autopoiesis
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Designs for the Pluriverse (?)
Beyond a theory of cognition and of the biological roots of human understanding, Maturana and Varela’s work constitutes a theory of the organization of the living as a whole. It is both biology and philosophy, a system of thought in the best sense of the term.1 Their approach to the living is all-embracing, from the cellular level to evolution and society. Perhaps it can be said that it is an attempt to explain life “from the inside” (that is, in its autonomy), with- out relying primarily on observer-generated concepts of what life is or does, whether in terms of “functions” (like the functions performed by a cell or an organ), “inputs,” or “outputs,” or the organism’s relation to its environment. Their theory is a departure from these well-known biological approaches; it explains living systems as self-producing and self-contained units whose only reference is to themselves. The approach stems from the insight that cognition is a fundamental operation of all living beings and that it has to do not with representations of the world but with the effective action of a living being in the domains in which it exists (chapter 3). From this it follows that the essential character of the living is to have an autonomous organization that enables such operational effectiveness, for which Maturana and Varela coin the term autopoiesis: “Our proposition is that living beings are characterized in that, literally, they are continually self-producing. We indicate this process when we call the organization that defines them an autopoietic organization” (1987, 43). It is worth quoting the original, albeit a bit technical, definition. An autopoietic system is that unit which is organized “as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) that produces the components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network” (1980, 79).2
I find it useful to think about “organization” in this context as a system of relations among components (e.g., biophysical, cellular, biochemical, nervous, etc., just to think in biological terms for now) whose continued interaction produces the composite unit itself. All living systems have to maintain this basic organization in order to continue being the living systems they are; losing that organization leads to their disintegration. It follows that all relations among living units have to respect the criteria of conservation of autopoiesis. This takes place through what Maturana and Varela call structural coupling; all living systems interact with their environment through such coupling. The key issue here is that the environment does not dictate the relation; rather, it is the organization of the unit (its basic system of relations) that determines its interaction with the environment. Another way of saying this is that living systems have “operational closure in their organization: their identity is specified by a network of dynamic processes whose effects do not leave the network” (1987, 89); yet another way to refer to this feature is to say that living systems are structurally determined (“machines,” in the above definition) in that their changes are determined by their organization (in order to conserve autopoiesis; e.g., 1987, 95–100; 1980). But again it is not the perturbations of the environment that determine what happens to the living being but the latter’s organization; the former only triggers the changes.