Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie. Metadiscourses of Impoliteness Following “France’S 9/11” in Selected Print Media

Topics in Linguistics - Issue 16 – December 2015 DOI: 10.2478/topling-2015-0010 Je ne suis pas Charlie. Metadiscourses of impoliteness following “France’s 9/11” in selected print media Milan Ferenčík University of Prešov, Slovakia Abstract Almost immediately after the Charlie Hebdo shootings of 7 January 2015, some print media made room for alternative opinions of what had happened. The articles and the discussions they inspired are replete with evaluations which lend themselves to analysis using methods and procedures of Politeness Theory. The paper examines an example of a metadiscourse of (im)politeness which questions the “moral orders” underlying the cartoonists’ as well as other participants’ social practices vis-à-vis their ideological foundations, esp. freedom of speech as one of the principal liberties of our society. To that end, the approach to politeness as “social practice” is employed which, while insisting on multiple understandings of politeness, places participants’ evaluations at the centre of politeness research. Keywords Charlie Hebdo shooting, impoliteness, metacomment, politeness as discursive struggle, politeness as social practice Introduction aggression which was extensively covered in The quote from my example of a European mainstream mass media and metadiscourse, i.e. a discourse about ultimately invited audiences to take discourse(s), succinctly formulates the positions. The “Charlie Hebdo discourses” position in which many people seemed to almost immediately polarized the European become “trapped” following the deadly populace along two opposing memes: Je suis attacks on Charlie Hebdo’s staff on 7 January Charlie and Je ne suis pas Charlie. While the 2015 and who, while decrying the murders, former sprang out as an immediate and did not approve of Charlie Hebdo’s satirical spontaneous negative evaluation of the journalistic practices which preceded them. infamous violent act and sought to become By drawing our attention to the tension primarily an expression of solidarity with the between the illocutionary force of the victims and identification with the values cartoons depicting the prophet and the which they professed, esp. freedom of social goals which they were perceived to speech, the latter began to express a critical meet, viz. that of a face-attack, the quote position towards this identification by invokes the role of evaluations of others’ pinpointing the fact that freedom is not behaviour, as well as our own, which are without limits. The “Charlie Hebdo made against the background of the norms discourses” which appeared on the pages of that have been established in the print media and in the discussion fora sociocultural groups to which the evaluators underneath the articles are rich in claim to belong. The killings, and the evaluations addressing the ensuing developments over the following (in)appropriateness of this violent act, as months, further aggravated an already tense well as of the Charlie Hebdo practices atmosphere in Europe and added another regarded as having engendered it, and thus layer of discourse about violence and offer possibilities of insight into how societal 42 Topics in Linguistics - Issue 16 – December 2015 norms are “struggled over” vis-à-vis the expanded the “Be polite” rule by further identities taken up by the actors of these specifying the three sub-rules, viz. “Don’t disputes. The lexical-semantic layer of these impose”, “Give options” and “Make [alter] feel discourses testifies to the actors’ good – be friendly”. Through her ground- metapragmatic awareness and offers breaking study Lakoff delineated many of analysts a wealth of pragmatic data for the future developments in politeness theory scrutiny. My goal in the paper is to use the and practice, especially in its “classic” methods and procedures resulting from period. A similar task of developing Grice’s current approaches within Politeness Theory ingenious remark was tackled by Leech (PT) and to demonstrate their feasibility in (1983), who devised the “Politeness accounting for how debates following a Principle” as a finer system of six politeness major societal disruption lead to a maxims based on several pragmatic scales, reassessment of the underlying system of and placed it alongside Grice’s Co-operative values upon which sociocultural groups are Principle within his more general framework founded. of “Interpersonal Rhetoric”. Both Lakoff and Leech represent the core pragmatic 1. Politeness Theory – an overview approaches to politeness by assuming that In the course of just over forty years the area interlocutors behave rationally, i.e. use within pragmatics known as PT has not only means-ends reasoning to calculate why their gone through an emergence, rapid