Indi, I need to tell you about this cool thing I learned today while researching for my english paper. Strangely enough, this theory has been applied to the poet I’m studying, but I think you would find it fascinating, that is, if you don’t already know about it.
(I’m quoting everything from Richard Halpern).

“Maturana and Varela describe an autopoietic machine as a network of processes of production of components-components which, through their interactions and transformations, regenerate and realize in their turn the network of processes that produced them in the first place. They thus consitute the autopoietic machine as a concrete unity within the topological domain of its realization as a network.” (they give the nervous system as a prime example…more convincing than it seems, when you read the text in full).

Anyways, get THIS: “A theory of autopoietic systems will, by contrast, postulate a fundamental limit to informational linkage, because as social mechanisms become increasingly complex and differentiated, their principles of selectivity will render them increasingly closed to one another. The discourse of sexuality, for instance, will become less and less legible to other systems as its own semantics becomes more fully developed and differentiated. Or rather, sexuality actually becomes more and less legible at once. More, when a form of psychoanalytic listening develops whose specialized function is to “hear” and decode sexuality; less, because the increasing complexity and differentiation of psychoanalysis renders its results more opaque to other social systems, such as the law.”

ANd NOW, the piece de resistance: “This is not,…the result of any kind of resistance to, or struggle against, surveillance; it is, rather, an inevitable systemic necessity which nevertheless produces the happy result of limiting coordination among mechanisms of social power”.

Let me know what you think…(sorry for the long-windedness, Halpern uses bloated language, but I think the idea is pretty straightforward.)

k.