Keeping the Spirit in the Bottle: On Pathological Reduction of Information in Totalitarianism

Abstract

This article begins with disputing the teleologically charged notion of unstoppable information growth, pointing at the alternation of informational contraction and expansion in open dynamic systems. Narrowing the focus, it turns to the 20th century totalitarian systems as particularly paradoxical informational environments: Being less capable of processing information than their democratic counterparts and therefore more vulnerable to overloads, they are particularly prone to suppressing informational transmission in some areas, codes and media. Dilution and conflation are singled out as the most common ways of lessening the informational value of communication in totalitarian societies. Whereas the first greatly increases the ratios of signs to messages and messages to interactions, causing redundancy and semantic inflation, the second rolls back preexisting functional differentiations (person vs. social role, sender vs. message, message vs. information etc.) within societies and their communicative system. It is argued that both attempts at semantic impoverishment of public communication in totalitarianism lead to the pathological states, failing to reduce the overall amount of information within the systems in question and precipitating the very informational explosions they were designed to prevent.