Where AE’s ideas come from

In this essay

• Activity before isolated elements: Dewey’s early challenge
• Cybernetics: regulation, circularity and the boundary of mind
• Autopoiesis: how living organisation produces its own unity
• Observation, distinction and the recurrence of form
• Luhmann and the contested reconstruction of social autopoiesis
• Enaction: embodiment, adaptivity and shared sense-making
• Simondon: individuation and the transformation of a field
• Material practice: Latour, Pickering and Barad
• Infrastructure, classification and the unequal costs of continuity
• Contemporary developments: constraints, artificial communication and meaning
• AE’s place within this continuing discourse
• Continue reading

Organisation, meaning and ecology: a scholarly history of the questions AE inherits.

How does an organised entity come into being, retain an identity and participate in a world it helps to transform? This question connects several intellectual traditions, although their answers differ substantially. Pragmatism examines activity and experience; cybernetics investigates regulation and circular causation; autopoiesis specifies self-producing organisation; systems theory reconstructs communication; and studies of science and technology examine how knowledge and agency emerge through material practice. Autopoietic ecology enters an already substantial conversation about these problems.

This essay follows that conversation through selected works and disagreements. It distinguishes a direct conceptual inheritance, such as AE’s engagement with autopoiesis and Luhmann, from a comparison that helps clarify a shared problem. Placing Dewey, Simondon, Pickering or Barad alongside AE does not establish a personal chain of influence or make their theories equivalent. The purpose is to explain what these scholars argued, what remained contested, and how those disputes make AE’s questions intelligible. The account is selective and interpretive; the connections drawn between traditions are the argument of this essay.

Activity before isolated elements: Dewey’s early challenge

In “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” (1896), John Dewey questioned the separation of stimulus, idea and response into successive, independent events. His example of a child looking at and reaching towards a candle shows why the separation is misleading. Looking already involves movement and attention; reaching changes what is seen; being burned reorganises the significance of the activity. What counts as a stimulus depends on an ongoing coordination. Dewey therefore treated the apparent elements as functions within an activity whose organisation gives them their character. (Dewey, 1896)

This argument matters because it relocates explanation. Rather than starting with independently specified units and asking how they connect, an investigator can ask how the units acquire their roles within a process. Dewey’s concern was psychological explanation, not a general theory of autopoiesis. Nevertheless, his argument supplies an early and precise comparison for AE’s question of operability: how does an occurrence become capable of doing something determinate?

The comparison also introduces a continuing difficulty. An account must explain how a larger coordination is constituted without treating “the whole” as a mysterious extra agent. Later theories will offer different resources: feedback, productive networks, distinctions, embodied regulation and material arrangements. Their shared dissatisfaction with isolated elements leaves considerable disagreement about the organisation that should replace them as an explanatory starting point.

Cybernetics: regulation, circularity and the boundary of mind

Mid-twentieth-century cybernetics made the organisation of activity a subject of explicit modelling. W. Ross Ashby’s An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956) analysed transformations, stability, coupling and regulation. His treatment of requisite variety connects successful regulation to the range of disturbances and responses that a regulatory arrangement can distinguish and handle. Its force comes from specifying relations among variables and constraints. A general wish for flexibility does not by itself amount to an application of the principle. (Ashby, 1956)

This approach made it possible to study patterned behaviour across different physical settings. It also sharpened questions about what an observer includes in a system and what counts as a disturbance. The analyst’s choice of variables affects which regularities become visible. A thermostat, an organism and an institution may all invite questions about regulation, but similarities in a model do not settle whether their organisation is of the same kind.

