Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally

January 2013

The fear that woke my stomach, reaches my head. Wide-awake in a still-dark bedroom I realize that when morning comes I will have to outline the research I’ve conducted for UCL’s risk register. Tasked to ‘own’ the risk of research expansion, I have focused on UCL’s reputation as global researcher leader, and its academic reputation based on independence and integrity. I will suggest that one of the risks associated with research expansion comes from accepting financial gifts from corporations, particularly where there are disparities between the practices of those corporations and UCL’s principles as published in its core principles and procedures. I am focusing in particular on UCL’s decision to accept funding from the charitable arm of BHP Billiton – one of the world’s largest mining corporations – in June 2011 to set up an Institute of Sustainable Resources (ISR) at UCL and position this inside the Bartlett in September 2012. ² If we follow the Brundtland Report of 1987, which states that sustainable development must be ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’, then the mining of fossil fuels is unsustainable on two counts – first fossil fuels are a finite resource, and second, as published climate science evidences, the limit of the ecosystem to absorb CO2 has already been dangerously surpassed. ³ I will argue that UCL is taking a risk with its reputation for independent research into sustainability, allowing BHP Billiton to buy legitimacy for the continued mining of fossil fuels and to potentially influence not only policy on sustainability, but also the definition of this contested term. I have judged the risk of potential damage to reputation to be significant enough to warrant purchasing a copy of a report by RepRisk on BHP Billiton. ⁴ This report is a collection of media articles, which provide evidence of how far BHP Billiton, and so any company associated with them, is exposed to reputational risk. Along with other companies in the mining sector, BHP Billiton is here categorized at the maximum risk level on environment principles, and exceeds other companies in reaching the highest level of risk in the areas of anti-corruption, labour and human rights. ⁵

The (Post) Critical?

In ‘Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism’, Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting (2002) rejected the autonomous disciplinarity and oppositional dialectics of critical architecture, as represented by the work of critic Michael Hays and architect Peter Eisenman, which they described as ‘hot representation’, and instead advocated an architecture of ‘the diagrammatic, the atmospheric and cool performance’ (p. 74). At the time, this paper established what appeared to be a dominant post-critical mood in architectural education, but it left many of us wondering otherwise. I asked myself, in Critical Architecture (Rendell et al., 2007), if, following Raymond Geuss (1981: 2), in turn following Karl Marx, critical theory can be defined in terms of self-reflectivity and the desire for social emancipation, then cannot any activity that takes on these tasks be considered critical?

February 2013

Since government funding to cover teaching costs has been all but removed in the UK, increasing efforts are being made to attract a new income stream – corporate sponsorship. But with so much talk of business links and enterprise, there has been very little institutional acknowledgement of the shifts in culture occurring in universities as a result of the reduction of state funding and the introduction of loans for UK students at BA Level. Yet I am reminded that UCL is not a public university, but a chartered corporation. ⁶ But, if not public, UCL is still proud of its radical tradition, the fact that unlike Oxford and Cambridge it was not founded as a religious entity, and that it was the first British university to accept women students on the same basis as men and award degrees to women. In fact, quite recently, being radical has become key to our brand: a briefing from the communications team suggests that we should speak in a radical and open voice.

Critical Spatial Practice

In Art and Architecture: A Place Between (Rendell, 2006), I coined the term ‘critical spatial practice’ to define modes of self-reflective artistic and architectural practice which seek to question and to transform the social conditions of the sites into which they intervene. Through the process of writing the book I came to understand that my own position between art, architecture and critical theory was constantly changing and influenced the interpretative accounts I was able to offer. I concluded Art and Architecture by arguing that the writing of criticism is itself a form of situated practice, one that is critical and spatial. ⁷

March 2013

Before dawn, almost every night now, I am jolted awake, surprised and disorientated for a second or two; then I remember, and the panic rears up through me. Will fighting this battle, pitting myself against my institution, lose me my job? Has UCL done its homework and, even if it has, will the right governance structures and due diligence procedures really be able to protect the independence of academic research? UCL has argued that we must engage with businesses in order to change them. But I still can’t grasp the stated logic that, on the one hand, when the funding is at arm’s length, the giver of the gift – in this case a charitable donation – should not influence the research that is funded by the gift it has given, but that, on the other hand, the receiver of the gift should influence the activities of the giver.

