/tag/scripts

24 quotes tagged 'scripts'

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

157

In 'The Shameless World of Phil, Sally and Oprah,' Vicki Abt and Mel Seesholtz argue that 'television is rewriting our cultural scripts' (172), undermining the traditional foundations of moral behavior in both the 'guests' and the viewing audience. 'The talk show ideology' trains those who confess to see themselves as ''victims' rather than possibly...irresponsible, weak people,' with the result that 'traditional boundaries between very private matters and public discussions are continuously breached' (178). For Abt and Seesholtz, the talk show confessional is socially, because morally, dangerous: 'The split between the televised action and the concomitant social effects in real life situations must be eroding our collective ability to make causal connections between actions and consequences' (187-188).

114

What, it is fair to ask at this point, does 'memory talk' look like? Here is an example of an exchange between a twenty-four-month-old boy and his mother, which Nelson quotes to illustrate the dominant role of the parent in the memory work involved:\r\n\r\n>C: Mommy, the Chrysler building\r\nM: The Chrysler building?\r\nC: The Chrysler building?\r\nM: Yeah, who works in the Chrysler building?\r\nC: Daddy\r\nM: Do you ever go there?\r\nC: Yes, I see the Chrysler building, picture of the Chrysler building\r\nM: I don't know if we have a picture of the Chrysler building. Do we?\r\nC: We went to..my Daddy went to work\r\nM: Remember when we went to visit Daddy? Went in the elevator, way way up in the building so we could look down from the big window?\r\nC: big window\r\nM mmhm... (Language 166)\r\n\r\nFrom such fragmentary beginnings as these, where the parent is doing most of the work, the balance of power will gradually shift until the child, having acquired the habit of reviewing autobiographical memories and mastered the narrative skills to organize them, can perform a self-narration of her own, such as this one by Emily in monologue at thirty-three months:\r\n\r\n>We bought a baby.\r\n[False starts: cause, the, well because, when she, well]\r\nwe thought it was for Christmas,\r\n*but when* we went to the store we didn't have our jacket on,\r\n*but* I saw some dolly,\r\n*and* I yelled at my mother and said\r\nI want one of those dolly.\r\n*So after* we were finished with the store,\r\nwe went over to the dolly and she bought me one,\r\n*So* I have one. (Language 204)\r\n\r\nStudy of this material, Nelson concludes, reveals children in the process of learning 'to talk about - and to remember - their experience in specific ways': 'They learn, that is, to 'narrativize' their experience' (Language 170). \r\n\r\nIn this formative phase of 'memory talk,' where parents are teaching the child how to work with autobiographical memories, parental styles of engagement can exert an enormous influence, transmitting both models of self and story.\r\n\r\n*Language*: Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind

111

The child's 'memory talk' training, I might add, confirms John Shotter's concept of 'social accountability' presented in Chapter 2: the child learns that she is expected to be able to display to others autobiographical memories arranged in narrative form.

108-109

Since it has been established that very young children do in fact have episodic memories¹ , it becomes reasonable to ask why they don't retain them. Rejecting any Freudian notion of repression, Nelson embraces instead an evolutionary perspective which prompts her to focus on the function of event-memories: 'As an adaptive system, the general function of memory is to predict and prepare for future encounters, actions, and experiences. That is, memory as such has no value in and of itself, but takes on value only as it contributes to the individual's ability to behave adaptively' ² . In early childhood, accordingly, memory work is dedicated to the generation of general event-memories or scripts that help to organize the child's knowledge of daily routines - bathing, eating, going to bed, and so forth. In this early developmental context, Nelson reasons, memory for novel experience (the one-time event that at a later stage will be valued and stored as autobiographical memory) 'does not have the same functional value, unless it is repeated' ³ , and so, if it is not incorporated into a general event-memory, it is not retained.\r\n\r\n\r\n¹ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 162\r\n² Katherine Nelson, 'The Ontogeny of Memory for Real Events.' In Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory, pg 265\r\n³ Katherine Nelson, Language in Cognitive Development: Emergence of the Mediated Mind, pg 158

...the key environment in the individual's formation is the family, which serves as the community's primary conduit for the transmission of its cultural values.

[Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]'s sensitive - and also startlingly funny - account of the permutations of racial identity, of 'being colored' (xiv), demonstrates how 'we'-experience shapes the trajectory of 'I'-narrative, not only his own but the one he projects for his children: 'In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to 'people of color,' to being, once again, 'colored people.' ...But I have to confess that I like 'colored' best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother's voice and the sepia tones of my childhood.

...developmentally speaking, the rise of the self that is the subject of autobiographical discourse dates from the child's initiation into a lifelong practice of self-narration.

The premise of Shotter's concept of social accountability is that 'one ontologically learns how to be this or that kind of person' in conversation with others (138). Identity formation, then is socially and (more specifically) discursively transacted: thus 'the capacity to be addressed as a 'you' by others is a preliminary to the ultimate capacity of being able to say 'I' of oneself' (143). \r\n... \r\nIf Shotter's theory of social accountability is correct, and I think it is, the longevity of the myth of autonomy is hardly surprising: in this view, we are conditioned precisely not to recognize the relational dimension of selfhood; possessive individualism, functioning as the dominant social 'text' to which we are held 'accountable,' masks the contribution of the 'practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137) toward making us what we are: 'we fail to register the fact of our involvement with others' (142).

The psychologist John Shotter has worked out a much more searching answer to the enduring vitality of the myth of autonomy. In order to correct psychology's - and his own - one-sided preoccupation with inner states, Shotter proposes 'to repudiate the traditional 'Cartesian' starting-point for psychological research located in the 'I' of the individual, ...and to replace it by taking as basic not the inner subjectivity of the individual, but the practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137). \r\n \r\n'In my earlier views,' Shotter writes, 'I was clearly still in the thrall of classic 'text' of identity, possessive individualism' (147). Possessive individualism is C. B. Macpherson's term for the proto-capitalist model of identity proposed by Hobbes and Locke, which posits the individual as 'essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them' (quoted in Shotter 136). Stepping back, Shotter asks why he - why we all - continue to account 'for our experience of ourselves...in such an individualistic way [as Macpherson describes]: as if we all existed from birth as separate, isolated individuals already containing 'minds' or 'mentalities' wholly within ourselves, set over against a material world itself devoid of any mental processes' (136). We talk in this way, he answers, because we are disciplined to do so by 'social accountability': 'what we talk of as our experience of our reality is constituted for us very largely by the already established ways in which we must talk in our attempts to account for ourselves - and for it - to the others around us...And only certain ways of talking are deemed legitimate.' So pervasive is this discursive discipline that not only our talking but 'our understanding, and apparently our experience of ourselves, will be constrained also' (141).

53-54

Like Benjamin, Steedman conceives of identity as relational, and the autobiography she writes is also relational, for she believes that her mother's self and story provide the key to her own. 'Children are always episodes in someone else's narrative,' she affirms, 'not their own people, but rather brought into being for particular purposes' (122).¹ In this way the familiar and perfunctory beginning of so many autobiographies - 'I was born...' - acquires a new and signal importance, for Steedman argues that her dawning recognition of the circumstances of her conception - her realization that she was neither a wanted nor a legitimate child - determined the very structure of her personality. \r\n\r\n¹ /publication/67

Models of identity are centrally implicated in the way we live and write about our lives. As Paul Smith puts it, 'None of us lives without reference to an imaginative singularity which we call our self' (6).¹ ... In forming our sustaining sense of self, we draw on models of identity provided by the cultures we inhabit. Some of these models are life enhancing, some not. \r\n\r\n¹ /publication/66

If Shotter argues that the individual's sense of self is generated in conversation with others, several theorists in Burkitt's survey - including George Herbert Mead and Rom Harre - propose that our subjectivity is itself structured as a conversation. Harre writes: 'The fundamental human reality is a conversation, effectively without beginning or end, to which, from time to time, individuals make contributions. All that is personal in our mental and emotional lives is individually appropriated from the conversation going on around us and perhaps idiosyncratically transformed.

In contrast to the unmediated, direct perception of the ecological and interpersonal selves, the reflexiveness that distinguishes Neisser's extended, private, and conceptual selves is much like the 'consciousness of consciousness' that distinguishes Edelman's higher consciousness from primary consciousness. Following the acquisition of language and the entry into symbol-making activity that accompanies it, the child now engages in the 'self-representations' that these modes of selfhood predicate. Development of these selves is normally shaped and fostered in a concerted way at home and school by the adults of the child's immediate culture. These are the selves familiar to traditional autobiographers, who relate the story of the extended and private selves by drawing on their culture's store of conceptual selves.

