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Kriterion: Revista de Filosofia
versión impresa ISSN 0100-512X
Kriterion v.3 n.se Belo Horizonte 2007
Spectacle, communication and communism in Guy Debord
Espetáculo, comunicação e comunismo em Guy Debord
João Emiliano Fortaleza de Aquino
Professor of Philosophy at Universidade Estadual do Ceará (UECE) and at Universidade de Fortaleza (Unifor). email@example.com
Translated by Marli Warde
Translation from Kriterion, Belo Horizonte, v.48, n.115, p. 167-182, 2007.
The present work is oriented by the hypothesis that Guy Debord's reflection on language and criticism of the commodity fetishism are inseparable aspects of a single and same point of departure of the critique of "the society of the spectacle", centred on the criticism of language and commodity-form. Debord holds the view of a transition, concerning the horizon of the aesthetic and social reflection on language, which is the transition of the concept of expression to that of communication or dialogue. He seeks to compile and maintain, but also surpassing, the critical characteristic of uncommunicative expression (and, therefore, refractory to the "pseudo-communication" of the bourgeois society), as it was conceived and experienced by modern art and the vanguards of the beginning of the 20th century, formulating the social critical perspective of the direct communication.
Keywords: Reification; Language; Expression; Communication.
O presente trabalho se orienta pela hipótese de que a reflexão sobre a linguagem e a crítica do fetichismo mercantil, de Guy Debord, são aspectos inseparáveis de um único e mesmo ponto de partida da crítica da "sociedade do espetáculo", centrado na crítica da linguagem e da forma-mercadoria. Debord se posiciona por uma transição, no que diz respeito ao horizonte da reflexão estética e social sobre a linguagem, do conceito de expressão ao de comunicação ou diálogo. Ele busca recolher e manter, ultrapassando-a, a natureza crítica da expressão não-comunicativa (e, por isso, refratária à "pseudocomunicação" da sociedade burguesa), tal como concebida e experienciada pela arte moderna e as vanguardas do início do século XX, formulando a perspectiva crítica social da comunicação direta.
Palavras-chave: Reificação; Linguagem; Expressão; Comunicação
The language of an absolute lonely man is lyrical; it is monological. This loneliness isn't simply the drunkenness of the soul imprisoned by fate and converted into music, but also the torment of the creature condemned to isolation and that yearns for community.
LUKÁCS, G. A. The Theory of the novel.
Published in 1967, the book The Society of the Spetacle, by Guy Debord (1931-1994), in the late years, has been the topic of discussion in several different disciplinary areas of the humanities, mainly in the so called cultural studies. Even when it is not the very subject at issue, its main concept the "spectacle" is incorporated in diverse reflections, although quite frequently at the expense of its specific conceptual meaning. In considerations of this concept most often sociological, what is frequently lost is the central pretension, announced by the author, in various occasions, to articulating an up-do-date approach to the criticism of the political economy. This approach takes in not only the experience and the reflection on language, very typical of the vanguards and the modern art, but also the resumption, in vogue at the beginning of the 1960's, in France, of a philosophical reflection on Marxism, promoted in that period by the publication, in French language, of The Theory of the Novel and History and Class Consciousness, both written by G. Lukács, and Marxism and Philosophy, by K. Korsch.1
Founding member of the Situacionist International, Guy Debord received the publications of the works above mentioned - which were central to the philosophical discussion in the context of the theoretical criticism of society, in the years 1920-1930 on the basis of a claim from the experience of the interwar artistic vanguards, proposing, thus, the issue of the currentness of the vanguards' programme under the conditions of the second post-war capitalism. What follows from this reflection is the proposition of a critical theory of the late capitalism, in which, according to Marxian concepts of alienation, commodity fetishism and reification, the social and aesthetic experience of language takes the central place. Based on this interpretation, I intend to present in this article the conceptual articulation between the critique of the commodity-form and the critique of the reified language, under the hypothesis that such an articulation constitutes the centre of the critical theory of "the society of the spectacle". In this way, I shall conclude by discussing how an emancipatory perspective results from it, considering that in this perspective the overcoming of reification and the supersession of the art form are inseparable from both a communicative conception of language and the social praxis.
