tactics vs strategy

• some consider tactics as short term and strategy long term, immediate methods and details vs overarching goals and principles
• others criticise this division between bottom-up and top-down practises that often converge

critique of dichotomy

• “founded on an antagonistic relationship between strategies and tactics, discourses on tactical media practices tended to portray tactics (and resistance) as built upon a “hit-and-run” logic. In other words, tactics meant a sudden, spontaneous, disruptive, and unexpected intervention into a hegemonic structure (e.g. an institution or a technical system) from a supposedly autonomous and untraceable outside place, to temporarily paralyze its mechanisms and gain short-term benefits” (Smolicki, 2017)
• “the context of contemporary techno-cultural context in which a distinction between tactics and strategies becomes confused and blurred (cf. the conflation of sousveillance and surveillance),” (Smolicki, 2017)
• see slow tactics
• “unhinge the notion of the tactical from its opposition to the strategic.” ⤴️
• what starts as strategy can become tactical, tactics under strategy, and later these images become part of other strategies/tactics too - past instrumentalised for future
• Highmore argues de Certau’s view that strategy/tactics division as unhelpful as reduces everything to oppressor/oppressed, when in reality societies always have both dominant practises and its normative institutions as well as minor practises that persist but don’t control discourse (Smolicki, 2017)
• “Strategies and tactics ought not to be seen as forces at two opposite ends of an axis. Tactics are not always about a direct and rapid response to a strategic force, but might also evolve silently as the result of an “inventive employment of possibilities within strategic circumstances” (Highmore, 2002, p.159) (Smolicki, 2017)
• “[Tactics] do not operate outside the strategy that they seemingly confront: “to do this would require a counter-strategy, they are in an ambiguous position of being inside but ‘other’: they escape it without leaving it” (Highmore, 2002, p.159)” (Smolicki, 2017)