Page 82 [82]
FURTHER EXAMINATION OF THE BONDIAN ÁPPROACH
290
adopted by people. But Davis?" clarifies that Bond’s concept of ideology should
be understood more from a poststructuralist perspective giving language
a central role in creating the subjective reality.
[...] [Llanguage only works with abstractions therefore allows people to use language
to tell us how it is: to tell us what is real. If we allow ourselves to be taken into that
way of thinking, then we are taken over by ideology. In fact, postructuralists would
argue that that is what happens once the new-born child leaves the early pre¬
linguistic stage and enters into the world given to him or her through language.
Then the child takes in that culture and shapes itself and is shaped by it, as are
we all. Bond has taken this dimension of postructuralism into his thinking and
structured his drama accordingly. His whole drama is structured to avoid this
purely linguistic trap and enable the audience to ‘see’ with pre-linguistic/pre¬
encultured eyes, to avoid seeing through the opaque glasses of ideology.”
Davis links the creation of an individual’s subjective reality to the abstraction
of language. He defines ideology as “made up of a body of ideas and beliefs
that a nation, a political system, a religion has about itself”, and this body of
ideas is spread by those who “wish to spread their influence”.””° Perhaps Davis
is referring to the domination that language has on our thinking, and locates
the domination of ideology in this impact. Bond describes the process from
the individuals’ perspective, who do not realise that the social constructs they
grow into are artificially created. Hawkes offers a useful explanation:
All societies represent and give meaning to the lives of their inhabitants by
constructing systems of ideas about them. These systems are not optional extras,
but constitute the lived reality of the people. It follows that the ideological
representations by which we, in advanced capitalist countries, bestow significance
on our surroundings, are by no means ‘natural’ but are instances of the Aristotelian,
man-made ‘second nature’. It is characteristic of ideology, however, for this second
nature to pass itself off as the ‘first’ nature, so that what has been constructed by
human beings is fetishistically regarded as eternal and unchangeable.”
The monolith characteristic of ideology can be connected to this aspect
of its nature in Bond’s theory as well; so it is not what we believe in that is
homogenous, but the extent to which we accept the meaning attributed to
things in our culture are the ‘real’ meaning. The central question for Bond
290 Davis: Commentary, xxvi.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., xxii.
23 Hawkes: Ideology, 143-4.
+81 e