Face and face-work

Goffman’s notion of ‘face’ has been succinctly described as “a person’s immed-iate claims about “who s/he is” in an interaction” (Heritage 2001). This is distinct, but related to more enduring aspects of a person’s identity. Goffman’s own definition of face is “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact”

(page 5) (Goffman 1967). Participants in an interaction do interactional work in order to maintain their own face and ensure an image of self which is consist-ent, but they are also actively engaged in saving the face of other participants in the interaction. The maintenance of face is therefore an inherently social, cooperative and moral affair, involving each party in a careful balancing act of attention to the current circumstances, with an eye to the social world beyond the immediate encounter. Interactants may endure threats to their own face, if there is a sense that the ‘self’ may be being undermined by alternative images of the self which are inconsistent. Participants in an interaction are also mutually engaged in trying to avoid threats to the face of fellow participants. The flow of

110 an interaction is dependent on this mutual attention to face by all parties.

Goffman adds to this by making the observation that

… in trying to save the face of others, the person must choose a tack that will not lead to loss of his own; in trying to save his own face, he must consider the loss of face that his action may entail for others

(page 14) (Goffman 1967).

He suggests that the performances that constitute face-work, including the tacit cooperation with others in their own performances of face-work are demonstrative of a willingness to abide by ground rules in social interaction.

In the short data extract shown in Table 5, the patient’s comment about the doctor’s break from work (“good (0.2) you deserve it”) is an example of face-work. It suggests that in the (limited) capacity in which the patient knows the doctor, the patient feels that his break from the work of general practice is well deserved (the implication being that he works hard most of the time and that this should be rewarded with some time off…even if it means that the doctor has not been available recently for appointments). The doctor similarly responds with some face-work when he replies “ye- well we went to [name of city]”. To simply agree with the patient that he deserved a holiday might be interpreted as presumptuous and immodest, but to disagree would be to suggest that patient’s remark was misplaced. Instead, we see something in between. He begins with what seems like an agreement – which he self-repairs

“ye- well” so that it becomes a partial agreement, and he then offers up some limited information about his holiday, which makes clear he is happy to engage with a modicum of ‘social chat’ at least in the context that the patient has opened up the topic.

111 5.2 The work of Bakhtin/Vološinov

The work of Russian literary critic and theorist Bakhtin/Vološinov,⁷ originates in the early 20^th Century, but was not available in English translation until the 1970’s and 1980’s. Bakhtin’s work, which broadly resonates with Marxist orient-ations of his time, was a critical response to the dominant assumptions regarding language use which were prevalent throughout most of the early to mid 20^th Century – specifically the traditional structuralist Saussurean view (see also §4.4) which characterised language as a system of pre-given representative signs which users of language select from and then transmit in order to make themselves understood i.e. a purely representational, neutral view of language. I will briefly describe three closely interrelated concepts:

• Language as dialogic

• Voice

• Language as a site of social struggle 5.2.1 A dialogic view of language

Bakhtin/Vološinov emphasised the importance that spoken utterances and written texts must be understood in terms of how they are responding to and anticipating other utterances or texts (including spoken or written texts).

Vološinov states that the word is a “two-sided act…the product of the reciprocal relationship between speaker and listener” (page 86) (Vološinov V 1973) – a notion which Maybin explains as follows:

Any utterance or text, always, therefore faces two ways: backwards to-wards previous utterances, and forto-wards toto-wards its own addressees

(page 70) (Maybin 2001).

This is Bakhtin’s central notion of the dialogic nature of communication, the idea that meaning is only possible at the point at which speaker and listener (or

7 The authorship of some of the Bakhtin/Vološinov writings is controversial, with some critics believing that work attributed to Vološinov may actually have been written by Bakhtin. This debate is one I do not discuss further, but for the purpose of this thesis “Bakhtinian” refers to the work of Bakhtin and / or Vološinov.

112 writer and reader) connect, and that the specific meaning will vary depending on this immediate social context, and is therefore never neutral (Bakhtin 1981b).

Blommaert explains this concept thus: that meaning “is always a meeting of (at least) two minds and consciousnesses, creating results that cannot be reduced to either one of them” (page 44) (Blommaert 2005d). Bakhtin/Vološinov concerns himself not only with specific utterances (compare this with Goffman’s participation framework §5.1.2) but with the whole pool of utterances available to the speaker (or writer). He emphasises the importance of both the immediate and the wider social context of this interactional exchange:

... the forms of signs are conditioned above all by the social organization of the participants involved and also by the immediate conditions of their interaction

(page 21) (Vološinov V 1973).

One consequence of the dialogic nature of communication is that it implies that utterances or texts always contain at least one other voice. The distinctions which Goffman makes between ‘speaker’ (be it animator, author or principal) and ‘hearer’ become blurred. Within any single utterance is a response to what has preceded the utterance (a ‘hearing’) as well as anticipation of what may follow (a ‘speaking’).