Edited by Henry Sussman

Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2

    2. Autopoiesis and the Planet

    The biosphere as a whole is autopoietic in the sense that it maintains itself.

    … Planetary physiology … is the autopoiesis of the cell writ large.

    Margulis and Sagan, What is Life?

    From its inception in 1971 as a cybernetic theory of biological form, to its current presence on research fronts extending from immunology to Earth system science to sociology, from geobiology, artificial life, and cognitive science to a range of literary and cultural theories, the concept of autopoiesis has developed on the margins, not in the strongholds, of mainstream Anglo-American science. It may be that its persistent Continental and countercultural vogue has made it suspect there, and also, that its outsider status within this scientific academy has increased its extrascientific traffic. Additionally, as a recent Italian commentator has pointed out, “autopoiesis originated in a time-window (the early 1970s) when the world of biology was completely dominated by a vision of DNA and RNA as the holy grail of life. Alternative views about the mechanism of life didn’t have much chance of appearing in mainstream journals” (Luisi, “Autopoiesis” 179). The concept of autopoiesis is interesting, then, for its multifarious cultural history, itinerant discursive career, and contrarian stance. Moreover, it has been particularly important for enabling microbiologist Lynn Margulis to outline a second-order form of Gaia theory (see Clarke, “Neocybernetics”). Here I will connect the conceptual linkage of autopoiesis and Gaia theory to the wider discourse of self-referential systems.

    Autopoiesis marks a reorientation “from interest in design and control to an interest in autonomy and environmental sensitivity, from planning to evolution, from structural stability to dynamic stability” (Luhmann, Social Systems 10). In this remark, social systems theorist Niklas Luhmann glosses the distinction of his cybernetic mentor, Heinz von Foerster, between first- and second-order cybernetics (see Foerster, ed., Cybernetics). First-order cybernetics is hetero-referential, it concerns “objects” such as natural or technological systems. Second-order cybernetics observes the self-reference of “subjects,” that is, the necessary recursivity of cognitive systems capable of producing observations in the first place. However, from the recursive logic of second-order cybernetics it follows that the traditional distinction between objects and subjects is (un)grounded in the primary self-reference of observing systems (see Luhmann, “Cognitive Program”). In Autopoiesis and Cognition (Maturana and Varela), the inventors of the concept made their definitive case for considering autopoietic systems, such as living cells, cognitive—not merely as observed systems but more fundamentally as observing systems. As a part of the process of its self-making operation, a biological autopoietic system produces and maintains a boundary, a membrane by which to regulate cognitions of its environment. Bound up in a higher-order reiteration of those same dynamics, we cannot look at Gaia as a planetary whole without looking, self-referentially, at ourselves, a part of Gaia, looking at Gaia. In either case, “objectivity” is surpassed by participation.

    The system concept in its proper theorization denotes a complex ensemble unified in such a way that a process emerges from, and only from, the interdependent interactions of those elements. Systems theory attends to both the elements and the processes of the systems it observes, precisely because in self-referential systems those elements are themselves the products of those processes—just as, in the Gaian view, the forms of living organisms coevolve along with the forms of their environments. Autopoiesis and Gaia fit together as interlocking, micro- and macro- modes of systems theory: biological autopoiesis defines the minimal formal requirements for living systems, beginning with the cell, and Gaia captures the “planetary physiology” of the biosphere, for which the atmosphere is the autopoietic membrane.

    Both theories participate in the travails of an epistemological transition by which the contingencies of self-referential systems now determine the bottom line of any possible observation. “Constructivism is the form assumed in reflection on the system of science facing its own extravagances” (Luhmann, “Cognitive Program” 151). The periodic ups and down of Gaia theory, as that concept of planetary self-reference and self-regulation has crossed between scientific and cultural discourse at large, bears out the travails of this transition. However, in the current upheavals in the Earth system as observed with reference to the place of the human within planetary dynamics, the climate crisis has made the stakes of these throes of transformation even clearer. If we are to render our technoscientific culture fit for the long term, then we will have to complete a pervasive redistribution of the ways that knowledge, scientific and otherwise, is constructed and communicated. A systems-theoretical observation of our geobiological situation within the planet we inhabit is a good place to start this rebooting of interrelations between science and society.