Gregory Bateson extended cybernetic inquiry into anthropology, learning and ecological relations. In the essays collected as Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), pathways of consequential difference become central to explanation. His discussion of a blind person navigating with a stick challenges a boundary drawn automatically at the skin: relevant transformations run through person, implement and surroundings. His treatment of learning likewise asks how contexts organise the significance of particular responses. (Bateson, 1972)

Bateson’s ecological argument also concerns the dangers of narrowly selected purposes. An intervention can achieve its immediate objective while damaging the wider relations on which that achievement depends. This gives ecological explanation a critical dimension: the unit that registers success may be narrower than the processes bearing its consequences. (Bateson, 1972)

Read together, Ashby and Bateson establish a productive tension. Regulation requires sufficient definition to identify variables and outcomes; ecological explanation may require extending the inquiry beyond the boundary that initially made regulation appear successful. That tension remains central when AE asks how one continuation changes another’s conditions.

Autopoiesis: how living organisation produces its own unity

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela shifted attention towards the organisation that constitutes a living unity. Their work, brought together in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), describes a network of processes whose products realise the network producing them and constitute its unity. The living organisation is maintained through continuing material activity. A cell exchanges matter and energy with its surroundings; its organisational closure does not mean material isolation. (Maturana and Varela, 1980)

This introduces a stronger criterion than recurring behaviour or successful regulation. A machine may repeatedly perform a task while its organisation is produced and maintained elsewhere. The question of autopoiesis concerns the production relations constituting the proposed unity. Consequently, a feedback loop and an autopoietic organisation cannot simply be treated as interchangeable descriptions.

The distinction between organisation and its particular material realisation helps explain how a living entity can change components while remaining recognisably the same kind of unity. It also constrains subsequent extensions: applying autopoiesis elsewhere requires explaining what is produced, through which relations, and how that production constitutes a boundary. These requirements become contentious when the proposed components are communications or institutional operations rather than molecular processes. (Maturana and Varela, 1980)

The relation to Bateson is illuminating. His account follows consequential circuits across a boundary that ordinary language may impose too quickly. Autopoiesis asks how a particular unity generates an operational distinction from its surroundings. These inquiries need not exclude one another, but neither does the word “system” resolve their different explanatory targets. A history of AE has to retain both the constitution of a unity and the relations through which it is materially possible.

Observation, distinction and the recurrence of form

The observer became an explicit problem within second-order cybernetics. Heinz von Foerster investigated how knowing, computation and self-organisation involve the activity of the observer. His essays, collected in Understanding Understanding (2003), include accounts of constructing a reality and of recognisable objects as tokens of recurrent behaviour. This places the production of a stable description within the field of inquiry. (von Foerster, 2003)

George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (1969) offers a different resource: a formal calculus beginning with distinction and indication. Its relevance to later systems thinking lies partly in making the distinction an operation to examine, rather than assuming a ready-made collection of objects awaiting description. The formal calculus and its philosophical or sociological interpretations must nevertheless be distinguished. A theorem about a notation does not, without further argument, explain how a school, a person or a communication system operates. (Spencer-Brown, 1969)

Louis Kauffman develops the relation between reflexivity, eigenforms and recognisable objects. In “Reflexivity and Eigenform” (2009), recursive constructions make it possible to explore how an apparently stable form can arise through operations. The important question becomes how stability is achieved within a relation between activity and observation. (Kauffman, 2009)

These contributions complicate a simple division between a changing world and an observer who merely records it. Yet they also pose a methodological demand: the investigator must specify which operation generates the distinction and which evidence supports the claimed recurrence. In AE, recognising a pattern is the beginning of an explanation. Calling it an eigenform does not establish the material conditions of its continuation, and a useful diagram does not by itself supply a formal model.

