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Abstract
This essay starts with an event – what I have come to call “an ethical hotspot” – a moment in which my value systems were challenged and I found myself unable to continue to act as before, until I undertook some critical reflection. Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam (Citation2004) describe what they call “ethically important moments,”Footnote1 which for them mark the “ethical dimension” of decision-making around the day to day dilemmas of research practice. For Guillemin and Gillam negotiating these dilemmas and their relation to institutional ethical procedures requires a degree of reflexivity on the part of the researcher. In this essay, I start by describing the ethical hot-spot that occurred in my life and then discuss how, by reflecting on these issues and the practices that I developed out of them, it might be possible to develop modes of ethical practice that I call – following Foucault – basanic.
Notes
1. Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam, “Ethics, Reflexivity, and ‘Ethically Important Moments’ in Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 10, no. 2 (2004): 261–280.
2. There is no official or formal job description of a vice dean’s position or duties at UCL in general or in the Bartlett in particular, but in practice they are a deputy to the dean and their role is to assist and support their specific dean in core areas such as teaching, research, enterprise, and international activities, and/or areas for focus and development, such as most recently in the Bartlett, of policy and public health. This positions the role holder in a structure of institutional governance in which the often unspoken expectation is that they will enact decisions taken by those in higher management roles, but as we will see in this paper, there is also the possibility to make ethical judgments, question governance structures, and propose alternatives. One way in which such an ethical critique may be practiced is the subject of this essay.
3. See “Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development,” UN Documents: Gathering a Body of Global Agreements. www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm#I (accessed February 4, 2020).
4. See RepRisk, RepRisk Company Report, BHP Billiton PLC (also listed as BHP Billiton Ltd) (Tuesday 28 May 2013).
5. Ibid., 2. The report has no author as it is composed of an automated data search of media articles in which the name of a company is associated with controversies: “Since 2007, RepRisk has produced the largest, high-quality annotated (human-labeled) dataset that allows us to train our machine learning algorithms to be more accurate and effective in identifying ESG risks.” https://www.reprisk.com/approach (accessed June 4, 2020). No ethical judgements are made by individual authors, rather the risks are assessed and mapped against sets of external criteria: “Born out of credit risk management, the purpose of RepRisk’s dataset is not to provide ESG ratings, but to systematically identify and assess material ESG risks. We have always taken an outside-in approach to ESG risks, by analyzing information from public sources and stakeholders and intentionally excluding company self-disclosures. It is now well-accepted that self-reported information is not reliable data – especially when it comes to risks.” https://www.reprisk.com/approach (accessed June 4, 2020). So unlike the ethical practice of parrhesia whose reporting on self and other is undertaken at some personal risk, and which I go on to discuss in this essay, for RepRisk the practice of self-reporting is seen to pose a risk in terms of reliability to the reporting of risk! In addition, the contract undertaken when purchasing the report require that it is not made public in its entirety.
6. Jane Rendell, “Configuring Critique,” in The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design, eds Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen (London: Routledge, 2018).
7. See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/about-us/our-values/ethics-built-environment (accessed February 4, 2020).
8. See http://www.apublishedevent.net/projects/lost-rocks (accessed February 4, 2020).
9. Jane Rendell, Silver (Hobart: A Published Event, 2016), frontispiece.
10. SILVER: A Courthouse Drama was first staged from 4-6pm, Saturday 18 March 2017, as one element of an exhibition titled CROCOITE. CROCOITE. SILVER. SILVER/LEAD (17–28 March 2017), curated by Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward, West Coast Heritage Centre, Zeehan Tasmania, as part of Sites of Love and Neglect (17 March 2017). See Jane Rendell, “Silver: A Courtroom Drama,” in Building Critique, eds Gabu Heindl, Michael Klein, and Christina Linortner (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2020).
11. Jane Rendell, “Giving an Account of Oneself, Architecturally,” Journal of Visual Culture 15, no. 3 (2016): 334–348.
12. See Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London: IB Tauris, 2006). Critical spatial practice aims to transpose the dual actions of critical theory taken from the Frankfurt School into practices that are both self-reflective and emancipatory; and to link these to spatial practices that offer critique in the form of Michel De Certeau’s “tactics” and Henri Lefebvre’s “representational spaces.” See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974, translated into English in 1991) (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991) and Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (1980, translated into English in 1984) (University of California Press, 1984).
13. Michael Foucault is very particular about this term: “I use the phrase ‘speech activity’ rather than John Searle’s ‘speech act’ (or Austin’s ‘performative utterance’) in order to distinguish the parrhesiastic utterance and its commitments from the usual sorts of commitment which obtain between someone and what he or she says. For, as we shall see, the commitment involved in parrhesia is linked to a certain social situation, to a difference of status between the speaker and his audience, to the fact that the parrhesiastes says something which is dangerous to himself and thus involves a risk, and so on.” See Michel Foucault, Discourse and Truth: The Problematization of Parrhesia, ed. J. Pearson (1999). Six Lectures given by Michel Foucault at the University of California at Berkeley, October–November 1983, n. p. (https://foucault.info/parrhesia/) n. p. (accessed 4 February 2020).
14. See Jane Rendell, “Critical Spatial Practice as Parrhesia,” special issue of MaHKUscript, Journal of Fine Art Research 1 (2), no. 16, (2016): 1–8.
15. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 8.
16. See Paul Rabinow, “Introduction: The History of Systems of Thought,” in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley and others, The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, v. 1 (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1997), xi–xlii, xix.
17. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 8.
18. Judith Butler, “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy, ed. David Ingram (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), 212–226.
19. Ibid., 212.
20. Ibid., 212.
21. Ibid., 215.
22. Ibid., 215.
23. Ibid., 218.
24. Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” [1997] trans. by Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 45.
25. Foucault, Discourse and Truth.
26. Ibid.
27. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/about-us/our-values/ethics-built-environment (accessed February 4, 2020).
28. Idare is a collaboration across universities in Australia, based at the Victora College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, and funded by the Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching which explores the role of ethics in creative practice, through both theoretical work but also participatory activities to build up a toolkit to help researchers and practitioners negotiate ethical dilemmas in their work. See https://idare.vca.unimelb.edu.au (accessed June 4, 2020).
29. https://www.urban-know.com (accessed June 4, 2020).
30. It is important to distinguish subjectivation from subjection in Foucault’s work. “The history of the subject, from the perspective of the practices of the self and the procedures of subjectivation, is completely separate from the project, formulated in the 1970s, of the history of the production of subjectivities, of the procedures of subjection by the machines of power.” See Frédéric Gros, “Le souci de soi chez Michel Foucault, A Review of The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, nos 5–6 (2005): 697–708, 698.
31. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 21 (digital edition). See also Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 (New York: Random House, 1985); Histoire de la sexualité 2: L’Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). She cites the page number as 28, referring to the English translation.
32. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 21
33. Foucault, Discourse and Truth.
34. Gros, “Le souci de soi chez Michel Foucault,” 704.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jane Rendell
Jane Rendell (BSc, DipArch, MSc, PhD) is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she co-initiated the MA Situated Practice and supervises MA and PhD projects. Jane has introduced concepts of “critical spatial practice” and “site-writing” through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). With Dr David Roberts, she leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission; and with Dr Yael Padan, ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, for KNOW (Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality). http://www.janerendell.co.uk, https://criticalspatialpractice.co.uk, https://site-writing.co.uk