and tactics Certeau, Michel de proposed that these terms (which he adapted from the work of the German war theorist Karl von Clausewitz) could be used to analyse what he termed the practices of everyday life. Strategy and tactics are defined as different types of calculations: strategy is the kind of calculation one can make when one is in control of all the variables, whereas tactics is the kind of calculation one must make when one is not in control of all the variables. For Certeau, the panopticon is the most fully realized example of strategy, but contra Foucault, Michel he did not regard its power to control the behaviour of inmates to be absolute. Indeed, he praised the inventiveness of inmates in circumventing surveillance and maintaining a semblance of autonomy and used the term tactics to describe their various subterfuges. Tactics, then, is what one can do in spite of the fact that one lacks the power to control oneâs environment. It is an ambivalent term and though it has been used to describe resistance to power (by John Fiske, among others), it is more accurately seen as an accommodation to a situation that cannot easily be changed. Further Reading: B. Highmore Michel de Certeau (2006).