Spectacle, Contemplation and Loss of Communication
The basis of the critical theory proposed by Guy Debord is an ascertainment, in the contemporary capitalism, of the everyday life, immediately phenomenical, of the abstract logic of commodity-form. This ascertainment is central to the debordian concept of "spectacle", precisely with regard to the transformations of appearance of the capitalist system. Indeed, under the concept of spectacle, the economy period in which the commodity would have reached the "total occupation of daily life", the situationist writer sought for unifying and explaining, according to him, a diversity of "apparent phenomena", which are, they themselves, "appearances of a socially organized appearance" (SdS, § 10).2 What does this mean? This question asks about something fundamental to his concept of spectacle. To explain it, it is necessary, above all, to consider that the concept of appearance in this critique does not refer, at first, to the sensory-visible appearance, but rather to the categories, of Hegelian origin, of appearance (Schein) and apparation (Erscheinung), in which Marx places the trades of equivalents in the first chapters of Capital, which deal with the circulation of commodities and money. In the Marxian exposition of the critique of political economy, the concepts of "sphere of circulation" and "appearance" are found articulated, precisely because they concern the immediate and daily experience of the market trade, a condition of the capitalist production which is, nevertheless, presented by the capital itself and is constituted, therefore, in "the apparition form of capital."3
It is already in this apparent instance of capitalist production, an instance constituted by the exchange of commodities and money, being equivalents in the sphere of circulation, that Marx sees the manifestation of a fetishist objectivity which, nucleated by the law of value, escapes from man's control and it imposes on him as "a relation among things". In an express mode, Marx conceives the fetishist character of the commodity-form determined neither by the "physical nature" of the products, nor by the "material relations" present at the practical exchange among individuals during their production, but, exclusively, by the social order of that exchange, as a mercantile exchange; therefore, that one does not concern the sensitive appearance, but concerns the "objective appearance of the social determinations of work".4 It is this objective appearance of the mercantile exchange which constitutes a phantasmagoric objectivity, for it presents itself to men, in his practical experience, as a natural relationship, constitutive of the things themselves, although it is a determination of the historical form of the social relations. However, it is a necessary appearance for it is the constitutive law of the value that in itself appears, exactly in the sphere of circulation, with the objectivity and with the need for a natural law. Thus, for Marx, a phantasmagoric and fetishist nature of the commodity-form, not being determined by its sensorial form, does not constitute, consequently, a unilateral illusion of the conscience, but an illusion that we could rather say objective, in so far as everyday experience of the monetary-mercantile exchanges, being exchanges of equivalents, "veils, instead of revealing, the social character of the private labours and, therefore, the social relations among the private producers."5 It is in this sense that the conscience of "the private producers only reflects [mirrors, spiegelt] "( ) those forms which appear in the practical circulation, in the product exchanges ( )".6 In other words, the daily conscience mirrors "nothing less than the determined social relation among men themselves that for them assumes here the phantasmal form of a relationship among things."7
It is this fetishist social appearance, formed by the circulation of commodities and money, which, according to Debord, extends its logic to the set of activities and daily relationships in the spectacular capitalism, producing and organizing the "appearances, "the apparent phenomena", these being sensorily visible, immediately present, in the individuals' social experience. The objective appearance of the mercantile exchange, of which Marx categorically affirms autonomy and independence in the face of "physical nature" and "the material relations" of the production of use-value, has now become physically apparent, sensitively visible. It becomes a socially organized appearance which is manifested, in the spectacular capitalism, in sensorily apparent phenomena, thanks to the extension of the mercantile relations to the whole of the daily life. Precisely so, autonomy, concerning the individuals, from the appearance of fetishist exchanges of values, starts to sovereignly constitute, subjected to its abstract logic, a series of apparent visible phenomena, which thus become, they themselves, also autonomous in relation to the individuals.