    Both autopoiesis and Gaia (in its original form as the Gaia hypothesis) were first published in the same year, 1974. Their conceptual histories have become significantly intertwined. But to begin with, Gaia theory has been if anything more controversial and more widely disseminated than the discourse of autopoiesis. In a 2004 article, the Dutch paleontologist and emeritus professor of geophysiology at Leiden University, Peter Westbroek, offers an account of his own scientific development focused on the advent of the Gaia concept. He begins by evoking his participation in a scientific meeting convened in San Diego in 1988 to debate the Gaia theory. The counter-arguments at that meeting were so critical that for a while Westbroek backed away from Gaian science. However, by the 2000 Gaia theory meeting in Valencia, Spain, even some of the skeptics of 1988, such as geophysicist Jim Kasting of Penn State University, had come around. For Westbroek, the improved fortunes of Gaia theory in the new millennium have been part of “the new wind blowing through the earth and life sciences since the beginning of the ’90s. The geological forces of life are hot stuff at present, as are gaian feedbacks; new scientific journals appear on ‘Biogeology’ and ‘Earth System Science,’ while the old ones eagerly compete for copy in this burgeoning field” (Westbroek, “Gaia” 415). But as Westbroek admits, in mainstream science Gaia remains hands-off:

    And Gaia, what about Gaia? When you look through the literature you can hardly find a trace of it. Research on Gaia is OK, but do not mention that name if you want a job! Gaia is taboo. The scientific inquisition is watching you. With the primacy of physics evaporated and global biology on its way, what else is standing in the way of Gaia? The problem is epistemology. (415)

    Landing square in the midst of the epistemological upheavals of post-classical science, both autopoiesis and Gaia theory are roiled by the philosophical turmoil centered on systems theory. As Gregory Bateson once remarked in conversation with Stewart Brand about the millennial implications of cybernetics: “We didn’t realize then (at least I didn’t realize it, though McCulloch may have) that the whole of logic would have to be reconstructed for recursiveness” (Brand, “For God’s Sake” 33). All of our systems are in turmoil, and so are the theoretical bases by which we try to understand how these systems operate. Taken together, the systems concepts of autopoiesis and Gaia epitomize a shift in the aims of scientific rationality, from instrumental control without due regard for environmental ramifications, to the observation and integrated coordination of system/environment relations. They entail more reflective ethical stances toward such contingencies of interrelation. An autopoietic reading of Gaia theory, as advanced by several prominent bioscientists and systems theorists, allows that premier model for the recursive turn in second-order systems theory to scale up from cellular dynamics to psychic, social, and planetary systematics. The autopoiesis of the planet links life, mind, society, and biosphere, even in their systemic differentiations, in a way that threads the world with a common mode of operation-in-context. Second-order systems theory thus creates a conceptual framework large enough to contain and sufficiently complex to guide the requisite thinking of ecosystematic interconnectedness thrust upon us by the literal climate crisis.

    The Evolution of Autopoiesis

    A certain renegade and globetrotting streak runs through the pedigree of autopoiesis. The concept was invented by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and initially vetted by the Austrian-émigré cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster. The concept of autopoiesis may be traced in utero within Maturana’s 1970 paper “Neurophysiology of Cognition.” In this essay, the particular physiology of cognitive processing in the nervous system is referred back to that of living systems in general: “Although the nervous system expands the domain of interactions of the organism by bringing into this domain interactions with pure relations, the function of the nervous system is subservient to the necessary circularity of the living organization” (Maturana, “Neurophysiology” 8). In 1971, Maturana and Varela coined the neologism of autopoiesis as a singular term for this cluster of interrelated concepts—circular organization, operational closure, and self-referring processes, a name for the self-referential or recursive form of the “organization of the living.” With an acknowledgment of von Foerster’s assistance in translating and placing the article, the first English-language publication of the concept of autopoiesis occurred in 1974:

    The autopoietic organization is defined as a unity by a network of productions of components which (i) participate recursively in the same network of productions of components which produced these components, and (ii) realize the network of productions as a unity in the space in which the components exist. Consider for example the case of a cell: it is a network of chemical reactions which produce molecules such that (i) through their interactions [they] generate and participate recursively in the same network of reactions which produced them, and (ii) realize the cell as a material unity. (Varela, Maturana, and Uribe, “Autopoiesis” 188).

