Standards and standpoints: Why and how standards,and studying them,imply critique

From procedure to practice

One way to begin is from Bowker and Star’s (1999) seminal work on classification and standards. They define standards as “any set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects”; that “spans more than one community of practice”; “are deployed in making things work together over distance and heterogeneous metrics”; are enforced, often by legal bodies, although they provide no guarantee of optimal function; and “have significant inertia” (pp. 13–14).

Let us first note that standards are said to regulate activity. Here we have it already: the relation of the standard to any concrete instance of the activity to which it applies is one of critique. That is, a standard is an ideal against which we can measure or at least describe some activity normatively. However, in this simple form, the definition does not seem to lend itself to the statement that studying standards must be critical. In order to achieve this, we need to unfold the definition further.

At first sight, it may appear strange that the definition highlights standards in relation to activity (“rules for the production”). In common language, standards often apply to things (e.g., electrical plugs). Of course, in our everyday experience, activities are often approached as things, in the sense that they are commodities with exchange value, and regulated from this point of view (e.g., if I hire a mason or a hairdresser, I have legal rights to expect that her work, reified as “masonery” or “haircutting,” meets certain standards). But in Bowker and Star’s (1999) definition, the link between activity and object is made the opposite way, from the point of view of production rather than exchange. If a plug meets a standard, it is because it has been made that way and it is this process of making that is regulated. Even in the case of standards for objects, the concept of standard directs our attention to the activity through which it emerged.

But we can turn this around yet again and note that this “objectivity” of the activity is implied when we approach activities with the concept of standard. Standards imply categories of objects and procedures for their classification. The standards that apply to the mason’s and the hairdresser’s work make sense partly because of what they are dealing with (bricks, hair) and what is expected to come of it (solid wall, stylish haircut). This is useful because it directs our attention to this aspect: What object is being produced? That may seem obvious with the mason, and even the hairdresser, but what about the drug counsellor who uses a standardized method? Should the client, or her problem, be regarded as an “object”? In what sense are the targets that are set for this process (e.g., abstinence or health) “objects” that are “produced” by the counsellor? These are difficult—but potentially productive—questions.

The example with the counsellor can also help us see that “standards” may precisely mean that the activity is distinguished from its object and described in its own right as a procedure. In fact, part of the more recent historical rise in industrial standards comes from the wish to bypass the testing of a product so that it can be more quickly and smoothly put to use and storage costs reduced (“just-in-time,” etc.; cf. Busch, 2011). There, of course, the assumption is that a standardized procedure yields a standard product. Not so in counselling. Even if the counsellor meets every standard, the outcome may still not be the “object” that it is supposed to “produce.” On the contrary, the point in sticking to the standard may be “defensive,” to accountably blame the client for his relapse (and then again, standard procedures that keep resulting in such controversies tend to lose credibility, even in drug counselling—if the client has a say at all).

If the distinction of activity from object that is implied in the concept of standard comes from a situation where multiple subjects are involved in the process, it leads to another issue of how to distinguish the standard activity from the inter-subjective relation (negotiation, collaboration, dialogue, community, etc.) that it is part of. ¹ Further, just as hairdressing standards include handling of comb and scissors, counselling standards include the use of artifacts like couches and two-way mirrors, but also more sophisticated “tools” such as certain linguistic forms (e.g., idioms, phrases, narratives) or certain kinds of activity (e.g., drawing or drama), and, this is where it gets a bit tricky, even the standard method itself can be regarded as a tool.

Finally, the focus on procedure opens the regulation of the activity in other aspects and with respect to other concerns aside from the immediate properties of the object produced. Besides a nice haircut, I also want to be spared any exposure to dangerous chemicals; a proper mason rings my doorbell at 7 in the morning; even relapsing addicts have a right to certain clinical ethics. Thus, most standards are composed of a mixture of concerns. Some concerns may appear quite external to the “core” (e.g., in Bergen, Norway, the rules for attaining a PhD include that the Dean must wear a robe at the defense). But it is a general point that any activity, at closer inspection, is directed toward a complex and often debatable set of targets or goals in a whole landscape of concerns.

The point in all this is that from the simple sequence procedure–object, the concept of standard forces us in the direction of a broader concept of activity—although still one that is object-oriented.