Luhmann and the contested reconstruction of social autopoiesis

Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems, published in German in 1984 and in English in 1995, reconstructs autopoiesis around communication. Communications become possible through relations to other communications. People remain indispensable to social life, but the operation identified as social is communication rather than an individual’s intention or conscious experience. This distinction allows Luhmann to investigate how expectations and selections acquire continuities that no participant individually controls. (Luhmann, 1995)

Operational closure, on this account, concerns how further operations are produced. It does not deny environmental dependence. Structural coupling helps explain how differently organised systems can become recurrently responsive to one another without exchanging operations as if those operations were identical objects. Closure and dependence are therefore already connected within Luhmann’s theory. (Luhmann, 1995)

The conceptual reconstruction remains disputed. John Mingers’s “Can social systems be autopoietic?” (2002) critically assesses the extension of a biological theory to social systems. His examination brings the adequacy of the proposed social unity and its self-production into question. The existence of recursive communication does not remove the need to justify how a concept developed for living organisation changes when applied to social relations. (Mingers, 2002)

This disagreement sets a demanding context for AE. Demonstrating that institutions rely on bodies, energy or technical resources is insufficient to establish a correction to Luhmann, since environmental dependence is already recognised. An ecological development needs to show what its additional distinctions explain: for example, how a formally successful decision reorganises the work required elsewhere, or how a repair becomes effective across differently organised processes. Such questions extend the comparison while leaving the legitimacy of generalising autopoiesis open to argument.

Enaction: embodiment, adaptivity and shared sense-making

Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch’s The Embodied Mind (1991) connects cognitive science with lived experience and embodied activity. The enactive approach understands cognition through the activity of an organism in relation to its world, challenging accounts that begin with a detached processor receiving a fully specified environment. (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991)

Ezequiel Di Paolo’s “Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency” (2005) then asks whether autopoiesis alone sufficiently explains sense-making. His answer introduces adaptivity: regulation in relation to conditions of viability. An organism can respond differently to tendencies that support or threaten its continued existence before its organisation actually disintegrates. This makes possible a more differentiated account of significance, agency and the organism’s own norms. (Di Paolo, 2005)

Hanne De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s account of participatory sense-making (2007) extends the inquiry to interaction. Coordination between participants can acquire dynamics that enable or constrain what each can do and understand. Meaning-making is consequently shaped both by individual capacities and by the organisation of their encounter. The autonomy of an interaction does not simply erase the autonomy of those participating in it. (De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007)

This literature makes a consequential distinction visible. Explaining the constitution of an organisation differs from explaining how occurrences matter to a living participant, and both differ from explaining how an interaction develops. For AE’s study of education and AI, these distinctions guard against treating technical output, lived understanding and communicative uptake as one event. A generated explanation can affect a conversation without demonstrating that the generating system experiences the stakes of that conversation. Enaction supplies substantive criteria with which claims about meaning can be compared.

Simondon: individuation and the transformation of a field

Gilbert Simondon’s inquiry into individuation asks how individuals emerge from conditions that cannot be adequately described by starting with already constituted individuals. His work, available in the complete English translation Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2020), draws on physical, biological, technical and psychosocial problems. The individual is approached through its genesis and its relation to a milieu. (Simondon, 2020)

Transduction names a structuring activity that proceeds through a domain, with a local formation providing conditions for further formation. The idea challenges an account in which a complete form is simply imposed on passive material. Individuation works through tensions and potentials in a situation; the individual and its associated milieu have to be understood through that process. (Simondon, 2020)

This is a useful comparison with autopoiesis, whose explanatory emphasis falls on the organisation constituting a unity. Simondon directs attention towards the genesis and transformation of individuation itself. The comparison asks whether an account explains the maintenance of an established organisation, the emergence of a new one, or both.

