be known.... It will ‘merely’ be performed. Still the question ‘Can we give
up knowing?’ remains. This question canbe answered, even if we do not know
the answer. But in answering (or, at a minimum, exploring) it, we recommend
doing so in a way which gives up our deep-rooted modernist need to know
that we have done so. Such an exploration entails abandoning not simply
the troublesome substantive conceptual elements of epistemology (mind, self,
truth, and company) but epistemology itself as a form of life. Consequently,
we must substantively eliminate the substantive myths of modernism (amongst
them the individuated mind, the individual self, and individual cognitions)
only as we deconstructively/ reconstructively (socially activistically) eliminate
the mythic ancient (Aristotelian) formsof modernism (explaining, describing,
interpreting, identifying, and knowing).
(Newman and Holzman 199 7 : 31, emphasis in the original)We do this by positing a ‘third kind’ of knowledge which gives up modern
assumptions about knowledge, reality, the orderliness of the world, unreal and
underlying appearances, in favour of a new stance towards the world-practical-
moral knowledge which argues that the world is constructed through activity, and
especially the activity of talk [where ‘talk is action, not communication’ (Edwards
1995: 585)], which includes the expressive powers of embodiment. Yet how
we conduct talk tends to make this kind of knowledge invisible. But this need not
be the case, if we acknowledge that talk is responsive and rhetorical, not represen-
tational; it is there to do things. In other words, this is to reject the cognitive
notion that talk is primarily communication (or rule-governed and concerned with
exchanging meanings). Instead talk is conceived of as a ‘structure of presupposi-
tions and expectations of a non-cognitive, gestural kind that unfolds in the
temporal movement of joint action’ (Shotter 1995: 66).
This is not just a restatement of speech-act theory, rather it is an attempt to
understand knowing from within a situation, a group, social institution, or society.
Rather than knowing-what or knowing-how, it is ‘knowledge-in-practice’ and
‘knowledge held in common with others’ (Shotter 1993: 19). At the same time,
it is an attempt to initiate, along with Wittgenstein, not new theories but new
practices which can make us more attuned to sensing other possibilities.
That is, instead of helping us to ‘find’ or ‘discover’ something already existing,
but supposedly hidden behind appearances, they help us grasp something
new, as yet unseen, that can be sensed in the emerging articulation of the
appearances unfolding before our very eyes (or ears). And in these instances,
the problems facing us ‘are solved not by giving new information, but by
arranging what we have always known’ (Wittgenstein 1953, No. 109). We
find in our current ways of ‘going on’ with each other (as a social group)
possibilities for relating ourselves to each other in new ways, possibilities for
new social practices. Thus Wittgenstein’s methods ‘move’ us, professionally,
towards a new way of ‘looking over’ the ‘play’ of appearances unfolding before
us, such that, instead of seeing them as related to each other in terms of certain122 Part II