs to have objective measurements for comparison, and hence standards. In healthcare, however, this desire for improvement has as its emotional core the incessant frustration of cacophony— the noise of overlapping unstandardized (mis)communications (it is part of the constant perception that healthcare "lags" behind other industries [Kaplan87]). What the participants in these worlds are struggling with, however, is not simply a local problem of noise in an industry plagued by complexity. What this demand invokes is a specific historical legacy that connects invisible hands in theories with visible ones on keyboards in a culturally specific, but universal handshake. In healthcare, the diversity of standards is complicated by the use of that word to refer to standards of quality as well as standards of technical compatibility or conformance with regulations. The diversity of standards in healthcare will be deferred until section F, while this chapter offers a longer view of scholarship, selective, but hopefully highlighting the relevance of standards to the history, philosophy and social study of science A Literature Review The subject of standardization is as well studied as it is oft-invoked across disciplines. Can I offer a map? Yes. Shall it be in cylindrical, azimuthal or Mercator? Can I offer a measurement of standards? Yes. In metric or American, in what notation, with what tolerance? On whose time: daylight savings, Amtrak's, GMT? With which language, shall English Orthographie Dycktate thee Petioles of Truth, or shall charset=iso-8859-1? Let's begin at the beginning. Year one. Or shall we forget this most fundamental standardization, the Christian Calendar, root of all teleological possibility, the innovation of Dionysius Exiguus in a year that he would only retrospectively imagine himself as part of: 525 A.D. (perhaps this locution already signals the connection between a linearized language and a standardized time, between memory and technology) Such an innovation, insignificant in itself (ultimately arbitrary perhaps) would not have been interesting without the subsequent systematic rise of Christianity in the west. The chronology we live by, the one that threatens us with judgement, Anno Domini, is perhaps the most insidious metric of domination by standardization. Even in acronymical terms, the standard betrays a concession that traverses religions: B.C. no longer references Christ, but instead, commonality, the common era, what is shared: B.C.E., just as C.E. resists particularistic domination even as it concedes the essential technical standard. The end of history itself is theorized as a particular relation to time, a time that is universal for all who believe in it, across religion and history. And now, even for those who don't: today, for very different reasons we await the millennium beside a corps of engineers contemplating a judgement all too banal: Y2K. [Fischer99] Our standardized chronology, wantonly truncated by a COBOL Cabal, threatens us with all seven broken seals (or do we measure seals in binary? 111 seals?) of mundane mechanical failure, or perhaps worse. A self-fullfilled prophecy, a numerologist's nirvana. Dionysius Exiguus calculated a calendar for the age of a judgement day promised and always anticipated, now aged programmers offer the meek excuse that they never anticipated that the systems they built would still be in use come judgement day. Is it irony that this literalization of the calendar puts us at the mercy of a nature less natural than technical, at the mercy not only of cycles of the seasons, but the cycles of a processor? Or is it therapture.com? The arbitrariness of the Christian calendar transforms a convenient measure into scripture. Millenarianism and fins de siecle have a technical connection to Christianity, even if the standard were neither decided upon by men, nor whispered to a prophet. Its existence signals a coordination of men and seasons whose cause is inessential to this very remarkable fact of agreement achieved through some means (whether force or faith). In fact, any given standard signals the existience of political and economic (and theological) strings of committees, institutions, governments, firms, markets, accidents, and laws that work to make obligation cohere to cooperation. A spectrum haunts this set-up, ranging amongst standards, conventions, customs, laws, regulations, perhaps even connecting up consensus[1] and common sense. Are Durkheim's social facts standards, connecting religion and standardization in the problems of spontaneous self-generation? And Geertz's culture? Hidden behind the bewildering swirl of seeming signs and actions? Historical, economic, anthropological, sociological approaches emphasize sides of an investigation of standards, conventions, and laws; each locates responsibility differently, but all aim at partially thematized political theory— a social theory that carries traces of a problem of cooperation, coordination, and allocation. Games, collective action, cake-cutting, dialectics of recognition, love and sharing, passion and spite— these are not the beloved tales of social theorists solely for their exemplary power, but because the problem of reaching across justification to make a decision and back again is a fabulously difficult and