«En un agenciamiento maquínico, las instituciones y las máquinas técnicas» a diferencia de lo que creían Varela y Maturana, «son también autopoiéticas»

por Juan Pablo Anaya

«Guattari has suggested that to consider a living system only as a closed, autopoietic unity of inputs and outputs cut off from the developmental events of its entire genetic phylum would fail to account for its liveliness (1995: 39). And for Maturana and Varela ecosystemically autopoiesis is always organized and organizing in relation to both other autopoietic processes and a greater ecology of interactions (1988: 43 – 50). Autopoiesis entails collective activity and collectives always comprise a diverse ensemble of human, nonhuman, institutional, and technical agents. Niklas Luhmann also noted that a more generalized systems approach to autopoiesis might see nonliving systems using a general “ system-building ” principle of “ self-referential closure ” (2008: 84). Once we understand generative processes transversally, the distinction breaks down between technical systems as allopoietic (producing something apart from themselves; a factory producing a silicon chip, for instance) and living systems as autopoietic: «Institutions and technical machines appear to be allopoietic, but when one considers them in the context of the machinic assemblages they constitute with human beings, they become ipso facto autopoietic. Thus we will view autopoiesis from the perspective of the ontogenesis and phlyogenesis proper to a mecanosphere superposed on the biosphere» (Guattari, 1995: 40).»

Guattari, citado por Anna Munster en An Aesthesia of Networks, pág. 50.