ABSTRACT
Engaging various streams of cognitive and biological science, anthropology, and philosophy of religion, Sylvia Wynter theorizes the origins of human social systems in evolutionary terms. While Wynter’s sociogenic principle and law of cognitive autopoietic non-altruism hinges around the system-environment relation, Niklas Luhmann takes the relation to its farthest and most complex logical conclusions by pushing it toward a thoroughly technological and non-cognitive framework of interpretation. What makes Luhmann’s theory of society distinct from other sociological and philosophical accounts of society, including Wynter’s cognitive centered genres of being human, is its radical disavowal of human beings as the subject of sociological analysis. The communicative closure of autopoietic systems and their structural coupling means that though normative relations can be constructed across different systems, contingency and hyper-complexity ultimately goes all the way down. This also means that there is always the possibility, or even inevitability, of entropic destruction.
