Abstract
The concluding chapter offers a synthesis of the book’s main ideas from the specific angles of interdependency, hypocrisy and politeness. In accordance with a principle of ‘reciprocation’ that research has shown to be specific to human culture, political influence is predicated on a system of favours and debts that the series brings to the fore. In an age of constraining urgency, media and politics are also dependent on such exchanges of ‘friendly’ services. Correlating manipulation with a politeness–impoliteness continuum, Sorlin argues that only a hybrid form of im/politeness can account for cases where politeness is used as a strategy of manipulation. She concludes on the claim that traditional philosophy of language has unfairly discarded agonistic exchanges as ‘failures’ of communication.
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Notes
- 1.
I borrow the term from Domenici and Littlejohn (2006: 6–7), linking one’s life narrative to the notion of identity: ‘Each of us possesses a dynamic and changing lifescript that guides our personal, relational, and community identities. The lifescript is a roadmap for how to live a life and how to respond to the constantly changing landscapes in which we exist.’
- 2.
In a commercial coup to reposition itself as an Internet TV network, Netflix indeed releases entire seasons at once, allowing for ‘binge watching’. In addition to differentiating itself from other networks that are still constrained to a broadcast schedule, it also changes the producer’s relation to creation: where traditional series are dependent on the creation of cliff-hangers at the end of each episode to seduce the viewer into watching it one week later, the House of Cards creators have no such constraints any more, which implies more creative freedom for them. Furthermore, from the metarecipient’s point of view, the whole season can be seen and studied as a real aesthetic unit.
- 3.
For Bourdieu (2008: 20), the competition between channels paradoxically contributes to some ‘homogenization’ of information—every channel feeling obliged to treat what the other competing channels have treated. This is not the same though with TV series, which must be all the more creative as the competition is ferocious (numerous series have taken politics as backdrop for instance, see Chap. 1).
- 4.
Among ‘metarecipients’ are reviewers, university scholars or ‘film zealots’ (Dynel, 2011: 1633) who have more time to reflect on Frank’s rhetoric.
- 5.
See Chap. 4, footnote 22. Due to a clash of interests, the coercive action ‘impoliteness’ implies is not in the interest of the target.
- 6.
If sweet talk can be manipulative, manipulation is not always ‘seductive’ (for lack of a better word in English). There is thus a specificity to this type of manipulative discourse.
- 7.
‘If the addressee manages to search for the higher level deceptive intention, he may succeed in detecting the manipulative intention’ (see de Saussure, 2005: 177).
- 8.
Davidson (2004: 8) indeed shows that, for society’s sake, some writers from Locke to Austen came to perceive the hypocritical dissimulation inherent in good manners as preferable to conflict-inducing outspoken truthfulness: ‘In response to the very general fear that manners are closely allied to hypocrisy, many of the writers treated in this study choose not to avoid but to embrace hypocrisy as a synonym for manners and strip the word in the process of much of its stigma.’
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Sorlin, S. (2016). Concluding Remarks: Reciprocation and (Im)Politeness. In: Language and Manipulation in House of Cards. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55848-0_7
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