viable agency
Compiled with AI assistance and selectively reviewed. Please consult the cited passages; the books remain the authoritative source. About this companion
Editorial synthesis · provisional
Definition
Viable agency is the practically sustained capacity of participants to shape, contest and revise the conditions of their becoming within a shared world. It includes usable possibilities of refusal and exit, rather than options reduced to compliance or prohibitively costly departure. Its ethical test concerns whether that agency can coexist with others’ viability.
Explanation
AB contrasts mutual aid with surveillance: both are densely relational, but one makes response easier while the other turns vulnerability into grounds for exclusion. Participation is therefore tested through what a regime enables, not the amount of connection it produces.
PB names participatory agency beside viability and revisability and requires systems contestable by those governed. Its formal treatment of exits remains distinct from the practical ethical claim; the source does not make ethical bindingness a theorem.
RB3 develops participation as a condition of correction under novelty: suppressing it conceals emergent harms and can make a regime self-sealing. The author retains contestability even in unavoidable damage control, and extends the wider criterion to the more-than-human milieus sustaining agency.
RB2 supplies an institutional development: arrangements distribute who can act and endure, while governance should keep collective agency open to revision. This differs from its biological account of sensorimotor agency; evaluation still requires additional premises.
Scope and attribution
The phrase is directly attested in AB and RB3. PB supplies the participatory criterion, and RB2 contributes institutional development; neither is silently relabelled as an exact lexical definition. Viable agency is evaluated within compossibility, not identified with an organism’s persistence, technical performance, unlimited individual choice or a formal exit alone.
AB — The Actual Book
A regime expands agency when people remain able to shape, contest and revise its conditions; mere connection, compliance or nominal exit is insufficient. This is tested within compossibility.
Occurrence locators: 181, 182, 191, 193, 194, 209; Glossary: 225; Appendix: 279.
PB — The Possible Book
The Manifesto and Tractatus place participatory agency among three tests of a shared world and require contestability. The formal exit treatment is a separate source formulation, not a proof of ethical bindingness.
Occurrence locators: 37, 38, 105, 155, 156, 179.
RB2 — The Real Book, Volume II: Becoming Is Being
The institutional discussion develops who can act, decide and endure, and how collective agency stays open to revision. It supplies relevant development rather than a separately named definition of viable agency; its sensorimotor account remains distinct.
Occurrence locators: 291, 292.
RB3 — The Real Book, Volume III: Murmurations
Direct viable-agency questions develop into a structural account of participation, correction and non-domination, with wider ecological and temporal conditions. The argument defends contestability even during unavoidable damage control.
Occurrence locators: 229, 234, 243, 250, 253, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267, 290, 297, 298, 309; Living in a World of Relations: 345.
Background used in the editorial explanation
Named theories and mechanisms are distinguished from neighboring background, homonyms and the author’s own synthesis. Reproduced AI passages retain their separate voice.