What Does Knowledge Do?
By Naomi Kim
In her essay on what she dubs “paranoid” and “reparative” reading practices, the scholar Eve Sedgwick takes up the problem of knowledge. “What,” she asks, “does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving again of knowledge of what one already knows?” Sedgwick’s essay is best situated in a broader debate in literary studies about critique and postcritique, but the essential question she raises is haunting even without the finer details of her argument. What does knowledge do? It’s a question I’ve been coming back to more often, and with more anxiety, as I move through grad school. The more I learn—the more I know—the more pressing the question becomes.
In the current season of my PhD program, I’m entering the major fields process, a span of two or so years in which my primary task is to develop knowledge of my field. It’s a joy to me that I get to devote my time to this work, but even on the best days, I’m often paralyzed by the weight of my knowledge—by the ever clearer view my studies have given me of how racism, imperialism, and capitalism structure our lives. Everything seems hopelessly and heartbreakingly entangled in systems of oppression. It’s the weight of this knowledge that recalls Sedgwick’s question for me. What does knowledge do? What does my knowing do? Too often, I find myself doing nothing more than wallowing in worry about what I know, about my own complicities and the seeming impossibility of a viable solution. Sometimes, it feels like knowledge amounts to hopelessness, or leads to it. Nihilistic despair can seem like the only response to knowing that I, we, all of us, live entrenched in the confines of racial capitalism. No way out. Nothing that can be done.
The story of Paul’s encounter with the Athenians in Acts 17 can also be read as a story about knowledge. In mulling over this passage, I’ve found myself reconsidering how I think about knowledge—and about despair and hope. Paul discovers that the city, full of idols, even has an altar with this inscription: “To an unknown god.” But the Athenians actually desire to know. When Paul debates with their philosophers and thinkers, telling of Christ, they ask him to say more. And so, invited by the intrigued, Paul declares, “What therefore you proclaim as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” This is the God of power and majesty and sustaining provision. Moreover, this is a God who wants to be known, ordering the world so that all nations “would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him.” Thus Paul makes the case for shedding ignorance and embracing this knowledge of God that he brings.
But the Athenians respond in different ways to that knowledge. Some are convinced, like Dionysus the Areopagite and Damaris, who join Paul as fellow believers at the end of the passage. Some are curious, who say to Paul, “We will hear you again about this.” And some are downright incredulous: “When they [the Athenians] heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed.” The passage suggests that the resurrection is particularly galling and preposterous—a hope too hopeful to be true.
It’s these scoffers who interest me most because their response suggests something telling about knowledge—theirs and mine. Their ridicule strikes me as an odd kin to my despair, and their response reminds me, in a way, of the dead ends to knowledge that the academy sets up. For the scoffers, what they already know creates bounds on the possible: the resurrection is not compatible with their understanding of the world, and so they reject it. The scoffers can’t accept this knowledge—knowledge of the resurrection, of a God powerful enough to raise the dead—because it is too big, in a sense, for their capacity, for their knowing. It breaks apart the bounds of the world as they understand it, cracking open the cosmos into bewildering possibilities. So they turn away. They will not change their lives in response to the knowledge, the claim, that Paul asserts.
Knowledge of God is, of course, not the same thing as knowledge of racial capitalism. But the scoffing response in Acts 17 reminds me of what, exactly, might be the problem with my despair. Like scoffing at the resurrection, despairing in the face of racial capitalism is a failure to imagine something beyond the bounds of current knowledge. Despair insists there’s nothing else and nothing more. It’s a refusal to believe that there are other possibilities and futures beyond the limits and confines of present knowledge. The work of naming and critiquing unjust systems is essential to understanding our world, but when that knowledge becomes the end rather than the beginning of our imaginations, we run into a dead end. We get stuck. We despair. Knowledge tells us how we got here, but it doesn’t save us on its own. In that sense, it’s what we do not know that provides the greatest source of hope in the face of oppressive systems. As James K. A. Smith writes in How to Inhabit Time, “Undoing the root causes of injustice and oppression—the promise of justice in the kingdom of God—will require something more radical than any agenda we could undertake, even any revolution we might instigate.” We have tasks to carry out right now and right here to make a more just world, but our ultimate salvation lies with something more radical and more powerful beyond our knowing.
In the end, the greatest unknowable we know is God, who despite self-revelation in the person of Jesus remains a mystery to human minds. Paul tells the Athenians that God intends to be known, but we know too that God is beyond perfect knowability. We know this, that we see through the glass darkly. If our hope lies with the unknowable, then our hope ought to lie with the gloriously unknowable God, who can save us far more completely and eternally than we could ever save ourselves—in ways we could never have thought or imagined. Paul preaches of the resurrection, the impossibility that cracks open what our knowledge holds to be probable and real. I can face tomorrow because he lives—because a powerful love breaks the bounds of my knowledge, because the God who died and rose again will one day make all things new, make all things well. This is the promise, the end beyond the dead end of all our knowing, the hope beyond despair.