ESTUDIO DE MERCADO

The important nous in de Certeau's description of strategies and tactics is that, strategies represent entities that are stable and have the power to make long-range plans and decisions. The analogy of tactics however relates to a lack of locus points and a state of temporariness and flexibility. De Certeau's conception of tactics applies to individual decision-making and everyday circumstances which underline the importance of "no fixed" locus points. While his engagement with migration per se is limited, de Certeau anchors his theorisation of tactics on mobility. He highlights the agency of tactics and attributes the strength of tactics to their lack of locus points and their temporariness. Tactics are devised on the move as individuals navigate the spaces around the strategies imposed from above. This has clear resonance for transnational migration.

Immigrants in the context of Johannesburg are fittingly analysed within this context of temporariness and individual attention as theories that focus on macro perspectives typically overlook those living within the realm of tactics,

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manoeuvring within the crevices left by the deployment of strategy. This is the making do that de Certeau is concerned with in his anthropology of the

subordinate and marginalised or of the ordinary person (de Certeau et al. 1980). The South African scholarship on tactical cosmopolitanism and liminality adds helpfully in this area, showing that tactics are not only deployed in relation to and using current physical location, but also in terms of the spaces across which an individual may be suspended both in terms of patterns of mobility and

psychological attachment.

De Certeau's analysis has clear use value when applied to Zimbabwean migrants who reside in Johannesburg. Zimbabwean migrants in their diversity occupy the position of tactics in relation, for example, to the South African state as

represented by different forms of officialdom that regulate or provide official services such as the Department of Home Affairs (DHA), the Department of Health (DOH). They also occupy the position of tactics in relation to the various units of the City of Johannesburg, including those who regulate street trading, housing, the conditions of buildings and public health.

Strategy is however not only exercised through official structures but also by groupings that have relative power in society. In the context of Johannesburg this includes South African citizenry quite broadly, who by virtue of being citizens have a privileged position over non-citizens. This is a complex area and I should clarify from the onset that this broad and loose categorisation of the South African citizenry as constituting strategy is only in relation to their contact with

Zimbabweans and other immigrants in Johannesburg. It is used with awareness that South Africans are not by any means a homogenous group and that there is enormous variation in the degrees of power possessed by South Africans. South African citizens are often in the intermediate position between strategy and tactics, responding tactically to the authority of the state and to more powerful South Africans, and operating with strategy in relation to non South Africans and less powerful South Africans.

The further complication is that immigrants may themselves gather a degree of power within a host society, operating with strategy in relation to citizens and

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non-citizens in the host society. The operation of strategy and tactics in relation to South Africans and Zimbabweans is complex and differentiated. However, we may take a broad position that, generally speaking, members of the host society have a position of power over those who are not recognised as belonging. Strategy as enunciated by de Certeau represents power and an established basis from which such entity derives or bases such power. Thus, in this case, the South African citizenry base their power on difference and the ability to distinguish between those that belong and those that do not belong. Such presence of difference and its actuation through the threat of xenophobic violence creates a flexible structure that is an important determinant in Zimbabwean migrants' spatial decision- making.

In adopting this position, I have drawn on my previous collaborative work, Harrison, Moyo and Yang's (2012) which pertains to the constitution of strategy and tactics and the need to look at de Certeau's thesis differently. In this work, we argued that, tactics do not only respond to regulatory frameworks or remote strategy but to other instruments or agents of similar disposition. As such, my conception of the dialectical relationship between strategy and tactics is that it is flexible and adaptable to different encounters between Zimbabwean migrants and the South African state as well as the South African citizenry. Both strategy and tactics may reside in any one group or individual even if there is a tendency towards one or the other dependent in part on the formal status of belonging. Having articulated the usage of de Certeau’s theory of strategy and tactics in understanding migrant spatial decision-making, I will now turn attention to the concept of mobility and discuss how it extends the analysis of movement within the context of de Certeau’s tactics.