seemingly essential social theoretic problem. Almost all questions of convention, if not exactly standards, reference a classic debate in the philosophy of language that generally begins in Greek: physis and nomos. Cratylus [Plato61] is the standard, by nature or by convention is less clear, for the problematic of nature and convention in language. The argument for nature inevitably rests on some version of etymology, onomotopoeia, or mimologism,[2] while the argument for convention stumbles on the impossibility of knowledge and the divinity of the world. The argument between Socrates and Cratylus picks through the nature of naming and name-giving, the relationship to legislation and to the justness and unjustness of names, engaging a familiar economy of the proper and property. A first reference to the relationship between knowing and owning that will reappear throughout this section. Such a debate is never confined only to language; which is only another way of saying that the problem of language is never just one among others. Alain Boyer, in a brief article on "Conventions and Arbitrariness" [Hjort92] gives some familiar examples of the ubiquity of the concept from Cratylus to David Lewis [3]. Arbitrariness is the quintessentially semiotic intervention: motivation and unmotivation being the mysterious operators of nature against convention for semiotics, a secret manner of evading the metaphysical implications of the problematic of the foundation of legislation and the justness of naming opened up by Plato. Boyer traces arbitrary to the latin abitrarius and the derivative arbitrator, to the third party responsible for deciding (I trace decide to the latin decidere, which retains some of its root cidere, to cut, and thus some of the violence necessary for the production of convention— I too reference nature in the form of etymology) and thus for originating a convention, even if that convention then becomes the very form of the natural [4]. Or, in fact, precisely because it does: the third party that decides a dispute, whether it be cutting a cake or coordinating the size of screw threadings, is ultimately arbitrary in a cosmological sense (though, I'm suppose ANSI would be alarmed to hear this said of their decisions about screwing). That is to say, its reasoning must either be ultimately unknowable— divine, maybe, or simply couched in a language of truth or efficiency masking the arbitray decision— or completely transparent to users and standardizers alike, in order to allow the arbitrary to be naturalized (in the case where convention is implicit, but references a deeper convention— truth, nature, tradition) or to allow it to remain always and radically open, subject to almost constant revision, having, as its essense, almost no force as convention at all (in the case where convention is explicit). No standard will ever be allowed to be arbitrary (in the sense of random), and yet its justification must be either forgotten (black-boxed, perhaps) or constantly referenced ("first principles" perhaps) such that it fails to appear as convention, and becomes natural unto truth. It is only by reference to the objectivity of a measurement, in the specific sense of its independence from a subjective being, that is, to a somehow shared agreement (an agreement that, among scientists and engineers, takes the form of a demand that it be called truth, and no less, and this truth is transcendental in both a secular and a religious sense) that an object is measured by a standard of some sort, that these difficulties are resolved[5]. In the fields of the History of Science and the Social study of science, there has been a substantial quantity of work on the relationship of standards to the production of scientific truth, or experimental verification. Theodore Porter and Ken Alder's works stand out as strong examples of this work, attempts to explain truth (in the case of Porter) and mass production (in the case of alder) with reference to standards. In both cases, this focus leaves the very problem of convention— from arbitration to justification— untouched. One of the most well known recent works on the production of scientific truth that deals with standardization is Theodore Porter's Trust in Numbers. I choose this example out of others on objectivity because it Porter treats objectivity as an effect of standardization. Standardization per se is not his study, but rather the fact that the growth of science can't be told without a concomitant story of the growth of the bureaucracy of standards. Mechanical objectivity— rule-based validation— depends, obviously, on rules [Porter95]. But rules are not quite the same as laws, whose role is discipline and consequence— punishment. Rather, these rules are intended to conquer subjectivity first, distance and time next. Quantification is the means of achieving a result over which no individual has ultimate control. Yet, as Porter duly notes, objectivity and law are relentlessly identified with each other in the scientific and political culture of Europe and America. The rule of judgment must be countermanded by the rule of law. 