Beyond narrative to performed conversation - ('in the beginning' comes much later)

What is the radical and liberating potential of narrative, discursive, perf ormative, and other language-oriented psychologies and psychotherapies? How can if be realized? Using an activity-theoretic framework (in which Lea Vy gotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein are taken as pre-postmodernists), we suggest that the value of these therapies, influenced in varying ways by postmoder n thinking, lies in their becoming postscientific. In our view, their great strength is that they explain nothing and need no explanation. In contrast , many recent discussions of language-oriented, social constructionist and constructivist approaches focus on their explanatory power as alternative e pistemologies, thus missing the emancipatory power of storytelling and narr ative as performed activity (performed conversation).