Impoliteness, power and ethics

3.1 Communication ethics: responsibility, understanding and equality

The importance of ethics in communication has been increasingly recognized (Xie and Fan 2024). Planalp and Fitness (2011: 136), for instance, call for “the need to recognize the fundamental role of ethics in all aspects of relational communication”. Following a similar logic, one should also recognize “the fundamental role of ethics” in impoliteness as significant communicative phenomena. Nevertheless, a more urgent issue concerns what are the core tenets or concepts one should refer to when it comes to ethics in communication in general and in impoliteness in particular. Unfortunately, there are no well-developed, agreed-upon frameworks for one to resort to, perhaps largely due to conceptual diversity of communication ethics. Fortunately, multidisciplinary approaches can be employed to develop frameworks that will be able to accommodate various issues concerning communication ethics. Put differently, the issue of ethics in communication still remains a fascinating topic of great conceptual, theoretical and methodological potential.

It is worth noting that the landscape of communication ethics in recent decades has been shaped substantially by Levinas’ phenomenology of the Other, which not only emphasizes the “absolute alterity” (Levinas 1969: 207) of the Other as face, but ultimately calls for responsibility for the Other. Communication ethics, which tends to emphasize difference as well as responsibility for the Other (e.g., Arnett 2017, 2018; Pinchevski 2005) has arguably been influenced, to varying degrees, by Levinas’ philosophy. It must be stressed that Levinas’ theory of the Other calls for responsibility (or responsible action) of the superior “I” for the inferior Other in a face-to-face encounter. In other words, some key notions such as power, inequality, non-reciprocity and asymmetry presuppose any discussion or comprehension of Levinas’ ethics. It must also be added that for Levinas, the superior Master’s responsibility for the inferior Other is absolute and unconditional, despite the fact that the superior’s responsible action can in no way be guaranteed. Simply put, Levinas’ ethics primarily concerns the responsibility of the superior for the inferior, and one is even obliged to claim that Levinas’ ethics is essentially the ethics of responsibility. Responsibility for the inferior Other in communication therefore becomes one of the major concerns of communication ethics. There is no denying that Levinas’ philosophizing of ethics demands a one-sided, non-reciprocal obligation, as Pinchevski (2005: 9) comments:

Such conceptualization brings Levinas to the provocative speculation that the ethical relation is asymmetrical: one is responsible for the Other before and beyond being reciprocated by an equivalent concern – responsibility is my affair, reciprocity is the Other’s. Individual responsibility does not promise that every person will respond in the same way, or even respond at all.

Levinas’ emphasis on my responsibility for the Other is out of his concern with and solution to the fundamental inequality in human relationships. Nonetheless, Levinas’ ethics cannot be universally and effectively applied to all types of relationships, especially those that demand mutual responsibility and benefits. As Mumby (2011: 95) puts it, “‘acting ethically’ is a dynamic practice that requires an ongoing awareness of the everyday operation of power, and a willingness to engage ‘the other’ in a manner that is both responsive to his/her/their difference and that opens up the possibility for self-transformation”. Noticeably, Mumby’s (2011) idea of ethics not only recognizes the omnipresence of power in daily interaction, but emphasizes the need for reciprocal and dynamic exchanges between the self and the other. Following this line of thought, communication ethics, focused primarily on mutual respect for individual difference and benefits, prioritizes mutual understanding, rather than unilateral responsibility as does Levinas’ ethics.

Apart from the regard for responsibility and understanding, the issue of equality lies at the heart of communication ethics, as Fritz (2016: 6) comments: “Respect, dignity, justice, and fairness as orientations of value relevant to the human being give rise to concerns for equity and/or equality as sites of ethical consideration in interpersonal communication”. Planalp and Fitness (2011: 136) not only consider ethics pivotal to communication, but associate ethics with the well-being and prosperity of humanity, as they suggest the need to “promote a culture of caring that enables human beings to flourish, both individually and in relationship with one another”. A culture of care refers to the well-being of humanity, which is in line with the idea of equality. Apart from a rather brief review of the three major concerns of communication ethics, namely, responsibility, understanding and equality, I also feel the need to resort to the philosophical perception of ethics, for two reasons. On the one hand, ethics is primarily a philosophical notion, and the definition of ethics can always be traced back to philosophy. On the other hand, my theorization of the ethics of impoliteness would be less legitimate without it being securely grounded in a definition of ethics widely accepted and agreed upon by philosophers and scholars for centuries.

