What I take from Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela is autopoiesis, a system that produces itself. I use it, with Luhmann, to describe the metabolic sovereign. Varela is also one of my Ishtadevatas.
How the word moved
In October 2025 autopoiesis became my way into metabolic sovereignty, and in March 2026 I named them outright in the firewood essay. By July 2026 Varela was one of my local guides and sat in the Cellosophy bibliography, where his enactivism matters as much as autopoiesis.
In my words
"A metabolic sovereign is a political unit that possesses monopoly control - or what systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela would call autopoiesis"
from Polyconflict #4: Firewood and the Gendered Nature of Polyconflict, 27 Mar 2026
Related
- Related Autopoiesis - their concept.
- Related Metabolic Sovereignty - I applied autopoiesis to the sovereign of flows.
- Related Cellosophy - Varela's enactivism runs through my work on minds without brains.