    At its inception, the discourse of autopoiesis was coupled directly to a self-referential description of the cognitive process that produces the discourse. Observed both as and by an autopoietic operation, the minimal organization of life, the cell, takes the form of a closed circular process of self-production (autopoiesis) within a system open to environmental interaction (cognition). In other words, while the environment can (and must) feed such a system, and can bring about responses within the system that compensate for environmental perturbations, neither the environment nor the observers it contains can operate (or control) the system. All mythical tales and literary fantasies to the contrary, life cannot be endowed from without. Open to the material-energetic flux of its environment, an autopoietic system is closed or “information-tight” in the sense that it is self-operating, or autonomous. It self-maintains the continuous production of the components that bind and replenish the system that produces the components that bind and replenish the system, and so on, until or unless the co-realization of the living system and its medium can no longer conserve their co-adaptation, and the lapse of autopoiesis induces the death of the system.

    The inclinations of both Maturana and Varela were to tamp down efforts by others to extend autopoiesis beyond biological systems. They insisted on its delimitation to the realm of molecular dynamics, on its material specificity as a membrane-bounded process of biological production. As Varela put it in 1980, “autopoiesis is a particular case of a larger class of organizations that can be called organizationally closed, that is, defined through indefinite recursion of component relations”; however, it “is tempting to confuse autopoiesis with organizational closure and living autonomy with autonomy in general” (Varela, “Describing” 37). With regard to social systems, he was quite definitive: “Unless a careful distinction is made between the particular (autopoiesis and productions)”—meaning that in autopoiesis proper, the system produces itself, produces the very elements that compose it as a system—“and the general (organizational closure and general computations), the notion of autopoiesis becomes a metaphor and loses its power. This is what has happened, in my view, with attempts to apply autopoiesis directly to social systems” (Ibid. 38). Varela’s particular concern is warranted for theories that posit persons as the elements “produced” by social systems. Placing the autopoiesis of social systems on a non-metaphorical basis would have to locate an alternative rationale.

    Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory has arguably established a properly non-metaphorical approach to the autopoiesis of social systems. Luhmann proceeds like so: “If we abstract from life and define autopoiesis as a general form of system building using self-referential closure, we would have to admit that there are nonliving autopoietic systems, different modes of autopoietic reproduction, and that there are general principles of autopoietic organization that materialize as life, but also in other modes of circularity and self-reproduction” (Luhmann, “Autopoiesis” 2). So far this could appear to conform to Varela’s notion of “the general (organizational closure and general computations),” that is, to no more than a metaphorical extension of closure in the absence of self-production. What maintains Luhmann’s social appropriation as autopoiesis proper is that “the particular (autopoiesis and productions)” is supplied by communication itself. In social autopoiesis, communications are the social products that continuously reproduce the system of further communications.

    Social systems use communication as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. Their elements are communications that are recursively produced and reproduced by a network of communications and that cannot exist outside of such a network. Communications are not “living” units, they are not “conscious” units, they are not “actions.” Their unity requires a synthesis of three selections, namely information, utterance, and understanding (including misunderstanding). This synthesis is produced by the network of communication, not by some kind of inherent power of consciousness, nor by the inherent quality of the information. (Ibid. 3)

    Further, Luhmann observes the operational differentiation but “interpenetration” of social and psychic systems. Both are autopoietic. Either co-emerges with the other; either presents the immediate environment of the operation of the other. For both, the elements of autopoietic self-production are the forms of systemic events proper to each: events of consciousness for psychic systems, events of communication for social systems: “In the areas of the theory of consciousness or the theory of communication, the event-character of elements that cannot be further dissolved forces itself upon us. A sentence is a sentence, it is spoken when it is spoken, and no longer afterwards and not yet before. A thought or a perception, when I see something, is current in this moment and no longer afterwards and not yet before, so that the event-character of the operations becomes obvious” (Luhmann, “Self-Organization” 150). However, biological autopoiesis has its own clock with regard to the material-energetic contingencies of metabolic self-production: “The formal definition of autopoiesis gives no indication about the span of time during which components exist… . Conscious systems and social systems have to produce their own decay. They produce their basic elements, i.e., thoughts and communications, not as short-term states but as events that vanish as soon as they appear. Events too occupy a minimal span of time, a specious present, but their duration is a matter of definition and has to be regulated by the autopoietic system itself: events cannot be accumulated” (Luhmann, “Autopoiesis” 8–9).

