Lefebvre’s “Great Pleonasm”

A warning from a time prior to hyper-connectivity…

At the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations lose all meaning. At the extreme looms that shadow of what we will call ‘the great pleonasm’: the unmediated passing immediately into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is in the everyday – the events grasped, pulverized, and transmitted as rapidly as light and consciousness – the repetition of the identical in a wild whirling dance devoid of Dionysian rapture, since the ‘news’ never contains anything really new. If this extreme were reached, the closed circuit of communication and information would jeopardize the unmediated and mediated alike. It would merge them in a monotonous and Babel-like confusion. The reign of the global would also be the reign of a gigantic tautology, which would kill all dramas after having exploited them shamelessly.

Of course, this extreme is still a long way away. It would be a closed circuit, a circuit from hell, a perfect circle in which the absence of communication and communication pushed to the point of paroxysm would meet and their identities emerge. But it will never come full circle. There will always been something new and unforeseen, if only in terms of sheer horror. There will be ‘creations’ which stimulate informative energy and allow for a massive injection of new information. This extreme exists only in the mind’s eye as a distant possibility, in the same way as the debasement of informational energy and the triumph of entropy are. And yet, this extreme allows us to imagine and determine certain aspects of ‘the real’. The very least we can be sure of is that the mass media have not incorporated the everyday into a vaster, richer whole, such as spontaneity or culture. They have left it to its ‘privation’ while moving into privation and taking it over. It is the generalization of private life. At one and the same time mass media have unified and broadcast the everyday; they have disintegrated it by integrating it with ‘world’ current events in a way which is both too real and utterly superficial. 

–Critique of Everyday Life, Volume II (pg. 77)