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Face, Facework and Political Discourse
Peter Bull & Anita Fetzer
International Review of Social Psychology 2010, 23(2/3), 155-185.
Peter Bull Department of Psychology, University of York, York, United Kingdom Mailing address: Department of Psychology, University of York, Heslington, York YO 5DD, United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] Telephone number: +44 (0) 1904 433142 Fax: +44 (0) 1904 433181 Anita Fetzer University of Wuerzburg, Germany. KEYWORDS: face; facework; political discourse; political interviews; Prime Minister’s Questions; political speeches
Political discourse is examined through the concepts of “face”and “facework” in the context of three distinct genres of political communication: broadcast interviews, Prime Minister’s Questions, and monologue. In broadcast interviews, politicians must defend themselves against face-threatening questions by avoiding responses which may make them look bad or which circumscribe their future freedom of action. Questions to the Prime Minister are posed not by political interviewers but by other politicians. Face aggravation is a salient feature of this type of discourse, although the Prime Minister must also defend both positive and negative face. Delivering a political speech (monologue) gives politicians the opportunity to enhance positive face, although they may also protect negative face by avoiding awkward commitments, and take the opportunity for face aggravation, by attacking their political opponents. It is proposed that the salience of different forms of facework varies according to genre of communication, as do the appropriate communicative skills and techniques.
- Face and facework In common parlance, we talk figuratively of “saving face”, “losing face”, or “maintaining face”; we also talk of a “slap in the face”, we can even describe a remark as “in your face”. Of course these terms are metaphors, but what is this face that is lost, saved, maintained or slapped? In their highly influential theory of politeness, Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) postulate what they call a “model person”, a conceptualization of people as rational agents who think strategically and are conscious of their language choices. The two primary needs of this model person are face and information; in every communication, these two needs are accommodated. That is to say, interlocutors are not regarded as exchanging just factual or propositional information (information that is either true or false), but also as exchanging information in relation to their face needs. According to Brown and Levinson, face is important in all cultures; it can be lost, maintained or enhanced. Thus, face preservation is a primary constraint on the achievement of goals in social interaction. “Some acts are intrinsically threatening to face and thus require ‘softening’” (Brown & Levinson, 1978, p.24). Communicative actions such as commands or complaints may be performed in such a way as to minimise the threat to positive and negative face, where positive face is defined as “the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others”, negative face as “the want of every ‘competent adult member’ that his actions be unimpeded by others” (Brown & Levinson 1987, p.62). So, for example, a request to do something may threaten someone=s negative face (by restricting their freedom of action), whereas disagreements may threaten positive face (by showing a lack of approval). These two concepts - that of the model person and the face-threatening act - are central to politeness theory. At the time the theory was proposed, the central role of information exchange in communication was widely accepted in linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. In
contrast, the use of references to the interlocutor=s face were regarded as arbitrary, if not irrational (Ferrara, 1985, Lakoff, 1973, Leech, 1983), hence were not deemed relevant to the examination of strategic interaction. Subsequent to Brown and Levinson=s (1978, 1987) theoretical proposals, the concept of politeness as linguistically represented references to face has been assigned the status of a fundamental premise in natural-language communication. Politeness theory itself was based on a highly influential paper “On Face-Work” by Goffman (1955/1967). According to Goffman (1967, p.5), face is “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact”. From this perspective, face can be seen as the successful presentation of identity (Holtgraves, 2002). “To fail to have one’s identity ratified is to lose face in an encounter, to have one’s identity ratified is to have face, to maintain an identity that has been challenged is to save face. Face, then, is something that resides not within an individual but rather within the flow of events in an encounter” (Holtgraves, p.39). Goffman regarded face as salient in virtually all social encounters, facework the means whereby threats to face could be minimised. Although Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) conceptualisation of face is known as politeness theory, the terms face and politeness are not synonymous. Politeness is a form of facework, but not the only one. Indeed, Goffman (1955/1967) specified three kinds of facework: an avoidance process (avoiding potentially face-threatening acts), a corrective process (performing a variety of redressive acts), and also what he called making points (the aggressive use of facework). The latter was elaborated in Goffman’s (1967) extended essay “Where the Action Is”, where he discussed incidents in which adversaries deliberately antagonize one another; the focus is on who will back down in such situations, and on what counts as backing down.