Immanence and imposition

If we follow this track, the broadly cultural-historical tradition for theorizing activity or practice would urge us to consider that some standards may not be exactly agreed-upon and enforced, but rather can be immanent to practices. For my purposes here, the Danish philosopher of practice Uffe Juul Jensen and his student Keld Thorgaard are as good as any representatives of this tradition. Thorgaard writes about medicine:

Within the professional social practice there are norms and standards that tell you, “when you practice medicine, you do like this.” The rules and norms are not necessarily articulated or listed somewhere; rather they can be read off of common patterns among the routines of healthcare practitioners. They are publicly accessible because you can watch other practitioners and learn how to do by them. (2010, p. 53)

The Wittgensteinian legacy is discernible. But from Jensen’s (1987) account, we further learn that standards are also immanent because they are built into things, so that the public and collective practice realizes (and objectifies) the ideal not only by going through patterns and routines, but in producing and using things as prototypes or models:

Taking part in a practice is to perform particular tasks in accordance with the standard procedures of that practice, embodied in the prototypes regulating the practice and the rules for their use. (Jensen, 1987, p. 94)

The concept of prototype is as general as that of practice. Rather than the special (although increasingly salient) case of agreed-upon and enforced standards, we have here a wider concern with human practice, where the concept of standard points to the interplay and mutual presupposition of the subjective and the objective moments of practice. Along this more Hegelian–Marxian line, another relevant inspiration is from E. V. Ilyenkov, for whom “ideality” exists only

through the unceasing process of the transformation of the form of activity into the form of a thing and back—the form of a thing into the form of activity. (2014, pp. 77–78)

This aspect is developed in Wartofsky’s (1979) conceptualization of artifacts. Here, the primary artifacts (tools) that always embody standards of their production and their use are distinguished from secondary artifacts that, on top of this, also provide tools for reflexively handling standards (language: the tool of tools), and finally tertiary artifacts, which allow standards (meaning) to be separated (and perhaps alienated) from specific, concrete contexts of practice—and then perhaps imposed on others.

In any human practice, then, standards are built into a complex infrastructure of activities and artifacts from the very beginning: This would seem a wider concept of standards than the one Bowker and Star (1999) use. My point in considering it is that the distinction between immanent and enforced is not always clear-cut—and not always uninteresting. From the point of view of this wider theory of practice to which standards are immanent, it seems obvious that the very description of the practices of creating, agreeing upon, imposing, and using standards—such description must itself presuppose a more general theory of practice, which is at least open to the question of the immanence of “ways of doing things.”

To be precise, the issue is not simply whether immanence is acknowledged at all. In Bowker and Star’s (1999) discussion, the “significant inertia” of standards has to do precisely with their ubiquity and the ways they, once stipulated, have been built into infrastructures and objects, and embodied in habits. The difference also does not concern the normativity per se of standards. In Jensen’s (1987) and Thorgaard’s (2010) accounts, standards are no less normative when they are immanent. If anything, the power of immanent standards is more compelling than those that appear to us as mere possibilities. This is a shared idea, and an important one. The question concerns, rather, the place for a universal conceptualization of human practice—in which standards can be claimed that have not necessarily been decided and imposed—in a theory of standards.

Jensen distinguishes the above-outlined “concrete concept” from the “abstract concept,” which is “an explicit conceptual representation” of the concrete prototype that “permits a new kind of practice, the consideration of possibility” (1987, p. 94). Thus we have different practices, and different kinds of practice, juxtaposed with each other—and they correspond with different kinds of objects. “But,” Jensen continues, “actuality is not dependent on possibility” (p. 94).

Jensen seeks to establish a more general and perhaps more fundamental ontology of practice, an actuality (of concrete concepts) that is not dependent on possibility (abstract concepts), while Bowker and Star (1999) seem to refrain from that, and limit their field of study to a world that is always-already suffused with standards, which may now be taken for granted and unnoticed by most people, but were once agreed-upon and/or enforced. In terms of extension, this is probably the same world that Jensen has in mind, with the same immanent standards. But are these immanent standards, for all practical purposes, battles and blueprints that have become black-boxed, reified, and alienated, or can we, should we, rather, dig even deeper into them in order to find some other, more primary, “actuality” of standards, prototypes, and practices?

Starting from the first option, we might ask: What is the point in disputing over metaphysics? What would be the practical purpose of excavating, in a Modernity that is anyway a Teufelsberg ² (a natural object built of artifacts) of objectified abstractions, an actuality that is supposed to be independent of possibility? And what would that excavation do to it?

These questions would be accepted, I think, as completely valid by Jensen and Thorgaard. Yes, they would agree, discussing the “metaphysics” of an actuality of standards is for broadly practical purposes, and yes, this does add more rubble to the Teufelsberg of Modern abstractions-turned-concrete. They would even concede that any such ontology of practice would begin with precisely some conceptualization of potentiality: an ever-so actual practice can still only be grasped as striving to realize anticipations. Even if these anticipations are not necessarily articulated in any other ways than in and through that practice itself, they must guide practice as possibilities rather than actualities, and this would seem to somewhat complicate the idea that an actuality of practice is primary to its possibility.

