ABSTRACT
For the past several years, we (the authors) have been examining our own approach to human-social life-in particular, our clinical practice known as social therapy1-in light of recent postmodern and postscientific critiques of modern epistemology. In doing so, we have become more convinced that not only is a new nonepistemological mode of understanding desirable but that it is required for some of the new psychological practices, particularly those concerned with language. And yet, the hold of the epistemological paradigm-the identification of understanding with something to understand-is so strong that the radical and liberating potential of narrative, discursive and performative psychologies and psychotherapies (influenced in varying ways by postmodern thinking) may never, we fear, be realized. In our view, the strength of these approaches lies in their being postscientific-that is, they explain nothing (there is nothing to be explained) and themselves need neither explanation nor theory. Failing to either see this or realize it in practice, we believe, is to misunderstand both what science is as a modernist mode of understanding and what postscientific, postmodernist modes of understanding are and can be. For the emancipatory power of storytelling, narrative, performance, etc. comes from people discovering and transforming their life activity through creating a nonexplanatory understanding of the “story-ness,” the cultural mythicality, the human authorship of consciousness.