'Trust,' is Porter's (and certainly not his alone) powerful name for the exergue of truth. What Porter calls 'standardization' is different from the subterranean means by which techniques, practices, methods, tools, apparatus and training are transmitted via personal and institutional connections to constitute something that has come to be called "the scientific community," or "the scientific method. Much recent scholarship in the history of science has begun an investigation of these networks of learning and research techniques, either by reference to explicit contacts (in the form of schools, patronage or apprenticeship) or 'tacit knowledge' and the transmission of techniques through either direct training or laboratory experiment and communication networks. For Porter, all of this would be impossible without the sine qua non of agreed upon measurments: "The bureaucratic imposition of uniform standards and measures has been indispensible for the metamorphosis of local skills into generally valid scientific knowledge."(21) and "In this [social and natural scientists] were allied to the centralizing state and to large scale economic institutions."(22) The activity of standardization was rarely the subject of science, but always the limit point of the legitimacy of science. Porter appeals to familiar problems of standardization, time-tables and maps in particular, reiterating the classic historical insights of E.P. Thompson [Thompson67] and Witold Kula [Kula86] — the imposition of the metric system in france, the struggles over the cahiers de doléance, the creation of electrical standards in the late 19th century and the development of national bureaus of standardization, trade groups and the intertwining of regulation and science[6]. "For most purposes, accuracy is meaningless if the same operations and measurements cannot be performed at other sites."(29) The conquering of distance made possible the expansion of science, and with expansion came legitimacy and power (though these are not the foci of Porter's study). Porter dwells on measurement as the core of standardization— the appeal to an authority other than human judgement; and even if every standard is somehow produced in judgement to begin with, this much is somehow forgotten (i.e. the arbitrariness of the decision is naturalized) by those who appeal to the standard. This is a foundational explanation of how objectivity and standardization work together. Porter's title Trust in Numbers sums up the troubling relationship of truth and trust in the context of an endeavor (science) whose entire history is focused on relinquishing the latter in favor of the former. But Trust is no less mysterious for that, and Porter's description only shows the half of it. The difficulty through which standardization is achieved, its remarkable persistence, and its inextricable dependence on 'truth' for its legitimacy is left open for another history while Porter surprises the history of science with its secret political history of quantification. Some of Porter's theory references Bruno Latour's work [Latour87], in particular, the concession that modern science is not a miracle of individual geniuses and a passive nature they unveil, but the result of the hard work of stabilizing conventions. Latour's work, along side the more politically engaged works of Donna Haraway, asks the hard questions about how something comes to be true, for whom, and why this is not only a philosophical conundrum, but a social one as well. In Latour's craw, standardization takes the form of agonism. Science, like politics, is just War by other means (as it also is in Lyotard's treatment, though it emphasizes the strategy of the game first). Allies, enlisting, recruitment, are the terms of Latour's investigation, and the result is a temporary stabilization based on the threat of exclusion or worse. Ultimately, Latour's interest is not in the empirical structures of standardization, nowhere referenced in his works because they are fundamentally arbitrary, and as such, uneccessary to a theory of action in which opportunistic actors enlist standards as needed in order to win arguments, settle disputes and make society durable. This is only a gesture to the depth of Latour's thought, however, and his counterpoint to this investigation would be a more thorough investigation of the concept of networks in his work, expecially as it relates to the historical and worldwide network called "the scientific community" and its uses of networks of communication and dissemination, including, most importantly, the internet and its kin. The range of sources that could be included under a review of standardization and its relationship to science would include the following, at least: Simon Schaffer's work on late victorian metrology [Bud92] and measurement [Wise95]; Jed Buchwald's work on experimental standards [Buchwald94] [Buchwald89] and collected volume on standardization [Buchwald96]; Tim Lenoir's collection of essays about the institutions of science [Lenoir97]; Peter Galison on 'image' and 'logic' as two standards of proof [Galison97]; Norton Wise's collection of essays on precision [Wise95], Bob Brain's work on the graphical method [Brain99] and the standardization of language under the 19th century regime of writing [Lenoir98], Eugen Weber's work on the creation of the French state [Weber76], Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt [Mitchell88], Thomas Richard's Imperial Archive [Richards93]. In