I'm retroactively posting on Rita Raley's "Introduction: Tactical Media as Virtuosic Performance" that we discussed in class on Thursday, October 11, 2018, for a couple of reasons: 1) Although we discussed the nature of strategy/tactic in military terms, we did not quite cover Michel de Certeau's related conceptions of strategy/tactic, and 2) although the essay demonstrates an effective use of aesthetics as politics, I was rather unsatisfied with the conclusion (not so much the arguments themselves).
Regarding Certeau. Firstly, I thought I would lay out a few helpful quotes from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) that outlines his understanding of key concepts from the essay.
“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 serves 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 is, the place of its own power and will, from an ‘environment’” (35–36).
Completely consistent, I believe, with Raley's use of the terms, Certeau's notion of strategy stresses the power of the symbolic order via place. In the structuring of a place, the strategic will/subject creates an "environment," or might we say medium?
“By contrast with a strategy (whose successive shapes introduce a certain play into this formal schema and whose link with a particular historical configuration of rationality should also be clarified), a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus. No delimitation of an exteriority, then, provides it with the conditions 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…In short, a tactic is an art of the weak” (36–37).
For Certeau, as well as Raley, the notion of tactic presumes the ordering of the environment that actually creates for any tactics their conditions of possibilities. Places give rise to space where the "other" and the "weak" may operate freely.
“Take, for example, what in France is called la perruque, ‘the wig.’ La perruque is the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a secretary’s writing a love letter on ‘company time’ or as complex as a cabinetmaker’s ‘borrowing’ a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room” (25).
Finally, what Certeau points to as subversive labor practices (la perruque) has a direct parallel to "tactical media" in Raley's aesthetics.
Regarding the Conclusion. Raley constantly reminds us that tactical media only intends to disrupt but never re-establish a new symbolic order. This position deserves merit because any re-institution of a symbolic order risks imposing violence on a new "other." Even to recreate a new system, completely different from its predecessor, may only perpetuate its tyranny.
She writes near the end of the essay:
"While I am less certain about the definitive claim that capitalism is always able to erase the possibilities for political repurposing, I would acknowledge that Lovink and Rossiter make a strong point in their critique. Their emphasis on perspectival, subjective truths about tactical media, however, reminds us of the integral role that the audience has to play. The right question to ask is not whether tactical media works or not, whether is succeeds or fails in spectacular fashion to effect structural transformation: rather, we should be asking to what extent it strengthens social relations and to what extent its activities are virtuosic" (28–29).
By her estimation, she doubts Deleuze's claim that capitalism incorporates everything into its own internal logic. If Deleuze is right, however, then capitalism will ultimately gobble up tactical media and the virtuosic. Capitalism, if we combine Certeau and Deleuze, not only provides the conditions for tactical media's existence, it will also devour it in the end. Even if tactical media point us to new directions and new paths, does that matter if it can't provide substantial transformations (if not an entire system overhaul)? Again, I want to stress that I find Raley's essay compelling, but does the rest of the work justify ways in which might at least posit alternative modes of reality within the existing symbolic order? It is the lack of possible political change afforded by tactical media that leaves me anxious for further development.
Bibliography
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
Raley, Rita. Tactical Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
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