Relational Critique

If criticism can be defined by the purpose of providing a commentary on a cultural work, then criticism always has an ‘other’ in mind. The central task of criticism might then be considered as: how does one relate to an ‘other’? Grounded in the object relations theory of DW Winnicott, the psychoanalyst, Jessica Benjamin (1988: xii) argues that the central task of psychoanalysis is the ‘double task of recognition: how analyst and patient make known their own subjectivity and recognize the other’s’.

April 2013

Did I really record him in his own office on my mobile phone? Was that wise? I asked him for permission, explaining that it was so I could remember exactly what he had said without having to take notes, and that the information would not go public. He agreed. I was very friendly about it. So was he. So maybe it is all fine … But this process has turned me into a researcher of my own institution. Did it set up a note of mistrust, having the phone there on the desk, between us? What if a colleague who had come to talk to me, on a complex and tricky issue, had asked to record me? Would I be fine about it?

Institutional Critique

Benjamin Buchloh (1990) coined the term ‘institutional critique’ to describe a strand of conceptual practice developed through the work of artists such as Hans Haacke and Michael Asher in the 1960s and 1970s. In the Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles (1974), for example, Asher removed the partition between the office and exhibition space, revealing to the public viewer the usually hidden operations that allow the gallery to function economically (Buchloh, 1983: 76–84).

May 2013

I am so angry I can barely breathe. I am expected to back decisions that have been made without consulting me. I always knew the Vice Dean role came with responsibility, but I never really understood the implications and potential contradictions of holding such a title until now. It is hard not to wonder if I was excluded from the decision-making process because I am a woman? But perhaps not, as along with the five men who signed the partnership between UCL and BHP Billiton there was one woman.

Site-Writing

Feminists, such as Donna Haraway (1988), have developed conceptual tools such as ‘standpoint theory’ and ‘situated knowledge’, for exploring how ways of knowing and being are culturally and spatially constructed. ‘Site-writing’ is the name I have given to a practice I have initiated which draws attention to the situatedness of critical knowledge. ⁸ I am interested in how criticism as a practice performs acts of interpretation, produced by, and in turn productive of, the changing positions and sites we occupy – materially, conceptually, emotionally and ideologically – as critics. Site-writing responds to Howard Caygill’s (1988: 34, 64, 79) notion of strategic critique where a position of judgement is advanced through the process of criticizing, and parallels Gavin Butt’s (2005: 7) ‘call for … a mode of contemporary criticality’ which is ‘apprehended within – and instanced as – the performative act of critical engagement itself’.

June 2013

As Vice Dean of Research, and having been tasked in January 2013 to ‘own’ the risk of research expansion, I suggested the need for the following three documents:

[…].

Feminist Figurations

A key aspect of situated knowledge is the locatedness of personal experience, and the relation of one person’s knowledge, understanding and experience to another, which brings us very much into the field of life-writing, biography and autobiography. The oral historian Linda Sandino draws on the work of Paul Ricoeur to consider how different forms of figuration operate in narration, relating the act of telling to the told, such that oral history might be itself understood as ‘a double interpretive operation in which the narrator recapitulates the told in the telling’ (Sandino, 2013: 9). Following Ricoeur, she describes how the individual in interpreting his or her life ‘appears both as a reader and writer’, and the ‘story of a life continues to be refigured by all the truthful and fictive stories a subject tells about himself or herself … a life is not “how it was” but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and re-told.’ And in the feminist figurations of Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti spatial arrangements are an intrinsic aspect of their story-telling function: specifically, the role of actual locations, and the cartographies of power relations and the differing positionalities they generate. Braidotti (2006: 11) writes:

Figurations are not mere metaphors, but rather markers of more concretely situated historical positions. A figuration is the expression of one’s specific positioning in space and time. It marks certain territorial or geopolitical coordinates, but it also points out one’s sense of genealogy of historical inscription. Figurations deterritorialize and destabilize the certainties of the subject and allow for a proliferation of situated or ‘micro’ narratives of self and others.

