Habitus and Context Models

In Ideology, Teun van Dijk dismisses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a “psychologically inadequate” and only loosely defined in a cognitive sense.  Habitus, according to van Dijk relies on “structured dispositions” to explain social practices “which precisely need to be explained in terms of other cognitive representations”.  Cognitively, the concept is circular and presents no insight into the mental structures that form social practice.  For van Dijk, habitus does not compare to the concept of social cognition as a basis for the cognitive analysis of ideology.  I agree that habitus, even when compared to generative grammar for its combination of social and autonomous factors (dispositions) in the subject’s creative interaction with the world, seems more classificatory than cognitive in that it works well as a tool for typifying social practice and ideology.

Habitus is intellectually slippery and vague.  I have read a number of applications of the theory that seem to draw on differing perspectives of the concept.  Perhaps habitus is not a concept that cognitively links the social and the mental in the way that social cognition does.  Maybe habitus is an interface that selects and arranges mental spaces within the mind based on social cognition.  Maybe habitus is the structuring structure that creates van Dijk’s context model.  Context models, according to van Dijk, are selected scripts and schemas that I believe are formed into a platform of mental spaces that include Fouconnier and Turner’s grounding mental space, but also includes other spaces of background knowledge, place, tone, etc. for the purpose of contextualizing thought.  Further research will be required, but I believe habitus may be the cognitive process of selection and arrangement of context.  The context of any given social situation, action, or discourse is different in each encountering mind; elements of context schemas could be selected and arranged based on Bourdieu’s notion of disposition; a disposition that is generated anew for each thread of socially engaged thought.    

I believe that Bourdieu was attempting to link mental activity and social cognition in his definition of habitus taken from The Logic of Practice 1990:

“Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively “regulated” and “regular” without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor (53).”

Almost all cognitive activity related to conceptual matters occurs below conscious thought.  Dispositions generate and organize practices and representations according to the definition, but maybe they only generate and organize the scripts and schemas that in turn generate and organize the practices and representations.  This seems like a fine distinction, but it is a crucial one; dispositions need contexts in order to form.  Habitus arranges context models that serve to form dispositions.  In an Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu invokes the idea of context when he states:

“Through the habitus, the structure which has produced it governs practice, not by the processes of a mechanical determinism, but through mediation of the orientations and limits it assigns to the habitus’s operations of invention.  As an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to particular conditions in which it is constituted, the habitus engenders all the thoughts, all the perceptions, and all the actions consistent with those conditions and no others (95).”

The problem I have always had with habitus is its form.  Is it some form of mystical consciousness or is it metaphysical?  Brining together context model and disposition gives habitus a form; it is a selection and arrangement mental activity similar to conceptual blending.  Some specific cognitive sequence brings context schemas and scripts into specific context models that allow us to ground (in the Peircian sense) our thought. 

This thesis requires far more research and I believe it will be an interesting addition to the sociocognitive work of van Dijk on ideology.  Group belief systems are reliant on context and context on disposition; habitus may be the cognitive process that explains context formation.