The Functions of Event Memory: Some Comments on Nelson and Barsalou (in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory)

Author: Robyn Fivush

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1988)

The Ontology of Memory for Real Events (in Remembering Reconsidered: Ecological and Traditional Approaches to the Study of Memory)

Author: Katherine Nelson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press (1988)

Food of the Gods

Author: Terence McKenna

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Author: Julian Jaynes

Publisher: University of Toronto Press (1978)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

524

You know the old saying, 'different strokes for different folks'?' she asked over her shoulder. 'Hagbard and FUCKUP have classified sixty-four thousand personality types, depending on which strokes, or gambits, they use most often in relating to others.' She found the book and carefully walked back to her chair. 'For instance,' she said slowly. 'Right now, you can intersect my life line in a number of ways, from kissing my hand to slitting my throat. Between those extremes, you can, let's say, carry on an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation underneath it, or an intellectual conversation with sexual flirtation and also with kinesic signals indicating that the flirtation is only a game and you don't really want me to respond, and on an even deeper level you can be sending other signals indicating that actually you do want me to respond after all but you're not ready to admit that to yourself. In authoritarian society, as we know it, people are usually sending either very simple dominance signals— 'I'm going to master you, and you better accept it before I get really nasty'— or submissive signals— 'You're going to master me, and I'm reconciled to it.' 'Lord in Heaven,' Harry Coin said softly. 'That was what my first session with him was all about. I tried dominance signals to bluff him, and it didn't work. So I tried submissive signals, which is the only other gimmick I ever knew, and that didn't work either. So I just gave up.' 'Your brain gave up,' Stella corrected. 'The strategy center, for dealing with human relations in authoritarian society, was exhausted. It had nothing left to try. Then the Robot took over. The biogram. You acted from the heart.' 'But what has redundance got to do with this?' George asked. 'Here's the passage,' Stella said. She began to read aloud: People exist on a spectrum from the most redundant to the most flexible. The latter, unless they are thoroughly trained in psychodynamics, are always at a disadvantage to the former in social interactions. The redundant do not change their script; the flexible continually keep changing, trying to find a way of relating constructively. Eventually, the flexible ones find the 'proper' gambit, and communication, of a sort, is possible. They are now on the set created by the redundant person, and they act out his or her script. The steady exponential growth of bureaucracy is not due to Parkinson's Law alone. The State, by making itself ever more redundant, incorporates more people into its set and forces them to follow its script.

All human beings consider themselves sinners. It's just about the deepest, oldest, and most universal human hangup there is. In fact, it's almost impossible to speak of it in terms that don't confirm it. To say that human beings have a universal hangup, as I just did, is to restate the belief that all men are sinners in different languages. In that sense, the Book of Genesis— which was written by early Semitic opponents of the Illuminati— is quite right. To arrive at a cultural turning point where you decide that all human conduct can be classified in one of two categories, good and evil, is what creates all sin— plus anxiety, hatred, guilt, depression, all the peculiarly human emotions. And, of course, such a classification is the very antithesis of creativity. To the creative mind there is no right or wrong. Every action is an experiment, and every experiment yields its fruit in knowledge. To the moralist, every action can be judged as right or wrong— and, mind you, in advance— without knowing what its consequences are going to be— depending upon the mental disposition of the actor. Thus the men who burned Giordano Bruno at the stake knew they were doing good, even though the consequence of their actions was to deprive the world of a great scientist.

'If you can never be sure whether what you are doing is good or bad,' said George, 'aren't you liable to be pretty Hamlet-like?'

'What's so bad about being Hamlet-like?' said Hagbard. 'Anyway, the answer is no, because you only become hesitant when you believe there is such a thing as good and evil, and that your action may be one or the other, and you're not sure which. That was the whole point about Hamlet, if you remember the play. It was his conscience that made him indecisive.'

'So he should have murdered a whole lot of people in the first act?'

Hagbard laughed. 'Not necessarily. He might have decisively killed his uncle at the earliest opportunity, thus saving the lives of everyone else. Or he might have said, 'Hey, am I really obligated to avenge my father's death?' and done nothing. He was due to succeed to the throne anyway. If he had just bided his time everyone would have been a lot better off, there would have been no deaths, and the Norwegians would not have conquered the Danes, as they did in the last scene of the last act.

