Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: IntroductionIf we understand ideology as the crystallisation, dissemination and consolidation of ideas about the world and of viewpoints that serve the interests of specific groups and help to implement social value structures, we are automatically compelled to consider a connection with politeness.As a catalogue of well-tried modes of conduct, politeness regulates social interaction, so that a minimisation of potential conflicts can lead to a maximisation of personal profit.In this respect politeness is undoubtedly connected with power. 1 It arises from social power relationships and reflects, regulates and, in the last resort, indirectly stabilises them.In this way it creates a self-enclosed circle of behaviour that can only be broken, if at all, by far-reaching social revolutions.The relationship between politeness and power exists on a number of levels and, above all, must be understood dialectically.In order to harmonise social communication, real power relationships have to be substituted by simulated power relationships; they have to be 'dealt with', as it were.Politeness, in other words, is based on the stronger giving power symbolically to the weaker and thereby setting in motion a mechanism of reciprocal exchange or balance of power that upholds the existing social relationships, and interprets and perpetuates them by constantly reformulating them.Out of the momentary defusing of conflict arises a workable social code of order which indirectly, but all the more efficiently, serves to strengthen the power of those who already possess it.Two aspects are at the centre of an ideology such as this: on the one hand, the intuitive willingness of the individual to expose her/himself to power in order to be protected by it and, on the other hand, the acquired consciousness of the need to keep one's distance, which is the mark of recognising and consolidating power.The former aspect, which we can call 'psychological', serves the natural need to reduce fear and create security; the latter aspect, which we can call 'socio-political', is connected with rational aims, more narrowly with claims to be able to reward or punish.Gestures of submission (GSs), which are the focus of this article, are one of the central means of expressing this dialectic game of power between fiction and reality.From the point of view of the actor, I understand a GS, in a very general fashion, to be any type of self-withdrawal, self-denigration and personal submission in favour of the interactional partner, which a polite individual is constrained to perform for social-ethical reasons.Seen
Author: Gudrun Held
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W2082871894