Whereas modernist conversation required a grounding in epistemological claims about why we think and feel the way we do when we try to influence each other, Newman and Holzman see that view of language as a kind of "aboutness" and as limiting.  In contrast, they propose a view of language as something we perform in relationships, and they take readers beyond John Shotter's position that all meaning-making conversation occurs in a context of justification and argumentation.  They suggest, instead,  that new meaning is best created in a shared performance of meaning, and they discourage recitations or negotiation of meanings that we bring from our prior forms of "knowing". 

Newman and Holzman describe themselves as radicals whose roots go back to the tumultous sixties. They have been active in alternative education, community development and theatre as means of promoting social change. Their point of view comes from their unique readings of Wittgenstein, Vygotsky and Marx. Specifically, they regard social constructionism (especially writers they still admire such as Gergen and Shotter) as probably anachronistic for holding to enduring meaning, even meanings derived from conversational and unscientific means. This they suggest needlessly creates "fetishized and fossilized" forms of meaning or knowing. 

Their view reminds me of a quote from David Abrams' Spell of the Sensuous "The alphabetized intellect stakes its claim to nature by staking it down." For them, the "shelf-life" of any form of knowing is found in the immediacy of the relational use of that knowing. Knowing, in the ways that concern the authors, is an attempt to generalize the utility of meaning beyond the context in which it is spontaneously required. This is their concern with most social constructionist writing: whether the knowing is generated in laboratories or in playground interaction, any attempt to carry it forward as Truth or "truth" results, they tell us,  in problematic generalization. 
 
What Newman and Holzman have done is merge the contextual specificity implied by Wittgenstein's notion of "language games", and Vygotsky's  developmental notion of the ZPD (zone of proximal development). They suggest that these contexts of interaction are where we not only perform what we know, but this (and here's where they Marx in) is where we change both what we know and the relationships where we are doing that knowing. Put differently, a language game, developed in the interactions between people, is also a context of developing development, in a developing relationship that changes its forms of interaction, along with the characters and relationships between them, through the performance of changing meanings. 

They are hypothesizing a basis for knowing that is process-contextual/relationally-developmental, as opposed to knowledge that, in Marxist terms, would be "commodified", or adhered to as static generalizations people could apply to their varied life circumstances.  In their view, we become who we are by continuously "being who we are not" and they contend that the ultimate postmodern shift will be away from having to regard our world as knowable, for relationships of successful performance. 

"Can we learn to give up knowing?" is their combined question and challenge. Their detailed answer is that we find, in the immediacy of our circumstances (not in commodified knowledge), what we have to perform, and accounting for that successful performance is not as important as doing it. 

Newman and Holzman regard language as being important for its rhetorical potentials, its ability to "move" its users. It is in performing our language that we learn of our influence in relationships.   But we don't do that performing alone, we also continually create our relationships in what and how we talk and, as we do, we, our relationships, and our subject matter all change too. This is how they tie together Vygotsky's ZPD and language games; there is an essentially 
non-reflexive (i.e., non-justificatory, non-epistemologically based) meaning to engaged activity, a Zen-like wu-wei-ness ("no-mindedness), people are doing without self- or other-consciousness. As people are acting or performing in this manner there is little "aboutness" mediating their subsequent performance; it would be like stopping an intimate moment and asking out loud "why am I kissing you?" But it is in the course of  this activity that we transcend our previously held meanings and the spontaneity of the moment moves us to new ways of being. 

This is radically different from a narrative perspective that would suggest we bring some consistency to our social encounters by re-enacting our stories of who we are. Instead, in performing meaning and experiencing what self-relations 
Therapist Stephen Gilligan calls the "relational field", the previous meanings of our 'self-stories' develop according to the relatedness found in spontaneous performance. In the words of Newman and Holzman: 
 

In their  postmodern world, meaning is performed in the circumstances in which it is required. This is quite different from common notions that our meaning or knowledge is acquired then later implemented or negotiated into the circumstances in which it seems required. Words and manners of speaking then become performance tools although I was uncertain  how the authors distinguished these tools from the forms of knowing they rail against. I was also unclear about how Newman and Holzman regarded the effect of perceived power differentials in the performance of meaning. The authors are describing a dialogic world in which people find their optimal co-existence through efforts to share and create meanings that are mutually transformative.  Power in relationships, as I've come to understand it, is about the continued application of privileged meaning. 

I  yearn for the world the authors are describing but still can't abandon Shotter's view of the "cultural politics of everyday living". In such "cultural politics", discourse seems tied to Truth or "truth" claims in rhetorically insisting and accepting meaning. In any event, the position of Newman and Holzman is provocative to say the least: imagine again their challenge that we give up our need for 'aboutness'. 

How do our present conversational practices seem to require this "aboutness," and what does this do to the transformative potentials that could otherwise arise in activity and play? We reference too much of our conversation to forms of explanation or justification and lose the spontaneity and relatedness that allows meanings to be coordinated and co-created in the moment. Newman and Holzman's comment that we become who we are by being who we are not reminds me of the creative use of play used  by family therapist, Peggy Papp. It also reminds me of that common relationship therapy technique of requesting participants do what they can to stay in dialogue. What typically breaks the dialogue are the claims of "aboutness" that concern the authors. Rather than deconstruct the meanings (or "aboutnesses") brought to therapy, Newman and Holzman see the focus of therapy as leaving behind our fossilized and fetishized meanings for what we are able to create with each other in the conversational encounter.  They ask us to think beyond continually situating our language use in positions for the relatedness and spontaneity that the moment requires, to 
think beyond our normal individuality to what it means to co-exist 
relationally/ contextually. In Fred Newman's words: