Interview mit Humberto Maturana

Von Till Nikolaus von Heiseler am 04. Februar 2008 um 17:11

[Gesprch 1.Feb.08, Transmediale/Haus der Kulturen der Welt]

Heiseler: We are here in Germany and there was a famous german sociologist. His name is Niklas Luhmann.
He refers to different theories: Fritz Heider, Georg Spencer Brown, Talcott Parsons and to you and Verela, in
your case by using the term Autopoiesis. What do you think of Niklas Luhmann's Systemtheory?

Maturana: I had a disagreement with him.

Heiseler: May I tape you?

Maturana: Yes, yes, yes. I was in Bielefeld, I think 1990, 91, something like that. A couple of years before he
died. And we talked much. And I thank him because he made me famous. But my discordance with him was,
was that he left out human beings.

Heiseler: That is the whole idea.

Maturana: I know, I know, but I thought this would be inadequate. I asked him why, why did you do that? He
said he wanted to do that, because he wanted a predictable theory. If you introduce human beings you
introduce into certainty a certain uncertainty... My answer to that is: That we have two ways of dealing with
that. One is to eliminate the human being. The other is to make a theory which includes human beings. But
later I realized that one thing that he wanted was to deal with closed systems. And he thought, I think, that
Autopoiesis allowed him to deal with closed systems.

Heiseler: In a way

Maturana: In a way.

Heiseler: A nervous system is a closed system.

Maturana: Yes.

Heiseler. It is closed on the operative level to be open on the cognitive level as you made it clear in your books.

Maturana: Yes. But he wanted to do that. I think, in order to do that with communication he needed
Autopoiesis, but he needed to leave out the human beings. You can't have a closed system with human
beings, if it includes the dynamic of the participation of human beings and the realization of communication.
What you cannot predict is the flow of communication, but you can predict the nature of the closed system.
This you can have. This was our discrepancy, because we gave a seminar together in which we always were
encountering this discrepancy.

Heiseler: If you take the concept of Autopoiesis and transfer it to the field of social system, what is transferred?
Is it just a metaphor or does this lead to hard science like the biological idea of Autopoiesis, if this would be
called hard science?
Maturana: It is a metaphor, because it leads to believe in something what it is not. I remember that Heinz von
Foerster when he first heard about Autopoiesis, he said: "Fantastic! - This solves the problem, because social
systems are autopoietic systems." I said if social systems are autopoietic systems, I want to get out
immediately. Because if that is so, then a social system is an embodiment of totality. And I don't want to be a
part of an embodiment of totality.

Heiseler: So you still believe in a subject, in a way. I ask this, because we have a lot of theories in the 20th
Century, speech theory, discourse analysis, media theory which excludes in a way the human being.

Maturana: I don't think that they solved the question.

Heiseler: Okay, that is what I wanted to know. Thank you.

Maturana: Thank you to you, too.

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