Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

Author:Yarden Katz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press

AUTOPOIETIC LOVE

At this point, it is worth revisiting Maturana and Varela’s work, since they sought to explain the world that phenomenologists took as given. The hope for Maturana and Varela’s account is that it would help make sense of the relationships between organisms, environments, and cultures without cementing already existing relations of power, as phenomenology has so far done.

Maturana and Varela see autopoiesis as the defining activity of living things, but for them, self-remaking is only the starting point. What they are really after is explaining how cognition emerges within an individual (herself a composite of autopoietic unities) and how individuals then collectively give rise to a social world. Thus if phenomenology could be accused of trying to explain the world as it already is, then Maturana and Varela by contrast seek to explain world building.

Maturana and Varela’s quest comes with a strong social and ethical dimension framed around love, responsibility, and care for the other. For them, “love is a biological dynamic” that is essential to world building with others:

Biology also shows us that we can expand our cognitive domain. This arises through a novel experience brought forth through reasoning, through the encounter with a stranger, or, more directly, through the expression of a biological interpersonal congruence that lets us see the other person and open up for him room for existence beside us. This act is called love, or, if we prefer a milder expression, the acceptance of the other person beside us in our daily living.35

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