[Reader-list] third posting: Tactical City

[Rupali Gupte]

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Third Posting: Rupali Gupte, Sarai Independent Fellowship, 2004

TACTICAL CITY 

In the narrative ‘Tactical city – Tenali Rama and other stories of Mumbai’s urbanism’ certain cultural theorists appear anachronistically as markers of particular ways of thinking about the city and the urban. While the narrative incorporates these synthetically and in a playful manner, this paper will attempt to self consciously examine the references. The last posting was a paper on the Tactical position and a précis of the narrative with respect to the position. This paper will intend to further delve into the term ‘tactical’ and elaborate some of the KEY CONCEPTS in cultural theory that help situate the narrative. These hopefully, will form the various nodes that the narrative in its ‘tactical form’ will attempt to connect. 

POWER:    	
“Modern power is tolerable on the condition that it masks itself – which it has done very effectively. If truth is outside of and opposed to power, the speaker’s benefit is merely an incidental plus. But if truth and power are not external to each other, as Foucault will obviously maintain, then the speaker’s benefit and associated ploys are among the essential ways in which power operates. It masks itself by producing a discourse, seemingly opposed to it but really part of a larger deployment of modern power. ”  (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982- Dreyfus and Rabinow, Foucault Beyond Structuralism and hermeneutics. ) 

ARCHEOLOGY
Archeology is structuralist.  It tries to take an objective neutral position and avoids causal theories of change. (Dreyfus & Rabinow1982)  

GENEOLOGY 
The genealogy of knowledge consists of two separate bodies of knowledge: First, the dissenting opinions and theories that did not become established and widely recognized  and, second,  the local beliefs and understandings (think of what nurses know about medicine that does not achieve power and general recognition).  The genealogy is concerned with bringing these two knowledges, and their struggles to pass themselves on to others, out into the light of the day. 
Genealogy does not claim to be more true than institutionalized knowledge, but merely to be the missing part of the puzzle.  It works by isolating the central components of some current day political mechanism (such as maintaining the power structure which diagnoses mental illness) and then traces it back to its historical roots (Dreyfus and Rabinow).  These historical roots are visible to us only through the two separate bodies of genealogical knowledge described above. 
Foucault says, "Let us give the term 'genealogy' to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.”  
Whereas archeology studies the practices of language (in a strict sense), genealogy uncovers the creation of objects through institutional practices. (Dreyfus & Rabinow,). Whereas the archeological historian claims to write from a neutral, disinterested perspective, the Nietzschean or Foucaultian genealogist admits the political and polemical interests motivating the writing of the history (Hoy, 1986 
 
RESISTANCE  
"There are no relations of power without resistance"  (Foucault 1980)  

TACTICS	
“If there is an imperative in my lesson then it is a tactical one: If you want to fight, here are some guidelines. I will expose tactical directions. (Foucault, 1978:  
This is taken to another level by Michel de Certeau’s thesis of tactics versus strategies in his ‘Practice of Everyday Life’.
According to De Certeau, Strategies are the tools of the dominant elite while tactics work in the shadow of strategies and are ‘an art of the weak’, which form mute processes that organize socioeconomic order. With respect to Foucault’s thesis of all pervading power structures, De Certeau notes “ If it is true that the grid of discipline is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced to it, what popular procedures (also miniscule and quotidian)  manipulate the mechanisms of discipline and conform to them, only to evade them and finally what ways of operating form the consumer’s (or dominee’s ) side of the mute processes that organize socio-economic order” .Tactics are for De Certeau “procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time, to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of space. Strategies, as De Cereal argues, “reflect a typical military attitude towards establishing autonomous place and distinguishing it from an 'environment.' Therefore, strategy is about a mastery over space through an exercise in the control of sight, for which De Certeau uses Foucault's idea of panoptic practice. In this architectural metaphor of power relationships, tactics stay permanently out of the reach of panoptic power; it is time where one realizes individual preferences” .  

The Role of the Architect 
Having laid out the idea of Tactics with respect to power relations and the representation of power, one goes on here to dwell on the role of the architect vis-à-vis this position. If De Certeau’s argument talks about how people, through quotidian practices seek to tweak power relations, where does the architect fit into the equation? Isn’t the architect’s work primarily in the category of ‘Strategies’? 
To answer this question would be to attempt to expand on the role/definition of the architect and the understanding of the tools s/he has at her disposal. 