    Over numerous volumes published from the 1970s to the 1990s Luhmann carried out the most rigorous and pervasive extension of autopoiesis outside of biological research in particular and the scientific academy proper. Above and beyond its own ongoing establishment in sociology, legal studies, literary theory, media theory, and other discursive disciplines, Luhmann’s work can deepen and augment the other discourses of autopoiesis specific to other environments and modes of system production. We must get past whatever idiosyncratic preferences stand in the way of integrating biological, psychic, and social autopoiesis into a comprehensive systems theory adequate to contemporary hypercomplexities and the manifold of environmental challenges our current systems confront. The autopoietic reformulation of Gaia theory is one important vector for this conceptual integration.

    The Evolution of Gaia

    Along one line of development, then, the concept of autopoiesis has unfolded with second-order systems theory as a discourse of epistemological constructivism. Here autopoiesis has been exported beyond its original living borders into the realms of mind and society—the metabiotic organizations of consciousness and communication that have emerged from the evolution (or Gaian proliferation) of living systems. In this realm Luhmann’s theory stands out as the most successful and far-ranging exaptation of autopoiesis to metabiotic systems theory. Many observers consider Luhmann’s definition of the elements processed by social autopoiesis as communicative events (as opposed to, in the biological instance, molecular dynamics) and his subsequent specification of the temporalization of autopoiesis to be his primary innovations, his most important contributions to the field of general systems theory. Along another line of development, as we have noted, autopoiesis has been brought up to the level of the biosphere with geobiological systems theories of planetary regulation, the Gaia theory of James Lovelock as elaborated, following some critical commentaries given by Varela himself, by Lynn Margulis.

    In the final chapter of her memoir Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis narrates the first-order cybernetic framework of Lovelock’s original Gaia hypothesis: “The term Gaia was suggested to Lovelock by the novelist William Golding… . Lovelock asked his neighbor whether he could replace the cumbersome phrase ‘a cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies as detected by chemical anomalies in the Earth’s atmosphere’ with a term meaning ‘Earth.’ ‘I need a good four-letter word.’ … The name caught on all too well” (Margulis, Symbiotic Planet 118). Lovelock’s initial hypothesis had modeled the sum of the biota as a thermostat controlling the viability of the abiotic environment. As its critics were quick to point out, the limitations of this scheme were several. For one, it overcompensated for traditional geoevolutionary accounts, in which life always played the passive partner having to adapt itself to the whims of a capricious and overbearing environment, by placing life itself over and in charge of its environment. For another, this biocentric version of Gaia in turn prompted Lovelock to venture the first-order cybernetic vocabulary of optimization, looking at the cybernetics of Gaia as one would at the engineering of a control mechanism.

    In the development of his hypothesis into a theory, by the later 1980s Lovelock had both relinquished the rhetoric of optimization—at least to the extent of replacing notions of optimal with, at best, viable—and brought life and Earth back into realignment as a coupled meta-system. Gaia theory integrates life with its terrestrial environment into a geobiological system whose coevolution has been a composite phenomenon of co-emergence, bounded by a self-organized atmosphere filtering the input of solar radiation:

    Through Gaia theory, I see the Earth and the life it bears as a system, a system that has the capacity to regulate the temperature and the composition of the Earth’s surface and to keep it comfortable for living organisms. The self-regulation of the system is an active process driven by the free energy available from sunlight… . Gaia had first been seen from space and the arguments used were from thermodynamics. To me it was obvious that the Earth was alive in the sense that it is a self-organizing and self-regulating system. (Lovelock, Ages of Gaia 31)

    But in point of fact, Lovelock has never entirely relinquished his commitment to “strong Gaia”—the conviction that Gaia is in some sense alive, even if only, as here, in virtue of its being a system. Varela once called Lovelock out on this orientation, in terms of, with reference to the theory itself, “some of the more animistic notions that have parasitized it” (Thompson, ed., Gaia 2 211). In her account of Gaia in Symbiotic Planet, discussing Lovelock’s tendentious troping of the properly scientific system-concept of Gaia, Margulis confessed:

    I regret this personification… . Gaia, the system, emerges from ten million or more connected living species that form its incessantly active body… . Gaia … is not an organism directly selected among many. It is an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun. (Margulis, Symbiotic Planet 118–19)

    Restated in the terms I use to distinguish biological from social autopoiesis, Margulis is saying that, literally considered, Gaia is not a biotic but a metabiotic system.

