Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

6.10 Tactics of use
Operating within a highly controlled environment,
hackers and modders are forced to adopt a
‘tactical’ approach. Where commercial strategies
are capable of producing, tabulating and imposing
spaces, ‘tactics’ can only use, manipulate and
divert these spaces. As de Certeau states, tactics
‘remain dependent upon the possibilities offered
by circumstance’ but they ‘do not obey the law
of the place, for they are not defined or identified
by it’ (1984, p. 29). Like the practice of guerilla
warfare, the tactic resists from within. Unable
to claim a space as their own, the user traverses the consumer environment,
negotiating their own path through the dominant logic of
normalized use.
In the text ‘de Certeau and Foucault: Tactics and Strategic Essentialism’,
Claire Colebrook claims that ‘a tactic works metaphorically:
rather than returning the logic to some ground, it thinks the logic from
a different point of view’ (2001, p. 546). Although the tactic cannot
hope to defeat the system it inhabits, it is not contiguous with this system.
Through the gap offered by metaphor, the tactic figures the world
differently; it plays the game, but to a different end. Following are
four examples that may be regarded as tactical responses to dominant
models:
• A popular hobbyist t-shirt produced by O’Reilly Media proclaims
‘Void your warranty, violate a user agreement, fry a circuit, blow a
fuse, poke an eye out…’ 15 Here, the dominant logic that positions
hacking and modding as dangerous and foolish is turned on its
head: ‘dangerous and foolish’ are claimed as positive traits.
• As football crowds disrupt Cliff Wins’s private life, Wins’s alter –
ego Maduncle makes a game of the situation, figuring an alternate
world of zombies and heroes. Action that, in another light, may be
confrontational becomes playful. 16
• While Apple Inc. regards the redistribution of its repair manuals as
a form of theft, Marion Bates establishes a website that positions
this act as a gift.
•
And, in possibly the most dramatic and wide-reaching example,
Stategies of Control and Tactics of Use
[Figure 6-10]
Text from Make magazine t-shirt,
2010. Image Make Media.
15/ Similar sentiments are preva-
lent in online discussions where user
signatures include taglines such as ‘If
it ain’t broke, Mod it till it is’. http://
www.bp6.com/board/viewtopic.
php?t=1471 accessed 15 February
2011.
16/ See Chapter 5: Telling Stories.
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