Viability, identity and autonomy

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Viability, identity and autonomy

Viable = “able to maintain a separate existence” in “a particular sort of environment” (DTS 1985: 1) as “a recognizable identity” (TBYT 2009, “The Will of the People”: 107). Autonomy is self-regulation, not isolation. Pure VSM — Overview Draft 0.8 — not project canon.

What Beer says

Viable “if it can survive in a particular sort of environment”; “existence is never independent of other existences, even though the individual has a separate identity” (DTS 1985: 1). “A viable system is one sustaining the capability for independent existence as a recognizable identity” (TBYT 2009: 107). The firm “is something organic, which intends to survive — and that is why I call it a viable system” (BOTF 1981: 75).

Identity: principles “that systems cannot violate if they are to maintain their identity” (HOE 1979: 24). Cohesion “governs the question of identity in the viable system” (HOE 1979: 351).

Autonomy: “‘a law unto itself’ […] responsible for its own regulation” (BOTF 1981: 103). “If a division of the firm were really and truly autonomous it would not be part of the firm at all. […] if the heart and liver were not more or less autonomous […] we would be dead in ten minutes” (BOTF 1981: 75–76). Metasystem should “preserve the maximum autonomy for […] System One consistent with preserving the coherence of [the whole] as a viable system itself” (BOTF 1981: 275).

“Freedom is in principle a computable function of systemic purpose as perceived” (HOE 1979: 158). DF: redesign the “‘liberty machine’” to have “liberty as its output” (DF 1974, Lecture 3); “produce freedom as an output” (DF 1974, Lecture 6).

Where it sits in the model

System Five carries identity. System One needs autonomy; System Three/System Four/Five delimit it. Law of Cohesion is the inter-recursion bargain. Freedom = horizontal/vertical variety (HOE 1979: 145–146).

Textual notes

BOTF: intention to survive (BOTF 1981: 75). DTS: OED separate existence (DTS 1985: 1). TBYT 2009: 107 adds identity. HOE 1979: 158 formal function; DF 1974 political “output”.

Punch and Judy

Punch and Judy argues that Beer’s viability slides in the tradition into a constructivist sense in which knowledge is ‘viable’ when useful — a slide the authors say makes ‘the model is viable’ unfalsifiable (Ch 19) — and that the model describes a viable system already assembled, with no account of becoming or of a system changing its kind (Ch 7). It reads Beer’s declaration that freedom is ‘a computable function of systemic purpose as perceived’ as never computed and dropped by the tradition that inherited his handbook (Ch 26), and the coda adds that a system is viable for someone, naming the system being the method’s consequential but unprocedural first act (Coda). These are the manuscript’s arguments and a stress test, not findings against Beer.

Open points

HOE 1979: 158 italics — emphasis or display? (ch. 5). DF 1974 by lecture only; no 1974 print pagination (ch. 17).

Stafford Beer · Viable System Model · Recursion · Part II — The Viable System Model · Part III — Applications and politics · Think Before You Think · Punch and Judy — Overview