Self-Destruction of Complex Systems

Kirill Postoutenko is a Senior Researcher in the Special Research Area 1288 (Practices of Comparison) at Bielefeld University, Germany, and an Adjunct Associate Professor (Docent) of Russian literature and culture at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is the author and editor of eleven books and ninety-five articles devoted to systems and communication theory, conversation analysis, history of identity, history of media and communication in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and the history of Russian poetry and literary criticism. His most recent books include the edited volumes Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics (together with Darin Stephanov, 2021), Media and Communication in the Soviet Union: General Perspectives (together with Alexey Tikhomirov and Dmitri Zakharine, 2022) and Beyond ‘Hellenes’ and ‘Barbarians’: Asymmetrical Concepts in European Discourse (2022).

• 1. Introduction: Saving ‘Self-Destruction’ from Itself at the Times of COVID and War2. Some Thoughts on Systems and Their Self-Destruction 3. Studying Communicative Mechanisms of Self-Destruction in Complex Systems: Structures, Modes, and Self-Reinforcing Dynamics4. Reproduction and Eventual Dissolution of Some New Guinea Secret Cults in the Light of the Overlapping Generations Model5. Entropy Dynamics and Self-Destruction6. Signalling, Vagueness, and Meaning in Political Ritual7. Semantic Inflation and Systemic Breakups in Nature and Society8. Reading John Read’s Ten Days That Shook The World: Tacit Segmentation, Robust Proximal Codes, and the Elusive Meaning of “Counter-Revolution” in the Russian Civil War of 1917-19229. Autoimmunity, Life, and Death in Deconstruction