Introduction

Chapter 5 demonstrated that significant social and moral pressure is put on the performer of a rite of moral aggression to act, and on the recipient to counter-act. This is a dual pressure: the PSP in heckling scenarios cannot afford to avoid countering the heckler without losing his professional face, and similarly not helping a victim in trouble triggers a sense of shame. In a similar way, a heckler is humiliated if he is simply silenced by the PSP (unless a perceived act of heckling was unintentional, e.g. through coughing), as giving up the conflict implies the admission of defeat; a person who accepts bystander intervention without any struggle allows himself to be positioned as the ‘wrongdoer’. As my data shows, the only way out of such conflicts is if countering the heckler and bystander intervention are politely fringed, hence offering a way out for the recipient to accept the moral order and become reintegrated into his social/participant status that preceded the act that triggered the rite of aggression: examples (5.7) and (7.1) represent such cases. However, even then, there is moral and social pressure at least on the ritual performer.

On a personal level, this moral and social pressure triggers an imminent threat of the performer's and the recipient's face (see Kopytko 1993: 55 on this relationship between face and social pressure). The participants tend to voice their awareness of the moral and social pressure and the ritual setting by metapragmatically framing the performance and the counter-performance; this metapragmatic activity also serves as an interactional tool to have the ritual and its performer ratified or deratified by the third-party community. In this chapter, I take the rite of bystander intervention as a case study to capture the role of (im)politeness in rites of moral aggression. I explore the relationship between (im)politeness and participants’ perceptions and understandings of altruism and politeness principles as evidenced by their metacommunicative voicing (see Chapter 1 on the notion of ‘principle’). In so doing, I aim to capture the way in which (im)politeness gains momentum as first- and second-party participants evaluatively reflect on a ritual action of moral aggression (see Figure 1.4).