    Let us briefly trace the development of this second-order Gaia theory. CoEvolution Quarterly for Summer 1975 presented the first publication of the Gaia hypothesis in a non-specialist journal. Margulis and Lovelock led their readers into the topic with a seventeenth-century engraving and a discussion of Harvey’s demonstration of the circulatory system of the body, presenting this earlier discovery as an analogy for the atmosphere’s Gaian role as a circulatory system in relation to the planetary “body” (Margulis and Lovelock, “Atmosphere”). Fatefully, however, to this more popular article was appended a separate section titled “Gaia and Cybernetics,” an excerpt from a more technical piece that had been published the year before, with Lovelock rather than Margulis as the lead author (Lovelock and Margulis, “Atmospheric Homeostasis”). That excerpt gave mathematical formulae for the application of Shannon and Weaver’s information theory to the thermodynamics of living systems. The next number of CoEvolution Quarterly devoted an entire page to a letter to the editor from Maturana and Varela’s colleague Heinz von Foerster, asserting defects in the information theory presented in “Gaia and Cybernetics.” Nonetheless, von Foerster supported the main innovations of that presentation: “I found Lovelock’s and Margulis’s ideas too important to see them becoming vulnerable because of deficiencies of a different kind. As a comment on their—or anybody else’s—classification of Life I suggest that you reproduce ‘Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, its Characterization and a Model’” (Foerster, “Gaia’s Cybernetics”). Von Foerster’s constructive criticism is to my knowledge the first and original suggestion of a relation between the cybernetics of Gaia and the theory of autopoiesis as a description of the operational organization of living systems.

    Erich Jantsch’s The Self-Organizing Universe of 1980 took autopoiesis in the opposite direction from Luhmann, back to the abiotic nexus of dissipative structures, and then, forward once more to the singular super-organic system of Gaia. Jantsch aligned the concepts of self-organization and evolution to connect emergent forms in physics and biology to cosmological events and cultural repercussions. Given that autopoiesis can be construed as a theory of minimal life emerging from prebiotic autocatalytic processes, underscored by its readiness for computer modeling as such, Jantsch proceeded to backdate the evolution of autopoiesis from biotic cells to abiotic chemical reaction systems: “In the more than 3000 million years before the appearance of the first multicellular organisms, three main levels of autopoietic existence appear: dissipative structures, prokaryotes and eukaryotes. In macroevolution, however, the identification of autopoietic levels is more difficult. Nevertheless it seems that the prokaryotes are matched on the macroscopic branch by the autopoietic Gaia system” (Jantsch, Self-Organizing Universe 131).

    Jantsch alluded here to the now broadly accepted account of Lynn Margulis’s serial endosymbiosis theory: all nucleated cells (eukaryotes) evolved from the viable merger of distinct forms of bacteria (prokaryotes) (see Margulis, Symbiosis). Even before the appearance of eukaryotes about 1.5 billion years ago, Margulis and Lovelock have argued, once the bacteria had achieved critical mass on their own and blue-greened the planet, the phenomenon of biospherical self-regulation binding the biota and their total geological environment into an emergent whole earth system—Gaia—had already appeared (see Lovelock, Ages of Gaia; Margulis and Sagan, What is Life?). While Jantsch may be said to have stretched the idea of autopoiesis too thinly over multiple arenas of application, his was nonetheless a seminal grasp of its possibilities as a unifying concept within systems theory. And while von Foerster was likely the first to put the two concepts side by side, without suggesting that Gaia was itself autopoietic, Jantsch may have been the first to directly assert the autopoietic nature of the Gaia system.

    In 1988, Lovelock, Margulis, and Varela participated in a Gaia theory symposium in Italy. Its vigorous concluding symposium began with Varela’s lengthy assessment and critique of Lovelock’s Gaia theory. His tour de force of scientific conversation provides a definitive second-order cybernetic perspective on Lovelock’s first-order orientation. First of all, as mentioned above, Varela addressed Lovelock’s continued use of phrasings that hypostatize the “life” of Gaia, and he implicitly suggested for that complex coupling of biotic and abiotic component systems, instead, a generalization of the discourse of biotic autopoiesis allowing for the “living-like” operational autonomy of metabiotic systems:

    Jim has made it very clear … that Gaia cannot be described as other than having the quality of life… . But it seems to me that this difficult issue can perhaps be helped and clarified by making a distinction… . It is the difference between being alive, which is an elusive and somewhat metaphorical concept, and a broader concept, which is perhaps easier to tackle, that of autonomy. The quality we see in Gaia as being living-like, to me is the fact that it is a fully autonomous system … whose fundamental organization corresponds to operational closure… . Operational closure is a form, if you like, of fully self-referential network constitution that specifies its own identity… . Autonomy, in the sense of full operational closure, is the best way of describing that living-like quality of Gaia, and … the use of the concept of autonomy might liberate the theory from some of the more animistic notions that have parasitized it. (cited in Thompson, ed., Gaia 2 211)

    Although Varela would not have put it this way, the recognition that there are metabiotic modes of autonomy based on autopoietic closure—that broadly considered, as Luhmann has argued, autopoiesis describes a general mode of systemic self-reference, one form of which is biological—underwrites the extension of autopoiesis to a properly metabiotic observation of Gaia.

    Margulis’s later adaptations of autopoiesis to Gaia theory appear to have been informed by the points Varela expressed in this exchange: “The simplest, smallest known autopoietic entity is a single bacterial cell. The largest is probably Gaia—life and its environment-regulating behavior at the Earth’s surface. Cells and Gaia display a general property of autopoietic entities: as their surroundings change unpredictably, they maintain their structural integrity and internal organization, at the expense of solar energy, by remaking and interchanging their parts” (Margulis, “Big Trouble” 267, 269). Margulis and Sagan would seem to echo Varela again in the way that they have stressed Gaia’s participation in, rather than identity with, the form of life per se: “The biosphere as a whole is autopoietic in the sense that it maintains itself… . As an autopoietic system, Gaia therefore shares an essential quality with individual living systems” (Margulis and Sagan, What is Life? 20).

    In short, the biologist Margulis has effectively remediated the chemist Lovelock’s homeostatic or first-order cybernetic animism—that is, she has followed a second-order systems-theoretical resolution of the central problem with the overly “strong” form of the Gaia concept. If Gaia is “not an organism,” but is, nonetheless, “an autopoietic system,” then Margulis has essentially retraced for Gaia a metabiotic course parallel to that by which Luhmann has carried the theory of autopoiesis over into the metabiotic co-emergence of psychic and social systems, consciousness and communication. This suggests that one could point to the formal echoes of these operational parallels among autopoietic systems to account for the powerful ways that Gaia has always propagated its prosopopoeias within meaning systems. That is, the Gaian system’s overlapping forms of life and Earth resonate with the forms of human psychic and social systems, and these system/environment frequencies go all the way down and all the way out. Gaia’s systemic resonance for consciousness and communication produces both its mythic and its scientific faces—its primal intuitions, its historical articulations, and its belated re-cognitions.

    The Autopoietic Planet

    As the conversation around Varela’s critique of Gaia theory at the 1988 symposium continued, the conceptual shift from first- to second-order cybernetic models—from homeostatic regulation to autopoietic recursion—became more explicit. Varela went on to discuss the complex adaptability of Gaia’s ongoing emergence as a globally distributed network of systems, a planetary network that, like an immune system, continues to learn on the job. In that case,

    the best model for Gaia is not one of the old tradition of feedbacks added together, but one of a fully distributed network… . I believe that one will not have a fully convincing argument for Gaia until the full plastic network qualities of Gaia become apparent. For then, you see, you will actually be able to put your finger on the learning capacity of Gaia to show just how it becomes adaptive. (cited in Thompson, ed., Gaia 2 212)

