Autopoiesis was originally presented as a system description that was said to define and explain the nature of
living systems. A canonical example of an autopoietic system is the
biological cell. The
eukaryotic cell, for example, is made of various
biochemical components such as
nucleic acids and
proteins, and is organized into bounded structures such as the
cell nucleus, various
organelles, a
cell membrane and
cytoskeleton. These structures, based on an internal flow of molecules and energy,
produce the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components. An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an
allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something
other than itself (the factory). However, if the system is extended from the factory to include components in the factory's "environment", such as supply chains, plant / equipment, workers, dealerships, customers, contracts, competitors, cars, spare parts, and so on, then as a total viable system it could be considered to be autopoietic. Autopoiesis in biological systems can be viewed as a network of constraints that work to maintain themselves. This concept has been called organizational closure or constraint closure and is closely related to the study of
autocatalytic chemical networks where constraints are reactions required to sustain life. Though others have often used the term as a synonym for
self-organization, Maturana himself stated he would "[n]ever use the notion of self-organization ... Operationally it is impossible. That is, if the organization of a thing changes, the thing changes". Moreover, an autopoietic system is autonomous and operationally closed, in the sense that there are sufficient processes within it to maintain the whole. Autopoietic systems are "structurally coupled" with their medium, embedded in a dynamic of changes that can be recalled as
sensory-motor coupling. This continuous dynamic is considered as a rudimentary form of
knowledge or
cognition and can be observed throughout life-forms. An application of the concept of autopoiesis to
sociology can be found in Niklas Luhmann's
Systems Theory, which was subsequently adapted by
Bob Jessop in his studies of the capitalist state system.
Marjatta Maula adapted the concept of autopoiesis in a business context. The theory of autopoiesis has also been applied in the context of legal systems by not only Niklas Luhmann, but also Gunther Teubner.
Patrik Schumacher has applied the term to refer to the 'discursive self-referential making of architecture.' Varela eventually further applied autopoesis to develop models of mind, brain, and behavior called non-
representationalist,
enactive,
embodied cognitive neuroscience, culminating in
neurophenomenology. In the context of textual studies,
Jerome McGann argues that texts are "autopoietic mechanisms operating as self-generating feedback systems that cannot be separated from those who manipulate and use them". Citing Maturana and Varela, he defines an autopoietic system as "a closed topological space that 'continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components, concluding that "Autopoietic systems are thus distinguished from allopoietic systems, which are Cartesian and which 'have as the product of their functioning something different from themselves. Coding and markup appear
allopoietic", McGann argues, but are generative parts of the system they serve to maintain, and thus language and print or electronic technology are autopoietic systems. The philosopher
Slavoj Žižek, in his discussion of 18th- to early 19th-century thinker
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, argues: Recent work by Stankovski extends the concept of autopoiesis into the quantum domain, modelling it as a quantum-informational process grounded in physical interactions and addressing longstanding philosophical problems of identity, persistence, and knowledge within a unified formal framework. ==Relation to complexity==