tactics

At several points, I find myself saying "I don't get that reading of x, but I'll go with her on it b/c I'm interested in the general point she's making."  With her assessment of de Certrau, though, I sort of lost patience.  From ch. 3 of Molly Anne Rothenberg's The Excessive Subject

For those of you just joining us, both books address a personal politics of resistance to dominant contexts that seek to completely overcode us.  One of the major arcs of The Practice of Everyday Life is in the relation of non-grounded tactics to ground-preserving strategies.  Rothenberg makes an overreaching reduction that I don't get in the course of her overall argument (that I probably agree with) that de Certeau doesn't go far enough in explaining how an individual's resistance to a dominating context can actually be charted. In case you're opening up wikipedia right about now, No, I don't think the editors there characterized de Certeau accurately.  Or is it me that's missing the point?

Here's Certeau:

"I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject with will and power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated. It postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed. As in management, every "strategic" rationalization seeks first of all to distinguish its "own" place, that it, the place of its own power and will, from an "environment." A Cartesian attitude, if you wish: it is an effort to delimit one's own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other. It is also the typical attitude of modern science, politics, and military strategy.The establishment of a break between a place appropriated as one's own and its other is accompanied by important effects, some of which we must immediately note:(1) The "proper" is a triumph of place over time. It allows one to capitalize acquired advantages, to prepare future expansions, and thus to give oneself a certain independence with respect to the variability of circumstances. It is a mastery of time through the foundation of an autonomous space.(2) It is also a mastery of places through sight. The division of space makes possible a panoptic practice proceeding from a place whence the eye can transform foreign forces into objets that can be observed and measured, and thus control and "include" them within its scope of vision. To be able to see (far into the distance) is also to be able to predict, to run ahead of time by reading a space.[market trend analysis...](3) It would be legitimate to define the power of knowledge by this ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces. But it would be more correct to recognize in these "strategies" a specific type of knowledge, one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one's own space....

By contrast with a strategy..., a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the condition necessary for autonomy. The space of a tactic is the space of the other. Thus it must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power. It does not have the means to keep to itself, at a distance, in a position of withdrawal, foresight, and self-collection: it is a maneuver "within the enemy's field of vision," as von Bulow put it, and within enemy territory... This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, an size on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment.... In short, a tactic is an art of the weak."

OK, so one of the main distinguishing marks of a strategy is the orientation of the subject to it's propre, or proper, or locus, or put another way, a ground.

The precondition for unpacking and diagramming force-relationships is a tableau where the subject is separated from her environment.  Put another way, you first have to make a distinction between the sensing subject and the apparatus, i.e. all the abstract machinery that impinges and influences on it. 

This would seem to introduce a thorny problem; e.g. if subjects are described mostly by a contextual negotiation of influences, how do you isolate a part or whole that is separate from those contexts.

Luckily, you don't usually have to, not absolutely.  Generally this model doesn't require a purifying reduction to an a priori subject, and the separation into a tableau serves as a device to allow enough distinction to rearrange and scrutinize parts of an already-in-motion scene, rather than a complete removal of a contextually created subject into a sterilized space. It's enough to draw a line on a shifting dune.

In fact, de Certeau provides a tautological help.  You draw the line around the subject when you can identify a propre, a place that the subject uses/operates upon as a ground. (The degree to which the subject IS the ground is the topic of lots of discourse.) If you can identify a ground, a perspective, a point of reference, you can isolate some aspect of the subject.  Personally, I think that given the body of thought (and de Certeau's notes) on a subject's possible tactical relationships to a ground that operate without a designated propre or dedicated space, it seems odd to define a subject wholly by means of its ground.  i.e.  if a subject operates on a ground, it stands to reason that the subject is apart from it. How else would the subject be able to operate without a ground?

Now, it's true enough that at some degree of magnification you'll encounter a metastability issue, which I think is probably not the same as the context issue described above. Metastability is the condition of apparent cohesion based on scale of reference, characterized by a lack of isometric symmetry. Along the axis of magnification, you eventually encounter a threshold of destability where the subject breaks down into its components.

Massumi refers to this as a dissipative structure--a structure constituted of a self-organized strata that emerge into a metastable molarity upon the reduction to a certain magnification.

But back to subjects and strategies, or really, tactics.  So at the least, a propre is a helpful device in circumscribing a subject. But what about the context of tactical activity, where the subject is acting as a guerrilla, without a ground.  This is a space well described by Deleuze.  How do you isolate a subject in absence of a claimed/defended ground?

You're forced to describe the subject as the body of methods that transform various grounds, or you describe it as as operating upon a particular kind of fleeing, mobile space.  This is Delueze territory-- the idea that the subject's ground is nomadic, that the subject can maintain a claimed ground even if it is not localizable on a Cartesian grid. A ground/space that is not a ground/space.  Here you see the link to Bataille?

Before heading into Deleuze, what about the former idea-- that the subject is a collection of methods operating above a ground, and not necessary moving inside/on top any kind of claimed space at all?

You'd be reducing or expanding the subject to a relation of methods. A collection of verbs and adverbs rather than a noun. The 'subject' in the subject is just a placeholder for the switching board for the various potential actions.  But that is still a noun, yes? Some 'thing' must still select between all virtual methods. Doesn't this take us back to Deleuze-- a mobilized point of selection?  The subject is the localized confluence of available methods.

In this sense, the subject is created as an act of recursion only.

The degree to which recursion interacts with Deleuze's nomadic subject?  I don't know. I think that generally Deleuze treats the subject as engaged in strategies of probing, experimentation, capture, and escape, all more or less external-facing actions.

OK, interestingly enough, this takes me back somewhere in the ballpark of Rothenberg's reading of Bordieu, which gets outlined as this: subjects have limited tools at their disposal for resisting and/or changing the dominant context (which may be only a small segment of the overall apparatus).  One of the tools is in the creation of repeating habits that, even though are born from the dominant context, eventually go adrift from it and lag behind, creating albeit small fissures in the apparatus that the subject can find a way to exploit.

Rothenberg takes this argument apart, complaining (I'm going to assume rightly) that neither Bordieu nor Certeau maps out how that drift occurs and what causes it. But I think that if you shift a little bit, you can see Bordieu's descriptions as talking about recursive practices that incorporate feedback.  Recursion and feedback, I think, take us back into Massumi's discussions, which potentially offer some kind of way out and probably more problems.... Subjectification is inherently recursive, and operates in a context of interpellative feedback.  Now I'm just conjecturing, but couldn't you say that at the point where tactics are identified and adopted that their interpellative frame of reference changes and their recursive differential downshifts?  That at the point that a walk, a route home through the city, a daily habit is adopted (by which I mean that you come to the perception that you're continuing to do a thing in a particular way), it becomes infolded into a differently overcoded regime of signs, and that it then becomes the domain of two overlapping strata, the involuted interpellative strata and the apparatus's strata. That would inherently induce the lag and the drift, right?

OK, I see the follow-up query here.  This description presumes that the subject is not already wholly subsumed by the apparatus, that there is some point of difference. That there is any difference between the two strata.  hm.... If there weren't, how would you know....?