July 2013

The deed is done.

On 1 July 2013 I formally ‘stepped down’ from my role as Vice Dean of Research for the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL at a meeting of the Research Advisory Group (RAG) of which I was chair.

But what does that mean?

I think it means that I’ve withdrawn my consent and refused to collaborate.

I believe it is the ‘right’ thing to have done, but has it been the most effective way to influence the situation?

Critique as Crisis

Roland Barthes (1982[1971]: 379) comments that ‘to criticize means to call into crisis’. To consider critique as crisis closely mirrored my state of mind when I chose to step down, so fearful was I of institutional repercussions. I was in crisis at the time, doubting my actions, and feeling panic going through me like electricity each time I spoke out.

July 2013

Following my formal act of ‘stepping-down’, I met various senior managers at UCL to discuss my decision. To my surprise they all showed support for the work I had been doing on reputational risk and expressed an interest in involving me in developing UCL’s ethical procedures and structures. In an act of what I now see as a ‘stepping up’, I put forward several proposals for action – that I would:

Constructive Institutional Critique

Artist/architect Apolonija Šušteršic (1999: 56) has suggested that institutional critique ‘doesn’t produce any constructive resolution, when it doesn’t effect changes in our political and cultural structures’. Her comment was made in conversation with the curator Maria Lind, who has put forward the idea of ‘constructive institutional critique’ to describe the work of Šušteršic and others, which, rather than being ‘based on negativity … offer[s] a proposal for change, possibly an improvement, or a test of how to do things slightly differently … based on dialogue between the artist and the institution, rather than an inherent conflict’ (Šušteršic, 1999: 56).

December 2013

Conducted under Chatham House Rules, and involving senior managers, academics, administrative staff, and students at UCL, I hosted Rich Seams or Dark Pools? Fossil Fuel Funding and University Research, a seminar where eight speakers addressed what is at stake when fossil fuel funds university research on sustainability. The title of the event referred to a tension between fossil fuel funding as a ‘rich seam’, an opportunity or resource to be exploited, but also a ‘dark pool’, adopting a term used to describe a source of unregulated financial exchange in the world of corporate finance. ⁹

Transversality in the Group

Winnicott’s idea of the transitional object that exists between mother and child was an inspiration for philosopher Félix Guattari’s concept of the institutional object in his work on transversality and psychiatry (Guattari, 1984[1964]: 20). Guattari (1996[1964]: 63) argues that dual relations are always triangular in character, noting that ‘there is always in a real situation a mediating object that acts as an ambiguous support or medium’. Guattari calls this third factor the institutional object (Genosko, 2002: 69). His philosophy proposes a new concept: ‘transversality in the group’, an ‘unconscious source of action’, which carries a group’s desire, ‘a dimension opposite and complementary to the structures that generate pyramidal hierarchisation’ (Guattari, 1984[1964]: 18, 22). For Guattari, transversality provides the possibility of bringing the ‘institutional context, its constraints, organization, practices, etc., all those things and relations which normally exist in the background’ into the foreground for critique (Genosko, 2002: 70).

July 2014

I have found others who are fascinated in a range of ethical issues, some with quite different perspectives to my own, but who also wish to look at the UCL’s governance structures guiding ethical issues, and at how ethics is configured through different practices and disciplines – pedagogical and professional – in built environment research. To pursue such interests, I have put together a research proposal for a year-long project, and applied – successfully – for some internal funding from the Bartlett Small Grants Scheme. As well as involving a participant from each part of the Bartlett, and advisors from across UCL, the project will employ researchers to map those areas of UCL, which engage specifically in ethics, involving discourse analysis, literature reviews, ethnographic interviews, and seminars, ending in June with a two-day international conference, Practising Ethics, where speakers from academia and industry, including architects, artists, environmental scientists, fiction writers, and urban planners, will offer their ethical viewpoints through panel sessions and round tables. ¹⁰