language use achieved interactionally, but so is face. According to Arundale (2006, p.201): “To paraphrase Heritage=s (1984) observations with regard to conversation and context, communicative action is both relationship-shaped and relationship-renewing, and like context, relationship is endogenously generated within talk, not simply exogenous to it”. From this perspective, whenever people communicate, their relationship is brought into the communication and brought out in the communication (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007). By the same token, face may also be brought in and brought out in the interaction, as may the different aspects of face identified above. As an example, one might consider a politician and an interviewer who in the past have had a relationship based on mutual respect and trust, which has guided their interactions accordingly. One day, the interviewer poses a potentially face-threatening question referring to a recent public controversy in which the politician has been accused of telling blatant lies. In this context, the original definition of their relationship cannot be simply renewed; it has to be redefined as one in which trust and mutual respect can no longer be taken for granted.
- Identifying types of facework in political discourse According to Goffman (1955/1967), not only do people defend their own face in social interaction; there is also an expectation that they should seek to protect the face of others. In the context of a political interview, politicians might support the face of political colleagues and allies; at the same time, they would not wish to support the face of negatively valued others, such as their political opponents. Goffman further observed that in many relationships, the members come to share a face, so that in the presence of third parties an improper act on the part of one member becomes a source of acute embarrassment to other members. This is especially true of the British party political system, where the party is paramount: typically, the politician appears on television as the representative of that party to defend and promote its collective face.
Consequently, on the basis of Goffman's observations, it can be argued that politicians must concern themselves with three faces: their own individual face, the face of significant others and the face of the party which they represent (Bull, Elliott, Palmer & Walker, 1996). These proposals are further discussed in Section 3.1 with particular reference to broadcast interviews. Political discourse can also be understood in terms of politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1978/1987). According to Jucker (1986, p.71), “It is clear that what is primarily at issue in news interviews is the interviewee's positive face”. Upholding positive face, Jucker proposed, is of particular importance for democratically-elected politicians in the context of political interviews. This is because their political survival ultimately depends on the approval of a majority of people in their own constituency. Conversely, Jucker argued that negative face is of little importance, because the politician by consenting to be interviewed has already consented to his/her freedom of action being limited in this way. In fact, if positive face is essentially the need to be well regarded by others, it is arguably of fundamental importance for politicians, irrespective of communicative context - whether a politician is being interviewed, making a speech, debating with another politician, or responding to a question from a member of the public. A politician who suffers serious loss of positive face may come to be regarded as a liability by his or her political party. A government minister or an opposition front bench spokesperson may come under pressure to resign; a Member of Parliament may be defeated at the next general election, or if deselected, may not even be allowed to stand for election as the party’s parliamentary candidate. But negative face is also important. Even in news interviews, where Jucker (1986) downplayed its significance, politicians may suffer serious potential face damage through responses to questions which circumscribe future freedom of action. If, for example, the leader
themselves in a favourable light, to defend their freedom of action, and in an adversarial political system, to attack the face of their political opponents while defending their own. But the significance of these different forms of facework cannot be considered just in the abstract. As Arundale (2006) points out, face is a relational and interactional rather than an individual phenomenon, in that the social self is interactionally achieved in relationship with others. From this perspective, political facework needs to be considered in situated context. In the next section, three different genres of political communication are discussed: broadcast interviews, PMQ, and monologue. Each genre involves a different form of political interaction within a different interpersonal relationship: specifically, politicians questioned by professional interviewers, a politician questioned by other politicians, and politicians addressing an audience.
