Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life articulates two key concepts involved in the spatial-temporal relationship between producers and consumers or users—strategy and tactic. A strategy, associated with institutions of power—the “producers”—“postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as a base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats (customers or competitors, enemies, the country surrounding the city, objectives and objects of research, etc.) can be managed” (1984, 36). A strategy is implicated in the process of spatial circumscription, that is an autonomous place is created where particular varieties of consumption, be they objects or forms of knowledge including poetics and even memories, are deemed appropriate. A tactic, by contrast with a strategy, “is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus” (Ibid. 36, 37). In lieu of a unique locale a tactic plays upon the instant. For de Certeau, a strategy is to place as a tactic is to time. Without an autonomous place a tactic is “determined in absence of power” (Ibid. 38).

The separation of place and time is a primary distinction of strategy and tactic. Here I do not intend to follow de Certeau down the same path of classic structural logic. However, I believe that it will be useful to think through certain aspects of strategy and tactic in relation to oral performance and memory-history. Let’s begin with what is involved in a “moment”. For Matthew Goulish “a moment consists of a small action in a small amount of time in a particular place. The moment exists inseparable from the action, the time, and the place. It is that action at that time, for that amount of time, in that place…” (2000, 39). Time and place are indivisible from action within an exact moment. Action, time, and place are bound to each other. Therefore strategies involve products that have circumscribed moments of consumption—place, time, and action in, for example, a church service or a sporting event. Both strategy and tactic are predicated upon the notion of intersection, that is a connection or exchange in meaning within the moment. They are site-specific (see Kaye 2000).

Site-specificity in art arose out of minimalist expression in the 1960’s (Kaye 2000) and has to do with both position and place as defining criteria in relation to certain situated materialities. Here we take site-specificity to involve performance including acts of reminiscence.

On the one hand, consider the performance of a piece such as the Song of Daskaloyannis as a process of repeated poetics and action over and over again. Within this process of reiteration simply through the action connections are articulated between the past experiences commemorated in song and an originary oral performance with the performative act in the present. These connections bear upon the personal identity of the performer and the communal identity of those gathered around. When this occurs in a predetermined moment for such practice such as a community sanctioned event it becomes strategic performance. Strategy creates appropriate moments | contexts for reminiscence a priori. On the other hand, in some circumstances this need not be understood as a homogeneous process. Tactic plays upon the moment | context in absence of any predetermination. Tactically every performance is unique. Indeed, difference is key.

Strategy and tactic are fundamental to the production and consumption of memory-history. Nietzsche maintains the health and well being of an individual, community, or nation depend “on the existence of a line dividing the bright and discernible from the unilluminable and dark; on one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember at the right time; on the possession of a powerful instinct for sensing when it is necessary to feel historically and when unhistorically” (1984, 63). This line is demarcated by moments of community-sanctioned commemoration where memory-history takes form in oral performance—holidays, weddings, etc.

During fieldwork for Epic Memory two of us were invited to the Greek Orthodox celebration of the Temenos Stavros, commemorating the event of finding the cross on the evening prior to the name day of Agios (Saint) Stavros. This event began late in the evening on September 13 and carried on all night at the small chapel of Agios Stavros on the coast between the villages of Hora Sphakion and Loutro. While at the event we were able to obtain video footage of a number of songs initiated and sung in concert with the local priest. This strategic performance is a modality of power which implicates performer, audience, poetic material, place, and time. There is little in no space for innovation. Here I would like to place aside such strategic contexts where sanctioned commemorative events bleed together into composite memories and focus upon tactical performance.

With tactical performance the moment including place and audience varies. In our elicited performances the singer, here specifically Georgios Hatzidakis, played upon the site-specificity of the performance and utilized it as a component of the song. This involved an exchange between place and the content. In other words Georgios implicated context in the meaning of what he performed. For example, with the raki toast Georgios chose an appropriate portion of the song Erotokritos to suit the situation in which he finds himself. The connection arose out of the moment. This is tactical performance. This is a form of poiesis.

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