rise and partners depart from co-operation. For both extensive growth of empirical research but authors, politeness is a constraint on human also through a rethinking of its major tenets behaviour which is motivated by the need to and approaches, until it has stabilized into a minimize conflict and/or confrontation fully-fledged multidisciplinary domain of (Lakoff) and avoid discord/maintain concord social research. It grew in the latter half of (Leech). the past century as a reaction to the The bias towards the “polite” dimension of “pragmatic turn” which brought about a interpersonal relationships also marks the reorientation of research focus from langue third approach to politeness in the triad of to parole and from linguistic to politeness classics, viz. Brown and communicative competence. Ever since, Levinson’s (1978/87) model, which became politeness thinking and practice has been and has remained the most influential, best seen as evolving in three “waves” of known and most widely used ever since it approaches (Grainger 2011). was conceived (1978) and reworked (1987). The concepts they proposed form the 1.1 The first-wave approaches – the conceptual basis of PT and have become classic/pragmatic period widely known outside the discipline. Among Lakoff (1973), the pioneer of politeness them, the social-psychological concept of research, found pragmatic rules of well- “face” (which they took over from Goffman formedness on a par with those of a (1955)) occupies a central place, along with syntactic nature which controlled syntactic other terms such as “positive face”, “negative well-formedness and which, ultimately, face”, “face-threatening act” and several determined the grammatical competence of others. Like Lakoff and Leech, Brown and an ideal speaker/hearer, who was the Levinson also view politeness as the primary focus of interest of Chomskyan strategically planned, rational behaviour of a linguistics. Lakoff used the insight of the “model person”1 aimed at countering a advances in ordinary language philosophy, viz. Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Grice’s 1 In Politeness Theory, the notion of a Model Co-operative Principle, and incorporated Person represents a construct of an ideal them into her model of pragmatic interlocutor who is assigned the capacity to competence. While Grice himself made only rationalize from communicative goals to a passing note that, besides the maxims of expressive means and, when trying to be quality, quantity, manner and relevance “polite”, to use those strategies which there are possibly other maxims in consider the hearer’s face wants. Thus, the operation, such as the politeness maxim, it five politeness strategies as suggested by was Lakoff who was the first to explicitly Brown and Levinson (1987) are the result of formulate the “Be polite” rule as the second the Model Person’s rational means-ends of the two pragmatic rules (the first being reasoning through which he departs from Grice’s Co-operative Principle in the guise of the maximum efficiency, and “sacrifices” the formulation “Be clear”). Lakoff later cooperation (as captured in Grice’s 43 Topics in Linguistics - Issue 16 – December 2015 potentially adverse impact upon one’s face. (which betrayed a strong Speech Act Theory The face-threat inherent, as they claim, in influence) produced by the speaker and their virtually any type of behaviour is to be emphasis on the production pole of a averted or at least minimized by a strategy communication event, and ultimately, a chosen from an array of choices which possible lack of correspondence between rational users have at their disposal. These theoretical and lay understanding of what unprecedentedly detailed strategies led to an polite behaviour is. Efforts to rectify the upsurge of research into politeness issues problems inherent in the “classic” period of worldwide. politeness research were made in the The criticism levelled at the pragmatic subsequent decades. foundations of the models was principally directed at their Western bias, which was 1.2 The second-wave approaches – the claimed to be present in the rationality- post-pragmatic period based behaviour of an individual and also in In the early 1990s the first seeds of a the conception of individual face2 which substantial shift in politeness theorizing promoted Western values. Brown and were sown and new trends in its scope and Levinson’s claims for universality were methodology were forecast. Watts et al. contested and challenged especially by non- (1992) were among the first to suggest that Western researchers. Other criticism was politeness is a “marked surplus” made about the focus on isolated utterances phenomenon that is identifiable against a background of unmarked, expected (or, as it Cooperative Principle), but whose ultimate

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