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

Found Objects (I): Tact and Bearing Witness as Forms of Bricolage

306 Tact FoundObjects(I):TactandBearingWitnessasFormsofBricolage A quick Internet search of “tact” once yielded a curious list of other terms attached to it.I noticed that qualities thought to be directly contiguous with tact roughly fell into two categories. Some referred to deep, somewhat intangible qualities, such as wisdom, forethought, or charisma, that pertain to the tactful person’s inner ability to evaluate the situation he or she is facing. The others had more to do with the outer actions or words that are to follow that initial understanding. These words were resourcefulness, ingenuity, imagination, or creativity. Granted, many entries that came up in my search were want ads and job descriptions, but still, taken together, they made up a valuable overview of the way tact functions in the cultural imagination, perhaps even social practices. When it isn’t practiced as part of a larger yet veiled policing project, tact can offer a way to deal with difficult situations by making do with what’s handy for the immediate and mutual relief of all involved. Carmen’s question to the dying Sylviane, for example, doesn’t rest on the overall superiority of the former over the latter. After all, given what the friends were going through together in Auschwitz, the roles could just as well have been reversed. What is also striking in the passage is the fact that Carmen uses, on purpose,a perfectly hackneyed phrase in a context that seems shockingly incommensurate. But a platitude, in a sense, is something easily available to all. Its flat surface conceals no depth. It is simply there, one doesn’t have to look for it or wonder who will be able to understand it because everybody will be. Those who have little may then seize on it and reinvest it with a new meaning. Delbo also tells of the purposefully trivial—­ but tactful—­ last words that dying women would often utter so as to remove all momentousness to death and not discourage their friends. So you believed that only solemn words rise to the lips of the dying because solemn rhetoric flourishes naturally on deathbeds a bed is always dressed for funeral rites with the family assembled around it sincere pain and the appropriate demeanor. Naked on the charnel house’s pallets, almost all our comrades said,“I’m going to kick the bucket.” They were naked on a naked board. They were dirty and the boards were soiled with pus and diarrhea. Tact 307 This use of trivial words, as opposed to grander ones supported by institutions and rituals and designed to maintain societal continuity, also betrays the fact that master discourses had no more currency in Auschwitz, a place where inmates could envision no future beyond the end of the day. The extraordinary delicacy of the dying friends cannot be tied to a system of domination. In truth, it acts against one—­ Nazism—­ by tactically inhabiting another, the social conformity of the society they had left behind. This form of tactful bricolage also characterizes witnessing practices in the face of events so disastrous that they have no transcendence, point to no grand purpose or scheme of things. I mentioned, in this book and elsewhere, how Delbo, in order to appeal to her readers for greater proximity with an experience that will always escape them, makes use of literary clichés, stock images, and shared cultural assumptions, thus establishing common ground while protecting herself (and us) from totalizing knowledge . And in case we miss her point, she makes it clear that the content of these words can no longer be believed and that she uses them only to make contact. These words are rubble, and bearing witness to traumatic events takes place on rubble. It makes use of the remnants of concepts and values no longer in use—­ at least not for what they were originally intended to do. This requires resourcefulness and ingenuity to make small meanings and sustain small actions in the here and now with discarded bits and pieces of broken ideology, art, culture, institutions, and the like. If,as Goffman explains,the world becomes broken in the event of social embarrassment—­ he also calls this event a“false note” and a“dissonance”—­ we still have the freedom to resist the urge to fix it up and restore it to its old pristine state—­ to resolve the discordance. We may opt instead to remake the world in a different way. To see tact in its perpetual presentness, in...