Strategy and Tactic

Definition

Strategy and tactic are Michel de Certeau's core distinction for analyzing the everyday. A strategy is "the calculus of force-relationships" available to a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an institution) — tied to a delimited place from which it can manage relations with an exteriority. A tactic is "the art of the weak" — a calculated action "determined by the absence of a proper locus," practised in time, seizing opportunities on the terrain of the other. Strategies belong to cities, supermarkets, apartment blocks, universities — "places built to organize and control." Tactics belong to sidewalk markets, graffiti, appropriations of public space, la perruque (the worker's diversion of workplace time for personal use), reading as poaching — "the various formations of the people construct their spaces by the practices of living." The distinction ties de Certeau's theory of the everyday to a spatial politics: place is the proper, the organized product of the dominant order; space is practiced place, "produced by the creativity of the people using the resources of the other" (Conroy).

Key Thinkers

• Michel de Certeau — developed the distinction in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980); the everyday as tactical poaching on strategic terrain.
• Tom Conroy — clarifies de Certeau's distinction against Garfinkel's ethnomethodology and Fiske's cultural studies; the everyday as a "gloss term."

Related Concepts

• Everyday Life — the domain structured by the strategy/tactic distinction; tactics are the practices that constitute everyday life as a site of creative resistance.
• Dérive — the Situationist practice as an avant-garde tactic against the strategic order of the productivist city.
• Habitus — Bourdieu's parallel concept of embodied practice, though de Certeau emphasizes tactical creativity within constraints rather than pre-conscious reproduction.
• The Social — the strategic order that tactics appropriate, divert, and subvert.
• Practiced Place (Space vs. Place) — the definitional pair beneath the political one: the strategy's "proper" is precisely the place whose law ("the law of the 'proper'") rules; the tactic lives in space as practiced place, without owning it.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Culturally 'Doped' or Not?
• The Practice of Everyday Life
• The Politics and Potential of Everyday Life
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — the Introduction: for de Certeau "the everyday is inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, [obli]que, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals" (de Certeau 1988: xiv–xv, as cited); his "microscopic, multiform techniques" of re-appropriation "resonate closely" with Eco's "semiological guerilla warfare" (see semiological-guerrilla-warfare).
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the micro-subversion lineage's design-disciplinary reception: "many cultural theorists elevate the micro-subversions of the everyday as a diversion from the monotony of the mundane. Consider the defiant pleasure you might experience in covertly stealing shampoo from a business hotel, or the sense of control that you feel in screening your phone calls. This way of understanding the everyday, or quotidian routine of life, brings about micro-subversive actions that drive away boredom." Teston half-mocks the tradition while inheriting its elevation of the commonplace — see politicizing-the-interior.
• Spatial Stories (de Certeau 1984/2006) — the spatial grounding of the pair, in the same book's chapter 9: "every story is a travel story – a spatial practice. For this reason, spatial practices concern everyday tactics" (p. 79) — walking, the alphabet of spatial indication ("Take a left"), the daily news; and the definitional backing: place as the order where "the law of the 'proper' rules" (p. 79) — the strategy's locus — against space as "practiced place" (p. 80). See practiced-place.
• source-notes/heller-1970-everyday-life

Open Questions

• Can tactics scale beyond individual appropriation to become a collective political force — or does the tactic's dependence on the "absence of a proper locus" structurally confine it to the local, the temporary, and the defensive?
• In the age of platform capitalism and algorithmic space, what does a "tactic" look like when the terrain is no longer physical place but digital infrastructure owned and controlled by strategic actors?