Teaching Tact

This chapter shows that, for while it is true that Matthew Arnold focused on “the question of cultural values and intellectual and aesthetic standards,” the chapter suggests that it was precisely this focus that enabled Arnold to develop, against the grain of public discourse, an egalitarian ethic and a theory of education founded in the practice of tact. Arnold's writings propose, not a prescriptive content (of specific objects, rules, values, canonical goods), but a tactful mode of relation. It is a handling of experience, which is “adequate,” in Arnold's term, both to relieving the strain of, and finding new—egalitarian and creative—possibilities for, aesthetic freedom in modern social life. This effect of tact Arnold calls “deliverance,” and a “help out of our present difficulties.” It is a relation, a formal movement of making contact with the world, rather than an appropriation of the knowledge that would master it.

Relief Work

This chapter explores the work of Walter Pater. It shows that he wanted more from life. His essays raise the question of what this more might be, and where it might come from. They ask how we might become both more at home in and more penetrable by the vivid world. In an early essay, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), Pater rather mysteriously proposed: “He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky.” All of Pater's subjects seem engaged in this strangely heedful notation, as if on the lookout for a particular quality of life. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit” says Pater, glossing a statement by Novalis, “is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.” Pater's writing thus speculates at the boundary point of a “quickened sense of life.”

“Our Debt to Lamb”

This chapter considers Charles Lamb's deviation from eighteenth-century social and literary conventions. It reads together Lamb's tactful persona of Elia with his fellow essayists and contemporaneous debates about social change. Here, tact is a product of the modern city: never before had so many different people lived in such close proximity to one another, in a situation that required new forms of relating to difference and a reform of established, absolutist systems of status evaluation. Lamb's essays resist coercive claims to truth, keep meaning on the move, and preserve desire and possibility within social relations. Elia's language makes use of the possibilities of the essay form in order to provide the conditions for a phenomenology of tactful relation, a virtual reality, or what Lamb calls “illusion:” the cultivation of a neutral and impersonal space existing between people.

Introduction

This introductory chapter outlines some basic claims about tact, the subjects it touches upon, and the way this book is framed. In broadest terms: tact privileges encounters over knowledge, and an aesthetic of handling over more abstract conceptualization or observation—whether of people or objects. Tact can be described as a close and haptic attention to the moment, preferring a present ambivalence to a future perfection. Tact lends itself to political uses just where—in its refusal of assertion—it seems most impertinent to practical ends. It is a literary art that draws upon the particular resources of the essay as form; and it provides the grounds for a claim about the relationship between art and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy. Tact has its origins in a particular time and place, the British nineteenth century, but it is also a more generalizable and available style.

Aesthetic Liberalism

This chapter aims to resituate John Stuart Mill's early essays on aesthetics and poetry within the tradition of the tactful essayists studied in the other chapters of this book. As much as those of Charles Lamb, Mill's early essays are experiments, at once in both aesthetic and social form. Moreover, one can propose that the young Mill's aesthetic liberalism did survive: only not so much in the development of the discipline of political theory as in the nineteenth-century literary essay. The chapter looks closely at the tension between Mill's aesthetic and his argumentative liberalisms. It considers how and why the latter won out over the former during the course of his career.

Tact in Psychoanalysis

This chapter focuses on the writings of Marion Milner. Like Eliot in her essays, Milner laments the inadequacy of cultural resource available to support a creative life; but unlike Eliot in her essays, Milner is on the lookout for new uses for vulnerability. If the resources of the strong only serve to suppress the capacities and perceptions of those who are marginalized, then what use can they be to the weak? Though the chapter considers her diary books in some detail, its focus is on how their concerns with a freedom to see and feel for oneself, and the uses of vulnerability, shape her analytic work. In particular, how this work calls for a clinical sensibility with striking affinities to the tact of the nineteenth-century essayists described in this book.

The Grounds of Tact

This chapter argues that tactless essays open the way to tactful novels. Here, the resources of the essay form in George Eliot's work are marshaled, not to make use of more hospitable modes of mediation, wider repertoires of relation, but rather to protest precisely the lack of any desire for, or attention to them in the culture in which Eliot lived. Essays, for Eliot, are still the form in which our choices of relation are brought to the fore; it is just that, from this point of view, the world's inadequacies are glaring. Her novels will share her essays' commitment to an immense aesthetic project: seeking to redescribe the world in such ways as new relationships to it, and states of mind about it, become possible. The task of Eliot's essays was to find through critique a way in to alternative mediations of the world.