The first place to go to, to expand the role of the architect would be to challenge the architect’s understanding of Space. One needs to understand Space not as an object or thing as the architectural discipline does but as Lefebvre suggests, a historical production and the outcome of social being. Lefebvre postulates three kinds of spaces: Spatial practices, Representational Spaces and Spaces of Representation   

SPATIAL PRACTICES
The first, spatial practice concerns the production and reproduction of material life. Encompassing both everyday life and urban activities, it results in the various functional spaces – ranging from single rooms and buildings to large urban sites – that form part of the material production of space. Spatial practice is thus roughly equivalent to the economic or material base. Producing the spatial forms and practices appropriate to and necessary for different productive and reproductive activities, it thereby defines places, actions and signs, the trivialized spaces of the everyday and conversely, places made special by symbolic means. It is both a space of objects and things and a space of movements and activities. This is space, in Lefebvre’s terms, as it is “perceived” – in the sense of being the apparent and often functional form of space that we perceive before considering concepts and experiences. This is space as empirically observed.  

REPRESENTATIONS OF SPACE
The second kind of space, Representations of space, relates to the conscious codifications  of space typified by abstract understanding, such as those advanced by the disciplines of planning, science, and mathematics (and architecture – my emphasis) and by artists of a scientific bent. Representations of space are a form of knowledge that provides the various understandings of space necessary for spatial practices to take place. They thus display a tendency toward intellectually constructed systems of verbal signs. This is space as conceived as “concept without life”  

SPACES OF REPRESTATION 
The third and last kind of space, spaces of representation, concerns those experienced as symbols and images. In part then, the spaces of representation function similar to conceptions of reality in conditioning possibilities for action. But they are also liberatory, for at this level resistance to and criticism of dominant social orders can take place. In spaces of representation, space can be invented and imagined. They are thus both the space of the experience and the space of the imagination, as lived. Spaces of representation tend towards systems of non verbal symbols and signs; they are “life without concepts”. 

Lefebvre also has 3 other categories of space based on the idea that space is a production and postulates that each mode of production produces its own understanding of space. Thus here he distinguishes between natural or physical space (a preexistent natural phenomenon over which activities range – the space of prehistory) gives way first to absolute space (fragments of natural space rendered sacred, the space of rites and ceremonies, death and the underworld – the spaces of slavery) the historical space (the early towns of the west- the space of feudalism) and finally abstract space (space as commodity, at once concrete and abstract, homogenized and fragmented – the space of capitalism. ) Each space contains within it both traces of its predecessors and the seeds of the next, creating a compex historical geography of different social spaces. 
Lefebvre however also introduces the idea of a space yet to come : differential space, which restores the human body, the social body with its knowledge desires and needs. 
Edward Soja also locates his thesis in a similar tripartite categorization of geographical space and argues for a relation between the social and the spatial – “a socio-spatial dialectic”. He calls his conception of space yet to come, “Third Space”. 
Tactical City is an attempt to produce the tools for a “socio-spatial dialectic’. 

The Architect    
Having thus broadened the canvas of space for the architect, one needs to go back to our earlier question, what then is the role of the architect? The architect perhaps in Tactical City is less of a specialist using his/her bag of tools to carve out abstract space or a middleman/woman as he/she tends to be in the earlier conceptions, but more of an agent, an actor in space, helping tweak the power relations with his/her specialized bag of tools. The end product of such an architecture then is ‘tactics’: which could be as much in the form of words and images as they could be buildings and objects.  

TACTICAL TOOLS 
Let us now peek into the bag of tools available to the architect to develop tactics. These tools will encompass references and modes of representation that allow certain ways of thinking about the production of space. 

Situationists:  Mapping the city 
The Situationists in their deviant ways of mapping allow a reading of the city that is different from the narratives and truths conjured by the powers that be. In their tendency of paying attention to the detail as opposed to the whole, they allow a more subjective reading of the city. These form important tools for creating new knowledge banks and thus preparing the field for a more relevant intervention. 

Surrealists: Collage, Montage and the irrational
The Surrealists offer many tools for the production of space. Like the Situationists, they help construct defiant narratives of the city, the self and ways in which the self relates to the city and the everyday. Besides this, the Surrealists with their tools of collage and montage allow the juxtaposition of completely varying and sometimes contradictory ideas to generate a third idea. They allow the convergence of the banal and the significant, the mixing of scales and the swapping of the detail with the whole. These can be methodologically sound ways of tweaking power structures. The powerful imagery generated by these methods form stinging criticisms of the normalizing tendencies of power.  

Tactical Phenomenology
Architecture owes a lot to the work of phenomenologists starting with Gaston Bacchelard and Heidegger. The phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogenous or empty space but a space saturated with qualities and that may even be pervaded by a spectral aura . It is important to add the prefix ‘tactical’ however to phenomenology and marry the concepts because the tactical by definition is about ‘appropriation, domination and resistance’  and phenomenology has the tendency to be appropriated by a ‘self referential authenticity ’ However the marriage of the two phenomena, allow Space to be perceived, not as ‘abstract space’ but as a ‘lived space’  according to Lefebvre.  Phenomenology understood in this way then has its own tools and trajectories to tap the ‘ontological potential of human experience ’ and contains within it a shade of emanicipatory possibilities. 
 
These here are some of the tools that Tactical City references. This thesis is also a search for new tools and references and so this list will have to grow.