In his work Capital, Marx refers to the commodity as a "physically metaphysical thing". In his analysis of the contemporary capitalism, Debord observes a speculative movement of this abstraction constitutive of the economic value, towards the sensitive, movement through which, however, this economic value does not have its material autonomy restored, but, quite the contrary, it is completely subsumed to the abstraction of the value. In his theoretical critique of the spectacular capitalism, Debord rightly understands that the exchange value, having reached such a level of autonomy, by means of the superacumulation of capital and, jointly, through the extension of his logic to the dual dimension of space-time lived, may be presented in the totality immediateness of the use-values, and in such a way that his abstract logic not only becomes immediately visible, but also the unique thing which makes itself be seen .Thus, the individuals' everyday experiences, situated in the apparent sphere of the system which is constituted by the mercantile-monetary circulation, become, they themselves, as experiences subsumed into the logic of the exchange of equivalents, apparent phenomena of the capitalist production.
This automation of the apparent phenomena of the abstraction's economic value is named by Debord as "world of the autonomized image" (SdS,§ 2). However, this is not about as Mario Perniola critically appreciates "of an iconoclast attitude which considers the visible forms with suspicion".8 The spectacle would not be, says Debord, "a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images" (SdS § 4). In the use of the concept of image, Debord does not primarily do a narrow reference to the sensitive vision, but rather to a "mode of production" of which the spectacle would be, not a "supplement", or an "added decoration", but, precisely as a "form of appearance of capital" (Marx) "the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already made in the sphere of production and its corollary consumption" (SdS § 6) What Debord has in mind under the concept of image are the fetishistic social relations, founded on the automation of value and extended to the totality of the social use of time, of space, and beyond the wage labour, but essentially following its disciplinary and contemplative logic. The images and representations which, in the spectacle, replace what is directly experienced are, above all, a form of social relationship in which the individuals, who are related, they effectively place themselves as contemplative spectators in and of their own activities and generic relations.
If Debord can conceive the spectacle as constituted in the production, as a mode of production, it is fundamentally because he understands that "with the generalized separation of the worker and his products, every unitary view of accomplished activity and all direct personal communication among producers are lost"; consequently, "unity and communication become the exclusive attribute of the system's management." (SdS, § 26). In other words, the concept of the spectacle, not concerning the "mere gazing", speaks of "which escapes the activity of men, that which escapes reconsideration and correction by their work. It is the opposite of dialogue." (SdS § 18). If one has in mind the two last mentioned passages, one understands that, under the concept of the spectacle, Debord essentially seeks to articulate two fundamental dimensions constitutive of the social appearance, in an occasion in which the commodity-form extends to the whole lived: the expropriation of the autonomous activity, inseparable from the expropriation of the communicative language.9
What is mainly central, then, to the concept of the spectacle is that, according to the author, the horizontal extension of the exchange of equivalent brings to the "surface" of the social life (the appearance of the metabolism of the capital, in Marx's conception) the contemplation that is essential to the wage labour and that, on the whole, it is on the base of this same universalization of the commodity-form of the work products. Taking account of this relation between wage work and the spectacle is important, for it answers the frequent critique that this last category would be limited to the sphere of circulation of commodities and not concerned to the production of the capital.10 It must be remembered that, for Marx, "it is only from this moment [in which the workforce assumes, for the worker himself, the form of a commodity] that the produce of labour universally becomes a commodity."11 This universalization is not dissociated from the very thing that characterizes the capitalist production as the production of surplus-value. In his critical conception of the spectacle, Debord takes into consideration that the extension of the mercantile exchanges found a transformation - or, if one wishes, an adjustment in the social appearance, with the emergence of a totalitarian group of phenomena that produce and require, as in the immediateness of the lived, the contemplative passivity peculiar to the wage labour. His account on the social appearance is not restricted, therefore, to the sphere of exchange of equivalents, but to ponder on individuals' immediate social experiences in a social historical situation in which the mercantile exchange shows, in the extensive totality of most diverse phenomena, as hierarchical and contemplative as is the mercantile production based on the wage system. The instance of equal exchanges, which simultaneously composes and hides the production of the capital, starts to apparently manifest the contemplation that, in the industrial wage labour, is essential to the production of value.