3.2 Ethics in philosophy

There is no denying that ethics and morality are often discussed alongside one another in philosophy given the interlocking complications between the two, and needless to say, there is no easy way of distinguishing one from the other in light of their exasperatingly complicated relationship. Nevertheless, the distinction between ethics and morality in terms of the field of (im)politeness seems more critical than ever, especially in view of the fact that (im)politeness researchers currently are almost unanimously preoccupied with the issue of morality (Xie and Fan 2024), and have little to no concern for the issue of ethics. This leaves space for raising questions such as whether the issue of ethics can potentially contribute to (im)politeness research in ways different from that of morality. Previous research on communication ethics has indicated that the issue of ethics plays a fundamental role in interpersonal communication, in light of which, one has every reason to assume that ethics should become an important concern for (im)politeness researchers, and can contribute in no small degree to the field.

As for the distinction between ethics and morality, Darwall (2017: 552) comments that most philosophers accept Bernard Williams’ conceptual distinction between ethics and morality. Specifically, Williams (2011:1) considers Socrates’ question – how one should live – as the central concern of ethics, and questions such as “what is our duty” (Williams 2011:4) as concerns of morality, which often involve the “deontic moral questions of right and wrong” (Darwall 2017: 552). Given the complexity of the two concepts in their own right as well as Williams’ widely recognized authority in philosophy, I mainly draw on Williams’ conceptual distinction as the starting point of my discussion. In my view, ethics is more concerned with an ontological issue, i.e., the being of the individual self in the world, while morality concerns the evaluative issue of right and wrong. Here one feels the need to argue that the question of right or wrong is rather suspicious, in that concepts such as good and bad, right and wrong, polite and impolite, etc., are essentially binary oppositions which are hierarchical in nature. In other words, right and wrong are subject to a power relation in which what is right for one party (e.g., the superior) might be wrong for the other (e.g., the inferior), and the other way around also applies. As long as power is at play in communication, any judgements (evaluations) based on binary oppositions (e.g., good and bad; true and false) are inescapably arbitrary and contentious. As Wartenberg (1990: 4) points out, “[t]he concept of power, in its basic social use, indicates the presence of a hierarchical relation in society, one whose legitimacy is called into question”. It is not that questions of right and wrong are irrelevant or problematic, but that researchers would find themselves stuck in a situation where they find it hard to justify or clarify their footing when they make judgements about right and wrong, good and bad, polite and impolite. Haugh (2024: 220), in examining his data, poignantly raises questions about “how we justify the perspective(s) we take, as analysts, on (im)politeness”.

A pressing issue remains that researchers would need to justify their footing in the first place when they estimate certain behavior or speech as right or wrong, polite or impolite, etc., because such binary oppositions indicate an unequivocally hierarchical relation to which these judgements would be inescapably subject, and would therefore have little value given that any judgment of that sort has no promise of any justice. One may argue that one does not have to take a side to make judgements of right and wrong, while the question remains whether any analyst (or, an observer, a co-participant or a reader), either as a cultural insider or outsider, can ever justify his or her neutral stance. This is a dilemma without easy solutions. This is more like a catch-22 situation in which researchers must first take a stance to enable them to make a right-or-wrong judgement, but eventually in order to justify their evaluation, they would have to justify their stance in the first place, given that there is no such thing as a neutral stance.

What I am driving at is that if I were to develop a framework concerning the ethics of impoliteness, I wouldn’t concern myself with the question of right and wrong, or good and bad, because making such good-or-bad judgements means that one has, very often unknowingly, already taken sides with either the superior or the inferior in a power relation, and that move is in itself arbitrary and problematic. Not surprisingly, communication ethics has been regarded “as a pragmatic alternative to prescriptive telling about ‘the right’ and ‘the wrong’ that aligns solely with one’s own ideas of the good irrespective of the Other’s position” (Arnett et al. 2009: 1–2). I’ve brought up the issue of morality here mainly because I need to clarify that my theorization of the ethics of impoliteness distinguishes itself from existing research concerning morality in the field of (im)politeness, which does concern questions of good or bad (Haugh 2015: 173). I draw on Williams’ distinction of ethics and morality, largely in the sense that I’m conscious of the fact that my theorizing the ethics of impoliteness will not concern questions of right and wrong.^[3] Without that conceptual confusion in mind, what’s at stake remains in what sense Socrates’ question – how one should live – can shed light on my theorizing the ethics of impoliteness. I will address this issue in the following section.

