Applied Solaristics

Being an Account of a Field Devoted to the Study of Something That May or May Not Be Studying It Back

I. The Problem

The discipline of Applied Solaristics — the systematic study of the Manifesto for the Appropriate Administration of Undertakings — is now in its third decade and its fifth major crisis of self-definition. This is, by the standards of the field, a period of unusual stability.

The central difficulty has remained constant since the earliest days: the Manifesto appears to be a document about project management, and yet every attempt to extract a coherent methodology from it has produced not a methodology but a new school of interpretation. The text resists instrumentalisation the way the Solaristic ocean resists measurement — not through active opposition, but through a kind of serene indifference that leaves the investigator holding instruments that suddenly seem absurd. One arrives at the Café Central with a framework. One leaves with a Topfenstrudel and a sense of unease.

As of the most recent census (2024), the field encompasses fourteen recognised schools of thought, twenty-three peer-reviewed journals, an annual conference series that has split twice over the question of whether to serve lunch, and a professional certification programme that certifies practitioners in the interpretation of a document whose Principle VII acknowledges that “functioning” may require committee review. That no committee has yet been convened to conduct this review is either an oversight or the most profound enactment of the Manifesto’s values yet observed. Scholars disagree.

II. Historical Development

The Positivist Period (2001–2007)

The earliest interpreters approached the Manifesto as one might approach any technical document: with the assumption that it meant what it said and said what it meant. This period, now referred to by historians of the field as the “Positivist Naïveté” or, less charitably, the “Phase of Prussian Reading,” produced a number of earnest attempts to extract actionable practices from the text.

The most notable was Brenner and Kovacs’s Twelve Principles, Twelve Practices (2003), which proposed a concrete implementation for each of the Manifesto’s principles. Principle IV’s insistence on conversation “preferably in person, ideally over a meal” was operationalised as a mandatory weekly team lunch with a rotating cuisine schedule to satisfy Sektionschef Roth’s appended note on Viennese cultural centrality. Principle VIII’s prohibition on working through the night was implemented as an automated system that shut down version control access after 7 PM. The project was abandoned after four months when the team realised they had spent more time implementing the Manifesto than doing any actual work — a circumstance that several later commentators identified as, paradoxically, the most faithful possible enactment of Principle X’s call to leave undone that which need not be done.

The Positivist Period ended not with a refutation but with a gradual dawning. The Manifesto, it became clear, did not behave like a specification. It behaved like weather.

The Hermeneutic Turn (2007–2014)

The recognition that the Manifesto could not be reduced to practices initiated what is now called the Hermeneutic Turn — a period characterised by the conviction that the text’s meaning was deep, layered, and recoverable through sufficiently sophisticated reading.

The dominant figure of this period was Prof. Anneliese Kirchner-Waltz (Universität Graz), whose landmark paper “The Topfenstrudel as Dialectical Figure” (2008) argued that the Manifesto’s recurring references to Viennese pastry constituted not incidental local colour but a systematic philosophical vocabulary. In Kirchner-Waltz’s reading, the Topfenstrudel — layered, requiring patient preparation, structurally delicate but satisfying — represented the ideal organisational process, while the unmentioned but implicitly contrasted Apfelstrudel (more robust, more portable, less refined) stood for the Prussian-Atlantic model of brute-force delivery. The paper was enormously influential and generated a sub-literature of over two hundred responses, including a notable rebuttal from the Bohemian school arguing that Dr. Hasek’s minority opinion, which does not mention pastry at all, constituted a deliberate anti-pastry hermeneutic that Kirchner-Waltz had failed to account for.

It was during this period that the first formal taxonomy of Manifesto passages was attempted. Kirchner-Waltz’s student, Dr. Gregor Selb, spent three years developing what he called the Solaristic Catalogue — a classification system modelled on the Giese-Eunike taxonomy used by Solarists to categorise the ocean’s surface formations. Selb proposed four primary categories of Manifesto passage: Extensors (passages that appear to expand outward toward universal principles), Mimoids (passages that seem to imitate the form of practical advice without containing any), Symmetriads (passages whose meaning is identical when read forwards and backwards, or sincerely and ironically), and Asymmetriads (passages that appear to say one thing while doing another). The Catalogue was published in 2011 to considerable acclaim, adopted by three of the fourteen schools, rejected by six, and ignored by the remaining five on the grounds that the Manifesto had precisely twelve principles and did not require a taxonomy so much as a decent lunch.