4.7.1.1 De Certeau’s tactics and mobility

In his essay on "walking in the city", de Certeau reasserts his focus on the ordinary person whom he allocates to positions of subordination and on the

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opposite side of apparatuses and panoptic structures of power. He argues that the streets and other infrastructure built by planning authorities receive use value and enunciation through the walking feet of the ordinary person. According to de Certeau (1984: 99), "walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it 'speaks'." This is analogous to the manner of speech and according to de Certeau,

The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered" (1984: 97). "Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs (ibid: 117).

While de Certeau in this particular passage speaks to the strategic systems of urban planning and regulation, his intuition and pre-occupation with the ordinary person and his or her place in the generation of urban form has relevance to my approach to the exercise of movement in the city. I connect the articulation of the practice of walking and that of "walking feet" described by de Certeau to his earlier intimations about strategy and tactics as well as the practice of “making do” in the face of the structures that exist outside of the ordinary person.

Mainstream migration studies literature has largely focused on the movement of people across national borders, particularly on the reasons for migration and the destinations to which people move. However, this direction of the literature does not sufficiently theorise migration in terms of the logic and tactical nuance embedded in moving from one place to another at a multiplicity of scales. In the broader collective of social science disciplines however there is recent reference to the emergence of a "new mobilities paradigm" (Sheller and Urry 2006: 207) or the "mobility turn" (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006: 1), which brings together the many different forms of movements and mobilities and questions the traditional societal and geographic constructions of territoriality (see for example, Cresswell 2010b; Hannam et al. 2006; Langevang and Gough 2009). According to

(Cresswell 2010a: 2), the crux of the mobilities turn, and what sets it apart from other similar approaches, is that, "it focuses on, and holds centre stage, a

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fundamental geographical fact of life – moving". The mobilities concept, according to Hannam et al (2006: 1) "encompasses both the large-scale

movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space and the travel of material things within everyday life".

Recognising the centrality of the new mobilities paradigm in current social sciences discourse, Hannam, Sheller and Urry (2006: 3) argue that, "Mobilities cannot be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastructural and institutional moorings that configure and enable mobilities." In other terms, these infrastructural and institutional moorings are for the most part facilitative of mobility and analogous to the structures and apparatuses of power described in de Certeau's strategies and tactics. Within the context of the mobility turn, some authors have drawn on de Certeau's strategies and tactics in theorising intra urban movements in cities. For example, Langevang and Gough (2009) discuss the movement of youth in the Ghanaian city of Accra and argue that, the youths use movement as a creative tactical response to a difficult economic environment that offers limited formal employment opportunities. Gough (2008) argues that in the Zambian city of Lusaka, strong linkages exist between young people's mobility and their livelihoods. Youth mobility in the context of Accra and Lusaka - taken as movement to and from work, movement to and from school and movement in search of employment - is cast as a key survivalist tactic (Gough 2008; Langevang and Gough 2009). For Gough (2008) and Langevang and Gough (2009) mobility is both a resource and a tactical recourse for those who have a subordinate position in relation to the powerful entities and structures in society. In a similar vein, Jackson (2012: 733) has extended de Certeau's strategies and tactics framework to the analysis of the mobility of homeless youths in London, and argues that mobility is used by the homeless youths to respond to uncertainty and danger. Jackson (2012: 740) further outlines three different tactical experiences of mobility by the homeless youth, namely, "mobility as a resource, mobility as loss, and mobility as managing". The common thread in Jackson's analysis and that of other authors that have drawn on the work of de Certeau to frame mobility is that the bulk of their analysis concerns states of mobility and daily movements as

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tactical and constitutive of survivalist resources. Nonetheless, the important consideration for this research is the way that the different studies utilising strategy and tactics have looked at mobility as a resource and as a tactic in an urban environment.

4.7.2 The transnational habitus: inviting Bourdieu to Zimbabwean