Abstract

This article consists of an outline of a dialogue between José Crisóstomo de Souza’s pragmatic poietic philosophy and Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic social systems. The premise of this proposed dialogue is the observation that the theory of social systems should be understood as a non-structuralist perspective of the social that emphasizes the non-systematic character of social systems, that is, the fact that the recursive unity of social life is defined by the temporal connections of practices and operations and not by the coherence between their structures. The intuition of this proposed dialogue is that this non-systematic and recursive character of autopoietic social systems opens new interesting horizons for thinking about social and individual creativity, as postulated by pragmatic poietic.