From utopian essence to reflection of standpoint

Within psychology, it has been primarily in the Vygotskian tradition that an ontology of practice has been unfolded as theory. Here, many have laid claim to the status of science by establishing practice (in various versions, as “activity,” “activity systems,” “communities of practice,” “collaborative projects,” etc.) as a substance “independent” from and “primary” to dominant ideology (for one recent version, see Blunden, 2010). At the same time, this scientific object has been used to criticize that dominant ideology, in so far as it is constructed as fundamentally innocent, that is, it expresses that which is human, as opposed both to the pre-human and to the inhumane.

It is possible to trace a long genealogy of this idea of an “innocent substance,” not only to notions of an original communism that is supposed to have existed before the rise of classes and states (and must be reestablished after their downfall), but even to the Judaic-Christian-Islamic idea of a paradise lost, even if the Modernist version of utopia substitutes scientific essence for dogmatic heavens. For the Vygotskian tradition (as for many other theories of practice), an important ancestral node can be found in Marx and Engels’ German Ideology, in which a “purely empirical” science is proposed, premised on the undeniable existence of “real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live,” the “first fact” of which is as innocent as anatomy and metabolism (1845/2000, Part 1A, Sect. 3, Para 1).

But the Marxian legacy is complicated, and can be read in different ways. Jensen takes up this discussion in a chapter addressed to a Vygotskian readership, in the form mostly of a critical dialogue with Alasdair MacIntyre about Marx’s epistemology (Jensen, 1999). Jensen calls cultural-historical psychology a “science of categories,” since these not only make up the theory itself, but also, as cultural forms immanent to historically evolving activities—thus, as aspects of standards—its subject matter. His main point is that such a science cannot build on a pre-given metaphysical (Aristotelian) concept of activity, like the one MacIntyre proposes. Rather, that philosophical task (the “metaphysics” of activity) is realized through the scientific and empirical-practical reflection of these activities as unfolding. This is similar to the program Marx outlined in the “Feuerbach Theses” and began (but did not complete) by engaging in economics and politics.

Jensen’s reading of Marx is a very clear rejection of essentialist metaphysics. But then how should we understand his ideas of standards as concrete, and of the “independence” and “primacy” of actual practice? Jensen provides a clue in the same text by focusing on a specific aspect of practice: standpoint. Jensen claims that, while natural sciences have not been affected much by foundationalist metaphysics, since they have anyway “taken the standpoint of practice” (i.e., in experimental practices), the situation is different in the human sciences:

These sciences have ourselves and our condition as object. We can and actually do take different standpoints (e.g., the standpoint of civil society and a standpoint of communal practice transcending the standpoint of civil society). ³ The human sciences therefore are about humans-taking-different-standpoints and moving between different standpoints. But standpoints embody … different categories which implies that sciences of man are—among other things—sciences of categories. (Jensen, 1999, p. 97)

Standpoint seems to be an overriding concept that includes categories (and thus standards) as realized (embodied) in the concrete. But these standpoints are not merely something the human sciences construct as their objects. It is also what they are as practices themselves. The claim that human sciences “are about” taking standpoints should be read also in the meaning that taking standpoints is (part of) what is going on in the human sciences. ⁴

So, the primacy and independence of actual practice is our reflection of the practical nature of what we are doing as human scientists. Although there is the complication that the special thing about sciences has to do with how we handle and produce what Wartofsky called tertiary artifacts—artifacts specializing in embodying standards—this does not mean scientists are not also participants in the larger community of human praxis. The concept of standpoint necessarily relates what we do in one practice with what we and others do in other practices, ⁵ in an ethics that is curiously juxtaposed to the ways that standards, as we remember, span different communities of practice. As Jensen phrases it, the philosophy that engages in these human sciences is a “philosophy just-in-time”: it takes part in current and actual struggles and debates, rather than having once and for all stipulated a metaphysics from which follows an ethics, or only being able to look back on development as accomplished. ⁶

Standpoint and hope

Precisely that contemporarity, however, calls forth another temporality: that of hope. In industry, to be just in time is to fit into a process that is goal-directed and pre-defined, like being on time for a train that leaves the station on its track bound for the next station. But the industrial-logistical metaphor is slightly misleading. The timeliness of research is not a question of fitting it to certain external sequences and interests that are defined in advance. It takes part in contentious practices, with hopes of its own, and it participates in constructing hopes that are shared. Jensen’s critique of MacIntyre’s essentialist Aristotelian metaphysics of practice is at the same time a critique of his way of “transcending the standpoint of civil society” (1999, p. 90). He claims that MacIntyre’s “account of the distinction between civil society and teleologically organized practices” works to shape the hopes of social transformation as “a kind of jump into a human society characterized by a communal practice” (p. 90). This way, Jensen links utopianism with essentialism, and critiques it from the point of view of its relevance, its social implications. Although MacIntyre’s Aristotelian conceptualization of practice cherishes its concreteness as opposed to a Modernity alienated by the abstractions of social engineering, it works as an abstract utopia, that is, an ideal that is meant to be attributable to a totality, but in fact never is, so that, in effect, it defines actual practice as an earthly or profane lack. The envisaged “concreteness” of this ideal practice conveys the dream of an abstraction to end all abstractions; an abstraction that is never tainted by rising to the concrete, since it is proclaimed to be always-already concrete. The claim to the innocence of the substance as purely concrete is precisely what works to conceal the work of abstraction that has made it, and to cloud the ways it seeks relevance.

