Transactional Autopoiesis: A Pragmatist Lens on Maturana’s and Luhmann’s Theories of Language.

It has been proposed that the Dewyan notion of transaction ought to be reconstructed in light of the theory of autopoiesis (McReynolds, 2017). This theory was originally developed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and later embraced by sociologist Niklas Luhmann. I argue that looking at transaction through the lens of autopoiesis allows for a clearer definition of the processes whereby the knower and the known are mutually constitutive of one another, and I focus on the realm of language. According to Maturana and Varela, living systems are organizationally closed and structurally coupled to their environment at the same time (synchronically). Their closure allows them to react to outside triggers on the basis of their inner constitution; their coupling permits what can be interpreted as co-constitutive transaction. In this paper, I explain Maturana’s theory of linguistic autopoiesis and how it converges with Luhmann’s theory of language where social systems are construed as a nexus of communications, autonomous from conscious direction. I criticize his functionalist interpretation, but also rescue his explanation of the production of meaning in demotic (descriptive) language structures, most legitimate in modern communication—but not the only language structure that humans use. Maturana says that human beings distinctively create a separate domain of language (organizationally closed) that is structurally coupled and sustained autopoietically by a complex network of human physiology, experience, habits, and emotion. Thus language can be seen as a system that displays growth in a transactional autopoietic co-constitutive relationship with human beings and their environment.