The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

The Shower Scene

256 Tact TheShowerScene Tact always teeters on the brink of its undoing. An excess of it can be just as devastating as the lack of it. There I was, alone in the gym’s shower room, showering, when a line of people, men of course, all of them fully dressed, began to walk right by me on their way to the pool in what I gathered was some sort of business tour of the facilities. Two? Five? Ten? How many more of them were there? Now, I’m really not bashful about being naked in a locker room, but this endless parade, reminiscent of two dozen clowns stepping out of a Volkswagen Beetle, was a bit too much even for me. As these clothed men passed by little naked me one after the other, trying their best to appear suddenly fascinated by their loafers or staring in the opposite direction, at nothing, I grabbed my towel and covered myself clumsily while childhood nightmares about going to school without clothes on seemed to have come uncannily to life.The embarrassment was palpable on both sides. Is it possible, I now wonder, to be tactful as a group, or even in a group? Is there such a thing as collective tact, or does it remain the province of the sole individual? The answer will have to do with how one defines the individual and tact itself, of course. If tact is a social convention pertaining to class systems, cultural norms, and other forms of power distribution, then it is always collective. Even if it appears to come from the unaltered will of an autonomous self, it has to be measured against an external set of criteria. Furthermore, if the individual is an effect of social relations and not a precondition for their existence—­if,in other words,there is no such thing as an autonomous self—­ one reaches the same conclusion, only using a different route. Tact, it appears, can only be a collective thing. The sense of measure or perfect balance between extremes is what has made it such a perfect bourgeois value.It mirrors the defining quality of the social class that claims it as its own. This ideal quality, however, does not inhere in tact, as if it were natural and outside the realm of the social, waiting, like land, to be reunited with its rightful owners and to legitimate them. Tact was historically elaborated from within a given social class to serve the particular interests of that class. This also means, though, that others may reappropriate it as well. ...