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Tact and Silence
- University of Minnesota Press
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274 Tact TactandSilence Whereas tactlessness means saying the wrong thing, one is tactful when saying the right thing means saying the wrong thing on purpose and saying it right. Sometimes, though, it means saying nothing at all, and silence too may be a form of social policing. If the phrase“It isn’t done” signals politeness , what defines tact is more like“It isn’t said.” In both cases, though, the passive voice leaves the agent conveniently unspoken, giving the impression that proper behaviors are in fact justified by some sort of unquestionable transcendent authority rather than by social conventions. But the link between tact and silence often appears as elusive as silence itself. First of all, for silence to be tactful it mustn’t in fact create an effect of amplification, a sort of echo chamber or emptiness in which embarrassment may expand unchecked and make matters worse for everyone. To stare dumbstruck at someone else’s mishap is not tactful. Clearly, not all silences are made of the same stuff. Distinguishing between tacere and silere, for example, Barthes brings out the crucial difference between, on the one hand, what is deliberately unspoken and thus verbal in essence and, on the other, the absence of sound or noise:“Tacere thus, as silence of speech, is opposed to silere, as silence of nature or of divinity.”Tact, in that it always indexes something that remains implicit, pertains to the first case, to what Barthes calls “worldly tactic”: In such a“semiology” of worldly morality, silence has in fact a “speakerly” or“speechly” [“parolière” ou“parolante”] substance: it is always at the level of the implicit. When in the field of worldliness, of strong sociality (and what else is it but an excessively social, worldly language?), the implicit (and the silence that works as its “index”) takes part in the worldly combat: It is a polyvalent weapon. Silence, then, may have a direct relation with power in one way or another : “In fact, in every ‘totalitarian’ or ‘totalizing’ society, the implicit is a crime, because the implicit is a thought that escapes power.” One may be “ ‘imprisoned by reason of implicitness’— or better, ‘condemned by reason of silence.’” Himmler’s initial, euphemistic silence about the reality of the “final solution,” which in turn gestures toward the bystanders’ tacit approval of it, indicates that some kinds of silence may not be tolerated in liberal democratic societies either, at least in principle, if they violate certain basic values. The nondisclosure of one’s HIV- positive status isn’t criminalized in Tact 275 totalitarian regimes only, as we know; but to force people to speak is totalitarian by nature, regardless of what kind of society in which this coercion takes place. In fact, it isn’t too far- fetched to consider the forced display of the yellow star as the ultimate mandatory disclosure. The issue of power remains a blind spot in Eviatar Zerubavel’s sociological study of silence and denial, The Elephant in the Room. Noting as a starting point the discrepancy“between the private act of noticing and the public act of acknowledging,” he goes on to add: And the difference between what we actually notice and what we publicly acknowledge having noticed is at the very heart of what it means to be tactful. . . . As when we forgive someone or pretend to have forgotten the promise he once made to us but never kept, being tactful involves at least outwardly treating things we actually do notice as if they are somehow irrelevant and, as such, can be practically ignored. The mistake in this description consists in positing the “private” as no different from the“individual.” (The book starts off with“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” by Hans Christian Andersen. Everyone can see that the emperor is naked, but no one says a word to anyone else.) This conflation, when applied to tact, cannot account for the role of tact in class formation and maintenance. If a class is closed to outsiders, it cannot be said to be public in the strict sense of the term, but that class is nevertheless a key player in establishing a political system that extends beyond the boundaries of the class in question. And, clearly, class isn’t an individual matter either. Zerubavel’s stated purpose is to“examine institutionalized prohibitions against looking, listening, and speaking that, whether in the form of strict taboos or more subtle rules of tact,help keep certain matters off...