I have adopted the concept of abstract utopia from Ernst Bloch (1995), another of Jensen’s and Thorgaard’s building blocks. Bloch’s contrasting concept of concrete utopia is the idea, precisely not of innocent domains as it is sometimes misread, but of tendencies that are aspects of a contradictory historical development and which can be articulated as “real possibilities” to guide struggles for their realization. Jensen’s (and Bloch’s) approach to social theories is through a critical discussion of the hopes they shape and their implications in terms of social transformation. It is easy to see how this can be illuminating when we reflect on theories that are explicitly critical—as indeed, there have been numerous discussions of the issue of utopianism in critical psychology, often with direct or indirect references to critical theory or to Bloch (e.g., Markard, 2000). But the implications are wider than that. Doing human science is about taking standpoints, Jensen (1999) claims, and this does not only apply to those human scientists who honor the Marxian legacy or otherwise would be inclined to think of their relevance in terms of social transformation.

This is where we can return to our hypothesis about the implications of positing a “metaphysics” of practice as primary and independent. When Thorgaard and Jensen are able to watch standards as immanent to a primary and independent medical practice, and as embodied in their prototypes, they are assuming a standpoint. They are not (in my reconstruction of them, at least) trying to hide their taking-standpoint by claiming medical practice (as described by them with the help of abstractions) to be “concrete” in an abstract way, that is, innocent or uncontested. They do not deny that, in social theory or philosophy, concreteness is never immediately given, but always something to arrive at. ⁷ Rather, they are proposing an ethics to span medical practice as well as their own philosophies. In other words, the philosophical claim about the primacy and independence of the standards that, however always-already imposed, guide medical practice from within, is a reflection of the shared embodiedness of philosophy and medicine, of the hopes for health they may have in common, and on the basis of which any philosophy of healthcare practices can achieve relevance. ⁸

To think of this primary embodiment as a “standpoint” is to break with any naturalism. Jensen and Thorgaard are not authenticating health as given in nature and dictating medical practice. Instead, through its dialogue with health practitioners, their philosophy partakes in constructing “health” as the complex set of standards that should be taken as relevantly immanent to health practices. The authenticity—in the meaning Charles Taylor (1991) proposes—of the philosophers’ attributions of standards as immanent does not come from their unveiling of an innocent core, but from the credibility of the hopes they propose, from the extent to which, and the ways in which, they build on real tendencies and possibilities toward ends that are worth striving for.

The trouble with articulating standpoint

However, we should acknowledge that it is no easy task to accomplish an “assumption of standpoint” in the practices of writing about practices. In this section, I shall discuss two exemplary scholars who have allowed us access to their struggles with how their studies of standards immanent to certain practices imply standpoints. One finds her theory deprived of its critical impetus when applied, the other feigns a eulogy. But in both cases, the attempt is made to ward off unwanted implications of a critique of alienation by retreating to a purely academic home ground. This is, we should grant right off, an understandable temptation. The struggle we have just witnessed, for a non-essentialist conceptualization of the primacy of immanence, is troublesome, and often lost.

In 2008, Jean Lave looked back on the ways in which her concept of community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) has been read, with some frustration:

Situated Learning has all too often been read as painting a view of social life as closed, harmonious, and homogenous. … There is a widespread belief and longing for such a state of affairs along with massive work to deny their absence. … Probably the most frequent, and irritating, question from readers of Situated Learning has been, “how do I know I’ve got a community of practice?” (Especially since they do not bother to ask with equal bewilderment about what is a family or a neighborhood, school, race, culture, gender, or society). There is, of course, no such species in the world, recently discovered, that we can now set out to capture. It is a way of looking, not a thing to look for. Carsten Osterlund (Personal communication, 1999) observes that about 85 per cent of articles that discuss communities of practice begin with the notion of a (homogenous, harmonious, unchanging) community. (Lave, 2008, pp. 288–290)

No kidding: 85 percent?! One imagines Osterlund reading those silly articles in such numbers they must be recounted as percentages, tearing his hair with frustration. His critical observation is personal; an authoritative voice indeed, directly passed on through the very author of the concept they have thwarted so badly. The same author who appears to know what her readers have neglected to question, but who seems to now trust her new readership to regard it as a matter “of course” that the “community of practice” does not exist as a “species in the world”.

