Autopoiesis

Definition

Autopoiesis ("self-making," from the Greek roots for "self" and "to make") is Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's term for the organizational pattern common to all living systems: a network of production processes in which each component participates in producing or transforming other components, so that the network as a whole continuously "makes itself." As the authors put it, "In a living system, the product of its operation is its own organization." The network also produces its own boundary, which is what distinguishes it from a merely self-organizing but boundary-less process.

In the Book

Capra traces autopoiesis to Maturana's research on color perception at the University of Santiago in the 1960s, where he discovered that the nervous system "operates as a closed network of interactions" and generalized this "circular organization" into a hypothesis about the organization of all living systems. Working with his student Varela, Maturana coined "autopoiesis" and drew a sharp distinction — central to the whole book — between a system's organization (the abstract pattern of relationships that makes it a member of a class, such as "bacterium" or "cat") and its structure (the actual physical components embodying that pattern). Capra illustrates the mechanism concretely with the plant cell: a membrane enclosing a nutrient-rich fluid, with organelles that are themselves produced and maintained by the network they belong to. He also notes physicist Geoffrey Chew's earlier, structurally similar "bootstrap hypothesis" about subatomic hadrons, and explains why it falls short of autopoiesis (no defined boundary, only probabilistic bound states) — sharpening what does and doesn't count.

Why It Matters

Autopoiesis supplies a mechanism for identity in any bounded, self-producing network: a system counts as "the same system" not because its components persist but because the relationships that keep regenerating those components persist. That reframes "what makes an organization a real, continuing thing" — a company, a community, an ecosystem — around whether it keeps producing the relationships that define it, independent of whether any particular member, part, or piece of infrastructure survives.