addititon, various social scientific studies from the tradition of Latour and SSK exist, exemplars are [Hanseth96], [Mallard98], [Hogle95]. Ken Alder Ken Alder's article "Making things the Same: Representation, Tolerance, and the end of the ancien regime in France," [Alder98] is a rich starting point for the question of standardization. Drawing on Theodore Porter, Bruno Latour, and the "social construction of technology," Alder compels technical description to enrich two very storied stories: the politics of the French Revolution and the technology of the industrial revolution. In his telling, the tale revolves around riflings. The bores and balls of the French industrial system make exemplary drawings for imaging the vicissitudes of interchange and standardization. Parts is not just parts. Dissenting from "the usual response" (499) to support what "historians have shown"(500) he finds the origin of (mass?) mechanization, not in post-fordism, nor even with Ford, but with the French Revolution. "Making things the same" is his clever tag for the focus on identity in artifacts and representations. "Things" help this historian insist on identifiying new origins for old stories. His two fold goal is to depart familiar theoretical narratives of production for more aggressively historical ones, and yet to do so without giving up the drama of politics and ideologies that inform the boring drawings of French guns. This laudable goal is a corrective to economic speculation and to the bogeyman of American History of Technology: technological determinism. However, in setting sights, Alder's curious anachronism surprises: "Long before the advent of the computer, material artifacts were being produced in conjunction with techniques and representations ('information technologies') that were themselves subject to a process of standardization.(500)" Things and representations were standardized together, artifacts have politics, as do their representations, so that the co-negotiation of things and representation demands a rich focus on the political stakes of the time. "The technology that results from this process...is both the bearer of political values and can in some sense be called 'objective' {emphasis in original}" (503) Objectivity is a political value that can (Alder believes Porter here) coordinate research in order to standardize the representation of natural phenomena. Science needs number plus communication to contact truth, objectivity and standardization relate in a dialectic, and it is Alder's goal to get inside this dialectic and show exactly how truth is its sublation. Alder claims the 'thick description' of Geertz to make a strong case for the interpretation of things as manipulative of, constrained by, or effective of representations (according to the workings of both political and technical constraints— but what constrains, nature or convention?). These representational tools— in this specific case, mechanical drawing tools and manufacturing tolerance tools— are called by Alder 'information technologies.' On the one hand, this amounts to a deep disavowal of the problematics of representation, including the specificities of language and communication and the familiar vicissitudes of the metaphysical imputation of voice as the measure of presence [7]. Language and meaning, the loci of interpretation, and the core of human judgement in matters of standardization, are here reduced to just another technology. This is an anachronism, to be sure, but one no worse than a thousand other texts that now impute theories of information and communication to all aspects of human history, and at the limit, give nature itself the structure of information [8]. On the other hand, it is equally a mystification of what 'information technologies' are today. That words are now things (software), yet somehow retain something of the problematic of representation (software needs comments— interpretation— in order to be understood by humans, or code specifically designed for translating code from one language to another, or from one machine to another; all of which can be standardized at some level or another), is obscured in the reduction of information technology to drawing and measuring tools. Speech and writing still inhere in things, while action has become more disembodied and thing-like than ever. No compass and pencil ever achieved quite the unheimlich qualities of the telephone and phonograph, for instance [9]. And the combination of pencil and compass, or telephone and phonograph in the internet (software plus communication) demands an attention whose focus is not only representation, but— and this should excite Alder— the structure of war and revolution itself. In Alder's case the war is background for standardization of weaponry, offering constraints on negotiation. It is the source of political beliefs about objectivity and standardization— not, as Clausewitz might suggest, "standardization by other means." Friedrich Kittler [Kittler97], on the back of this other hand, insists that all war is nothing more than a competition amongst technologies: "War, as opposed to sheer fighting, has been for a long time an affair of persuasion." (117) These techniques of persuasion that wars intend are enhanced, even replaced by technologies of communication