What I Learned from Preparing a Presentation for the Complexity Lounge

I recently had the opportunity to return to the Complexity Lounge and deliver a talk on time from the perspective of Humberto Maturana. This is what I learned during the preparation process.

Introduction

In August, I posted a shorter piece on Maturana’s time that I then posted to LinkedIn, which fortunately caught the attention of the Complexity Lounge and resulted in an invitation to come speak on the topic. I had delivered a talk in 2021 at the Complexity Lounge titled “Framing Complex Systems: Reality, Language, and Flow,” so this would be a most welcomed return to the community. I was excited to have the opportunity to present again, this time on Maturana’s time. I find time to be an interesting subject, and as I have been studying Maturana for years, it was natural that the two came together. Maturana’s writing on time is not extensive; it includes a letter of acceptance, which has received valuable commentary, and one journal article from 1995. The rest is scattered throughout his works. This talk is not an exhaustive look at everything Maturana wrote about time, but a selection of excerpts that create a complete talk on cultural and biological time.

Lessons Learned

I learn something from every talk I give by first submitting an abstract that is a few weeks or a month beyond where my knowledge presently is, and then closing that gap leading up to the conference. I am sure this is common. I have found this method to be the best way to learn and grow during the conference cycle, even if it is the most stress-inducing.

I did not expect to follow the same process when I was preparing my talk, “Humberto Maturana’s Time: Living in the Present.” I was practiced with the material, had written about it, and delivered a short presentation on the topic. I was feeling stable in my knowledge.

The same day the Complexity Lounge and I came into agreement about the talk on Maturana and time, I started putting slides together. I was fortunate that I had plenty of time and was able to read from Maturana, Heidegger, Husserl, Stiegler, and Varela. Early on, I endeavored to include the prior as part of the discussion, but as time progressed, I realized a singular focus on Maturana would produce the best talk. This was when I started to realize that I had previously made some errors in my understanding of Maturana’s time and had some unexpected opportunities to engage anew with the literature.

The first error was not distinguishing between cultural invented time and biological time (also known as autopoietic time or zero time more popularly). Drawing a distinction between biological time is critical to the entire presentation, and doing so early can provide some much-needed clarity. The biological phenomenon that supports zero time is distinct from the invented dynamics that constitute cultural time. The separation of zero time and cultural time that permeated the final talk was critical to its coherence, message, and flow.

As part of distinguishing cultural time and its past, present, and future from zero time and its continuously changing present, a study of the material revealed that my previous additions of past and present onto zero time were incorrect. Prior attempts failed to draw the distinction between zero, biological time, and cultural invented time, so this distinction made sense. However, in this talk, the two modalities of time were correctly distinguished, and as a result, it was not possible to attach past and future to zero time that has only a massive continuously changing present. In fact, towards the end of the presentation, it was mentioned that if zero time came into contact with the past and future, then it just became “the present,” although surely this is not the only avenue for having a present.

Zero time, the continuously changing present, begins with the autopoiesis, the dynamics of the living. Upon engaging with the material a little more broadly and spending some real time with it, autopoiesis is not something that can be captured in an image, despite the use of one by Maturana and Varela. Autopoiesis is too dynamic for that, and having looked at these images, I formerly thought it was just the change from the molecules interacting and producing molecules that produces the network that produced them that was the focus. However, I am now convinced that the pathways that the molecular processes follow change as well, in addition to how molecular transformations are carried out. As a result, there is a continuously changing present in an ongoing flow of structural transformation. The continuously changing present also gives some insight into the temporal structure of zero time. It is a constant flow of change in the present, as there is no past or future. It is, in other words, an unbounded change taking place in the present. While Maturana writes that humans are autopoietic systems, it seems there might still be a gap between zero time as observation and as a mode of living. Is our way of living also our way of observing if we allow it to be?

Within Maturana’s time, there is no chronological time, no clocks, no watches, no lock screens, no calendars. This makes it all the more mysterious and all the more wondrous at the same time. Cultural time is almost reminiscent of a version of internal time that Varela wrote about, but that becomes attached to Husserl’s three-fold structure of internal time consciousness, which is the wrong sort of temporality, as it is too immediate. Drawing from Husserl, the past of cultural time was labeled “recollection” and the future “expectation” to capture longer time horizons, while also allowing the past, present, and future to be adjustable dimensions depending on what the observer’s focus is.

Conclusion

There is enough material across the slides from this talk to support something larger, such as a journal article or a framework, or both. Although there were some prolonged periods of uncertainty during the process of creating this talk, I could always return to the literature and find my way back to solid ground. Sometimes it was new ground I had not expected, but ground nonetheless. It was an excellent process and has expanded and reworked my understanding of Maturana’s time.