Although I sympathize greatly with Lave’s anti-essentialist struggle, I have recapitulated her text in such an ironic-deconstructionist way in order to highlight how hard it is to avoid the trope of authoritative sanctioning that, at least in part, is what fixes essence, even as one claims a purely academic domain. Jean Lave is wonderfully democratic and never seems to hesitate to express standpoint; but here, her authority operates under cover, in the gap between her theory and its relevance. The idea of a pure “way of looking”—looking at something that forever remains in process, never quite achieves existence—a way that endures as an “analytic,” rather than “prescriptive way(s) of taking up notions like ‘communities of practice’” (Lave, 2008, p. 291), appropriates the concept as academic property (the propriety of which is secured by refusing its embodiment) at the same time as it seeks to withdraw from relevance. ⁹

In this, Lave’s reflections could resemble some post-structuralist attempts to overcome essentialism by suggesting a purely negative ontology, in effect, an ontology where “ways of looking” are the only “things to look for” (cf. Brown & Stenner, 2009; Nissen, 2008, 2013a). But mostly, her (understandable) hesitation from attributing immanent standards, lest that attribution be read as essentialism, leads to a descriptive ethnographic pragmatism akin to a widespread approach in studies of standards (Busch, 2011; Suchman, 2007; Timmermans & Berg, 2003; Timmermans & Epstein, 2010). In this, the objective becomes portraying agents’ situated handling of standards in order to substitute empirical description for the ideals embodied in the standards and so often thought to directly structure activity. Such ethnographic descriptivism has proven very fertile in science and technology studies as a way of circumventing the “science wars” and the implied unproductive choice between scientific realism and constructionist critique and relativism by invoking a new kind of pragmatic empiricism (e.g., Latour, 2004, 2005). Practices and material things are substituted for beliefs and social functions; scientific or managerial standards are not revealed as inhuman or false, but retraced and recognized as both entangled in and transformative of the flow of everyday occurrences. This way, the epistemological radicalisms of anti-essentialism and anti-dualism no longer seem to challenge the spontaneous scientific realism and modernist ambitions of the agents. In effect, scientific and science-imbued practices have become amenable to insightful analyses rather than only being targets of polemical critique. But have science studies turned apologetic?

Emilie Gomart (2004) has contributed to this discussion by framing one study explicitly as a “praise of drug substitution treatment in a French clinic”: the pharmacological approach of the “Blue Clinic” in question was somewhat exceptional at a time when psychodynamic approaches were dominant in France. On Gomart’s account, those approaches shared with critical medical sociology a dualistic understanding of agency as either determined and oppressed by, or constituted independently of, social structures and material agents such as drugs. Gomart precisely connects the intention of overcoming this dichotomization of agency in a dynamic ontology with the endorsement of the new standards she studies. Gomart presents her standpoint, which she refers to already in the title, as a methodological device:

I “followed the actors,” to use an often-quoted phrase of Latour’s in the sense that I sought to learn from them, staff and users at the Blue Clinic, how to set up the conditions of my competence.

The first condition I learned from them was enthusiasm. It was clear that a rapid and deadly critique of their practice was possible: the rhetoric of medical sociology could immediately be used to describe a conflict of interest between authoritative doctors and vulnerable individuals who seemed to have lost in advance. … The medical sociological reflex, however, would have ignored the enthusiasm of the first methadone promoters, users and professionals. … In order to learn something from these actors, in order to be surprised by methadone and its relations with subjects, I would have to discipline myself into writing a eulogy of the treatment experimented with at the clinic. … This is not an empty gesture of loyalty. It turned out that when I took their biases as my biases (like enthusiasm), it became possible to describe an alternative relation between drug and user, object and subject. …

The point here, however, is not to … worry about whether this argument was actually a fair criticism of existing treatments. Instead, what matters here is that in the midst of this imbroglio new ways of posing the problem of the relation of drug and user became possible. For the sake of these possibilities …, I allow that my own action [ethnographic analysis] began under the influence of their no doubt biased critique. (2004, pp. 86–88)

This “possibility to describe an alternative relation” seems the overall goal, to which being “surprised by methadone” and “learning from these actors” are requisites, which, in turn, require the discipline of a eulogy. The vectors of influence are reversed: because the point is to arrive at new ways of posing the problem, Gomart now, in her text, “allows” the research activities it reports to have begun under the influence of a critique whose bias she now does not even need to doubt, and so leaves aside.

