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Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes

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The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science

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Abstract

This chapter traces how the concept of autopoiesis, originating in the field of theoretical biology with Chilean scientists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, has generated a wide range of disciplinary uses outside the sciences. The unlikely transit of autopoiesis was made possible in large part by the interdisciplinary ferment of postwar cybernetics that recast living organisms as information-processing machines. This chapter highlights the overlooked significance of the literary model that inspired this paradigm shift in the re-description of cellular life: Cervantes’s seventeenth-century novel Don Quixotede la Mancha. Through a reading of cybernetics, autopoiesis, and Cervantes, this essay compares scientific concepts of self-organization with the literary stakes of autopoiesis and “languaging” for theorists such as Sylvia Wynter and Michel Foucault.

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  1. Department of English, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Avery Slater

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  1. Avery Slater
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA

    Neel Ahuja

  2. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Monique Allewaert

  3. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Lindsey Andrews

  4. Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA

    Gerry Canavan

  5. Southwestern University, Georgetown, TX, USA

    Rebecca Evans

  6. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Nihad M. Farooq

  7. University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

    Erica Fretwell

  8. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Nicholas Gaskill

  9. University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Patrick Jagoda

  10. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA

    Erin Gentry Lamb

  11. Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA

    Jennifer Rhee

  12. University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA

    Britt Rusert

  13. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Matthew A. Taylor

  14. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Aarthi Vadde

  15. Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Priscilla Wald

  16. North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

    Rebecca Walsh

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Slater, A. (2020). Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana, Varela, Cervantes. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_16

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