Standardization (Standardisation) Jonathan H. Grossman What is standardization? Three relatively recent books by social scien- tists all use the same tactic to introduce the topic. First, these books open with an example. It can even be the standardization of the paper of the book in your hands. Then, having thrust an example of standardization into the foreground, they alert us to the invisibility of standardization, its ordinary operation in the background, and at the same time contrast that with the ubiquity of standardized objects and processes, their presence all around, which their example also demonstrates. Largely unnoticed but everywhere thus becomes a theoretical frame—proceed to a number of further disparate examples. The examples are captivating. They are shown to evidence, as one might expect, how standardization empowers or disempowers people as they go about their lives, how it comes in categorizable forms, and how it intersects with the many social dimensions of humans and things. But there is a problem with the way these authors have framed the subject. The difficulty is not merely that even if successful standardization may involve some par- ticipants remaining unconscious of its presence, the supposed social in- visibility of standardization seems dubious given the countless stories of standardization, from railway gauge to MP3, all highly visible to extended I thank for their insights and unflagging encouragement the University of California, Los Angeles graduate students in our seminar on standardization—Devin Beecher, Caitlin Ben- son, Kathryn Cai, Jessica Cook, Elizabeth Crawford, Timothy Fosbury, Yangjung Lee, Samantha Morse, and Michael Vignola; thanks also for invaluable help to Catherine Waters and the audiences at Kent University’s Modernities conference, to the University of Calfornia, Berkeley’s “Nineteenth Century and Beyond” working group (including Ragini Srinivasan); and to Michael Cahn, Michael Cohen, Deborah Douglas, Yogita Goyal, Carrie Hyde, Keith Martin, Helena Michie, Kent Puckett, Mark Seltzer, Elisa Tamarkin, Andrea Thomer, and Irene Tucker. Critical Inquiry 44 (Spring 2018) © 2018 by The University of Chicago. 00093-1896/18/4403-0003$10.00. All rights reserved. 447 This content downloaded from 128.097.244.163 on April 06, 2018 12:14:17 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).