and control. Kittler constantly slides the needle across this record, unable to keep it from skipping, insisting that culture is no more than a diversion from the progess of war, and that the war's apotheosis is the struggle between media: "wars of persuasion culminated and ended in persuading the enemy that traditional secret services and not computers had gathered the most vital information. Thus the name of man and the title of intelligence are pronounced, proclaimed, and published only in order to better veil machines 'At some stage,' wrote Alan Turing, 'we should have to expect the machines to take control" (127). Alder's approach, far less fanatic, lets war stand as event and background, without insisting on its connection to persuasion and its role as an arbitrator's arbitrator, as a struggle to decide which technologies are superior, and by that, which nation. However, revolution, especially the French one, as Alder recognizes, was a much more difficult background against which to forge this contraction of society and technology. But it is this question of origins that grows a third hand on my reading of this article. On the third hand, in the emphatic statement that this is "the story of the origins of 'making things the same'"(500) [emphasis in original] Alder sets t equal to zero. It is perhaps appropriate to see in the confluence of networks and software that are called "information and communication technologies" some remarkable traces of an original standardization (that of "modern technology") which, when properly historicized, will help order the stories of both history and economic development. In this Alder insists that his is the story of "the rise of modern technological systems out of the demise of the corporate order of the ancien régime, and the crucial importance of information technologies in that transition." (505) Thus can "modern technology" be historicized. Yet in the same breath, "information technologies" rise from the ashes of a fallen determinism to provide a new ahistorical wedge by which representation may be trapped in things and tutored; the perils of thought and mysticisms of interpretation avoided, in favor of an ever more hypostatized archive of things and documents that do not resist the steady hand of the historian. Alder's mistake here is to let the representations of which he so carefully explores the detail, suggestiveness and unruliness become nothing more than complement to the riflings and barrels, to historicize development of technology by reference to representations represented by him as "information technologies." In short, information technology is neither modern nor ancient, but outside history. Nothing suggests that "information technology" can be abused in this way. Or, by reference to the extremism of Kittler, this use of "information technology" does not go far enough in the direction of formalism. Kittler's insistence that meaning and presence are nothing but the accidental effects of a technological war of media whose apotheosis is the bit, or his implications that culture is an epiphenomenon of media, are often haunted by the hermeneutic crises and by the inevitable necessity of writing and books. Alder, on the other hand, simply stops at the point where information technologies can be either cure-all or excuse, where historicization (of information) is abandoned in order to supplement another historicization (of 'modern technology'). Despite overwhelming detail and convincing narratives, it is thus difficult to believe Alder's subsequent assertion: "I provide my own thick description: a detailed case example of how identical artifacts and the instruments which made them possible emerged as the negotiated response to social conflict among parties with diverse understandings of artifacts— and can thus be understood as the outcome of a historical (rather than a logical) process. (505)" Difficult to believe because we have already noticed that information technologies are treated here as something less than or more than 'historical' (if not precisely 'logical'). But this certainly does not dismiss or damn his point, only make it more obscure. On the one hand, his historical stories will serve well as example and genealogy [10], and yet, methodological atavisms will prevent us from understanding the particular configuration of things, words and actions that Alder claims to describe thickly, much less the 'information technologies,' or the internet and its standards (which, granted is not Alder's focus, but nonetheless appears as background to the argument). There is no glimpse here of the mechanism of standardization, only an appeal to politics and negotiation as a corrective to purely technical descriptions of the development of technology. Somehow, even though we may learn from this thick description of the French revolution, somehow there must be a way directly encounter the problems of representation in standardization as it has changed from the French to the information revolutions. What, then, is the difference between standardization then (mechanization, as the origin point for standardization in the History of Technology) and standardization now? Perhaps an example is needed.