    We note a related neocybernetic observation in another passage from Peter Westbroek’s discussion of Gaia theory, in which he invokes the systems approach of the French theorist Edgar Morin. According to Westbroek, in La Vie de la Vie (La Méthode, II), Morin

    provides a dazzling picture of a major phase transition in biology, that is, the spontaneous emergence of smoothly operating ecosystems from “egocentric” organisms and their inanimate surroundings. He shows how multiple antagonisms may generate solidarity and generosity and how the omnipresence of noise and misunderstanding in a signaling cacophony may give rise to understanding and mutual collaboration. Thus, a flexible ecosystemic organization arises, autonomous, acephalous, yet capable of learning by selecting its constituent parts. By implication this brings home the idea of Gaia learning over the eons to recycle nutrients, to detoxify the global habitat, and to regulate the global climate. Recent advances in Earth System Science are revealing how and when the various steps in this learning process were accomplished. (Westbroek, “Gaia” 418; italics in the original)

    As we can draw from Westbroek’s overview of complexity theory and Gaia, in contemporary systems theory the rigid structural paradigm of traditional holism gives way to fluid self-organizations from noise. The proper frame of such observations is the system/environment distinction. With Gaia, it may be, “the whole system uses itself as environment in forming its own subsystems and thereby achieves greater improbability on the level of those subsystems by more rigorously filtering an ultimately uncontrollable environment” (Luhmann, Social Systems 7).

    It is also interesting that a recent study of autopoiesis by workers associated with Varela’s research group, developing a mathematical model of minimal life, defends the plausibility of Gaian autopoiesis in a manner that also addresses one of Varela’s standard complaints about social autopoiesis, that it cannot indicate a boundary by which to enclose its domain of operations. In the midst of their article “Autopoiesis and Cognition,” Paul Bourgine and John Stewart address the issue of higher-order autopoietic systems. They ask: “What is necessary in order to consider multicellular organisms as autopoietic systems, not just because they are made up of first-order autopoietic systems, but as second-order autopoietic systems in their own right?” (Bourgine and Stewart, “Autopoiesis” 336). Their answer is that: “What is required for this is a ‘boundary’ defined in functional terms,” that is, in terms other than the material ones so literally presented by cellular membranes (Ibid. 336). Moreover, “these considerations are even more compelling if we consider the possibility of a third-order autopoietic system including among its components both first- and second-order autopoietic systems. One possible candidate here is the whole ecosphere of the planet Earth, considered in the light of Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. This is certainly a system consisting of a network of processes that continually produce the components (including first- and second-order autopoietic systems) that reproduce those processes”:

    It must be an open question at present whether the terrestrial ecosphere actually is a bona fide autopoietic system… . We do not want to rule out this possibility simply because the ecosphere does not have a single clearly reified membrane… . Our point here is not to argue particularly for or against the hypothesis that Gaia, or an insect colony, is a third-order autopoietic system. Our point is rather that for these to become tractable questions, we require a renewed definition of autopoiesis that does not depend on an excessively reified definition of “membrane” or “boundary.” (Ibid. 337)

    Bourgine and Stewart’s emphasis on the functional rather than material instantiation of the autopoietic boundary delineating the system/environment dyad does several important things. It further promotes the integration of autopoiesis into the Gaia paradigm, and by doing so, it augments the concept of autopoiesis by integrating its cellular origins with its higher-order, ultimately metabiotic natural extensions. Their autopoietic spin on the Gaia concept is precisely metabiotic up to the “sentient” borders of life and mind, where it joins Luhmann’s metabiotic extension of biological autopoiesis to both consciousness and communication. Both psychic and social systems are higher-order natural systems self-producing their metabiotic forms only within the medium of living systems. The autopoietic “selves” of psychic and social systems are not organic but systemic—co-emergent, co-evolving, functionally bounded differential forms of virtual autopoiesis spun off from the literal metabolic looping of living systems. In this way, autopoiesis comprehends the interconnections—the structural couplings as well as the operational differentiations—among natural systems, in a way that can guide our critical efforts at comprehensive thinking past the pitfalls of holistic totalization and specious unification. Moreover, nothing and no one controls these systems. Beyond these considerations of theoretical comprehension, our challenge is to get right with autopoietic systems.

    Works Cited

    • Bourgine, Paul and John Stewart. “Autopoiesis and Cognition.” Artificial Life 10 (2004): 327–45.
    • Brand, Stewart. “For God’s Sake, Margaret: Conversation with Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead.” CoEvolution Quarterly (Summer 1976): 32–44.
    • Clarke, Bruce. “Neocybernetics of Gaia: The Emergence of Second-Order Gaia Theory.” Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis. Ed. Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. 293–314.
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