azdak

I read Kate Fox's Watching The English a few weeks ago, and laughed my head off at how well she'd put her finger on my own deeply ingrained cultural biases (she is particularly funny about queueing, about moaning, and about office Christmas parties). By the end of it, though, I felt that the entire essence of Englishness had actually already been summed up a couple of decades earlier in Brown and Levinson's On Politeness. On Politeness is one of the founding texts in the discipline of Pragmatics (of which most people have understandably never heard), and it examines cross-cultural politeness norms within the framework of what the authors call "positive and negative face". ("Slevy" was the Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Cambridge when I was doing my MPhil, and we were all terribly impressed by him, not to say jealous, because the book had arisen out of research he and Penny Brown had done for their PhD theses - they'd hammered it out on a typewriter as graduate students, in romantic cooperation, and it became an instant classic). Fox does refer to B&L occasionally, but doesn't really give them as much credit as they deserve, given that all the rules she formulates in the course of Watching the English pretty much come down to "avoid threatening your interlocutor's negative face".

I might be allowed to oversimplify drastically, B&L's argument is that some kinds of politeness pay attention to your interlocutor's "positive face" (eg making someone a compliment, making sure they have someone to talk to at a dinner party etc - Mr Knightly's asking Harriet to dance is an example of positive face), and other to their "negative face", which basically means you don't impose on them. And it struck me, reading Fox's book, that English culture is obsessive about negative face. That's why the English don't talk to one another on trains, except in clearly defined situations (it is permissible to moan if your train is delayed for a long time between stations, for instance) - because your fellow passengers may not wish to be obliged to talk to you. Their negative face - being left in peace - outweighs any possible benefit to be derived from a friendly chat. Similarly, the English disapproval of boasting comes from a dislike of being obliged to compliment the boaster, such an obligation being a clear imposition and hence failure to attend to the obligatee's negative face.

I was thinking about this because in the past week or so I have been given a link by various people I hardly know to their various pieces of work, and it made me extremely uncomfortable. These weren't people asking me to beta for them, it was people basically wanting me to send them feedback. And I hated it!!! I feel very strongly that work should speak for itself, that one shouldn't go around begging for feedback, that if someone doesn't comment, it's rude to ask them to, and that putting someone in a position where they are obliged to say something nice about your work, or else come across as an arrogant meanie, is the height of bad manners.

Then I wondered if I was overreacting, if I was turning into a curmudegonly old so-and-so, if I ought to be flattered that people wanted my opinion (even if they only wanted my good opinion....) And then it struck me that what we had here was a clash of politeness models. I wasn't overreacting, I was being English. To me, ignoring my negative face and obliging me to provide a response I quite possibly don't want to give is massively bad mannered. To the people approaching me, it was nothing of the sort.

Of course, it didn't actually help me draft my responses. I can hardly say "Please be aware that I come from a culture that pays attention to negative face and will therefore react badly to being asked to feedback your work." So I did the classic English thing and ignored the requests. Silence being a well-known way of expressing disapproval in English culture...