Something we had already said in a previous post, but the appointment is now pretty clear I think:
According to this, science is a system of structurally determined of a particular type. But apart from this it is also an autopoietic system, that is to say, a system that produces itself, by means of a network of elements that give it consistency, the elements that make it up?
We can give a positive answer to this question, with that let’s look at the scientific communication as an element that affirms the truth and excludes the falsehood (or vice versa, which excludes it and says it). As soon as the symbolic nature of the truth as the medium gives rise to a special quality within the social communication general -which can only be obtained in a connection recursive with other previous communications and the future of the system itself -there arises an autopoietic system that generates these elements precisely by means of these elements themselves, delimitándose with this environment from another communication’ (Luhmann, The Science of Society, p-203, Or Iberoámericana 1996, original 1990).
I don’t think that is required to test more clear that for Luhmann the autopoeisis is a theme of connection. What is shown in the quote is precisely the character of connection is recursive, but it has nothing with respect to the properly poiético: That scientific communications do not communicate only with scientific communications (and are closed with respect to the other), but that the scientific papers produced by other new communications. And for the record that in the case of the science not be so odd to defend the idea that the ‘papers’ produced ‘papers’.
On the next page, after collecting some doubts of Maturana, Luhmann says that it would seem these questions to limit the power and scope of the concept. But I think that the broad conception of autopoiesis in Luhmann, which makes it equivalent to self-reference finally, what it does is remove power to the concept: there Was a specific idea that I said several things, we now have an idea to diffuse that does not say much.
And suffice it to criticize Luhmann for now.