This prioritizing of academic over practical concerns we find again in Gomart’s rendering of the Blue Clinic’s novelty using a standard borrowed from the methodologies of Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret: traditional treatment “had set up a bad experiment” where “To use philosophical terms, users ‘had little chance of expressing themselves in terms which had not been already set out’ by the experimenters” (Gomart, 2004, p. 92), and where they even “excluded addicts, the very phenomenon of addiction, from addiction treatment”. Against this, “it became possible to hold that constraints—not just intersubjective but also chemical—might become resources for care, building blocks in the construction of the subject” (p. 94).

I am not arguing against Stengers’ and others’ methodological standard of recalcitrance (e.g., Stengers, 1997); and Gomart’s translation of it into “constraints” that are “generous” for cultivating subjectivity is quite useful for reflecting on drug treatment. Still, it is as if Gomart is defending herself against the critique that what she is doing, with her articulation of a dynamic ontology of drug treatment, is to help along, articulate, and develop the medicalized neoliberal governance of harm reduction policies. Just as Jean Lave tries to protect her “community of practice” from its dubious communitarian relevance, so Gomart seeks a way to avoid (or perhaps, excuse) the political instrumentalization of her description of methadone maintenance as “generous constraints.”

One might suspect the paradigm shift in social policy is at least as powerful as that in science and technology studies, and, given such power balances, the innocent abstract minimalism of “dynamic subject–object relations” and “actor networks” is likely to be put in the service of certain ideological forces. One might arrive at the primacy and independence of the harm reduction standpoints embodied in the Blue Clinic and other such drug treatment practices and prototypes by considering the ultimate weight of the argument that it is more “interesting” than other treatment approaches. But from safely within the text of an article in Body & Society, it appears as if the congruence of Gomart’s actor–network onto-epistemology with the social practices and policies of harm reduction is all along mastered by the theorist, even if one of her tricks was a feigned submission. The threat of essentialism that comes from taking standpoint is elegantly counteracted by constructing a realm of purely arbitrary theory, from which social work practices appear to unfold as an “experiment.”

Yet Gomart’s academic constructionism does point a way to realizing that studying standards is both studying critique and performing it—and that this makes it a lot harder. Allow me to distance myself from what I have just written: when I described the practice that Gomart (2004) praised as “medicalized neoliberal governance,” it may be read to imply that it is easy to develop and articulate a standpoint in relation to standards of drug treatment: with those words as signpost, anyone should be able to judge at a glance; at least if I take care to address a sufficiently limited readership. But this is far from the case. If it is relevant to claim that research (in the human sciences, including philosophy) is all about taking standpoints, this must be because taking a standpoint requires some research. It is not, in fact, simply there to be taken or assumed. In practices suffused with myriad complex standards, arriving at a reflected stance is far from simple. To get an impression of how complex the issue of how to describe and problematize harm reduction policies and practices such as Gomart’s Blue Clinic is, one need only study a fraction of the research on drug policies (Houborg, 2012), or, more generally, on the ethical issues with the pharmaceutical construction of our bodies and our lives (e.g., Rabinow, 1996; Rose, 2007).

My problem with Gomart’s (2004) eulogy, then, is not so much that it is feigned. I am much more worried that it is so simplistic. It may be that the simplicity of Gomart’s standpoint is what allows for the clarity and power of her analysis; but that power is borrowed and that clarity is itself problematic, as it glosses over important contradictions, especially concerning the kinds of recognition that are granted, and those that are denied, in such practices (see Nissen, 2013b). Gomart lets herself be influenced by a collective by the name of the Blue Clinic, echoing their argument that with their substitution (methadone) treatment, the voices of drug users are recognized, as they, in turn, let themselves be influenced by the drug. All along this chain of neatly aligned and simple agencies, certain complexities and substances are pushed aside, which are not highlighted by Gomart’s “dynamic ontology” of subjectivity. The political performativity of Gomart’s text is not so much a matter of her explicit praise for the clinic as it is the ideological workings of the particular kind of pragmatics implied in the way she reduces complexity.

The new relations of power and recognition in which the Blue Clinic, spearhead of the (then innovative) harm reduction ideology, is constituted in relation to its “users,” are carried by standards of medical practice that are co-constructed in Gomart’s analyses. Here as elsewhere, we can see the emerging contours of a different kind of welfare services that approach social problems in a more pragmatic and instrumental fashion; the values by which they are measured appear to be at once more homogenous, more focused, and more variable; and in this way suited for both (new public) management and dialogue with users. The clients, in turn, are constructed as “users” in practices that strive for, and expand conceptualizations of, normalization, stabilization, and pleasure. Yesteryear’s ambitions for social justice, re-socialization, and the building of strong and mature personalities, are discarded. Those ambitions were typically frustrated, but the new standards that Gomart’s analysis helped to set push them out of the picture altogether. The potential agency of a subject recruited as participant of a universalizing welfare state, and struggling with existential problems, has been reduced to the realized agency of a pharmacologically self-regulating body, a consumer occupied with adjusting effects to achieve pleasurable or comforting affects. The social exclusion and misery, which frustrated the hopes of psychodynamic clinical practices, are now taken for granted (cf. Nissen, 2013b).