- Genres of political discourse 3.1 Broadcast interviews Broadcast interviews characteristically take the form of question-response sequences; the interviewer is expected to ask questions, to which the politician is expected to reply (e.g., Greatbatch, 1988; Clayman, 1989; Heritage, Clayman & Zimmerman, 1988). This is the principal means used by interviewers for creating and sustaining talk (Schegloff, 1989), although they may also engage in non-questioning actions to open and close the interview (Heritage & Greatbatch, 1991). The adversarial nature of broadcast interviews has been analysed in depth by Clayman and Heritage (2002). They identified a number of techniques for adversarial questioning, such as accusatory questions, and what they call splits, forks and contrasts, whereby the questioner highlights inconsistencies in the politician’s own position, or disagreements with political allies. They also argued that adversarial questioning creates pressures on politicians towards
evasiveness, and identified a number of techniques for evasion, both overt and covert. Overt techniques may involve requesting the interviewer’s permission to shift the agenda, justifying an agenda shift, or even an outright refusal to answer. Covert techniques may include repeating the words of the question (without answering it), or modifying the question in such a way as to facilitate and conceal a shift in the agenda. If broadcast interviews are adversarial, there is also a constraint on interviewers as journalists to be impartial. For example, according to the editorial guidelines of the BBC, “impartiality lies at the heart of the BBC’s commitment to its audiences”. Techniques for maintaining impartiality while conducting adversarial interviews have been identified by Clayman and Heritage (2002). Notably, the question-response format itself allows interviewers to defend their neutrality, on the grounds that “they are only asking questions”. But within questions, interviewers may utilise embedded statements to disagree with, criticize or in some other way challenge the politician. Another device is the attribution of statements to third parties. This ensures that the interviewer's personal position is not on record, and neither the interviewer nor the news organization can be held responsible for statements which may be critical or even hostile to the politician. Through techniques such as embedded statements and third party attributions, interviewers may “... fulfil the complex journalistic requirement ... of being interactionally ‘adversarial’ while remaining officially ‘neutral’” (Clayman, 1992, p.196). Although Clayman and Heritage’s (2002) analysis was not couched in terms of face and facework, the adversarial nature of broadcast interviews can readily be analysed in this way. Thus, Bull (2008) proposed that politicians’ responses in broadcast interviews can be understood in terms of what is called the face-threatening structure of questions. This concept was developed from a detailed analysis of face-threats in 18 broadcast interviews with the leaders of
alternatives. If the politician chooses one of the alternatives, then this can be seen as a reply. It is also possible to present an additional alternative, which can be regarded as a reply. If the politician does not choose between the alternatives offered by the interviewer, nor offers another alternative, then response is regarded as a non-reply. This term was coined in preference to the more pejorative term evasion , because under certain circumstances not giving an answer can readily be justified, for example, when a question is based on an erroneous or misleading presupposition (Bull, 2009). A reliability study, in which the senior author and an independent scorer coded two broadcast interviews, showed good inter-observer agreement for the coding of question, replies and non-replies (k = 0.82, Cohen, 1960). On the basis of this analysis, it was proposed that the structure of a question (yes-no, interrogative word, disjunctive) will project a number of possible responses. Thus, to a yes-no question a politician may reply in the affirmative, or in the negative, or equivocate. To an interrogative word question, the politician may reply or equivocate. To a disjunctive question, the politician may choose one of the two alternatives, offer a third alternative, or equivocate. Each of these principal response options can present potential threats to face. For each question, potential response options are considered, and if deemed face-threatening, then coded according to whatever face threat/ threats they are judged to present. The results were analysed in the context of a theory proposed by Bavelas, Black, Chovil and Mullett (1990), according to which people typically equivocate when posed a question to which all possible replies have potentially negative consequences, but where nevertheless a reply is still expected. This situation Bavelas et al. call a communicative avoidance-avoidance conflict (referred to subsequently as a communicative conflict ). Many everyday situations can be seen to create such conflicts. Perhaps the most common involves a choice between saying
