Skill and genre are two of the categories of labour-power that constitute the four forms of knowledge (actually, moments of knowing) identified by Cook and Brown (1999), constituted respectively by concepts, skills, stories and genres. Whereas skills and genres are tacit (held and mobilised in *bodies*), concepts and stories are *explicit*: held and mobilised in category-schemes, in conceptual imagination and memory, in language, in paroles of verbalisation or on to the page, encoded into (textual) documents. Cook & Brown 1999
Conceptual knowledges - like skills - are held and can be mobilised by individuals (for example, a single person can write a book, or design an engine, or write a software program). Stories - like genres - are held and mobilised in collectives (performed *to* members of a collective, performed *like* other performances known to the collective, performed *in relation to* the stories known in the collective) and performed in venues located within both the apparatus and the culture of the genre-collective: the books that are available to read, the fabric of stories that are told, the publishing institutions and places of media-commerce, the occasions of story-telling in the lunchroom or by the fireside or on the newspaper page.
The dance of knowing - With evolved categories on the axes
Significantly, having identified the four modes, Cook and Brown lay central emphasis on ‘the generative dance’ of *knowing* that threads them together. *The dance* constitutes the modes as materially-existing configurations of in-here and out-there action and resource; the composite landscape of the modes is the ‘space’ of the dancing and choreographing. It is through this kind of internally diverse, multi-modal performance by individuals and collectives that knowledges in *any* of these forms are laid down, mobilised and ‘played back’, interwoven with the other forms, into the streams of ongoing action both out-there and in-here. They are the parts that constitute the whole: 'knowing'.
We know something *as* a knowledge (with a domain, and a community of practitioners) by the actions and practices that it effectively supports and systematically arises from. Skills, conceptual knowledges, stories and genres are historically- and culturally- and existentially-situated forms of differently embodied and located labour-power. Every skill, every conceptualisation, every story (and every genre!) has its genre; typically a hybrid. All aspects of knowing are utterly material-and-social, embodied, historically located. And if any instance of any of these should seem 'timeless' - skill, concept, story, genre - this too is a local production, locally sustained: an artefact of local work.