House of Cards: Tactics for Dummies

The theoretical nature of Michel de Certeau’s piece “Making Do”: Uses and Tactics made conceptualizing a scenario in which to implement his definitions of strategies and tactics quite difficult. I had to piecemeal his definitions with the bigger picture of our discussion on power and ethics this week (hinted at by the TLDR Ok Cupid story and the report on Facebook’s experiments) in order to grasp what de Certeau was describing within his writing. This particular quote from de Certeau’s piece helped me to further understand the temporal nature of tactics compared with the physicality of strategy.

“Even if the methods practiced by the everyday art of war never present themselves in such a clear form, it nevertheless remains the case that the two ways of acting can be distinguished according to whether they bet on place or on time,” (pg 39).

The way I visualize strategy versus tactics is through the notion of governmental advocacy. Michel de Certeau made clear that institutions of power could utilize strategy because they had a locus of control, i.e. a central network of influence that could act in unison towards a common goal. Though political parties are often in contention with one another, one must agree that the government is indeed powerful and can make strategic decisions that control the fate of the nation. The government in the United States also had a physical center in Washington D.C. as required by de Certeau’s definition of power. Governmental lobbyists and advocates for various causes have to use tactics as opposed to strategies because they are inherently in a position of weakness when compared with the institution they are trying to sway.

For example, a lobbyist trying to legalize marijuana has no hope of altering the manner in which legislation is passed to benefit their specific cause. The strength of the current governmental structure is far too powerful for any one lobby out of hundreds to alter its foundations. On the other hand, the lobbyist does have the ability to speak individually with Senators and Representatives, discover intricate alliances within and across party lines and ultimately, through carefully timed, tactical maneuvers, cause a vote to fall in their favor. This result would be caused not by one large strategy, but through many small tactical choices the individual made during a short period of time.

This analogy made me think of the tactical and often sinister maneuvers of Frank Underwood throughout the Netflix series House of Cards (no spoilers I promise). Frank Underwood doesn’t possess the power to stick to any one strategy throughout the show because he is simply a small cog in a much larger machine. He instead relies on ever evolving tactics to forge his way ahead, switching his allegiance at a drop of a hat to best benefit himself.

An interesting thought following the discussion of House of Cards is what could happen when you become so good at tactically bettering an institution of power that you yourself become more powerful (I hold that there is still no spoilers haha). Is that sort of role reversal possible in the age of digital culture between an average user and a huge corporation like Facebook, or is the power structure too deeply rooted for this sort of change to take place?

Also, check out this article about how one guy hacked Ok Cupid!