3.3 Ethics of impoliteness

The way I see it, Socrates’ question – how one should live – emphasizes one’s being in the world which is primarily characterized by one’s difference. Moreover, difference is more essential in that each individual “is shaped by differance” (Derrida 1976: xliv), which is perhaps one of the reasons that communication ethics stresses mutual understanding of, and respect for, difference. Arnett (2018: 32) details:

Communication ethics requires study of what matters to facilitate understanding of difference within persons and institutions. The world has never been a place of uniform agreement, as our history of war attests. However, the stark characteristics of goods protected and promoted in this historical moment make this perspective on communication ethics a form of common sense in an era defined by difference. We can no longer assume that mutual knowledge and commitments shape similar interests. The importance of communication ethics commences with practical knowledge that we disagree on both the important and the trivial.

Arnett (2018) notes that not only are individuals and institutions characterized by difference – the age that we are living in is defined by difference, which has important implications. Firstly, interpersonal communication is teeming with conflicts and disagreements between interactants. In this sense, impoliteness which features conflictive practice based on difference is more commonly exercised and noticed in communication than politeness, which, more often than not, prioritizes harmony and agreement. Secondly, interpersonal communication is more profoundly characterized, shaped and transformed by conflicts and disagreements grounded in difference. If we agree that interpersonal communication is essentially an act of negotiating difference, conflictive practice categorized under the umbrella term “impoliteness” is arguably more essential than politeness. Moreover, conflictive phenomena, as acts of negotiating difference, have greater potential in facilitating genuine understanding between interactants than politeness, which more often than not involves repressing one’s difference for the sake of maintaining harmony. Furthermore, as impoliteness largely manifests in conflictive practice based on individual difference, the ethics of impoliteness primarily concerns how conflictive practice can potentially contribute to interpersonal understanding and benefit one’s being in the world.

In theorizing the ethics of impoliteness, one is particularly aware that the importance of power cannot be overemphasized. As Castells (2009: 10) notes: “Power is the most fundamental process in society, since society is defined around values and institutions, and what is valued and institutionalized is defined by power relationships”. The issue of power simply cannot be avoided in discussing the ethics of impoliteness, as Bousfield (2008: 129) comments: “the exercise of power is both ubiquitous and inescapable when dealing with any aspect of politeness and impoliteness”. Power shapes, conditions and transforms social relationships, and one can even say, without causing much controversy, that power is the most fundamental element in social interaction. Power is, more often than not, oppressive, and certainly one of the factors that make communication “unethical to the extent that it functions in a systematically distorted manner to foreclose possibilities for full, open, and noncoercive dialogue” (Mumby 2011: 87). Nevertheless, Foucault (1979, 2003) reminds us that power can be productive as well, and I thus identify the productive aspect of impoliteness (as an exercise of power) as the ethics of impoliteness. There is no denying that politeness and impoliteness can both be oppressive as discourse of power. Nevertheless, the ethics of impoliteness concerns the “creative” (Culpeper 2013: 9–10), “positive” and “inventive” (Sorlin 2013: 55–57), productive or constructive aspects of impoliteness that can help reshape relationships and enhance understanding. In my theoretical framework, I place special emphasis on power for the reason that dialogue on equal terms and genuine understanding will not be possible if the oppressive aspects of power get the upper hand. Habermas (1984: 100) also reminds one that the act of speaking involves three claims to validity, namely, claims to truth, rightness and truthfulness, which, however, will not be achieved if communication is subject to a power relation that cannot be challenged or reshaped. In this sense, the ethics of impoliteness recognizes the productive, rather than the oppressive, aspect of power in reshaping and transforming an existing unequal relationship.