The ‘Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much’

In Judith Butler’s (2002: 212) close analysis of Michel Foucault’s 1978 lecture ‘What Is Critique?’ from The Politics of Truth, she notes how ‘critique is always a critique of some instituted practice, discourse, episteme, institution, and it loses its character the moment in which it is abstracted from its operation and made to stand alone as a purely generalizable practice’. She talks of how, for Foucault, ‘critique is precisely a practice that not only suspends judgment … but offers a new practice of values based on that very suspension.’ Butler points to the way in which the practice of critique emerges from ‘the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web’, and outlines that, for Foucault, this exposure of the limit of the epistemological field is linked with the practice of virtue, ‘as if virtue is counter to regulation and order, as if virtue itself is to be found in the risking of established order’. According to Foucault (2007 [1978]), the ‘signature mark’ of the critical attitude and its particular virtue is governance, ‘how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them’. ‘I would therefore propose’, says Foucault, ‘as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much’ (p. 45, emphasis in original).

March 2015

Along with colleagues from the Bartlett, the Medical Faculty, Laws and the Institute of Global Health, we have decided to hold a debate in UCL on Divestment. At the end of the discussion we took a vote – the wish to divest from fossil fuels was almost unanimous. ¹¹ As part of the debate, I argued that UCL had three ethical reasons to divest from fossil fuels: first, that investment in fossil fuel companies is inconsistent with many of UCL’s strategies; second, that UCL’s own researchers have just produced a paper, which argues that certain percentages of fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground; and third, that since universities educate the young they have a special responsibility to their future. ¹² I also pointed to new economic arguments for divestment, for example, that if international agreements on climate change are met then investors, by supporting fossil fuel companies, will risk their financial assets becoming worthless. Such investments are creating a ‘carbon bubble’ worth trillions of dollars based on assets that could prove to be unusable, with coal now being viewed as a ‘stranded asset’. ¹³ I noted that, as Brett Scott has recently argued, the two approaches to divestment – ethical and economic – converge in three areas: firstly, in the campaign to broaden the notion of fiduciary duty; secondly, in the quest to redefine the time horizon in which investments should be assessed; and thirdly, in the battle to incorporate non-monetary returns and losses into investment assessments. ¹⁴

The Question of Who One Is

Foucault understands ethical work to have both an intellectual and a practical dimension. For Foucault, according to Paul Rabinow (1997: xix), ‘who one is … emerges acutely out of the problems with which one struggles.’ Rabinow discusses how Foucault saw this as an attitude ‘rooted in an ethics and not a morality, a practice rather than a vantage point, an active experience, rather than a passive waiting’.

January 2015

Over the same time period that I was deliberating what it means for UCL to accept a financial gift from a fossil fuel company, UCL started to engage with the Research Concordat for Integrity, and review its own research ethics procedures. ¹⁵ In tandem with UCL’s work in this area, and with the Dean of the Bartlett’s approval, I decided that the research project on ethics I was leading needed to transform itself into a working group and to establish a new approach for engaging with ethical issues in the Bartlett through research, but also teaching and enterprise. Starting with the Bartlett Faculty’s four key principles of autonomy, integrity, sustainability and equity, I am keen to set in motion an approach where the implications these principles raise is followed through in the ethical stance we take in our work as researchers, whether through partnering with corporations, interviewing subjects or conducting participatory action research. My aim is to set up a Bartlett Ethics Forum, and to place ethics as a key aspect of our pedagogy from the education of first year architects onwards, while also offering a training to staff and guidance to students on how to deliberate ethical dilemmas in their work as built environment professionals, with the hope of following up and developing the work done by the Edge Commission. ¹⁶

Giving an Account of Oneself

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler (2005: 8) argues that ‘the “I” has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms.’ She goes on to note that: ‘If the “I” is not at one with moral norms’, this means that ‘the subject must deliberate upon these norms’, and that part of such a deliberation will ‘entail a critical understanding’ of the social genesis and meaning of those norms. Butler writes:

