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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 prelinguistic 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/preencultured 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
