P-Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Recognition

In this prompt, which is based on the public conversation “First Times do not exist” with friend, colleague, artist and curator Nkule Mabaso in Göteborg we ask how to deal with discomfort when encounters and inspirations are not formally acknowledged. An artistic book Nkule (co-)produced was the crucial inspiration for another peer's work, but despite the shared understanding of the politics of recognition, this act of reuse was not formally credited. In this conversation, Nkule insists on the importance and the willingness to take time and be in conversation to acknowledge and sit with this space of discomfort, so the tensions can become tangible and be addressed together rather than looking for punitive gestures or corrective quick fixes. Afterwards, we edited the transcription together. Nkule decided to add several footnotes and images – continuing to map the layers of this process.

When we encounter something that catalyses our thinking, how do we make this encounter legible? How do we account for such relationships when we disclose how something comes into being? And when we have reused work without recognising one another sufficiently, what can we do? 

Encounters in Practice: A Reflective Account

Nkule Mabaso (NM): So we had this call, where I said: “Hey your book is a wonderful publication, well done, but I am uncomfortable that there is no stated relationship between our publication and your publication.” If citation and referencing are about signalling how and when you come to know something, then what happens in the moments where it is not acknowledged. The space of discomfort means for me working through how to talk about it, how to deal with it. After some time, we had a call in order to present my discomfort, also considering the conversations we've had in other instances about the shared understanding around the politics of recognition and citation and what acknowledgement does. When you encounter something, and that thing catalyses your thinking, how do we then cite and make space for that moment of encounter? How do we make an acknowledgement? What would be an adequate way to signal that? Yes, the handwritten dedication in the book is a signalling: “Thank you for being an inspiration. We are majorly indebted to you. Your book was a lodestar for the making of this one, and for many more creative publications.” But this homage doesn't exist anywhere else, just in this one copy of the book given to us.

Manually annotated opening page of Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives. Photograph: Jacob Sweep (2024)

Eva Weinmayr (EW): You seem to make a distinction between a signal towards you, such as the handwritten acknowledgement in the book – and a signal which is legible to others?

NM: Yes, both publications follow particular conventions. Both got copyright declarations, Creative Commons licences and ISBNs. Both want to participate in the matrix of what it means to be visible or invisible in these registers and be accounted for within the academic or other contexts. There has to be a trackability of the impact of the contribution. Clearly, the publication was impactful, it contributed to the production of something new – but this impact remains unstated. It's problematic if it is not registered in the systems that provide certain kinds of recognition.

EW: It seems we are mostly talking about the registers of academic recognition?

NM: We are in academia. This is happening in the context of the editors now being at the University of Basel, and we were at the University of Cape Town. So in academia there is a particular regime of how to make things visible and make connections clear.

The publication of There are mechanisms in place was not an invisible act in an obscure location. It was a “moderately obscure act”, but at least we signalled it. We sent an e-flux announcement , like “Hey everybody, we did it”. So it would resonate, and it would somehow exist. But if all this effort of communicating the release broadly, the labour of disseminating, of getting it in front of people still means that its impact is again not acknowledged, then why disseminate? Why participate? Why produce?

EW: But there is a difference! It is being disseminated, and it has impact. It inspires people, as the handwritten note is already saying. And if you wouldn't be within this regime of needing citations in order to have a career in academia, then that would have been a really important acknowledgement: This book has been an inspiration. Outside academia, this gesture and acknowledgement would have probably been enough, and wonderful. Only once we move into the strict regimes of academia, then this informal gesture is not enough, and you'd need to count your the citation score in order to make a living. Quite cruel!

NM:  It's absurd that those systems exist and there are a lot of people who are already for the longest historical period outside the benefit of those systems. That's one thing to be aware of. And I would still caution and say, even within artistic practice that is outside of the academy, it’s still a crucial exercise to perform. To say, who has inspired you, and who the work departs from if it was catalytic to your thinking significantly. What does citation actually do? Citation is about making yourself legitimate, but legitimate to whom?

EW: Yes, of course, one question in our project is how to make the conditions of reuse explicit, how to refer to relationships or encounters, so they are recognizable and legible for others.

NM: How would you cite a relationship? What would be adequate? In our case, we don't want an apology, we don't want a statement on the website. It's not adequate, something else is going on here. It's a conversation that I'm trying to enter into. We need to talk in different ways to arrive at something else. But this something else is not quite clear. We don't need a quick standard corrective, it's about something else.  

Femke Snelting (FS): You brought up this omission and not wanting corrective, but you are still looking for repair?

NM: Yes, It's not a feeling that something is lost, it's more that something is missed. Something needs an adjustment. Now, when you go to the chiropractor, you take a risk! Ideally, you're coming out okay, but actually your body probably wants to settle in the old ways. There is this possible risk, that something is going to come out, and it's not clear what it is.

But what I said in the outset of our conversations, I don't want to create an alienating experience that something bad has happened. Nothing bad has happened. It's just something happened and it's interesting to look at it. Our case, since we are now “a case” that we can look at, is just an example of similar things happening in other contexts. I am curious how I could act better, how we all could act better, since I'm constantly working with different people on different things.

FS: What options are you considering?

NM: When we had the call, we went through some quick proposals, but we don't need to have proposals immediately! We just need to work through something. And whatever it is, it doesn't have to be public. It doesn't have to be about "performing" something.

And I don't want us to state from the outset what it is, because then again, it would mean we're going back to the corrective. So I don't know. It's a feeling. It sounds arbitrary. But it's really serious, because it's very emotional: They´re feeling something, I'm feeling something. We talk, you go back, look at the book, and then remember another case... There's nothing linear about it. And whatever happens will inform other things. It's just the willingness is to be in conversation. And to say, there's something here.