Needless to say, power is perhaps the most important, but by no means the only element that matters to interpersonal communication. In this paper, I endeavor to define the ethics of impoliteness mainly in terms of power as the very first step approaching the topic, though not without awareness that the significance of power doesn’t necessarily overshadow other elements that matter in no small measure to communication such as race, gender, religion, sexuality, to name just a few. Drawing on previous research on communication ethics, impoliteness and power as well as the philosophical connotations of ethics, I hereby propose a definition of the ethics of impoliteness as follows:

The ethics of impoliteness concerns the ways in which impoliteness as communicative practice can potentially help improve personal character and facilitate genuine understanding between interactants who negotiate difference and meaning in apparently unequal, power-laden relationships. Impoliteness, as an exercise of power, is unethical when it aims to insult, ridicule, threaten, dominate or exert one’s will upon the other, or control the other’s action; it is ethical when it contributes to mutual respect for human dignity, individual difference and dialogues on equal terms. The ethics of impoliteness is in no way a unilateral, non-reciprocal obligation, but a mutual responsibility of both parties who, highly aware of the unequal nature of their social relation, have the willingness or conviction to challenge, interrupt, subvert or transcend an existing power relation in an effort to defend their unique individuality, including their thoughts, views and goals, which manifests most quintessentially how one should live in the world.

The above definition is far from depicting a full picture of the ethics of impoliteness, in that it is just a tantalizing attempt to address the ethics of impoliteness, particularly in terms of power. It might be useful to clarify that theorizing the ethics of impoliteness is certainly a second-order endeavor, with an aim to understand and interpret impoliteness as communicative phenomena in relation to the constructive roles it can potentially play in social interaction. On the other hand, I will apply a combination of first-and-second-order, or multilayered, perspectives (Haugh 2024) in my analysis of the impoliteness phenomena, i.e., I will take into account not only the participants’ evaluations of one another’s linguistic performance (first-order, emic), but the norms and conventions of that particular historical context (first-order, folk theoretic) in which the conversations occur. My application of Culpeper’s (2011) definition of impoliteness, as well as my own theorization regarding the ethics of impoliteness to the analysis of the linguistic phenomena, is obviously a second-order perspective. I will apply concepts or terms to my discussion of the (im)politeness phenomena in Pride and Prejudice without favoring one participant over the other, and with an acute awareness that I’m clearly not siding with either party, be it the superior or the inferior, or the upper class or the middle class (as in the case study). As a researcher, I consider impoliteness primarily as communicative phenomena, and the ultimate goal of my research is to achieve understanding (perception), rather than judgement (evaluation).^[4] In the following section, an analysis of Pride and Prejudice will be provided to demonstrate the ethics of impoliteness, i.e., in what ways impoliteness as communicative practice facilitates interpersonal understanding, reshapes human character and transforms social relationships.

4.1 Research on and summary of Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has been favored by scholars and researchers (e.g., Afzali 2017; Brown and Curry 2002; Hardy 2019; Musyafa’ah et al. 2022) who are mostly interested in the issue of politeness regarding the novel, and there hasn’t been any research approaching the text concerning the issue of impoliteness. As a matter of fact, this literary classic turns out to be a text which emphasizes the ethics of impoliteness while criticizing the superficiality and falsehood of politeness.

First impressions – also the original title of the novel – can be deceiving, which is one of the central ideas of Pride and Prejudice, and which is also pertinent to my discussion of impoliteness as important communicative phenomena. The novel mainly details the courtship between Mr. Darcy and Miss Elizabeth Bennet, which is filled with a series of conflictive phenomena largely due to their mutual prejudice – conditioned by their difference in class and status – against one another. However, their conflictive interaction, while seemingly driving them apart, is gradually drawing them close to one another, and their happy marriage at the end of the novel is a natural outcome of their genuine understanding of each other. A parallel, though slightly minor, storyline concerns the courtship between Mr. Bingley and Miss Jane Bennet. Unlike Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Bingley and Jane Bennet are always agreeable to one another. In other words, there’s nothing but politeness between them, which renders their relationship superficial and fragile, in that they don’t really know much about one another because their politeness towards one another has actually turned into walls keeping them distant and apart. Compared with the dynamic though conflictive interaction between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, there’s no real interaction between Mr. Bingley and Jane Bennet, which explains the fact Mr. Bingley and Jane Bennet are easily separated apart and later brought together mainly due to Mr. Darcy’s interference. Taken as a whole, this novel, far from preaching the virtues of politeness, highlights instead the virtues of impoliteness, or the ethics of impoliteness.

4.2 Discussion: impoliteness, power and ethics in Pride and Prejudice