Metaphorum 2026 · The World in Torment: A Time Whose Ideas Has Come

The Škofja Loka Passion Play as a Nexus of System, Culture, Art and Religion

Purpose: In 'World in Torment: A Time Whose Idea Must Come', Stafford Beer diagnosed a civilisation governed by low-variety ideologies, losing the identities that hold societary units together. The paper asks what cybernetics contributes to interpreting the Škofja Loka Passion Play – the oldest preserved dramatic text in Slovenian, inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List in 2016. Cybernetics renders visible the structural conditions of the Play’s three-hundred-year viability; the Play is a living counter-example to the torment. Methods: The stance is stated plainly. The Viable System Model (VSM) belongs to organisational cybernetics; a passion play is not a firm. Nothing is prescribed. It is applied as Beer applies it in World in Torment – to any societary unit, “a village or a company, a state or the whole of humankind” – as a diagnostic instrument for evaluating identity, that “highly complex ethos of self-recognition”. A hermeneutic reading of the Play as cultural-spiritual text disciplines the cybernetic one; a case study maps actors, roles and flows. Findings: The study shows that the Škofja Loka Passion Play can be read through the lens of Beer’s Viable System Model. The scenes and processions correspond to the operational level of System 1, while the municipality, local associations, and the monastery jointly assume the coordinating and managerial roles of Systems 2 and 3. Scholarly engagement with the Play functions as System 4, and the religious tradition surrounding it fulfils the System 5 role of articulating and maintaining collective identity. With the involvement of roughly 1,500 volunteers, the production offers abundant leadership potential and, instead of sidelining parts of the community, brings a wide spectrum of people into meaningful participation, countering typical patterns of social exclusion. Implications/contribution: In contrast to enterprise diagnosis (Espejo, Schwaninger, Pérez Ríos, Hoverstadt) and community applications (Leonard; Espinosa and Walker), the paper extends the World in Torment reading of identity to living heritage and the scenic arts – where the idea whose time must come has quietly been coming for three centuries. Speaker: Tadeja Jere Jakulin — University of Primorska

Schedule to be confirmed