Ensuring wholeness: Using Code Biology to overcome the autonomy-heteronomy divide

Abstract

This paper presents an alternative to Autopoietic Enactivism in the form of a Code Biology-informed account on human sense-making. It demonstrates the possibility of avoiding a dualism between, on the one hand, the autonomy of individual sense-makers and, on the other, the heteronomy of social facts. This is possible because code biological principles are pertinent to different levels of biological and non-biological organization and cut across the organismic self—non-self border. Analytically, one can maintain the overall integrity of an agent as a separable unit of (inter)action while also avoiding an autonomy-heteronomy divide. We therefore emphasise the constitutive role of codified relations that, while irreducible to operational closure, connect the sense-making agent's social interactions to those of other agents. The move grants a central, constitutive role to external norms (or, heteronomy) as altering the internal, embodied integrity of an autonomous agent. Drawing on the case of prosthetics use in amputees, we show that successful integration of a prothesis cannot be reduced to the substitution of a missing limb. Rather, it demands experienced bodily wholeness on the part of the agent which can only be achieved by attuning and adapting to use of a prosthesis while also internalizing social norms and values. It is concluded that many aspects of the living actualize codified relations which incorporate both heteronomous and autonomous traits.