This critique, however, should not aspire to be final. Pointing to problems in the relatively recent historical change in social policies toward harm reduction is not the same as arguing for another simple standard. From the middle of what is sometimes declared to be another “paradigm shift” in this field, towards a “recovery” approach (see, e.g., White, 2009), it is perhaps easier to see some of the complexities, subjectivities, and substances that were ignored in standard harm reduction approaches. At the same time, the standpoint articulated by an attribution of immanent standards of “recovery” may be utopian in its view of what recovery standards will turn out to mean, if it only sees in them the humanism of the hope of recovery. It never ends.

Conclusion: The dialectics of standpoint and standard

This can be illustrative of how standpoint and standard interact. Standards and standpoints are dialectically, that is, internally related, mutually defined as opposing moments of a process. Standards can be said to imply standpoints, but only as standards are resituated into the complexities of political and ethical totalities—collectives, practices, traditions, subjects. In and of itself, the standard can “span more than one community of practice” without giving a clue to how differently it works in different places, for different people. But it always does have such concrete implications and effects, not in spite of, but as a set of abstract ideals for how things should be. Articulating standpoint is meta-reflecting the critique and the hopes thus implied in the standard as situated; the thin narrative of the standard is expanded into the thick narrative of a standpoint, with all its enmeshed and complex moral and practical implications for those involved and affected.

The standpoint must itself eventually be retranslated into a kind of standardization—carried by tertiary artifacts—if it is to be relevant beyond the situation of its articulation. But the articulation of standpoint as standard retains an indexical complexity, both from its references to theory—viewed as historically evolving traditions rather than only as structures of concepts—and from its references to singular practices, subjects, and events. This paradoxical indexicality of standards is emphasized in the concept of prototype (Nissen, 2009; Suchman, Trigg, & Blomberg, 2002).

This dialectics is so important because in so many fields the subjectivism of affect, emotion, preference, etc., is dichotomized from the objectivism of standardization. Standardization, as the imposition and enforcement of a standard regardless of situation, is the inverse counterpart to articulating standpoint. This does not mean that arguing for (regarding social theory as) the articulation of standpoint is arguing against standardization. But any argument for a specific standardization requires taking into account the complexities of the situations that are to be adapted to the standard. This is so even if the standardization itself, in the moment of its proposition, is a suggestion to disregard those complexities; it is a bracketing, rather than a reduction, of complexity. In fact, since this bracketing of complexity is imposed onto a complex situation, what emerges is an increase in complexity, which can only be endorsed with reference to the contents of the bracket.

However, whether that reference is demanded and substantiated is a question of priorities and power. One of the salient features of life in Modernity is the increasing alienation not only from standards built into infrastructures and artifacts, but also from the rationalities of standardizations proposed or imposed on living practices. A nice example of this, among many, is provided by Trudy Dehue’s (2002) ethnography of a clinic in Amsterdam that offered heroin to heroin addicts on a trial basis; the surprising outcome (which, ironically, was repeated later in Copenhagen, cf. Houborg, 2012) was that the clinic had difficulties recruiting users, who had appropriated medical standards into their own culture and did not at all find the clinic—which had been set up to ensure standards of hygiene and the conditions of a controlled trial—attractive.

Thus, the simple provision of one preferred drug proved to be a complex alienation. This is similar to the experience with many other examples of governance by standards that gain support by being presented as basic and unquestionable (who can object to “what works”?) yet often effect quite radical and baffling changes, not least in the positions allotted to the agents involved; thus, for instance, school is drastically transformed with allegedly simple and conservative learning outcome measures (Brøgger & Staunæs, 2016), and medicine is revolutionized by the evidence-basing that appears to be … just that (Thorgaard, 2010).

Such alienation tends to reduce standpoint to a purely subjective attitude or preference. When a subject neglects, or is not allowed or sufficiently educated, to articulate the complexities that are objectively present but bracketed in the standard imposed, her standpoint appears as an arbitrary expression of her wish or will; whether or not it is then or later accepted as valid, and which consequences should flow from it, is another matter. So for instance the recalcitrance of Dehue’s heroin users was not recognized as anything more than a practical obstacle and perhaps a morally despicable pickiness—nothing to be generalized as a relevant concern in the later implementation of a similar clinic in Copenhagen.