AE’s use of semantic transduction develops a more specific question about changing operative significance. An expression can become a different kind of contribution when it enters an assessment, a classification or an institutional decision. That usage requires its own definition and evidence; it does not follow merely from borrowing Simondon’s term. His scholarship provides a demanding interlocutor for asking what actually transforms during the passage, and what further activity that transformation enables. (Watson, Morgner and Brezovec, 2026)

Material practice: Latour, Pickering and Barad

Science and technology studies complicates accounts that assign agency either to human intentions or to an independently determining technology. In Reassembling the Social (2005), Bruno Latour presents actor-network theory as an inquiry into associations. The researcher follows how heterogeneous attachments assemble what is conventionally called social order. “The social” should not be used as an unexplained substance that accounts for relations whose production still needs investigation. (Latour, 2005)

Andrew Pickering’s “The Mangle of Practice” (1993) approaches scientific work through the temporal emergence of agency. Scientists’ plans encounter material resistance and are modified through accommodation. Instruments, goals and accounts can change together as practice unfolds. The eventual arrangement cannot be completely explained as the straightforward execution of an intention specified at the beginning. (Pickering, 1993)

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) develops a further challenge to independently given relata. Her agential realism, developed through an engagement with Niels Bohr and feminist scholarship, treats determinate boundaries and properties as emerging through intra-actions. The practices through which distinctions become determinate also have consequences for what can matter and who can be accountable. (Barad, 2007)

These positions do not form a single theory. Latour’s method of tracing associations, Pickering’s account of emergent practice and Barad’s account of material-discursive phenomena make different explanatory commitments. Their shared importance here is that none allows a technical device to explain its effects independently of the arrangements through which it acts.

The comparison with Luhmann raises a substantial problem for AE: how can an analysis follow heterogeneous material relations while retaining distinctions among kinds of operation? An ecological hyperknot is a proposal for investigating this problem. It asks how activities condition one another without assuming that they become one autonomous super-system. Its value must be shown through more precise explanation of a case; the preceding scholarship has already established that relations and material practice matter. (Watson and Brezovec, 2026, AE2.6)

Infrastructure, classification and the unequal costs of continuity

Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder’s study of a scientific information system (1996) brings ecological explanation into the detail of infrastructure. Their analysis shows how access and use depend on relations among technical arrangements, organisational practices and communication. Infrastructure is encountered differently according to a participant’s activities and circumstances; its adequacy cannot be inferred from technical provision alone. (Star and Ruhleder, 1996)

Geoffrey Bowker and Star’s Sorting Things Out (1999) develops the consequences of classification. Categories and standards organise information and work, but they also distribute visibility, advantage and suffering. Cases including disease classification, nursing work and racial classification under apartheid show that a category’s apparent administrative neutrality can conceal consequential decisions about whose activities and experiences count. (Bowker and Star, 1999)

These studies provide an empirical and political challenge to accounts centred only on an organisation’s successful continuation. What appears coherent from one position may impose additional labour or exclusion elsewhere. The fact that a system persists does not establish that its categories are defensible, that its burdens are fairly distributed or that the people sustaining it can influence its decisions.

AE’s concepts of rough closure and repair enter this established field of inquiry. A decision can be determinate while leaving substantial conditions unresolved. The important question then concerns what happens to those conditions: who handles them, which records make them visible, and whether they can change later operations. This proposed contribution should be judged against the explanatory achievements of infrastructure and classification research, including its longstanding attention to power and invisible work. (Watson and Brezovec, 2026, Rough Closure)

Contemporary developments: constraints, artificial communication and meaning

Later biological work further specifies the organisation of dependence. Maël Montévil and Matteo Mossio’s “Biological organisation as closure of constraints” (2015) explains closure through mutually dependent constraints operating at relevant timescales. This provides a comparatively explicit account of how organising conditions can be maintained through processes they help constrain. Its biological target and modelling commitments matter: extending the language to institutions requires additional work. (Montévil and Mossio, 2015)

Research on artificial communication introduces a different pressure. Elena Esposito’s Artificial Communication (2022) examines how algorithms participate in communication without needing to understand as human interlocutors do. This directs attention towards the organisation of communicative relations rather than assuming that social effects require humanlike intelligence inside a machine. (Esposito, 2022)