In this sense ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. And critique finds that it cannot go forward without a consideration of how the deliberating subject comes into being and how a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms. Not only does ethics find itself embroiled in the task of social theory, but social theory, if it is to yield nonviolent results, must find a place for this ‘I’. (p. 8)

October 2015

In Practising Ethics: Positionality, Spatiality and Subjectivity in Dialogue, a conference I organized for PhD students doing practice-led research, we explored some of the more general ethical principles drawn from medicine that universities use as guiding principles for working with human subjects, such as ‘informed consent’, ‘confidentiality’, and ‘benefit not harm’. Drawing on their own experiences as students, supervisors, practitioners and researchers, speakers from geography, psychoanalysis, ethnography/anthropology, political science, architectural design and the visual/performing arts offered a more nuanced understanding of the possible spatial, cultural and political settings involved in conversing and engaging with others and drew out questions around the positions we take up when speaking and listening. They examined how these actions of communication are informed by the psychic structures of subject–object relations, and the dynamics of power and knowledge around speech and sight, that vary according to practice and discipline. ¹⁷

Parrhesia

In the autumn of 1983, Foucault gave six lectures at the University of California, Berkeley exploring the practice of parrhesia in the Greek culture of the 4th and 5th centuries BC. He examined the evolution of the term with respect to rhetoric, politics and philosophy, and investigated the link between parrhesia and concepts of frankness, truth, danger, criticism and duty. Foucault (1999 [1983]: np) summarizes his thinking from the first few lectures as follows:

Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself).

October 2015

UCL is still accepting funds from BHP Billiton, but last week we hosted the first meeting of a new informal research network of UCL academic researchers and practitioners – with public engagement partner, the London Mining Network – exploring the ecological, economic, political, psychological, social and spatial impacts of mining on individuals and communities, not only the physical and material sites of the mines themselves, but also the constellation of sites of production associated with them – real, represented and imagined. Our speakers, invited to the UK by the London Mining Network and the Colombian Solidarity Campaign, came to London to attend the BHP Billiton AGM, and to talk at various events about their first-hand experiences of human rights issues connected with the construction and expansion of the Cerrejon opencast coal mine in Colombia, joint-owned by Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Glencore. ¹⁸ We bore witness to the evidence of Samuel Arregoces, who is on the committee of FECONADEMIGUA, the Federation of Communities of African Descent Affected by Mining in La Guajira. Samuel is from the village of Tabaco, where a community of small-scale farmers of African descent, was brutally evicted in 2001 to make way for expansion of the Cerrejon opencast coal mine in the province of La Guajira in the far north of Colombia. The construction of the mine has led to the forced removal and dispersal of a number of rural communities, the violation of indigenous cultural values and sacred sites, including those of the Wayuu, and the loss of livelihood among small-scale farmers. We also heard from Danilo Urrea, of Friends of the Earth Colombia, and Co-ordinator of CENSAT (The National Center of Health, Environment and Work), who has been accompanying communities affected by the Cerrejon mine and investigating its social and environmental impacts. CENSAT is working with communities and organizations in La Guajira to prevent Cerrejon Coal diverting local rivers for mine expansion, and with many other organizations to challenge the Colombian government’s policy of encouraging large-scale, foreign-owned opencast mining.

Bios and Logos

Towards his later lectures on parrhesia, Foucault turns to examine the function of parrhesia in terms of the crisis of democratic institutions, and then moves on to discuss how parrhesia occurs as an activity in human relations, with respect to oneself and the care of the self, and in relation to others, specifically through three kinds of relation: individual personal, community and public life. Here Foucault talks of how, in the shift from a political to a Socratic or ethical form of parrhesia, the relation between logos, truth and courage alters to include bios, and to focus on the balance between bios and logos with respect to truth:

Here, giving an account of your life, your bios, is also not to give a narrative of the historical events that have taken place in your life, but rather to demonstrate whether you are able to show that there is a relation between the rational discourse, the logos, you are able to use, and the way that you live. Socrates is inquiring into the way that logos gives form to a person’s style of life; for he is interested in discovering whether there is a harmonic relation between the two. (Foucault, 1999 [1983]: np)