The incompleteness of autopoiesis (revisited)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21910/rbsd.v13i3.1006Keywords:
Autopoiesis, Incompleteness, Indeterminacy, Symbolic media, Irritation, Coding, CrisisAbstract
With the incorporation of the concept of autopoiesis into Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems in 1984, communication —in the form of the autopoiesis of communication— acquired a distinctive role in the architecture of the theory. Because of this theoretical move, individual experiences and actions became a condition of possibility for communication, but not an operative component of its constitution. The autopoietic turn enables systems theory to engage conceptually with the complexity sciences. Yet it also undervalues the contribution that experiences and actions make in supplying variation to autopoietic communication and, in doing so, obscures the incompleteness of autopoiesis—that is, its moments of indeterminacy. The article contends that these moments of indeterminacy reside in the concepts of systemic irritation, coding, and crisis. The autopoiesis of communication is therefore not an infinite, complete, and perfect process, but a contingent systemic mechanism whose very moments of indeterminacy sustain its continuity.
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