"Contemplation" a category that, for L. Feuerbach and the young Marx, is inherent to the speculative inversion subject-predicate is taken by Debord, and herein following the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness, as a form of social relationship particular to this extensive moment of mercantile relationship. The spectacle is, thus, a speculative inversion between the sensitive and super-sensitive, which takes a historical concrete form in the field of value over the use-value, a field whose ultimate basis is the inversion between the producer and his product operated by the alienated work. For Debord, the more developed capitalism presents, in a direct manner, that is, phenomenical and apparent, the logic of the super-sensitive abstraction of economic value, imposing an inversion between sensitive and super-sensitive that, ever, had been the immanent fetishism of the commodity form. Therefore, there is not, in this context, a denunciation of the sensitivity on behalf of a true super-sensitive reality, but strictly on the contrary, it is the denunciation of the abstraction dominance of the economic value over the sensitive; it is the critical understanding that, in the conditions of advanced capitalism, the super-sensitive logic of value has become immediate, covered with images, transforming the very sensitive into something similarly abstract (as it occurs in the quantification of time, in the mercantile leisure, in the banalization of the space, in the consumption of goods ). It is like an image that imposes itself to be seen and to be contemplated that the auto-movement of the capital is constituted in the experience of contemplative passivity in the immediacy of the totality lived.
A second dimension inseparable from the first is that one which is connected with the communicative relationships among individuals. It does not concern, in this case, to separate, and much less to oppose, as does A. Jappe, "the importance attributed [by Debord] to the "communication", a supposed "great effective novelty of [his] theory [that] results (...) from its reference to the fundamental role of the exchange and the principle of equivalence in the contemporary society ".12 However, if the alienation of the productive activity is revealed, when mercantile relations become universalized in the totality of experiences and everyday relationships, as essentially the "opposite of dialogue", it is precisely because, according to Debord, the expropriation of productive activity in capitalism presupposes - and necessarily results in the loss of direct communication between producers. The expropriation of autonomous activity at work and the expropriation of communicative language are two determinations which reflect themselves reciprocally. G. Agamben highlights this reciprocal determination by considering as essential the critical theory of the spectacle which, in it, "the Marxian analysis is integrated in the sense that capitalism (...) was not directed only to the expropriation of productive activity, but also, and moreover, to the alienation of the language itself, that is, of the very linguistic or communicative nature of man."13 Debord presents, therefore, a theoretical critique of the advanced capitalism in which the mercantile passivity and the reified instrumentation of language are inseparably articulated. For him, the contemporary capitalism is characterized by essentially the same and unique expropriation of dialogue and autonomous activity, which are condition and necessary consequences of the universalization of social relations directed by the law of value.
Modern Poetry, Labourer Movement and Communism
Comprised of this double validity, the visible and immediate nature of the dominance of the value- form in the contemporary capitalism is a central determination not only related to the concept of the spectacle, but also, for this reason, the prospective affirmation immanent to the critique that Debord elaborates. In a similar way, as psychoanalysis proposes in relation to dreams and to oniric images, the whole issue is to translate into conscious desire, through language and communicative praxis, the possibilities of another life that are hidden/shown in the "images" constituent of the spectacular capitalism. Metaphysically, this essentially communicative position of social criticism seeks refuge in the concept of common language.14 Historically, it is based not only on anti-hierarchical experiences of the labourer movement, notably in Workers' Councils of the first quarter of the twentieth century, but also in expressive experiences of modern art, which were contemporary of those same revolutionary workers' experiences. In this context of reflection, Debord thinks the modern artistic development as component of a historical process of dissolution of the "old common language", a dissolution carried out, first of all, by the development of capitalism itself in its destructive nature of the pre-modern social relations. When thinking this artistic experience as constituent part of the social experience of language, whose destructive element has critically been assumed by writing and by the modern plastic-pictorial figuration, Debord articulates a prospective social sense for the historical experience of modern art, a sense that, for him, it is inseparable from the revolutionary overcoming the present conditions of existence.
