Oldal 72 [72]
SHORT INTRODUCTION TO BONDIAN THEORY AND THE DRAMA EVENT
According to Bond imagination is central in the formation of the self, as
humans give meaning to the meaningless matter surrounding them and also
events in the social world using their imagination. What happens on the stage
is similar to the structure of how people come to understand and relate to
the world around them. The relationship they form to the world, how they see
it and understand their role in it can be understood as their ‘self’.?*8
Let us turn back to the quote about society misusing the self’s need for
justice. Bond claims that human beings living in society want to feel at home
in the world, and this feeling develops into “the imperative to justice”.?*4
Human beings need to understand their material and social surrounding
to feel at home in it. However, the freedom to understand is influenced to
a great extent by popular narratives that give strong interpretations of
different personal and socio-political situations. These interpretations
are accepted often as truths by others living in the culture — for example
the parents of a child, or her peers — so the individual often also perceives it
as the explanation. These understandings about the world, what is considered
right and wrong, the values taken on, are represented in actions of individuals,
but they are also strongly connected to the culture they live in. Jerome Bruner
describes this process in the following way:
We neither shoot our values from the hip, choice-situation by choice-situation,
nor are they the product of isolated individuals with strong drives and compelling
neuroses. Rather, they are communal and consequential in terms of our relations
to a cultural community. They fulfil functions for us in that community. The values
underlying a way of life, as Charles Taylor points out, are only lightly open to
‘radical reflection’. They become incorporated in one’s self identity and, at the same
time, they locate one in a culture.”
Bond considers culture as a collection of stories that relate in different ways
to human needs and questions. He says that “a culture’s story is a plot which
binds its people to their place and means of existence. It gives life meaning
and so it is the source of judgement”.”*° Here again we can turn to Bruner
who explains that “our sense of the normative is nourished in narrative, but
so is our sense of breach and of exception. Stories make ‘reality’ a mitigated
reality”.*?” He carries on by stating that we equip children “with models and
procedural tool kits for perfecting” narrative skills, because “without those
skills we could never endure the conflicts and contradictions that social life
233
Bond: The Cap, xxiv.
234 Bond: Freedom and Drama, 212.
235 Jerome Bruner: Acts of Meaning, London, Harvard University Press, 1990, 29.
236 Bond: Our Story, 3.
37 Bruner: Acts of Meaning, 97.
+ 71°