“The crucial point for the moment is that in taking on a subject position, the individual assumes that she is the author of the ideology or discourse she is speaking. She speaks or thinks as if she were in control of meaning. She ‘imagines’ that she is indeed the type of subject which humanism proposes—rational, unified, the source rather than the effect of language. It is the imaginary quality of the individual’s identification with a subject position which gives it so much psychological and emotional force”
(Weedon, 1987, 31).

The terms available to describe the ascription of correct attitude in a population are not adequate— “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxy” describe an adherence to correct speech and behavior, but the additional notion of a proper attitude requires a bit of neo-logism. I call this “orthoposture.” Orthoposture describes the willingness of the individual to spontaneously submit to a supplied attitudinal condition in a social circumstance. It requires that the individual not maintain a distance from this requirement, and so not engage in any counter reflection. It thus avoids the outcomes of parody, cynicism, and critical scrutiny.

The condition of orthoposture can describe the complicit agreement of the subject position under circumstances of domination. This attitude masks domination by pretending that the subject is actually in control. The pretense is supported by narratives (myths) that naturalize domination as an inherent feature of the subject’s personality. The outcome is a subject that is, in effect, self-dominated.

Orthoposture is a common attitudinal requirement in many formal and informal encounters. For example, in the sport of baseball, the center fielder attending to the approaching flight of a batted ball, cannot afford to also simultaneously muse about the overall circumstances of professional sports. Orthoposture releases the player from such a critical perspective, and allows for spontaneous action. This attitude is a factor in the successful completion of the current game encounter, and in the player’s ability to enter future similar encounters.

“Why should the factor of spontaneous involvement carry so much weight in the organization of encounters? Some suggestions can be made. A participant’s spontaneous involvement in the official focus of attention of an encounter tells others what he is and what his intentions are, adding to the security of the others in his presence. Further, shared spontaneous involvement in a mutual activity often brings the sharers into some kind of exclusive solidarity and permits them to express relatedness, psychic closeness, and mutual respect; failure to participate with good heart can therefore express rejection of those present or of the setting. Finally, spontaneous involvement in the prescribed focus of attention confirms the reality of the world prescribed by the transformation rules and the unreality of other potential worlds—and it is upon these confirmations that the stability of immediate definitions of the situation depends”
(Goffman 1961, 40).

The orthopostural attitude is that of spontaneous involvement directed as what is serious for the game—whether this be a baseball game, a political rally, a business meeting, or an intimate conversation—and an equal neglect of what is trivial within the game. The central task of an ideology is to guarantee the orthopostural attitude of all its players. The illusio here is to “buy-into” the game. Bourdieu is quite correct here. There is yet another illusio, which is also implicit in Bourdieu’s sense of this term: which is the illusio that one is, in reality, a “player.” In fact there are two reasons why this may not be true. First, one may be a player in a low-level game that a higher-level game promotes, and which has the effect of limiting playership in the higher-level game, while tricking the player into thinking they are playing in the higher level game.

Bourdieu’s notion of the dominated fraction of the dominant class describes how a game of “culture” is perceived to be autonomous to and equal to the capitalist “economy” game. But its autonomy is illusory, as is its equality.

And second, one might not be “a player” at all, in the sense that the ability and authority to effect changes (to “make plays”) may be tightly constrained by others. This is the common outcome of domination, and orthoposture here is both the main outcome of domination and also its main practice.