A tactic, wrote the French philosopher Michel de Certeau, is »a calculus which cannot count on a ›proper‹, or thus on a border-line distinguishing the other as a visible totality«. Tactics, whether they are seen as an artistic approach or a political procedure, must thus confront what is there, have to make do with the existing conditions of time and space, without there being a clear division between the areas of identity and difference. As a consequence, questions regarding borderlines or their transgression can only become relevant when a tactical calculus is applied to a particular spatio-temporal context.
The issue »Tactics/Topographies« takes this idea of de Certeau and attempts to reflect upon it further in political and cultural dimensions. With regard to the first aspect, it comes as no little surprise, for example, that tactical procedures such as those undertaken against terrorism and external threats operate today with more lethal precision, the more “humanitarian” their objective purports to be. Eyal Weizman demonstrates this in detailed fashion with an excerpt from his current research project on Israeli security and territorial policies.
On the other hand, artistic »land surveys«, when they deal with places with a negative past, for example, have always tried to develop an eye for what is special, unique. The photographs of the author Heimrad Bäcker, who died in 2003, provide a striking example of this with regard to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Here, it is their »investigative form«, the search for traces and contours of a lethal modernity that are astonishing.
A number of other articles interrogate the formal vocabularies of modernity or their present-day applicability, whether with regard to films about the Russian Revolution or the resistances that oppose the »musealisation« of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard. The feature on the Moroccan magazine »Souffles«, which was one of the leading organs of the Maghrebi intelligentsia in the late 1960s, opens up a special historical perspective. As a cultural »topogram«, it illustrates not only the specific position of the group of artists associated with the magazine, but also how persistent tactical approaches need to be to confront the difficult conditions posed by their environment.
With »Tactics/Topographies« we are starting to engage with central themes of documenta 12, in this case the question »Is modernity our antiquity?«, a topic that will be examined further in the next issue, entitled »Different Modernities«.