We study a naturally occurring E ∞ -subalgebra of the full E 2 -Hochschild cochain complex arising from coherent cochains. For group rings and certain category algebras, these cochains detect H * (BC), the simplicial cohomology of the classifying space of the underlying group or category, C. In this setting the simplicial cup product of cochains on BC agrees with the Gerstenhaber product and Steenrod's cup-one product of cochains agrees with the pre-Lie product. We extend the idea of coherent cochains to algebras more general than category algebras and dub the resulting cochains autopoietic. Coefficients are from a commutative ring k with unit, not necessarily a field.