In this, we might recognize MacIntyre’s (1984) critique of how, in Modernity, ethics is reduced to emotivism, as the spontaneous counter-position to standardization. However, the anti-essentialistic premise of the present considerations suggests not to conceive of Modernity as a (spatio-temporal) domain from which we might hope to jump away. Standardization, as the reflexive construction, attribution, and application of standards, must be just as universal as practice itself. Standards may not necessarily be articulated (as possibilities) in other ways than through practice itself and its artifacts, and their status as contingent may often fade out of practitioners’ consciousness; yet any innovation of practice must imply a reflexivity, a suggestion to choose—and, at least in that sense, enforce—one standard over another; to adapt a certain class of situations to the standard, as opposed to another (already existing) standard; to (temporarily) ignore certain complexities and subjectivities. Whenever a practice or a tool is transformed in a deliberate human effort, there must be an aspect of standardization. There has been no innocent Paradise anywhere in human History that was free of standardization, in this very broad sense. And of course, as we have already discussed, it is presupposed in the relevance of any theory, science, or philosophy of standards.

Still, the arsenal of modernity critique can be useful, since the articulation of standpoint often implies the revelation of alienation, of a hegemony hiding within, and veiled by, a standard imposed. Thus, standardization can be seen to carry ideology (as I have discussed this concept in Nissen, 2012, 2013b): a critical standpoint can view the imposition of a standard as the enforcement of a common sense, as distinct from both the situated sense of the singular subjects involved, and from the formations of common meaning that are open to transformation in the processes of exchange and production. When the articulation of standpoint is thus performed as ideology critique, it is these two aspects of common sense that stand out: on the one hand, the way that the standard common sense glosses over antagonisms and establishes ideals that remain “abstract” in relation to the subjects who, in that same moment, are viewed as oppressed—compared to how the alternative standard (of social justice, etc.) could meet their needs. And on the other hand, the way that the endorsement of the established common sense as standard maintains given forms of power and subjectivity—as opposed to the “deconstruction” that both reveals and performs how meaning is relentlessly “postponed” and transformed.

If we thus re-articulate Gomart’s article as a work of ideology critique, she is revealing how the ideology of traditional psychodynamic drug treatment enforces the common sense of clients and therapists around standards of “well-integrated egos” and of bodies pure of drugs; and she is contextualizing the substantial working of the standard by pointing to the crucial power mechanism of exclusion; she shows how that common sense ignores users’ struggle for agency and recognition, and she criticizes how the ruling concepts are protected from the recalcitrance of users by professional authority. As articulation of standpoint, her article is at its best viewed in this negative aspect, as critique. Viewed positively, for the way it endorses standards not only of a dynamic ontology, but also of drug treatment, we can look back on it, as we saw, as complicit in the production of the ideology of harm reduction practices.

Modernity’s proliferation of standards that are imposed on a macro scale, rather than locally self-grown or suggested, means that ideology critique and critique of standardization increasingly converge. The concept of “capitalism,” in the Marxist tradition, was developed as part of an articulation of standpoint that implied a critique of the ways that modern standards—such as those that regulate economic exchange on the market—not only facilitated growth, but also carried the ideology of a ruling class. The Marxist critique of alienation would point to how the forms of production and exchange that produced inequalities were reflexively imposed regulations that at the same time worked as blind forces. Yet Marxism—continuing Hegel’s reflection of the historical rise of “subjective spirit”—was equally suspicious of the spontaneous counter-position of emotivism, or, with Wolf Haug’s Marxist term, “the bourgeois private form of the individual” (1977, p. 77). Marxism was always, of course, itself a Modernism, consistently critical (in its negative moment) of precisely that dichotomy; and if we recontextualize that Marxist Modernism as a (positive) standard, we are confronted with the grand projects of standardization that have emerged from the socialist movements and the state powers they have controlled or influenced, from the Soviet kolkhozes, through the architecture of welfare state housing projects, on to bureaucratic labor regulations and paternalistic social medicine and social work. All well-intentioned and powerful innovations that, in hindsight, enforced a particular common sense dressed up as universal.

Nevertheless, it is an implication of the argument presented here that the “double standards” of Marxism in its relation to standardization are twice as virtuous as would be a single-minded rejection or embracement of it. Rather than attempting to withdraw from this process of standardization—either by imagining a set of abstract ideals for the “concrete,” or by proposing a purely academic description—the articulation of standpoint (which can imply the attribution of standards as immanent to practices) must embrace standardization in the sense that it articulates the hopes that are implied in certain standards imposed or suggested and engages with their substance—their situated conditions and subjectivities—and in the sense of accepting that this is itself a standardization that may come to work as the enforcement of a common sense, or may be deconstructed, or…

Again: it is endless—even if this article is not.