Kirill Postoutenko

Bio

I have always been interested in the ways people create, perceive, sustain and destroy authority. My Ph.D. in literary criticism was devoted to the canonization of selected literary texts and the sanctification of their authors in Russian literature. Later on, I moved on to personality cults in politics and religion, studying the communicative foundations of leadership from Jesus to totalitarian dictators. In the later years, I am most interested in the life and death of cultural, social and natural systems, particularly from the communicative standpoint. How do peoples, empires and cultures produce, defend and demolish themselves by creating various racial, ethnic, cultural others? What are the natural mechanisms of this socio-cultural immunity, and how can it backfire and result in oppression and genocide? What is the role of language and information and communication in those processes? How the terms referring to the hostile others, survive, spread and form the backbone of imperialism, nationalism and gender intolerance?

Lately I was struck by the specific similarity between the self-other differentiations in human societies and immune systems. The parallel itself is not new, of course, but the fact that such processes, rigorously executed, frequently backfire in exactly the same fashion, leading to witch hunts and autoimmune diseases, has never been discussed in detail. Inversely, the tolerance – a systematic failure to distinguish between “friends” and “enemies” – has been found to be essential for the well-being of both societies and organisms. The tremendous role of communication in all these processes is another stunning fact which I appreciate more and more as I work on interaction in historical and systemic contexts.

Key Topic(s)

Already Plato has noticed that the distinctions between Self and Other are deeply asymmetrical – while Self is definite, solid and immediately perceived, Other is porous, vague and largely unknown. Helped by the great German historian Reinhart Koselleck, I started looking at the history of discourse enabling such othering practices: beginning with Ancient Greeks, there has always been a denigrative designation (Barbarians, Heathens, and, infamously, Untermenschen) unilaterally imposed upon the undesirable outsiders – often with tragic consequences. Later I have noticed that in totalitarian regimes based upon staid, inflexible distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the use of such asymmetrical concepts in public sphere is significantly higher than in the democracies.

Social impact

Our life is ravaged by increasing polarization that undermines natural, cultural and social diversity and thus endangers sustainability. It seems important to recognize the danger inherent in the entrenched practices of othering. Knowing their history, understanding their communicative mechanisms and assessing their impact would contribute to the stability of the natural, social and cultural life.

Difficulties

Interdisciplinary scholarship is always a challenge: inevitably, the terms and methods from one discipline are applied to the others, and there are always scholars who object to these generalizations. The case in point is my recent article on the opposition storage/interface in natural and cultural evolution enthusiastically supported by some scholars and vociferously criticised by others. Close collaboration with scholars from different disciplines helps alleviate these difficulties but they can never be fully eliminated.

Why do research?

The more I do research, the more I learn about the world - and myself.