Emily Bender and Alexander Koller (2020) approach the issue through the distinction between linguistic form and meaning. They argue that learning from form alone does not establish the communicative grounding of meaning. Their argument and Esposito’s ask different questions: one challenges an inference from linguistic performance to understanding; the other examines how communication can incorporate systems that lack human understanding. Reading them together opens a useful research space between a model’s capacities and the consequences of its participation. (Bender and Koller, 2020)

Zönnchen, Dzhimova and Socher (2025) bring this discussion directly into systems theory, including criticism of technological autopoiesis where self-production has not been sufficiently established. The question is therefore more demanding than whether AI changes social activity. It concerns what organisation is being attributed to the technical system and what warrants that attribution. (Zönnchen, Dzhimova and Socher, 2025)

For AE, these works help separate the production of an expression, a participant’s understanding, its communicative uptake and its institutional force. The relations among those processes are a subject of inquiry. Treating them as equivalent would bypass precisely the work an ecological explanation is meant to do.

AE’s place within this continuing discourse

This history brings several tensions into view: organisation and dependence; distinction and material practice; constituted unity and ongoing individuation; communicative continuity and lived significance. Earlier scholarship supplies competing ways to investigate these tensions. AE’s contribution has to be articulated within that disagreement.

The current formulation generalises autopoiesis as a philosophical proposition about the reciprocal constitution of operations and the organisation that makes them possible. It separates that proposition from empirical questions about renewal over time and from the attribution of a particular autonomous unity. This is AE’s proposed extension, not a conclusion jointly established by the authors discussed here. Maturana and Varela’s biological criterion, Luhmann’s communicative reconstruction and Di Paolo’s account of adaptivity retain their distinct purposes. (Watson and Brezovec, 2026, AE2.6) (Watson, 2026, Operability)

Rough closure asks how definite operations coexist with consequential incompleteness. Ecological hyperknots investigate dependencies among differentiated continuations. Meaning mediation and semantic transduction examine how expressions acquire significance and change operative roles. The historical comparisons suggest specific tests of contribution: whether these concepts explain a transformation, dependency or failure more precisely than existing accounts; whether they preserve distinctions that matter in a case; and whether evidence can challenge their proposed explanation.

Mathematical vocabulary creates an additional obligation. Research on linkoids and open curves supplies defined mathematical constructions. Using that research in an account of ecological relations requires a stated mapping between the formal object and the empirical target. It cannot be established by visual resemblance between a network diagram and a knot. (Barkataki and Panagiotou, 2022) (Barkataki, Kauffman and Panagiotou, 2024)

The continuing scholarly task is to connect these different demands without dissolving their differences. Biological organisation, lived experience, communication and technical practice can be mutually consequential while remaining distinct objects of explanation. A useful ecological theory must show how to investigate that combination, and make its own distinctions available for criticism.

Continue reading

The AE Concept Guide introduces the current vocabulary. The entries on Autopoiesis and operability, Rough closure, Ecological hyperknots, Meaning mediation and Semantic transduction develop these comparisons through examples. The references below provide routes into the scholars’ own arguments.

Sources support the particular claims discussed; their inclusion does not imply endorsement of AE. Publication and manuscript status are identified below.

Dewey, 1896

Dewey, J. (1896). The reflex arc concept in psychology. Psychological Review, 3(4), 357–370. Primary text reproduced by the Mead Project, Brock University. Source.

Ashby, 1956

Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall. Especially chapters 4–6 and 10–14. Estate-authorised online edition. Source.

Bateson, 1972

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chandler Publishing Company. Especially The Cybernetics of Self, Conscious Purpose versus Nature, and Form, Substance, and Difference. Linked text is the 1987 Jason Aronson reprint. Source.

Maturana and Varela, 1980

Maturana, H. R., and Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel. Source.

von Foerster, 2003

von Foerster, H. (2003). Understanding Understanding: Essays on Cybernetics and Cognition. Springer. Especially On Constructing a Reality, Objects: Tokens for (Eigen-)Behaviors, and Cybernetics of Cybernetics. Source.