something false but kind and something true but hurtful. For example, a person receives a highly unsuitable gift from a well-liked friend, who then asks directly “Did you like the gift?” In responding, the person has two negative choices: saying, falsely, that s/he likes the gift or saying, hurtfully that s/he does not. According to equivocation theory, the person will if possible avoid both of these negative alternatives - especially when a hurtful truth serves no purpose. What s/he does instead is to equivocate; for example, someone might say “I appreciate your thoughtfulness”, with no mention of what s/he thought of the actual gift. Bavelas et al. stressed that although it is individuals who equivocate, such responses must always be understood in the situational context in which they occur. Bavelas et al. (1990) further observed that communicative conflicts are especially prevalent in political interviews, and Bull et al. (1996) hypothesised that a prime cause of such conflicts in this situation are threats to face. Notably, of all the 557 questions in the 18 interviews from the 1992 general election analysed by Bull et al., none were judged to be devoid of any form of face-threat. Furthermore, there were some questions (41%) to which all the principal forms of response were judged face-threatening. The modal response to these conflictual questions was to equivocate (64% of responses), just as equivocation theory would predict. The modal response to the remaining 59% of non-conflictual questions was to reply. A second study was conducted, based on six interviews from the 2001 British general election (Bull, 2003). This study compared questions posed by professional political interviewers with those posed by members of the audience. It was hypothesised that political interviewers would be more likely to pose conflictual questions, hence would be less likely to receive replies. Whereas the politicians replied to 73% of questions from members of the public, they only replied to 47% of questions from political interviewers ( p < .025). Furthermore,
only replies but also non-replies can be understood as forms of communicative skill, in which appropriate facework plays an important role. 3.2 Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ) The tradition of PMQ in the British House of Commons dates back to the eighteenth century, to the era of the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1721-1742). In its present form, PMQ is a relatively recent innovation, dating from 1961, when Harold Macmillan was the Conservative Prime Minister (Harris, 2001). The procedure was changed in 1997 by Tony Blair (Labour Prime Minister, 1997-2007) to just one 30-minute session every Wednesday. Notably, the tradition of question time is not confined to the United Kingdom. In Canada, this convention is known as Question Period, in Australia and New Zealand as Question Time, in India as Question Hour. However, the ensuing discussion is based on British parliamentary proceedings, which notably have been broadcast on television since 21 November 1989. In the United Kingdom, backbench MPs who wish to ask a question to the Prime Minister must enter their names on the Order Paper. The names of entrants are then randomised in a ballot to produce a list in which they will be called by the Speaker of the House of Commons. PMQ always begins with the same tabled question to the Prime Minister, asking if s/ he will list his/her official engagements for the day. At this point, the Member called upon can put as a supplementary almost any question that relates to the Prime Minister=s general responsibilities or to some aspect of government policy. The MP is limited to this one supplementary, and cannot follow up the Prime Minister=s response with any further utterance (Harris, 2001). However, this is permissible for the Leader of the Opposition (currently the Conservative Party), who is permitted six questions (often used in two groups of three), while the leader of the third largest party (currently the Liberal Democrats) is permitted two. Only the
initial question regarding the Prime Minister=s engagements is tabled. Because Members have the advantage of putting supplementaries to the Prime Minister without notice, PMQ has the important elements of unpredictability and surprise. Like a broadcast political interview, PMQ takes the form of question-response sequences. The principal difference is that the questions in PMQ are posed by opposing politicians, not by political interviewers. Furthermore, whereas interviewers in broadcast interviews are expected to be impartial, there is no such requirement in PMQ: MPs can be as partial and as unashamedly partisan as they choose. Furthermore, MPs are protected by parliamentary privilege, which allows them to speak freely in the House of Commons without fear of legal action on grounds of slander. However, they are expected to observe certain traditions and conventions with regard to what is termed “unparliamentary