In this connection between the historical experience of language and the modern artistic experience, Debord formulates a theory of both the historical constitution and the crisis of autonomous art. In short, he conceives his theory like this: the aesthetic experience that, before, was called "the common language of social inaction", inseparable from the "religious universe" in pre-modern societies, is constituted, through the dissolution of the former common language, in "independent art in the modern sense", when "its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end" (SdS, § 186). This formulation points to a movement of historical constitution of the modern art statute, as a separated aesthetic experience, but separated from a whole social interconnection, in short, as an experience other than that of the former belonging immediate to the aesthetic phenomena of a whole closed community. For him, the independent art historically constitutes its emergence from the old mythical-religious universe, as a way out of a traditional common language; it is precisely this process that, when separating it from the integrated universe of the pre-capitalist community, in which a transmitted sense is retained, constituting it as independent art, dwelling, in this, the beginning of its dissolution as art. What really constitutes it as an autonomous modern art is, therefore, its assumption of the crisis keeping for itself the place of "self-destruction criticism" of the experience and the language common to tradition. Liberated for its autonomy, through the destruction of its ancient historical ethos, the modern art is constituted as such when it placing for itself an experience in which that destruction is assumed, according to Debord, "critically".
In this way, there would be found, in modern art, a "critical self-destruction of the former common language" (the italics are mine). Its entire movement is the one of conscious reflection and experimentation and also significant of this destruction of language, movement by which its very existence is inseparable from this more general historical-social experience. The importance of this process is that, for Debord, "the liberation of everyday life (...) implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication."15 This withering away was consciously discussed and put into practice by modern art. By understanding it in this historical articulation with its own social language, and having in mind, critically, the anti-communicative nature of the contemporary capitalism, Debord precisely sought to propose a historical prospective sense for this experiment, sense in which the critical feature of the destruction of the former common language in modern art is preserved: "The fact that the language of communication has been lost," says he, "this is the positive significance of the modern decomposition and destruction of all art. The negative implication of this movement is the fact that a common language must now be found"(SdS, § 187).
According to this understanding, the whole modern art was a consciously positive demonstration of the destruction of the former common language, which it stated and requested in the form of expressive aesthetics. Equally well it has become independent art, leaving the old religious universe, destroying itself critically as belonging to that universe, constituting, in this way, its own formal independence in a inseparable process from the social destruction of the former common language. However, as far as it makes itself the place of a conscious destruction of the traditional language, the modern art inscribes a prospective sense to this way of transforming itself, sense that negatively signals the search for another, non-alienated, "common language". If the destruction of the former common language is part of the destructive nature of the capitalist society, its assumption by the modern art in an expressive aesthetics is also a critical position considering this form of sociability, characterized by pseudo-communication. However, it is exactly in its critical position in view of the reified daily communication of the capitalist society, inseparable from the communicative perspective in which it is inscribed negatively, that, as stated by Debord, the modern art finds itself historically with the communicative experiences, as counsellors and "assembly men and women" of the revolutionary movement. The development of modern art in their expressive nature, negatively points at the search for the realization of another communicative language which, in their horizontal and anti-hierarchical experiences, the labourer movement positively rehearsed in a practical dialogue of refusing the unilateral language and outside the State.16
To better determine this communicative perspective that Debord elaborates on his theoretical critique of the more developed capitalism, it is possible to rehearse a distinction between his position and the onr formulated by Theodor Adorno. To this author, the ethical-aesthetic opposition between "expression" (Ausdruck) and "communication" (Kommunikation) has precisely the meaning of a negative position considering the reified "communication" in the market society, from which the expression constitutes a denunciation (essentially a part of socially critical content of the modern art).17. Adorno structured all his aesthetic perspective - which takes an important place in its social criticism of the late capitalism - the opposition between Ausdruck and Kommunikation, even in a situation in which he himself acknowledges the crisis of the category of aesthetic expression in the neutralized experiments of the "neo-vanguards". However, he reiterates it because he remains theoretically committed to the "autonomous form of art", as it would have been, according to his analysis, experienced by the modern art in between the two World Wars, trying to stress the critical nature of the autonomy of art in view of the dominant heteronomy in the late capitalism. On the contrary, Debord seeks for overcoming this opposition, not choosing, however, the alienated communication from the expression, but conceiving the possibility of a "direct communication". As conceived by Debord, direct communication is exactly contrary to the sense of Kommunikation criticized by Adorno, by he himself and, according to the analyses of both, experienced by the expressive modern art. Nevertheless, Debord intends to go beyond a statement of the expression against the reified communication of current social relationships. Neither disregarding nor circulating, but just taking as a basis the critical sense of that opposition, Debord searches for overcoming it dialectically, with a communicative perspective.
