Interview with Adrian Lahoud by Savia Palate

Negotiating the Constitution of a Problem

Savia Palate in conversation with Adrian Lahoud

Image for Adrian Lahoud’s Lecture 18 February, 2015 / Scale, The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL ( Found here: https://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/events/adrianlahoud-bartlettils)

Adrian Lahoud’s research interests are focused on the notion of scale; a fundamental mode of perceiving, classifying, measuring, and understanding architecture and the world. The main issues discussed in this interview unfold around the problem of how to constitute a problem and the inadequacy of today’s institutions to negotiate this conflict, given the implications of it in a multiplicity of scales. The interview was conducted in person on the 10th of March, 2015.

You started your lecture with this quote: ‘The nature of contemporary power is architectural and impersonal, not personal and representative.”

In your opinion as an architect, how do you perceive the fact that the nature of power is architectural? Because you also spoke about architecture as an environmental power can you define this more precisely?

The quote is from “The Invisible Committee”. What I tried to say is that a certain idea of politics organized according to political parties with specific political programs is wider politics. They are proposing that there is another idea of politics in which politics is something embedded in systems of organization and systems of exchange within logistics, within systems of circulation. Therefore, it is something that has a kind of materiality and something that is designed and therefore something architectural. Those forms of political power do not work on us by persuading us to vote for the conservative or the liberal party, or they do not work on us by telling us that we should believe in social welfare or high taxation. It is not about a specific political program. They work on us by very subtly rearticulating habits, the way we socialize, the way we understand ourselves, and the way we think about our futures. A so much more subtle form of power, but it is a form of power in a way that we are immersed in it all the time. And it is environmental because it is something that shapes us.

Between human and non-human conditions, the notion of scale that you focus on seems to be crucial, particularly because human actions, while mostly localized, they have an impact on another location or on a bigger scale. Would you say that we are in need of new tools to understand these cause-and-effect transformations in a multiplicity of scales to mediate a scale of relations?

Yes, we are. We are in need of new tools. I do not have any idea of what exactly these tools are going to be, but there is no doubt that these tools that we have, these institutions that we have, the legal institutions, the political institutions have really emerged out of too

many eras. One is the birth of the modern nation-state, and then the other one is more recently the idea of international law, for example, something that Carl Schmidt talks about. In both of those cases we find that we do not really have structures that allow us to think about these kinds of effects that are non-worlder. Especially environmental effects like ecologies, wind patterns, pollution, all of these kinds of things do not really obey sovereign territorial borders. You do not need a visa to go from one side to the other to move. As these things get more and more intense, they cause a very profound challenge.

Another difficult thing a lot of these these effects are produced by very simple day-to-day actions, like consumption, production of energy. The production of those causes has a single origin you cannot point to and say ‘ah this person fired the gun, this guy was killed, we have the evidence’. This is a version of crime and war that we are much more familiar with, but when something is far more distributed in time and space it is hard to reconstruct a sequence of events that allows you to make a legal claim. But I think there are also people who work on these kind of things now.

Even if we manage to develop new tools, what would be the best approach? Or, based on your hypothesis, how these kinds of conditions be resolved? I am referring specifically to this transition from one scale to another, which in a way causes an ambiguity of who holds the responsibility for what.

I think that this is a really good question. What I am trying to say is that I would never ever try to propose a resolution for any of these things. What I am saying is much more fundamental. It is about the way you construct the problem and the way the construction of the problem organizes the following debate around the problem. For example, in Copenhagen, during the Climate Summit, the problem was posed in terms of would there be a court or not and what would be the average temperature increase? Two degrees, two point five degrees etc. Posing the problem as a global average makes the globe the scale. But we also know that average is an abstraction.

Some areas will maybe get cooler, and some areas will get much hotter than 2 degrees. If you think there is a proper way of constructing the problem in order to have a proper political discourse around it, then the proper way of constructing that

problem is to construct it at the scale of its impact and its effect. If you do not do that, you might think you are resolving a problem, but because it is constructed poorly in the first place, you do not allow for a proper discussion to take place. Because you do not really know what is at stake. If you construct the problem such as we can say ‘ok this is the part of the world that is going to be affected in this way. They will have 3 degrees, a more difficult time producing agriculture. The economy is going to suffer. It is going to be a conflict, etc.’ Then there is another part of the world where they currently have ice caps. The ice caps are going to melt and suddenly they will have more agricultural land and their economy will get better or worse. Once you start breaking the 2 degrees average into the mosaic of the way fortune is going to be re-organized, some people are going to do better, while others will do worse. If you construct a debate in that way to begin with, then to my mind you have a proper discussion. That does not mean it will resolve itself, because ultimately it will be a question of who can mobilize the best argument, who has the most power in the discussion to make their voice heard and to have their point of view accepted as the right point of view. That is not for me to determine. All I can say is that we should pay attention to the way we pose those questions in the first place. When you think of how to pose the question what is at stake, the discussion is clear.

I presume that the fact we have constituted all of these international institutions, NGOs, and laws is part of an attempt at this broader impact/effect resolution. However, conflicts nowadays reflect that the institutional level is at stake, since each side or each nation cannot agree on which problem is theirs. How do we then negotiate this problem of constituting a problem?

That is also a really nice question. There some other things I think I could say, like for example you are right because real disagreements are not disagreements over the answer but disagreements over the construction of the problem. Which is to say that disagreements are what we should really negotiate. I think once we agree on what we should negotiate it becomes much easier. I also think that you are right. I think that we are in a phase where we

can see more and more institutions established to deal with the effects of climate change. And those institutions are going to be interesting because they are not going to be international like the UN, and I do not think that they will be necessarily about having a common territory, or a common language, or even a common history. I think that these institutions are going to bring together countries around different kinds of commonalities. Maybe around commonalities of risk, for example. Or, for example, all cities around river deltas might have more in common with each other because they are susceptible to sea rising levels, or all the cities susceptible to desertification. You start to see this kind of lobby group forming.

To move back to the individual scale… The disagreement of the constitution of the problem reminds me of what you have mentioned in your lecture that ‘all forms of subjectivity are collective forms of subjectivity’. Apparently ‘self’ is not a fixed entity anymore but many entities that constantly change. And if we see this through the problem of how to constitute the problem then what would be a strategy for architecture to maintain these unresolved and constantly transformed situations?

It is a really hard question. I can try and say a few things in response.

The first thing is I think that what we need is not just an intellectual evolution or evolution in design. I think what we need is more of a cognitive evolution or evolution on subjectivity. The way we think in the way we conceive ourselves and in the way we conceive of others. Real political change happens on that basis. So how do we not see ourselves competing with each other to the death? How do we not see ourselves striving to be productive and nothing else?

How do we see ourselves beyond being consumers? All of these major poles around which our desires in this time are constructed.

How do we construct new desires? I think this is a really fundamental question. And I think that this is something architecture has had a major role to play in the past. It was always part of broader social movements. But to me I think the most important question is how do we connect up to those social movements. How do we almost re-describe and re-imagine what is taking place there through architecture, through ways of organizing social life between

human beings, ways of organizing economic relationships between legal relationships. That is really what architecture should be trying to focus on. To re-describe these kinds of things. And architecture is very powerful to do these things.

I believe that your points in this conversation raised several important issues related to contemporary forms of power, politics, and architecture. It also triggered feelings of both vigilance and hope that we need to think about. Thank you.