How do we move beyond knowing? Through performance. Or, more precisely, through an activity-based, performatory approach to understanding human subjectivity. Changing, growing does not hinge on knowing, but on a direct, activity-based interaction with the world. Non-epistemic understanding is indistinguishable from participation in the life process. Children show us how to do this. They come to be knowers relatively late in the process of social adaptation. Prior to this they are virtuoso developers. We ought to rediscover this child-like ability to leverage our developmental potential.

Lois Holzman has been very influential in bringing these insights to social change and human/community development efforts worldwide. She introduces performatory approaches to hundreds of grassroots practitioners and supports their home-grown initiatives to develop people and their communities in order to engage poverty, violence, conflict, underdevelopment and environmental destruction. She is a prolific author. Recently she published The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world, in which she presents some of these ideas in an accessible way.