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

Tact, Power, and the Police (II)

266 Tact Tact,Power,andthePolice(II) In general, one needs to exercise tact when one’s interlocutor is, in one way or another, vulnerable, when that person has failed at something and is feeling touchy about it.To feel embarrassed or ashamed is a way to acknowledge our failure and to have it confirmed by others around us. As the sociologist Erving Goffman notes,“To appear flustered, in our society at least, is considered evidence of weakness, inferiority, low status, moral guilt, defeat, and other unenviable attributes.” A person in need of tactful treatment is, in a sense, broken—­ not intact. His or her integrity as an individual (that which cannot be divided or broken down) has come into question insofar as feeling embarrassed presupposes the ability to judge oneself, standing on both sides at once at the doorstep of shame. The avowed purpose of tactfulness is to mask the individual’s failure to remain undivided, metaphorically covering his or her nakedness, if you will, and pretend that nothing happened. Oftentimes, however, tact singles out what it purports to ignore. That’s the point. But to expel inevitably means to bring boundaries into stark relief . Elaine Scarry, for one, understands torture as a spectacle of power that makes the private visible. Like mandatory disclosure, it“makes people talk” in order to silence them. Tact, as a form of policing, finds itself caught in a similar double dynamic. On the one hand, it outlines discrete categories, and, on the other, it betrays a synthetic view of a world in which the tactee is a kind of resident outsider, so to speak, providing in full view of the world the repellent spectacle of outsidedness. Visibility is thus central. The tactee must be seen, as if on a stage where a private drama unfolds for all to see. The tactor’s tactfulness, to be legitimated as such, must be witnessed by potential fellow tactors. The act of concealing, then, increases visibility, and with this come certain risks that must be addressed. If a person isn’t intact, presumably because he or she is delicate, the rupture extends beyond the boundaries of the individual into the small worlds that people make when they come together. Reflecting on tact and embarrassment, Goffman notes: During interaction the individual is expected to possess certain attributes, capacities, and information which, taken together, fit together into a self that is at once coherently unified and appropriate for the occasion. Through the expressive implications of this stream . . . the individual effectively projects the acceptable self into the interaction. . . . At the same time he must accept and honor Tact 267 the selves projected by the other participants. The elements of a social interaction, then, consist of effectively projected claims to an acceptable self and the confirmation of like claims on the part of the others. . . . When an event throws doubt upon or discredits the claims, then the encounter finds itself lodged in assumptions that no longer hold. The responses the parties have made ready are now out of place and must be choked back, and the interaction must be reconstructed. The sociologist Anthony Giddens, who sees tact as central to Goffman’s thought, adds,“   Thus people routinely shore up or ‘repair’ the moral fabric of interaction, by displaying tact in what they say and do, by engaging in ‘remedial practices,’ and helping others to save face. . . . If day-­ to-­ day social life is a game . . . , it is a game into which all are thrust and in which collaboration is essential.” That’s one way to look at it. What Goffman and Giddens recognize, even though neither one phrases it quite this way, is that tact has a normalizing function. Something is broken. It may be a person’s sense of self or it may be social cohesion, that is to say, the coming together of selves in a mutually agreeable manner. Either way, or both, things must be repaired. I see little to dispute here. But the idea that tact’s primary purpose is to restore the kind of interaction in which all selves are recognized as equally acceptable and honored, to use Goffman’s terms, seems much more problematic . How can tact normalize social relations without, at the same time, producing the very rupture it claims to mend? Or to rephrase the same question with the self in mind rather than the social, how can one have a sense of what a functioning self is without contrasting it to a dysfunctional...