1. Perhaps Habermas vs. Lyotard, in their mini-non-argument over consensus and dissensus, over the impossibility of some final ground of meta-agreement would be a starting point for the investigation of consensus and dissensus as a question of implicit and explicit standards. See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 Vols. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 [1981] and [Lyotard84]. 2. See Gerard Genette, Mimologiques [Genette76]. 3. Lewis is at the intersection of game theory and analytic philosophy, and with lovely anglo-american clarity exhausts the problem of convention in a cybernetic-monadic world. It is a perfect illustration for both economists and philosophers and its influence is widely felt. [Lewis69] It is most likely to be criticized by Chomsky-ite evolutionary theories that would never accomodate an impossible animal such as "innate conventions". 4. A process Derrida berates Searle and kids Austin about in Limited Inc. [Derrida88]. 5. On this problematic see Bruno Latour, Science in Action [Latour87], also, Paul Feyerabend, Against Method [Feyerabend75]. 6. 20th century America and France have seen the most vigorous experimentation with the standardization and professionalization of scientists and engineers. In many ways, this focus relates directly to the more circumscribed realm of the history of Science that has focused on the rise of probabliity (Lorraine Daston's work on classical probability [Daston88], the two volume collection of essays on the probablistic revolution [Kruger87], Ian Hacking's Taming of Chance [Hacking90]), which is the trajectory that Porter followed in moving from a history of probabalistic methods [Porter86] to a question of probability as a means of measurement adequately mediating between the incorrigibly objective and necessarily subjective. The history of risk and insurance also follows this path, both in the history of sciece from Daston, et al. and from the French historigraphical school initiated by Foucault, including [Ewald86], [Donzelot94], [Poovey98], [Burchell91] etc. 7. See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena [Derrida73] and Of Grammatology [Derrida76]. 8. The information revolution. The information society. Infomap, infoculture, infoplex, infopreneurs; daily neologisms grind the edges off of this concept. Geoff Bowker [Bowker94] suggests that the excluded middle of the equation between current economic structures and the nature of life that is so commonly solved by information is actually that of organization work. Essential to understanding the myth of the information revolution is the "infrastructural inversion" which comes down to the recognition that the world must first be ordered by control and then it can be perceived as having the same structure as information. Such a recognition is crucial for escaping the ideology produced by the dogma of information, but still fails to approach the no less long-standing historical and contemporary problems of control and organization by standardization, or more problematically for most theorists: the problem of spontaneous organization. 9. This is the appropriate point to reference Avital Ronell's study of the telephone, schizophrenia and the metaphyics of disembodied— telepresent— speech [Ronell89] 10. In particular, a. the centralization of military production. The important figure of the "artillery inspector" (508) whose role covered both quality assurance and anti-corruption (that no deals outside the centralized system might be made). Simultaneously a way of controlling "precision and uniformity" and creating loyalty through detailed standards. b. The very perceptive focus on the necessity of going beyond images as two-dimensional images to "follow the efforts of engineers to translate their images into physical objects" (511). c. Points to a similar problematic in French engineering, projective drawing, as that explored by Diane Greco, with respect to structures and explanatory frameworks. Alder calls it 'epistemological mistrust that exists between the inner eye and the external world".(513) d. The fate of Gribeauval's Tables de construction, specifically, the claims that they 1) had the force of law, and 2) that they where unpublished until after the revolution because "publically validated representations would make it difficult for the artillerists to alter their designs as circumstances changed. These observations bring Alder closest to articulating the difficult problem of the collective legitimacy of a standard (as opposed to the individual problem of trust), which might affect the speed of a collective response. e. Mechanical authority— the Porter version of things— as the appeal to something external to the untrustworthy other, or self, works to the advantage of both parties, as long as they understand how to argue with it (and here again, we catch sight of the inadequacy of a concept like 'information technologies' in this context, since it is one thing to point to the co-negotiation of standard representations and standard things, and to point out how mechanical authority was a boon to both parties, but it is still yet a mystery how one learns to argue with standards? What infinite regress of meta-standards finally determines this political struggle?) (523-4). "The price of standards is eternal vigilance." (528)
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