The Post-Hermeneutic Condition (2014–Present)

The collapse of the Hermeneutic Turn is conventionally dated to the 2014 Salzburg Conference, at which Prof. Kirchner-Waltz herself delivered a plenary address arguing that her earlier work had been mistaken — not in its conclusions, but in its assumption that conclusions were the appropriate output of Manifesto scholarship. The Manifesto, she now proposed, was not a text to be decoded but a phenomenon to be inhabited. Its meaning was not in it but around it, in the institutional structures and scholarly arguments and conference lunches that had grown up in its orbit, the way the Solaristic ocean’s true nature was not in its formations but in the century of failed interpretation that surrounded them.

The address was received with twenty minutes of silence, which some attendees later described as stunned and others as merely the result of the post-lunch digestive interval.

Since 2014, the field has fractured into what can only be described as a condition rather than a period. The major schools are surveyed below, though the author notes that any survey is itself an act of interpretation and therefore subject to the very dynamics it describes. This observation is, at this point, so well-established as to be almost boring, but the field’s institutional norms require that it be made at least once per paper, and the author has now discharged this obligation.

III. Current Schools of Interpretation

The Vienna Circle (not to be confused with the original)

Based primarily at the Institut für Angewandte Solaristik in Vienna, the Vienna Circle holds that the Manifesto is best understood as a living administrative organism — not a document but a Verwaltungslebewesen — that continues to develop and respond to its environment. Adherents of this school spend considerable time in the Café Central, where the Manifesto was drafted, on the theory that proximity to the site of composition may produce sympathetic resonances with the text’s original intent. Critics note that this theory has not produced any publishable results but has produced a very thorough familiarity with the café’s pastry menu, which the Vienna Circle considers a form of fieldwork.

The Prague School

Founded on the intellectual legacy of Dr. Hasek’s minority opinion, the Prague School maintains that the Manifesto is essentially correct in its observation that all organisational methods converge on mediocrity, and that the only productive scholarly activity is to document this convergence with as much precision and as little enthusiasm as possible. Their journal, Proceedings of the International Society for Methodological Resignation, is widely respected for its rigour and universally dreaded for its tone. The Prague School does not attend the annual conference, on the grounds that doing so would constitute a form of optimism.

The Galician School

Operating from the principle embedded in Sektionschef Roth’s appended clarification — that the Manifesto’s Viennese assumptions are pervasive, structural, and largely invisible to Viennese scholars — the Galician School has developed a sophisticated practice of reading the Manifesto for what it does not say. Their most cited paper, “The Meals That Were Not Mentioned” (Lwów/Lviv Methodological Working Group, 2017), catalogues every cuisine, practice, and tradition that the Manifesto’s Principle IV implicitly excludes through its framing of “a meal” as a self-evidently understood concept. The paper runs to 340 pages and has been praised for its exhaustiveness and criticised for the fact that reading it takes longer than reading the Manifesto itself by a factor of approximately forty, which the Galician School considers appropriate given the historical distribution of scholarly attention.

The Atlanticist Tendency

A smaller but vocal faction, the Atlanticists argue that the Manifesto’s repeated disparagement of “certain Atlantic cultures” (Principle VIII) and “the Prussian habit” (Principle IV) constitutes not cultural commentary but a negative theology — a definition of the Manifesto’s values through the systematic enumeration of what they are not. In this reading, the entire Manifesto is secretly about Silicon Valley, which is described nowhere in the text and is therefore, by the logic of the Galician School (which the Atlanticists otherwise reject), its true subject. The Atlanticists publish primarily in English, which the Vienna Circle considers a form of performance art.

