Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991)

And that is precisely what human alienation consists in - man torn from his self, from nature, from his own nature, from his consciousness, dragged down and dehumanised by his own social products. This explains how there can be such a thing as a social mystery. Society becomes a mechanism and an organism that ceases to be comprehensible to the very people that participate in it and who maintain it through their labour. Men are what they do, and think according to what they are. And yet they are ignorant of what they do and what they are. Their own works and their own reality are beyond their grasp.

In this way leisure appears as the non-everyday in the everyday.
We cannot step beyond the everyday. The marvellous can only continue to exist in fiction and the illusions people share. There is no escape. And yet we wish to have the illusion of escape as near to hand as possible. An illusion not entirely illusory, but constituting a 'world' both apparent and real (the reality of appearances and the apparently real) quite different to the everyday world yet as open-ended and closely dovetailed into the everyday as possible. So we work to earn our leisure, and our leisure has only one meaning: to get away from work. A vicious cycle.

It is too simple to see desire as qualitative and need as quantitative - the one psychological and sociological (or psycho-social), the other biological and physiological. There are needs that are social, objective, and quantifiable: needs for so many sources of energy, so many houses or schools, etc. Economists and sociologists know these needs well. On the sociological level (to use the still unclarified term 'level'), need and desire still separate one from the other. A single human reality appears with two faces, one brutally objective - the social need (for this or that), the other subtly subjective - desire (for this or for that or for something else by means of this or that, or even for nothing or for the infinite or for pure surprise), with motivations which give meaning to the desired object and to desire itself.

There are many mediations between need and desire. In fact, there is everything: society in its entirety (productive activities and the modes of consumption), culture, the past and history, language, norms, commands and prohibitions, the hierarchy of values and preferences.

At the extreme, signs and significations which are nothing more than significations lose all meaning. At the extreme looms the shadow of what we call 'the great pleonasm': the unmediated passing immediately into the unmediated and the everyday recorded just as it is in the everyday - the event grasped, pulverised, 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 jeopardise the unmediated and the 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 situation 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 would merge. But it will never come full circle. There will always be something new and unforeseen, if only in terms of sheer horror.

If 'the real' cannot be exhausted in a finite series of limited questions formulated in logical and precise terms, to which the interviewee can only answer yes or no, and if in one way or another we must qualify it as being 'non-finite', surely we should take this into account in the representations we use.

The problem goes beyond our frame of reference. There is a law that knowledge still obeys: 'I must stop'. Sooner or later it comes to a halt before an obstacle which also acts as a support: an object. Praxis overcomes it; analysis dissolves it using other means. Knowledge and praxis perceive the non-finite as a possibility, a 'horizon of horizons'. We must not see it as actual infinite. We must make infinity relative.

It must be conceded and stated that this hypercriticism has had some disastrous results - for example, the extermination of humanism, philosophical support for human rights. On the pretext that humanism bore the marks of bourgeois liberalism and suspect ideologies, it was blithely trampled underfoot without anything being put in its place.

Hence we are not dealing with only - or not so much - with a technocratic utopia or ideology, but with a scientistic mythology - a paradox, what is more, with the myth of an electronic Agora and the disturbing project of the technological extension of the 'audit' intended for internal control of workshops, but capable of being extended to political and police control of spaces much vaster than the enterprise...

These ideologues do not think that they are interpreting the techniques, but that they are estimating them objectively. They refuse to concede that they are presenting, or representing, a tendentious political project. To them, the project seems to follow logically from the technology. Is not technologising the social and political, as opposed to socialising and politicising technology, a choice and a decision?

In the ideology of consumption and in ‘real’ consumption (in quotations), the consumption of signs plays an increasing role. It does not repress the consumption of ‘pure’ spectacles, without activity and participation, without oeuvre or product. It adds to it and superimposes itself upon it as a determination. It is thus that advertising of consumer goods becomes the principal means of consumption; it tends to incorporate art, literature, poetry, and to supplant them by using them as rhetoric. It thus becomes becomes itself the ideology of society; each ‘object’, each ‘good’ splits itself into reality and image, this being an essential part of consumption. One consumes signs as well as objects: signs of happiness, of satisfaction, of power, of wealth, of science, of technology, etc. [...] Consequently, he who conceives the city and urban reality as a system of signs implicitly hands them over to consumption as integrally consumable: as exchange value in its pure state.

The much vaunted neo-liberalism in this case simply means submitting everything to circulation. One thinks of this plan by Le Corbusier which gets rid of the city and replaces it with giant houses where everything is given over to circulation. Le Corbusier was a good architect but a catastrophic urbanist, who prevented us from thinking about the city as a place where different groups can meet, where they may be in conflict but also form alliances, and where they can participate in a collective oeuvre. I fear that liberalism will be a ‘free for all’, a space abandoned to speculation and the car.