What Is Certeau Even Talking About

I'll be honest, I struggled with this one more than any of our other readings so far. I'm going to take a shot at interpreting this anyway, though. So, he brings up tactics vs. strategy. From what I can gather, both from our reading and the discussion we had on Thursday, Certeau believes that strategies are fairly limited by design. To have a strategy, you need to know essentially everything about a scenario. Alternatively, the scale of the scenario has to be so big you can safely disregard any variables like that. For example, he brings up economics and politics. There are simply so many people involved in these things that you don't need to know any one person's opinions, you can assume the masses of people will do pretty much the same thing every time. You don't need to ask every single person if they have a job to determine unemployment, you can just take a small sample and assume it's representative of the entire country. This would make for a great time for a strategy. On the other hand, our day to day lives do not exist on this scale. You can't know absolutely everything about a scenario in which you, say, slip on a patch of ice while driving. You can't know how fast you're going, where the icy patch goes to, anything like that. Strategy won't help you here; what you need are tactics. A good feel for how your car handles, good sense of where things around you, these will serve you much better than busting out a compass and trying to navigate your way out. So, in the end, driving is very much like taking an exam. Sometimes you just need to wing it.