language”. Specifically, they should not be abusive or insulting, call another member a liar, suggest another MP has false motives or misrepresent another MP. These conventions are enforced by the Speaker of the House, who may ask a Member to withdraw an objectionable utterance. Over the years, Speakers have objected to the use of abusive epithets such as blackguard, coward, git, guttersnipe, hooligan, rat, swine, stoolpigeon and traitor (House of Commons Information Office Factsheet G7, 2004), and most recently (18 March, 2009) “complete phoney” (Bull & Law, 2009). A Member who refuses to comply with the Speaker may be suspended from the House (referred to as “naming”). Thus, in PMQ, MPs must orient both to the expectation that the dialogue should follow a question-answer pattern, and refrain from unacceptable unparliamentary language. Within these constraints, they are still allowed a great deal of scope to make strategic use of face aggravation. In doing so, they may employ considerable ingenuity to remain within the conventions of acceptable parliamentary language. For example, Winston Churchill once famously substituted
clearly perceive that the main role of the political opposition is to oppose, i.e., to criticize, challenge, subvert and ridicule the policies and positions of the government. Nowhere is this more evident than in these weekly exchanges between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Indeed, the latter is likely to regard his/her reputation as a skilful and effective adversary as a significant measure of his/her success as a leader, whereby s/he can best enhance his/her own face by undermining that of the Prime Minister. At the same time, if the Prime Minister allowed him/herself to become overtly angry during the course of these exchanges, this would be seen both by the Opposition and by his/her own party as a significant loss of face. Arguably, this adversarial and confrontational process has only been heightened by the televising of Parliament (Harris, 2001). Although the focus of the studies of PMQ by both Harris (2001) and Bull and Law (2009) was specifically on face aggravation, other forms of facework are also characteristic of PMQ. Thus, the Prime Minister needs to defend positive face against attacks from Opposition MPs, and to defend negative face by avoiding commitments which may hamper his/her freedom of action. Conversely, the positive face of the Leader of the Opposition depends at least in part on an ability to undermine the face of the Prime Minister. It should however be noted that the Prime Minister does not receive questions just from Opposition MPs; throughout each session, the Speaker tries to alternate between opposers and supporters of the government. Government MPs are notorious for asking “toadying questions”, which may be totally disingenuous, intended not only to ingratiate the individual MP with the Prime Minister, but also to give him/her the opportunity to put the government in the best possible light, thereby enhancing the Prime Minister’s positive face. Nevertheless, the highlight of PMQ is the interchange between Prime Minister and
Leader of the Opposition, in which face aggravation plays a central role. These gladiatorial contests can be seen to reflect their rivalrous relationship as contestants for the post of leading the Government. Thus, both asking and responding to questions are key skills in PMQ discourse, in which skilled facework plays a central role. 3.3 Monologue In the dialogic configuration of broadcast interviews and PMQ, references to face are employed and negotiated by both questioner and respondent. However, the situation is less obvious in the monologic configuration of a political speech. Nevertheless, political monologue can also be understood as an interactive event. Notably, Atkinson (e.g., 1983, 1984a, 1984b) compared speaker-audience interaction to the way in which people take turns in conversation, although in the context of a political meeting, audience “turns” are essentially limited to gross displays of approval or disapproval (such as cheering or heckling). If these audience responses are restricted, they may also be highly significant in the context of facework. Thus, the speaker’s positive face may be enhanced through applause or cheers; alternatively, it may damaged through heckling or booing. Atkinson (e.g., 1983, 1984a, 1984b) further pointed out that audience responses are not random, indeed, they are highly synchronized with speech: typically applause occurs either just before or immediately after a possible completion point by the speaker. This close synchronization suggests that audience members must in some way be able to project possible completion points in advance of their occurrence. According to Atkinson, it is features in the construction of talk itself that indicate to the audience when to applaud. In particular, he identified two distinctive formulaic rhetorical devices: three-part lists and contrasts. In a three- part list, once the listener recognizes that a list is under way, it is possible to anticipate the
