On Self-Creation: Autopoiesis and Autoreligion

This chapter provides an in-depth account of Wynter’s specific understanding of religion by reading it through one of her most important analytical sources: Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s concept of “autopoiesis” (self-creation). I provide an overview of Maturana’s and Varela’s theory and show how Wynter situates the emergence of human forms of life within a meta-historical account of autopoietic living systems operating around specific processes of neuro-biological and linguistic production and reproduction. Coining the term “autoreligion” as the human techno-rhetorical social function that produces transcendent narratives of group homogenization and behavior regulation, I argue that it is within this meta-historical framework of autopoiesis that the category of religion in Wynter should be understood. After tracing this account of religion in Wynter’s later writings, I conclude with a set of questions about the possibility of fully moving beyond autoreligion and achieving a truly objective and trans-genre “outside” perspective free of autoreligious “illusions.”