Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Excerpted from a Twitter-essay by R. Lemberg, immigrant (@RoseLemberg), 2018-06-26:

The concept of social face, coined by Goffman, is important here. Face is the positive social value a person claims when interacting with other people. Face is related to respectability, pride, and sense of self-worth.

Face is related to social status and to identity. What kind of face we can claim directly relates to who we are and what kind of social power we hold. People surrounding you are CRUCIAL to maintaining or not maintaining the kind of power we want/expect to project.

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Social status is maintained in a community. It can also be disrupted by a community. If a queen finds herself in a situation where nobody bows, nobody addresses her as "your majesty," and nobody shows any deference, it would not be easy to feel very royal. People - groups - societies - must maintain existing social norms and power relations. People must play along, or the relations of power are disrupted.

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Again, it is very important to understand that OTHER PEOPLE maintain or threaten one's social face, and therefore one's social standing, one's power.

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You already saw how this plays out in our MD example: the MD wants to be approved of by others (respect from nurses, patients), the MD wants to be unimpeded (e.g. to have orders carried out without disruption). People must play along for this to work.

More on positive face wants: people want to be accepted and approved by their family, social circle. More on negative face wants: people don't want to be told not to do the things they want to do. The more power one holds, the more one expects to have these face wants maintained. Maintaining face wants preserves the existing power relations. You have to be polite to people with more power, you do not have to be as polite to people with less power.

What is, then, politeness? Politeness is playing along with what is expected in terms of power. Politeness is maintaining the social power of people who already have social power (e.g. showing deference to doctors, politicians, etc) - this is positive politeness; and politeness is also not impeding the actions of other people, e.g. not resisting or questioning orders from power-holders - this is negative politeness.

Can you see how politeness is all about maintaining the existing social power in discourse?

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What are the current lamentations about "lack of civility" about, then? This is about the disruption of power relations. It's lamenting the lack of desire of people with lesser power to maintain the face of people with more power -- *because of their immoral actions*. "Return to civility" is a request to play along with power which demands 1) universal admiration (positive politeness) even as the power harms you, 2) not to impede the power's actions (negative impoliteness), even when it's snatching babies from parents.

[Bold emphasis added. Also, I've collected the thread onto a single page to make it easier for me to cut and paste from, and it occurs to me that some folks might find it easier to read that way too.]