Comparing the credit pages between There are mechanisms in place (left) and Lost Libraries Burnt Archives (right). Photograph: Jacob Sweep (2024)

Jen Hayshida (JH): Can you imagine a situation, where that kind of omission is productive?

NM: No, it's completely unproductive! It's how you end up with a whole continent that is underrepresented in particular kinds of research. If I take this case and consider this instance in the category of intergroup relations, what happens if we as Black women are failing to recognise each other? We've done all the things: we've had moments of encounter. We have made contact with each other, but how do we imagine ourselves from a specific geography that already has a wide invisibility in certain discourses, in politics – how do we imagine ourselves to show up?

JH: No, I understand. I am not talking about your situation. I am talking about the act of omission itself. Are there situations where it is generative?

NM: I don't think so. It's like when you write in your acknowledgements: I thank my wife, who was really impactful. It’s these strange things that need to be looked at for the construct that they are. Why are they operating, and why do they persist, and what do they support?

JH: I think there are ways that sometimes, and this is just a disjointed idea I have, but there are ways that disrupt the sort of fiction of lineage implied through citation. I think in other cheap political situations, I think there are ways that omission actually could be fruitful.

NM: You need to make a decision. It is your choice and you have to do it with intention. It's like, I'm appealing to this authority, or I'm appealing to this performance of whatever legitimization I need. In order to be legitimated here, this is who I need to cite. It is a political decision as well.

It is a choice to make the people that you cite visible all the way – whoever they are. If you are citing only white men, that is your politics. We will read you through that lens. But did you do that with intention? Are you really convinced about this is how you want to perform? This is really what resonates with you? And you are safe in that? And that's what it is. But if you want to have a different kind of intentionality? It's not a "no", I don't think nobody should not be cited. It's just about how, why, when, and where.

Editors note added to the digital version of Lost Libraries Burnt Archives. Download PDF

FS: I do think that there can be intentional omissions, and they can be deeply political: to not replicate and to not reproduce. There are many encounters that we have, exactly because of the dominance of certain types of knowledge and certain people and certain authors who we happen to encounter, and who have influence but, of course, that can be worked against.

NM: But what do we mean by omission, actually? If you're just not citing somebody, that's not an omission, that's a selection. Omission, would be using ideas and thoughts of a person, and then not pointing that out. Making a selection about your references, and who you cite is one thing, and omitting might be something else.

JH: I think there's a third space too, which, to me, has to do with cognition. As someone who has a completely broken brain, remembering what you've read and where you’ve read it becomes an issue. It has to do with the framework for your encounter and your ability to retain information. 

It also goes back to what I was talking about earlier: at what point is the information that you've taken in, translated so many times in your head, that someone could say, oh, right, Derrida writes about that, or that's like the project that so and so did, but in your head you've thought about it so many times that it's become sort of washed out.

NM: Katherine McKittrick writes about this “forgetting” and her efforts to account for the many genealogies that inform her thinking.

JH: Right, you can remember that! But there are ways where at a certain point, age or stress, trauma, or other things informs how you remember, and thus how you cite. Which is not necessarily I think, willful, but like a result of the imprint of the system that you're working under. It's also about the size of the object: Is it an entire methodological like approach or is it a line in a poem, that someone writes…

EW: Interesting that we keep using the term "object". We are talking about citation when we refer to published texts, or to emails or to something which is fixed, which is stabilized, which is tangible. So what about all the inspirations and all the knowledge I gain from more fleeting moments of encounter? How can I acknowledge those?

JH: Some people would argue that this needs to be cited. In some situations, I would say yes and in some I’d say no. That has to do with my judgment, and to a degree my politics, but also my ability to remember. Was I taking notes or was I not? Was I talking to you? Was I on the phone? Was it something I read on the internet? But I just think it's also about the size of the outline around the object, or the text or the phrase or the word or the thing.

FS: How do we remember what we encounter in ways that do not require everything to become an object? This is my fear with the force of academic citation and how it spreads in the world. It forces all things to become measurable, which means that processes that are not meant to be objects, or are not about boundaries, then have to become materialized or fixed in order to function within that system. I think, has to do with the way that artistic research passes through academic modes, which I find very frustrating, really frustrating. So what are ways that we can remember without making every encounter into an object? How do you do this?

NM: I write everything down. I don't do workshops, because then I can't remember who said what. I wouldn't put myself in the situation of using that as a format for trying to find out something. If I did, it would require a lot of other memory aid apparatuses operating in that space, recordings or filming, allowing me to go back to make it easy to attribute who said what. I wouldn't be trying to rely on my own memory.

And there are also other moments are more "containable". For example writing a paper. Making a presentation, organizing things that you're talking about. I have a folder for all of that information. So the organizing is already happening somewhere else all the time and there's constant organizing. I mean, I wished I was better at taking notes. I don't even bother because I never remember why I noted something. So I'd say there are probably lots of ways one can stay on top of what and how one knows. But that's something that you'd develop for yourself and it's a lot of effort.

My preoccupation at the moment is with working collaboratively and thinking about collective ways of working.

It's also about the impact of geography, where one is situated at a particular time, and what resonates and echoes versus when one is speaking from a geography or to another geography. And what do the relationships do? And how do we account for those catalytic moments of encounter? This can be encounter with space, encounter with people, encounter with something and how do you account for that when you disclosing how something comes to be?

Gothenburg, October 2023