51 Discursive Knowledge Construction or ‘There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about’ by Yannik Porsché* The proverb “there is no such thing as bad publicity” is frequently used when people talk about news coverage of celebrities and is to some known as a quote and philosophy of life by the American showman and circus owner Phineas T. Barnum. In academic circles the corresponding, all too well-known, phrase is “publish or perish” and the author Brendan Behan reformulated the proverb as “there is no such thing as bad pub- licity except your own obituary”. These sayings are supposedly based on Oscar Wilde’s “there is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about”. Taking these proverbs as a point of departure, I choose a discourse theoretical perspective on knowledge and focus on the importance of the condition of publicness and the question of who is speaking to whom to produce knowledge. Someone or some- thing can, for example, become visible and known by talking, being quoted or being talked about in a face-to-face interaction or in the press. Once people are known, we refer to their publicity. Publicity in turn has an impact on processes of knowledge con- struction, in the sense that more attention is paid to already well-known actors or issues than to less well known ones. In this paper, I will first use the proverbs to formulate some questions and theses and to introduce research literature on approaches to knowl- edge, discourse theory and political issues of representation. I will focus on pragmat- ic and epistemic culture approaches that emphasise the importance of context-bound, practical, tacit, subconscious and procedural knowledge. Then, I will illustrate how “knowledge of” 1 (in the sense of knowing that something or someone exists, in some instances through personal experience) and practical “knowledge how” crucially shape propositional “knowledge that”. 2 I will do so by presenting short examples of analysis surrounding issues of censorship in a case study of representations of immigrants in a Franco-German museum exhibition. * I would like to acknowledge helpful comments by Vivien Sommer on a previous version of this paper. 1 For instance, in phrases such as “I know of Paris” (its existence is not new to me) or “I know Paris” (I have experienced it or have met someone as in the German verb in “Ich kenne …”). 2 On this common tripartite definition of knowledge see for example NIELS GOTTSCHALK- MAZOUZ: Internet and the Flow of Knowledge: Which Ethical and Political Challenges will We Face?, in: HERBERT HRACHOVEC, ALOIS PICHLER (eds.): Philosophy of the Information Society. Proceedings of the 30th International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria 2007, Frankfurt am Main 2008, pp. 215-232, here p. 217. Porsché, Yannik (2016) Discursive Knowledge Construction or ‘There is only one thing worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about’. In: J. A. Turkowska, P. Haslinger, A. Schweiger (Eds.) Wissen transnational. Funktionen – Praktiken – Repräsentationen. Marburg: Herder Institut, pp. 51-69.