ABSTRACT
Politeness appears to be widely conceived in images of clothing, concealing and containing, as a conspicuous artifactual façade decorating the surface of social interaction. What is clothed, concealed and contained is presumed to be naked intentionality or instrumental reason, including the rudely impulsive reasons of the body (Elias 1978). Just as ritual symbolism is largely recognised through its superfluous deviation from instrumental action, implicating a surplus ‘wrapping’ of expressive meanings (Leach 1954: 12), so verbal and behavioural politeness is necessarily gauged against a Gricean touchstone of direct (‘unwrapped’) communicational efficiency. But as Brown and Levinson (1987) ironically demonstrated, this rude register of perfectly unambiguous communication – their ‘bald on record’ strategy – is itself perforce symbolic of differential status and power within normal social communication, which always needs to attend to the reciprocally sensitive ‘face needs’ of socially sensible interlocutors. From its outset, human communication is thus inflected by socially efficient considerations of politeness or face-saving indirection. Hence rudeness paradoxically becomes another kind of symbolic ‘dressing’ – albeit a conspicuous ‘dressing down’ – of expected social norms of polite communication, often expressive of alternative kinds of social solidarity or mutuality to those of hierarchy or social distance typically conveyed through express politeness.
