Permanence and change
INTRODUCTION
Scripts are essentially a metaphor for conceptualizing the production of behavior within social life. Most of social life most of the time operates under the guidance of an operating syntax, much as language, as a shared code, becomes a precondition for speech. The construction of human behavior potentially involves scripting on three distinct levels: cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts.
Our approach does not necessarily imply an abandonment of the research effort or the singular importance of that effort. What it does appear to require is an abandonment of the quest for effective formulas, an abandonment of abstract causal models that are applied to specific human beings, and a profound suspicion of the minimalist categories that the actuarial approach requires and often condemns us to. What a postmodernist perspective requires and promises is the development of a conceptual apparatus that can mirror shared collective and individual experiences in what will necessarily be recognized as imperfect and temporary ways. This is a way of seeing that will move us closer, not to truth as such but to finding broadened explanations for behavior and understanding of its meaning, moving us from an arithmetic of behavior to a literacy of behavior. Promising no final goal, such a perspective provides a vision that might serve until the next difference, if you will, the next mutation, in human experience occurs and reshapes our vision of the past, of the future, and of its temporary present.
What is required more than anything else, if a promise of a postmodern sexuality is to be realized, is a self-conscious effort to free the sexual from the intellectual isolation within which the modernization of sex originally prospered. This, admittedly, is no easy task. At a minimum it requires that we place all sexual behavior in the larger context of the lives lived by those having these experiences and that our “theories” of sexual behavior be made responsible to our sense of the human.