It’s nice to see that someone else has noticed the parallel between the conception of objects advocated by object-oriented ontology and autopoietic theory. Gary, over at Minds and Brains might be interested to know that this is precisely the account of objects I develop in the fourth chapter of The Democracy of Objects. There, drawing heavily on Niklas Luhmann’s variant of sociological autopoietic theory, I develop an account of objects as systems. While I retain Maturana and Varela’s distinction between allopoietic and autopoietic systems, I argue that all objects, whether autopoietic or allopoietic, nonetheless are closed and maintain only selective relations to the environment, such that these relations are self-referentially constituted by the object itself. This is my way of accounting for how objects interact under conditions of withdrawal.
In Critical Environments, Cary Wolfe (who is also a big supporter of Niklas Luhmann and autopoietic systems theory), criticizes Luhmann for failing to take into account material differences in the ability of various systems to observe:
We might say, then… that Luhmann’s “blind spot,” his unobservable constitutive distinction, is his unspoken distinction between “differentiation” and what historicist, materialist critique has theorized as “contradiction,” a blind spot that manifests itself in Luhmann’s formal equivalence of observers in his epistemology and their real lack of equivalence on the material social plane… Or rather… it is disposed of by systems theory, but only “abstractly,” as Marxist theorists like to say, only in thought, not in historical material practice. (77)
Wolfe goes on to remark that,
In this connection, we might (to stay with the Marxist critique for a moment) invoke Raymond Williams’s famous revision of the base/superstructure model to say that functional differentiation is emergent– even though it might be more pervasive socially– within a system in which dialectical contradiction remains dominant in the form of the asymmetrical importance of the economic system. In this light, what Luhmann’s epistemological idealism refuses to confront is that the differentiation, autonomy, and unfolding of complexity it imagines remains muffled and mastered by the economic context of identity and exchange value within which systems theory itself historically arises. (78)
Not only is this a problem for autopoietic systems theory in the domain of sociology, but it is also a broader problem within autopoietic theory as a whole. In other words, insofar as autopoietic theory argues that system development takes place only immanently within autopoietic systems (they are operationally closed in such a way that 1) their operations only refer to themselves, and 2) they constitute their own relations to their environments), autopoietic theory often downplays constraints that emerge in interactions between systems. To mitigate this problem I draw heavily on developmental systems theory and Maturana and Varela’s concept of “structural coupling”, developing an account of “regimes of attraction”, where the powers of entities are limited by their context among other objects.
Other readers will perhaps be happy to know that chapter 4 also contains a defense of Lacanian psychoanalysis or an account of how it can be retained within an onticological framework so long as it is not treated as ontologically foundational in the sense that Zizek would like. In this connection, chapter three contains a critique of Zizek’s split objects and his ontology founded on psychoanalysis, distinguishing onticology from his position.
June 18, 2010 at 1:24 am
That chapter sounds pretty cool, I look forward to reading it. The book as a whole sounds ambitious. It seems like you are going to cover a lot of complex territory very quickly but I’m glad to see someone is taking ontology into new, scientifically grounded directions.
June 18, 2010 at 1:36 am
I wonder if, perhaps, this might be a way to account for how stable or cogent certain philosophical theories or structures of thought tend to work. It seems that, for instance, when you become immersed in Gadamer’s theoretical project, however it might be defined, you begin to be persuaded in part because the very production of information is not between the theory itself and an absolutely aloof world, but that the theory draws the distinction between itself and the world from within itself, such that the longer you stay in it, the more everything looks Gadamer-esque, that is, being takes on more and more of a linguistic mediation, language appears more and more forcefully as the horizon of being, etc. The important thing to say here is not simply that Gadamer is simply incorrect or wrong and his theory reveals nothing but itself, but rather that every theory has its own “blind-spot,” every theory always loses something of being by its very nature of drawing distinctions the way they do. There is always a gain and a loss, in a sense. It seems that autopoiesis gives us an account of how a system, such as a theory, generates its own information. Then the value of creating new theoretical-objects, as you often do through bricolage, using sometimes very eclectic “raw materials,” so to speak, can truly invent new information, it seems to me, when it begins to draw new and ever more refined distinctions. (This is very valuable, I would think.)
Again, I have to say that those who critique OOO as trying to deny the truth of correlationism are both right in one sense, but very wrong in another. Surely OOO seeks to avoid and move beyond the human-world correlate, but it doesn’t do that by positing a naïve relationship between theory on the one hand and the world on the other. The self-referentiality of systems like theories, for instance, is yet another example of the more general structure of all (or many) beings which are self-referential in their distinctions. I wonder if we can speak of the “sensual objects” of theories, in this sense?
Just some thoughts here. The suspense of waiting for your book is…terrible. (Unlike Willy Wonka, I don’t hope it’ll last.)
June 18, 2010 at 5:06 pm
The trouble with autopoesis is that it’s based in part on an implicit decision that a system can organize itself. This decision is never argued through, only presented aesthetically via a visualization (?) of Bittorio units. I did a talk on this, “Animals, Vegetables, Minerals and Other Alien Beings” (iTunes U).