By: dazimon

dazimon — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:53:05 +0000

RE: “That’s why Svejkism (also known as work to rule) is such an effective form of workplace sabotage. Svejk comes from a book by a Czech author Hajek called ‘The Good Soldier Svejk’.”

“Svejkism” is more that work-to-rule: see Tropos Kynikos: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, by Peter Steiner, in the “Analyses” section of SvejkCentral.com

The name of the author is Hašek.

The military is not Czech, but Austrian, as in Austro-Hungarian Empire. 🙂

New translation of The Good Soldier Svejk is available at http://zenny.com/. More information about the Svejk phenomenon at http://SvejkCentral/.

By: brian

brian — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 21:36:22 +0000

I really like that stuff about the interplay between chance and collectivity. And Gaz makes a really useful distinction between experimental and exploratory. I tend to talk about "experimentation" too much, and it has got horrible (although laughable) overtones of men in white coats and rats pulling levers. And that's a hop, skip and jump away from the scientistic/positivist outlook of Marxism-Leninism... I've just finished reading My Revolutions (which is great, a real page-turner), and there's a clear sense of how exploration turns into something more didactic, a strategy of revelation. If there's one decisive moment, it's when Uther, the local shaman, drops out of sight: "without him, things got cold. Cold and hard." Of course, Chris/Mike only realises this in retrospect. At the time, there seems to be an inescapable logic pulling them all in one direction. It's only later that it's possible to see how much of this logic is not ours, but capital's (capital as separation, capital as discipline etc). So the question is this: how can we step outside the game long enough to decide whether it's a game worth playing? Or is it even possible to ask that question without implying some sort of strategic overview?

Comments on: Surrealist games

By: dazimon

By: brian