They are or they aren’t. Notes on standardisation and disobedience.

How can standardisation and normalisation processes — stigmatised by some intellectual discourse— function, paradoxically, as channels of consolidation and expansion of vernacular practices, ideas and daily tactics?

It is common sense to take the view that “the norm” and “the standard” — as channels of globalisation — undermine local production, consumption patterns and popular thinking. These notes take the opposite view, seeking to give structure to the argument that the elements of a material culture, with a high degree of standardisation —  and even that culture’s most insignificant standardised objects — can, in situations of crisis, become resources that can trigger and spread a material and cultural revolution. Family production in Cuba during the crisis of the 90s was radicalised by the presence of a large number of standardised objects stemming from Cuba’s participation in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and the associated exchanges. As all of us on the island had the same objects, knowledge on how to repair and reuse them became a common well on which we drew. A productive family movement found, in the rules of the norm, the codes for its own restructuring and expansion. Standardised dimensions, surfaces and shapes oiled the mechanisms of popular thinking.