Time, Interdisciplinarity and Ethics in Autopoietic Cultures
In: Cultural and Ethical Turns: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Culture, Politics and EthicsSearch for other papers by Scott H. Boyd in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
When Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela introduced autopoiesis in 1971, it was ‘to designate the organisation of a minimal living system.’ Since then the term has been used to describe non-living systems including those that are legal, political, academic, and corporate. In short, it has been applied to any system that is seen as ‘one that continuously produces the components that specify it, while at the same time realising it (the system) as a concrete unity in space and time.’ Though unique in its biological origins and initial goals, autopoiesis bears resemblance to other theories, which place human creativity or thought as a means of constructing the world, such as ‘nomos’ described by Peter Berger in the late 1960s. However, the consideration of time and engagement with the world in Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis is closer to Dasein in Heidegger. This chapter argues that cultures are autopoietic and inclusive of these and other theories as organised networks of processes (disciplines) of production (synthesis and destruction) and of components (language, behaviours, objects, beliefs) that continuously regenerate, realising the networks that produce them. Considering cultures as autopoietic allows that they are autonomous and for autonomic systems existing in a continuous presence. Secondly, such consideration reduces the primacy and power of disciplinary definitions and distinctions developed within a paradigm of representational (objective) analysis and instead privileges organisation rather than structure. Thirdly, if cultures are autopoietic, then every act takes place in language and, according to Maturana and Varela, ‘is an act of constitution of the human world.’ Thus, every act has an ethical meaning because every act ‘brings forth a world created with others in the act of coexistence.’