Functional Principle of Systemic Viability
What living systems teach us about coherence, instability and the conditions of durability.
The persistence of a structure is not enough to establish its viability. An organisation, an institution, a collective or an individual can go on functioning while increasing the cost required
The word « living » is used here in a functional sense. It designates first biological systems, and then extends cautiously to psychic, social, institutional and technical systems, as soon as
The central criterion is the capacity of a system to integrate perturbations, disagreements and contradictory information without indefinitely increasing constraint or producing a fragmentation
Table of contents
Opening. A stable world that becomes unliveable
Preamble. Status of the principle and method of reading
Part I · The principle
- Functional principle of systemic viability and the coherence of living systems
- Instability, disagreement and tension
- Variety, feedbacks and thresholds
- The illusion of stability
Part II · The survival mode of systems
- Survival mode and domination: when regulation becomes constraint
- Dissonance as a resource of power
Part III · The psyche and the cost of adaptation
- Intellectual understanding and psychic integration
- Psychic fragmentation, false self and the real cost of adaptation
- Collective fragmentation and the institutional management of incoherence
Part IV · Global scale and the continuity of living systems
- Collapse as a process and not as an event
- Functional continuity between emergence and collapse
Part V · Operative
- Withdrawing power's raw material
- A manual of de-feeding
- What cannot last
- Holding coherence in a world that has none
- After coherence
Epilogue. When coherence no longer needs to be defended