On the death of Humberto R. Maturana (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) by Dirk Baecker
First published: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Online page 
, May 7, 2021. Supplemented version for a Mexican anthology edited by Aldo Mascareño, in memory of Humberto R. Maturana, July 2021.
Humberto Romesín Maturana had accepted the invitation to the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University in the winter semester of 1986/87, but he was annoyed. How could Niklas Luhmann, who had invited him, come up with the idea of misappropriating his concept of Autopoiesis, the self-generation of life from life, for the description of social systems? The message of this concept was clear.
Published in 1970 under the title of *A Biology of Cognition*, it appeared in the same year that Salvador Allende was democratically elected president of Chile. Maturana had studied medicine there since 1948 before going to Harvard University for doctoral studies in 1956, researching questions of frog anatomy and vision.
Among other things, he found that after certain interventions in its nervous system, the frog stubbornly threw its tongue in one direction when trying to catch a fly, while the fly was to be found in the other. It is not the fly, he concluded, but the brain that coordinates the frog's perceptions and movements.
In 1960, he accepted a call to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Santiago de Chile and expanded his research into a theory of the organism, perception and cognition. In 1968, Heinz von Foerster invited him to the University of Illinois, where he held a visiting professorship until 1970.
Maturana understood his biology of cognition, a theory of cognition as a biological process, at the same time as a philosophy of Freedom. Nobody could take away from the organism the Autonomy of its perception of the world, as much as this autonomy depended on taking place in a suitable environment.
Heinz von Foerster recognized the far-reaching significance of this discovery. It fitted in with his attempt to formulate an epistemology that placed the observer at the center of interest. "Everything that is said is said by an observer," Maturana had written into science's pedigree. "Everything that is said is said to an observer," von Foerster added.
At the same time, Allende invited Stafford Beer to Chile to expand the observer's newly developed cybernetics into a system of social control for the Chilean economy. So soon after the turbulent 1960s, hopes must have been overwhelming that a free, self-determining society could finally be established. One knows how that ended. Supported by the CIA, first the copper entrepreneurs, then the truckers and shippers went on strike, paralyzing the country. In 1973, Pinochet staged a coup and established a military dictatorship.
Maturana must have followed all this with the greatest concern. He continued to give his lectures. At one point he devoted an entire semester to the question of a theory of the organism and later reported that at the end of that semester a student came up to him and told him that he now knew everything about the production of proteins from proteins, but still did not understand what "life" was. Maturana did not know the answer. He devoted his semester break to the question and found the answer in his concept of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis, self-generation, is understood as a process that extracts from the components of a living being, primarily cells and proteins, not only the components of the living being but also the network of generation of the components of the living being.
Life is an unfolded tautology. It is a one-time invention that has been repeated in an infinite number of forms since life existed on Earth. Life, so the consequence from this consideration, cannot be explained from its origin, but only from its continuation. One can speculate about the processes that preceded the emergence of life from the primordial soup, but the crucial point is not its emergence but its reproduction. Life is its own ("autos") work ("poiesis").
The turbulent 1960s were followed by the rather gray 1970s. Maturana further developed his theory together with Francisco J. Varela and became famous for his attempt to empirically confirm the concept of autopoiesis for the cases of the nervous system consisting of impulses and the organism consisting of cells.
Operational Closure was the keyword of the hour. At last we understood what the neurophysiology of a Johannes Müller, Gustav Theodor Fechner and Hermann von Helmholtz had already suspected in the 19th century, without being able to face this idea. The nervous system consists of nothing but its impulses. It must construct the abundance of figures, colors, sounds, sensations and ideas that occupy consciousness from these impulses and nothing else but these impulses. The organism is open to this world because it works closed on itself. Inconceivable. The neurosciences are not yet up to this thought today.
When Luhmann began to test the idea of autopoiesis on social systems in the 1980s, Maturana felt misunderstood. He feared that Luhmann was again subjecting the individual human being to the very social forces against which Maturana and Varela had developed their concept. The fact that Luhmann took the idea of Freedom seriously and also used it to describe families, organizations, and functional systems, not to mention society itself, was impossible to convey to Maturana. The attempt to discuss this with him in Bielefeld was quickly abandoned. Luhmann and Maturana were supposed to organize the seminar together that winter of 1986. But Luhmann quickly realized that Maturana's strengths did not lie in discussion. As early as the second session, he moved his chair to the edge of the room, left the podium to Maturana, and followed with fascination the lecture of a scientist who was able to devote an entire scholarly life to one of the most improbable thoughts one can think.
SIMON, Fritz B, 1988. Lebende Systeme: Wirklichkeitskonstruktionen in der systemischen Therapie. Springer. ISBN 978-3-518-28890-0. suhrkamp
Neither before nor after it was possible to convince the originators of the concept of autopoiesis of the fruitfulness of this concept in sociology. In the volume edited by Fritz B. Simon *Lebende Systeme: Wirklichkeitskonstruktionen in der systemischen Therapie* (Living Systems: Reality Constructions in Systemic Therapy) (Heidelberg 1988) a conversation with Heinz von Foerster, Niklas Luhmann and Francisco J. Varela is printed, in which one can find essential arguments again.
Operational Closure
To date, a number of questions remain unresolved in the work with the concept of autopoiesis. One of these questions concerns Luhmann's proposal to temporalize the notion of the component of autopoietic systems. It is *events* that self-referentially differentiate and reproduce autopoietic systems. Events appear and disappear. They have a punctually stable but fleeting existence. In this form they reproduce the Problem they solve. They are a connecting event in search of connecting events. In sociology, this is immediately obvious. Both action and communication can only be thought in this temporalized sense. Any structure beyond this is an expectation that certain events will or will not occur.
This idea is compatible with von Foerster's concept of operational closure: operationally closed systems are subject to the condition – their only condition – that every end is also a beginning. This implies a temporal understanding of operation, even though von Foerster does not make this explicit. Possibly this is easier to think of in physics than in biology. Electronic impulses have per se an ephemeral identity. How would this idea work in the description of neuronal systems, immune systems, organisms?
The concept of the network
A second issue concerns the incomplete reception of the basic idea of autopoiesis in social systems theory. The famous definition formulated by Maturana in his essay in Milan Zeleny's anthology (*Autopoiesis: A Theory of Living Organizations*, New York 1981) focuses on a network of production of components that - recursively generate and realize this network through their interaction, and - constitute, in the space in which they exist, the boundaries of the network that participate in the realization of this network.
Luhmann's reception of this concept focuses on the recursivity of the components, interpreted as the recursivity and reflexivity of the operative events that differentiate and reproduce an autopoietic system. Luhmann did not address the concept of network. In the 1980s, when Luhmann was formulating his theory of social systems, this was not surprising. The concept of the network hardly played a role in sociology. At best, it described certain group dynamics in which systems theory had little interest.
From the perspective of the 1990s and the present, however, one must regret this omission. With Bruno Latour's and especially Harrison C. White's network theories, sociology has developed a body of theory that can compete with that of systems theory. Networks are structures that have exactly the same value of describing uncertain expectations that Luhmann formulated for his concept of structure. One could have considerably improved both the empirical scope and, relatedly, the analytical acuity of systems theory if one had early on incorporated a network concept that, entirely in the sense of Maturana, allowed one to describe the structures, as concrete as they are exchangeable, in which the autopoiesis of the basal operations of social systems, which empirically always remains somewhat abstract, takes place.
The concept of production
A third question concerns the concept of production. Luhmann has pointed out that autopoiesis is to be understood as production in precisely that sense in which any production, outside of technical contexts, always has to do with the combination of available and unavailable factors of production. In sociology, this refers to knowledge and non-knowledge, both of which underlie all communication, since otherwise there would be no occasion for communication. But what does "production" mean here? The autopoiesis of social systems enables itself, as Luhmann says, from behind. It is a fundamentally retrospective production.
Urs Stäheli (*Sinnzusammenbrüche*, Weilerswist 2000) has pointed out what an important role the concept of Nachräglichkeit (engl., retrospective?) plays in Freud's psychoanalysis. However, Nachräglichkeit also misses, rescues, and reinterprets every current moment of the production of an action or communication. What does this mean for social systems? Do they thus produce that minimal complication of a description that does not reproduce the system one-to-one, which John von Neumann (*Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata*, Urbana, IL, 1966) already described as an elementary condition of an intelligent, because creative reproduction?
Mathematics suitable to model autopoietic systems
And certainly not the last question that could have been dealt with if there had been a better exchange between the biological and the sociological theory of autopoiesis concerns the question whether and, if so, which mathematics is suitable to model autopoietic systems.
Varela toyed with the idea of going back to George Spencer-Brown's *Laws of Form* (London 1969). Oddly enough, although he added to the calculus of indications precisely the autonomous value it already possesses in the re-entry of distinction, this too would have made possible a conversation with Luhmann, who oriented his understanding of communication more and more to Spencer-Brown's idea of re-enterable operations of distinction in his late work (see Luhmann, *Die Kontrolle von Intransparenz*, Berlin 2017). Can the idea of autopoiesis be grasped in terms of form theory? (see also Baecker's essay "A Calculus for Autopoiesis," online )
Does the accompanying *unmarked state* give its guidance to operations of protein production as well as to neuronal impulses or communicative acts? Is the recursivity and reflexivity of autopoietic operations in all types of self-referential systems bound to that state of indeterminacy in which the operations start to oscillate, to remember and to modulate their network?
Research program
These are all questions that arise from a research program that takes the empirical difference of organic, mental and social systems as seriously as the chance of their comparison from the point of view of their autopoiesis. Possibly the time is only now ripe for such a research program. In the 1980s, on the one hand, the annoyance about the sociological import of the concept prevailed and, on the other hand, one was much too busy to first play through the idea of an autopoiesis of social systems from their own events on all possible social systems. However, this should not prevent us from still seeing the great impulse of Maturana and Varela as a promising construction site even half a century after its formulation.
After his retirement, Maturana founded the Istituto Matríztica in Santiago de Chile together with Ximena Dávila Y., which deals with the topics of love and play as the "forgotten foundations of being human," as a book title reads, and among other things pursued the question of why matriarchal forms of coexistence have so rarely prevailed in human history. Maturana answered the question of what life is. The question of what cognition is, however, never left him. This amounted to a theory of the observer, about which he once planned to write a book together with von Foerster. This book never came about. Only the title was apparently fixed: "Autopoiesis of Autopoiesis". Maturana died in Santiago de Chile on May 6, 2021.