through the nervous system’s process of circular organization. From this premise Maturana then took the radical step of postulating that the process of circular organization itself—with or without a nervous system—is identical to the process of cognition:
Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with and without a nervous system. 45
This way of identifying cognition with the process of life itself is indeed a radically new conception. Its implications are far-reaching and will be discussed in detail in the following pages. 46
After publishing his ideas in 1970, Maturana began a long collaboration with Francisco Varela, a younger neuroscientist at the University of Santiago who was Maturana’s student before he became his collaborator. According to Maturana, their collaboration began when Varela challenged him in a conversation to find a more formal and more complete description for the concept of circular organization. 47 They immediately set to work on a complete verbal description of Maturana’s idea before attempting to construct a mathematical model, and they began by inventing a new name for it— autopoiesis.
Auto, of course, means “self’ and refers to the autonomy of selforganizing systems; and poiesis —which shares the same Greek root as the word poetry”—means “making.” So autopoiesis means “self-making.” Since they had coined a new word without a history, it was easy to use it as a technical term for the distinctive organization of living systems. Two years later Maturana and Varela published their first description of autopoiesis in a long essay, 48 and by 1974 they and their colleague Ricardo Uribe had developed a corresponding mathematical model for the simplest autopoietic system, the living cell. 49
Maturana and Varela begin their essay on autopoiesis by characterizing their approach as “mechanistic” to distinguish it from vitalist approaches to the nature of life: “Our approach will be mechanistic: no forces or principles will be adduced which are not found in the physical universe.” However, the next sentence
98
THE WEB OF LIFE
makes it immediately clear that the authors are not Cartesian mechanists but systems thinkers:
Yet, our problem is the living organization and therefore our interest will not be in properties of components, but in processes and relations between processes realized through components. 50
They go on to refine their position with the important distinction between “organization” and “structure,” which had been an implicit theme during the entire history of systems thinking but was not addressed explicitly until the development of cybernetics. 51 Maturana and Varela make the distinction crystal clear. The organization of a living system, they explain, is the set of relations among its components that characterize the system as belonging to a particular class (such as a bacterium, a sunflower, a cat, or a human brain). The description of that organization is an abstract description of relationships and does not identify the components. The authors assume that autopoiesis is a general pattern of organization, common to all living systems, whichever the nature of their components.
The structure of a living system, by contrast, is constituted by the actual relations among the physical components. In other words, the system’s structure is the physical embodiment of its organization. Maturana and Varela emphasize that the system’s organization is independent of the properties of its components, so that a given organization can be embodied in many different manners by many different kinds of components.
Having clarified that their concern is with organization, not structure, the authors then proceed to define autopoiesis, the organization common to all living systems. It is a network of production processes, in which the function of each component is to participate in the production or transformation of other components in the network. In this way the entire network continually “makes itself.” It is produced by its components and in turn produces those components. “In a living system,” the authors explain, “the product of its operation is its own organization.” 52
An important characteristic of living systems is that their auto- poietic organization includes the creation of a boundary that speci-
MODELS OF SELF-ORGANIZATION