Autopoietic

Autopoietic is an adjective used to describe systems that are self-producing and self-maintaining. An autopoietic system is defined by a network of processes that continually regenerates the components that make up the system and, in the process, creates and sustains the system’s own boundaries. The term was introduced by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the early 1970s to characterize living organization, especially cellular life.

The core ideas are organizational closure and operational closure. Organizational closure means that the system’s components and processes define and preserve the network that constitutes the system; nothing outside the system determines its organization. Operational closure refers to the way internal processes depend on one another to sustain the whole. Although autopoietic systems depend on material and energy exchange with their environment, the organization itself is self-maintained.

In biology, autopoiesis describes cells and living organisms as systems that continuously renew their components and preserve their structure. In cognitive science, the autopoietic view reframes cognition as the process of maintaining the viability of the living network, with perception and action seen as activities that support self-maintenance rather than passive information processing. In social theory, the concept was extended by Niklas Luhmann to describe social systems as autopoietic networks of communications that reproduce themselves.

Criticism of autopoietic theory centers on its perceived abstraction and questions about empirical testability, especially regarding the extent to which organizational closure can be observed in complex, dynamic systems. Nonetheless, autopoiesis remains influential in discussions of life, cognition, and social systems, highlighting how self-production and boundary maintenance contribute to the persistence of organized complexity.