Spencer-Brown, 1969

Spencer-Brown, G. (1969). Laws of Form. George Allen & Unwin.

Kauffman, 2009

Kauffman, L. H. (2009). Reflexivity and Eigenform. Constructivist Foundations, 4(3), 121–137. Author-hosted full text. Source.

Luhmann, 1995

Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Translated by J. Bednarz Jr. and D. Baecker. Stanford University Press. German original published 1984.

Mingers, 2002

Mingers, J. (2002). Can social systems be autopoietic? Assessing Luhmann’s social theory. The Sociological Review, 50(2), 278–299. Source.

Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press. Link leads to the revised 2016 edition. Source.

Di Paolo, 2005

Di Paolo, E. A. (2005). Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4, 429–452. Volume dated 2005; publisher records online publication in April 2006. Source.

De Jaegher and Di Paolo, 2007

De Jaegher, H., and Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6, 485–507. Source.

Simondon, 2020

Simondon, G. (2020). Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. Translated by T. Adkins. University of Minnesota Press. Source.

Watson, Morgner and Brezovec, 2026

Watson, S., Morgner, C., and Brezovec, E. (2026). Generative AI as meaning-mediating infrastructure in education: A critical integrative review of inclusion, exclusion, and semantic transduction. AI & SOCIETY. Source.

Latour, 2005

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press. Link to the author’s account and bibliographic record. Source.

Pickering, 1993

Pickering, A. (1993). The mangle of practice: Agency and emergence in the sociology of science. American Journal of Sociology, 99(3), 559–589. Source.

Barad, 2007

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. Especially chapters 4 and 8. Source.

Watson and Brezovec, 2026, AE2.6

Watson, S., and Brezovec, E. (2026). Autopoietic Ecology: Rethinking Systems, Meaning, and Matter. AE2.6, revised manuscript dated 15 September 2026. Unpublished manuscript. Relevant locators: preface; chapters 3–6, 10–12 and 15–18; appendices A–C.

Star and Ruhleder, 1996

Star, S. L., and Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134. Source.

Bowker and Star, 1999

Bowker, G. C., and Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press. Link includes the 1999 hardcover and 2000 paperback editions. Source.

Watson and Brezovec, 2026, Rough Closure

Watson, S., and Brezovec, E. (2026). Rough Closure: The Operational Texture of Persistence in Autopoietic Ecology. Synthesis version 1.0, 26 August. Preprint manuscript for scholarly circulation and author review; not peer reviewed.

Montévil and Mossio, 2015

Montévil, M., and Mossio, M. (2015). Biological organisation as closure of constraints. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 372, 179–191. Source.

Esposito, 2022

Esposito, E. (2022). Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence. MIT Press. Source.

Bender and Koller, 2020

Bender, E. M., and Koller, A. (2020). Climbing towards NLU: On meaning, form, and understanding in the age of data. Proceedings of ACL 2020, 5185–5198. Source.

Zönnchen, Dzhimova and Socher, 2025

Zönnchen, B., Dzhimova, M., and Socher, G. (2025). From intelligence to autopoiesis: Rethinking artificial intelligence through systems theory. Frontiers in Communication, 10, 1585321. Source.

Watson, 2026, Operability

Watson, S. (2026). Generative AI and the recursive constitution of operability: Rough closure, semantic transduction and ecological hyperknots. Cambridge EdgeLab working paper, version 1, 18 September. Manuscript consulted; not peer reviewed. Constructed case and prospective research propositions.

Barkataki and Panagiotou, 2022

Barkataki, K., and Panagiotou, E. (2022). The Jones polynomial of collections of open curves in 3-space. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 478(2267), 20220302. Source.

Barkataki, Kauffman and Panagiotou, 2024

Barkataki, K., Kauffman, L. H., and Panagiotou, E. (2024). The virtual spectrum of linkoids and open curves in 3-space. Journal of Knot Theory and Its Ramifications, 33(3), 2450006. Source.