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction.

When we appreciate how natural it is for man to strive to be a hero, how deeply it goes in his evolutionary and organismic constitution, how openly he shows it as a child, then it is all the more curious how ignorant most of us are, consciously, of what we really want and need. In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope. Occasionally someone admits that he takes his heroism seriously, which gives most of us a chill, as did U.S. Congressman Mendel Rivers, who fed appropriations to the military machine and said he was the most powerful man since Julius Caesar. We may shudder at the crassness of earthly heroism, of both Caesar and his imitators, but the fault is not theirs, it is in the way society sets up its hero system and in the people it allows to fill its roles. The urge to heroism is natural, and to admit it honest. For everyone to admit it would probably release such pent-up force as to be devastating to societies as they now are. The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the “high” heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the “low” heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

What Do You Say After You Say Hello?

Author: Eric Berne

Publisher: Grove Press (1972)

Two other slogans common among therapists are also common among the general population: 'You can't tell people what to do,' and 'I can't help you, you have to help yourself.' Both of these are outright falsehoods. \r\n\r\nYou can tell people what to do, and many of them will do it and do it well. And you can help people, and they don't have to help themselves. They merely have to get up, after you have helped them, and go about their business. But with slogans such as those, society (and I mean all societies) encourages people to stay in their scripts and carry them through to their often tragic endings. A script merely means that someone told the person what to do a long time ago and he decided to do it. This demonstrates that you can tell people what to do, and are in fact telling them all the time, especially if you have children. So if you tell people to do something other than what their parents told them, they may decide to follow your advice or instructions. And it is well known that you can help people get drunk, or kill themselves, or kill someone else; therefore, you can also help them stop drinking, or stop killing themselves, or stop killing other people. It is certainly possible to give people permission to do certain things, or to stop doing certain things which they were ordered in childhood to keep doing. Instead of encouraging people to live bravely in an old unhappy world, it is possible to have them live happily in a brave new world.

How is it that the members of the human race, with all their accumulated wisdom, self-awareness, and desire for truth and self, can permit themselves to remain in such a mechanical situation, with its pathos and self-deception? We are more aware of ourselves than apes are, but not really very much. Scripts are only possible because people don't know what they are doing to themselves and to others. In fact, to know what one is doing is the opposite of being scripted. There are certain aspects of bodily, mental, and social functioning which happen to man in spite of himself, which slip out, as it were, because they are programmed to do so. These heavily influence his destiny through the people around him, while he still retains the illusion of autonomy. But there are remedies which can be applied.

Richard Schechner has made a careful and scholarly analysis of time patterns in the theater which also applies to the dramaturgy of real-life scripts. The two most important types he calls 'set time' and 'event time.' Set time runs by a clock or calendar. The action begins and ends at a certain moment, or a certain time is given for its performance, as with a football game. For script analysis, we can call this clock time (CT). In event time, the activity is to be completed, like a baseball game, no matter how long or short a time it takes by the clock. We will call this goal time (GT). There are also combinations of these. A boxing match can terminate either when all the rounds are completed, which takes a set time or clock time, or when there is a knockout, which is event time or goal time.\r\n \r\nSchechner's ideas are useful to the script analyst, particularly in dealing with 'Can' and 'Can't' scripts. A child doing homework can be given five different instructions. \r\n \r\n*Clock Time Can* \r\n* 'You need plenty of sleep, so you can stop at nine o'clock.' \r\n\r\n*Clock Time Can't* \r\n* 'You need plenty of sleep, so you can't work after nine o'clock.' \r\n \r\n*Goal Time Can\r\n 'Your homework is important, so you can stay up and finish it.' \r\n \r\n*Goal Time Can't\r\n Your homework is important, so you can't go to bed until you finish it.' \r\n \r\nThe two Cans may relieve him, and the two Cant's may irritate him, but none of them box him in. \r\n \r\n 'You have to finish your homework by nine o'clock so you can get to sleep.' \r\n \r\nHere Clock Time and Goal Time are combined, which is called a 'Hurryup.' It is evident that each of these instructions can have a different effect on his homework and on his sleep, and when he grows up, on his working habits and his sleeping habits.