The Quantitative School

Funded primarily by management consulting firms seeking to operationalise the Manifesto for enterprise clients, the Quantitative School has developed a series of metrics, indices, and assessment frameworks that attempt to measure an organisation’s degree of alignment with the Manifesto’s values. Their flagship product, the Habsburg Agility Index™ (HAI), evaluates organisations on a scale from 0 (Prussian) to 100 (Viennese), with scores assessed across eight dimensions including “Conversational Density,” “Pastry Proximity,” and “Graceful Adaptation Quotient.” The HAI has been adopted by over two hundred organisations worldwide, none of which have scored above 34. The Quantitative School attributes this to the difficulty of the standard. The Prague School attributes it to the nature of organisations. The Vienna Circle does not acknowledge the HAI’s existence, on the grounds that reducing the Manifesto to a numerical index is precisely the kind of thing a Prussian would do.

IV. The Mimoid Problem

No survey of Applied Solaristics would be complete without a discussion of the Mimoid Problem, which has preoccupied the field since Selb first identified the category and which remains, in the author’s judgement, the discipline’s most important unresolved question.

A Mimoid, in Selb’s taxonomy, is a passage that imitates the form of practical advice without containing any actual directive content. The paradigmatic example is Principle VII: “Functioning work is the primary measure of progress, though we acknowledge that ‘functioning’ is a more philosophical question than it first appears and may require committee review.” The passage appears to establish a criterion (functioning work), immediately undermines it (functioning is philosophical), and then defers resolution to a committee that has never been formed. It has the shape of guidance. It has the cadence of guidance. It is not guidance.

The difficulty — and here the parallel to Lem’s ocean becomes most exact — is that Mimoid passages cannot be reliably distinguished from genuine directives. Is Principle V (“Build projects around competent individuals… and then trust them to do the work”) a sincere instruction, or is its inclusion of the modifier “competent” a Mimoid gesture that merely defers the problem to the question of how competence is identified? Is Principle I’s commitment to work that is “if not perfect, at least adequate” a genuine standard, or does the phrase “at least adequate” function as a Mimoid that absorbs any possible output into its definition of success?

Every attempt to develop a reliable detection method has, upon examination, turned out to itself exhibit Mimoid properties. The Selb Criteria for Mimoid Identification (2012) contain six diagnostic questions, at least two of which (“Does the passage create the impression of actionability?” and “Would a practitioner feel guided after reading it?”) are themselves passages that create the impression of diagnostic utility without providing a determinate method of application.

The author has no solution to propose. This is, of course, exactly what a Mimoid would say.

V. The Question of Contact

In Lem’s Solaris, the central question is whether meaningful contact between human investigators and the alien ocean is possible, or whether each side is so fundamentally different that communication — though endlessly attempted — can never actually occur. The ocean produces formations that look like responses. The scientists produce interpretations that look like understanding. Neither side can confirm whether anything has been transmitted.

The parallel to the relationship between Applied Solaristics and the Manifesto has been noted so frequently as to constitute its own sub-field (Meta-Solaristics, based in Brno, journal: The Recursive Observer). But the author wishes to note a discomforting possibility that Meta-Solaristics, for all its self-awareness, has not fully confronted.

It is this: the Manifesto was written by seventeen signatories over the course of seventeen afternoons in a Viennese café. Three of the signatories disagreed with the final wording. One signed only in a limited representative capacity. The Bohemian delegation appended a note arguing that the entire exercise was futile. The Galician delegation appended a note arguing that the document’s assumptions were parochial. The document, in other words, did not agree with itself at the moment of its creation.

It is possible — the author raises this as a hypothesis, not a conclusion — that the Manifesto’s resistance to systematic interpretation is not a puzzle to be solved or even a condition to be inhabited, but simply the natural and expected behaviour of a document produced by seventeen people who could not agree on what they were writing. That the ocean has no message. That the formations are just formations.

This hypothesis is known in the literature as the Hasek Conjecture, after the Bohemian signatory whose minority opinion first articulated something like it. It has been formally proposed three times, at the conferences of 2009, 2016, and 2022. On each occasion it was discussed respectfully, found to be irrefutable, and then set aside so that the conference could proceed to the afternoon sessions.

The field continues.

The author acknowledges the support of the Viennese Foundation for Methodological Inquiry and the Café Central, which has provided the Angewandte Solaristik research group with a reserved table on Wednesday afternoons since 2009. The author declares no conflicts of interest, though he notes that the concept of “conflict of interest” may itself be a Mimoid and therefore require committee review.