Albert Kapikian
Knowledge and Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement brings the unseen to light, and makes it known. In a pluralistic democracy, the production of knowledge includes the production of acknowledgement, and our ongoing encounter with others is the public humanities in which the production of knowledge is the production of social justice.
At a community college, there is no principle of sorting. The unseen and the unacknowledged are given opportunities otherwise unavailable and enter a commons where welcome is not inconsistent with excellence but constitutive of it. Here, a degree is not a predictor of voting preference but a validation of belonging. It reflects enmeshment into a community where way-finding is not limited to prescribed pathways and decorated destinations but includes encounters that call on students to consider the contingency of their opinions, engendering the kind of self-scrutiny and self-doubt that are the preconditions for the unseen to emerge.
There are hidden histories and hidden connections between the human and the natural as well, and these too require acknowledge-ment. The natural world “sees” what we do not. On our cover, on a narrow barrier of land between bodies of water, in Assateague, Maryland, a horse’s seeing is projected onto the hidden side of the volume. This image becomes our visual guide on a journey into the unseen. It offers a kind of seeing—as if through a spiderweb, or a lace curtain—perhaps best described by Rilke in his Duino Elegies, as seeing with “the creatures’ countenance,” necessary because there is “something out there” we know only through the “animal’s gaze.”
In this image, we might also recognize the way truth comes into view and then disappears into a region of unlikeness. It is a region where purely intellectual attempts fail, where the mind knows where to go but the will is too weak to follow. It is where knowledge without acknowledgement mirrors the reckoning we have with many things we know we should do, but do not—such as the descent in humility necessary to address the changing climate, or the now unfathomable distance of simply looking up from our screens to acknowledge the “stranger.”
Rückenfigur is a compositional device that not only invites the viewer into the scene but invites them to see through the figure’s perspective. It unites the viewer through the acknowledgement of another’s viewpoint. Jonathan Starke writes in “Never Was,” “But the whole time you never looked at me. You looked past me. Through the moonlit window and out into the cold night. Like I wasn’t even there. Like I never really was.”
Tracy Rundstrom, in “Tracing Life Lines and Mending Heart Strings,” reflects, “I don’t think she’d have answers, but I long for someone to walk beside me, to witness this challenging journey and tell me I’m doing a good job.”
If there is an unseen, unprogrammable commons—a commons-which-may-be, a more perfect union—it can only emerge by responding to the country’s brokenness with an acknowledgement of our own. This is a faith, not an already accomplished possession, an eschatological reality rather than an ontological one. The unseen is not the “real me” that “nobody sees,” but the person next to us whom we fail to see. It is not something the commons does for us, but something we do for the commons in order to bring it to life.
The rejection of this version of the unseen is not an act of imagination. It is instead a disreputable moment in the history of our country. Looking at examples from the literature of our past, we can trace this tendency. We see the “bitter spirit of malice and revenge” in Hawthorne’s “Custom House”, written after the election of General Taylor. We find it again in John O’Hara’s “Graven Image,” where divisions emerge through antipathy toward the Ivy League on one side and “fellows like you” on the other. In every case—including our own—the other side is always misunderstood, always portrayed as the unassimilable force.
Today, when posting has become the purpose of politics and an AI-powered app, no matter its brand name, can perform this task better, the unseen becomes our civic spirit. We have surrendered ourselves to private pursuits and curated certainty. Our consumer identities target our citizen identities. Derek Updegraff, in “Ethan Welcomes Back the World,” captures this tension:
But Ethan knows they’ll tell it wrong. Whatever explanation the daylight reveals won’t be the real story. He’s read things, too. And he’s thinking about how the Greek Eros was a fierce warrior god before the Romans named him Cupid. And what a ridiculous guise he’s been given since, a chubby angel with a tiny bow and arrow gracing the fronts of five-dollar cards in February. Because Eros rode on a lion’s back. Eros hurled great spears. And when his massive arrows connected, they consumed all they hit.
This is a disreputable moment in the history of American education as well. Offloading acknowledgement, we have reduced learning to a means to an end, which in turn feeds our post-truth environment. The oxymoron of “online discussions” is just one example, where the learning experience is contorted to fit the software. This trend reflects both our intellectual and economic habits—commodity fetishes in which citizenship is replaced by consumership. Professors, marketed to as if they were sitting with their laptops in a field of sunflowers, are transformed into unseen owners of capital. They are encouraged to “phone it in,” sorting students for success or failure as if they were employees. Worst of all, we have become caretakers of this system, nurturing its brand-name iterations. We give it what it most craves: a generation afraid to look up from their screens.
Our commons has shifted into a space of score-settling and shaming. Even humor, once fraternal, has become fragmented and privatized. This post-commons “paradise” eliminates the need to acknowledge anyone. It creates desires that can never be fulfilled. Trapped in the territory of our own needs, we remain disconnected. At the same time, we are enthusiastically committed to encouraging others to embrace the same isolation we defend under the banner of progress.
This defense serves to justify the privatization and commod-ification of every space. Joining together is now sold to us as “joining AI,” which waits and wants to be acknowledged everywhere. AI stands ready to automate even our social infrastructures. Its proselytizing represents the latest iteration of the hallucination that history has ended. It fosters the illusion that the only problem left is seeing the truth—especially in educational settings—that there is allegedly nothing more to the commons than the all-consuming sameness of money. This sameness asks students to trade the possibility of a vibrant and progressive commons for an unseen, iridescent apparition. Jessica Cuello’s “Childhood Icons” underscores the problem of unreliable narration:
When I was seven, I lay sick in bed and overheard my mother answer a visitor who’d asked how I was feeling. I overheard my mother say, “She’s fine. She exaggerates her sickness. She lies in bed to get attention. She’s an actress.” I listened with no sense of outrage or anger, dispassionately, like I was learning what I did or who I was. I was an actress. I exaggerated. I turned onto my side to assess how true it was. My head was not stuffy. I was not tired and achy. Was not. Was. Was not.
In Gaslight the lights flicker. I see the lights flicker. I imagine things, Ingrid says, saying what she sees. She repeats. Then repeats what she is told to see.
What the writers in this issue “bring to light” is a commons-to-be that summons us, but is powerless without us, cannot bring itself into being without us. The commons sold to us only wants to replicate itself, and ouroboros-like, consume us. Somehow storytelling (through poetry, essay, short fiction) “sees” this, and at the same time helps us see each other, acknowledge each other, and therefore know each other—both in the public sphere and in private everyday living.
Literature can help bring forth this frontier when we release it into the commons of the classroom, exampling how beauty has a contemplative component, that we are not just bodies but embodied—holders of an elevated individuality that includes acknowledgement of the unseen.
This commons-to-be is also an embodiment of an idea, an old one—and it is inevitable that, when it is seen, Humanities, STEM and service will be seen as co-equals, as they must be, in the education of citizens in a pluralistic democracy, itself a commons that does not exist until all are invited. The “price” of admission is only the willingness to look for common ground in the structure that has been made for the American experience, but that can disappear if not modeled for the next generation.