Actually, his communicative conception is diametrically opposed to the criticism that J. Habermas presents in view of Adorno's expressive perspective. First of all, this does not concern, for Debord, with distinguishing, in a phenomenological mode, world of life and systemic world, as does Habermas in his theory of the communicative acting, but, conversely, it concerns with indicating in a dialectical procedure that a reified logic of the commodity form and the wage labour organizes the entire everyday life. Consequently, the so-called world of life, a category with which Habermas thinks the daily life, is ready determined by the world from the systemic world of fetishistic economical relations. Therefore, it is not a question, for Debord, to take the everyday communication, as it exists in this present alienated society, as a basis of a social communicative perspective, just in the same mode Habermas wants, mode which refers to a "rationalization of everyday communication, linked to the inter-subjective structures in the world of life, for which the language is the means genuine and irreplaceable of understanding"18 For Debord, this present daily communication, in all its levels of "rationalization", is formed by the autonomous mediation of mercantile relations, hence, it is a "psedo-communicatio.n". Similar to Adorno's solitary position, R. Duarte says, precisely against Habermas' position, that "if anyone of the participants in an activity mediated by language is imbued with this negativity so essential to the philosophy, "communication" between them rarely exceeds the phatic level, in which the ideological instances of the administered world operate". In that sense, a "'communicative action' is really accomplished from the moment when it is able to fully incorporate a radical negativity in respect of the current state of affairs."19 It is precisely in satisfying this requirement, by taking it as an assumption, that Debord's communicative perspective can be understood as a dialectical supersession of the "adornian" position, incorporating it. Rather than deviating from it or abandoning it in favor of an "acritical" communicative perspective, such is the case of Habermas', Debord incorporates the existing negativity in opposition between the expression and the reified communication, just like this opposition was formed by the modern art and discussed by Adorno.
Thus, as for the essentially anti-comunicative nature of contemporary capitalism, in which the aesthetic expression would no longer maintain full negative potentiality that the period in between the two World Wars would have, Debord's position is for a communicative perspective as a critical stance and as a social project of overcoming the reification. In this regard, there also imposes a radical difference in his conception related to the theory of "communicative acting", which Habermas would articulate some years later: it does not concern, for Debord, to seek a transcendental foundation for the "communicative praxis".20 It concerns, therefore, thinking it exclusively based on the negative praxis as regards the unique system of alienations of the market and of the State, negativity that the modern poetic expression, that is, anti-hierarchical, would indicate. It is only while it claims for this negativity, immanent in the modern art experience and typical to the revolutionary tradition of the labourer movement, that, for Debord, the programme of supersession of art, sought by the vanguards of the beginning of the 20th century, means that in the spectacular capitalist conditions the supersession programme of the expressive aesthetics to the social communicative praxis. In this perspective, the proletarian revolution will be heir of the modern art, by positively accomplishing the communicative programme which, in negative, it is immanent, and in contrast, modern art will be achieved, by overcoming itself as a separate art, with the transformation of the entire daily life in creative life, non-alienated and historical.
Therefore, as a social critique, this communicative perspective means the affirmation of a strong sense of communication that is not identified, but conversely it opposes, seeking to overcome it, as the social reified experience of the "interchange", of "communication". It is this concept - inseparable from the claim, by Debord, of the "insurrectionary tradition" (Benjamin) of modern poetry - that essentially removes the various Marxist trends because, for him, anti-communication, founded as commodity-form, also constitutes the many other forms of social hierarchies, the political representation, the "theories" separated from praxis (ideologies), the conception of the party called "revolutionary", the trade unions and the State. In short, this is a ommunicative perspective that carries, with radicality, another sense of communication, which presents once more the Marxian project of a classless society and whose first historical condition is the overrunning of the fetishist dominion of the value. Marx referred himself to communism, in Capital, as consisting of "transparent and rational relationships [of men] among themselves and with nature."21 It is this same perspective that reappears to Debord with the formulation of an "immediate transparency of some communication, of the reciprocal recognition, of the agreement."22 This debordian claim for "transparency" strictly refers to the social possibilities of dialogue and of communication in feasible decisions about men's common life in a society liberated from the fetishist dominion of value-forms. Without this last liberation, no actual and potent dialogue is possible to the social scale, but also no real overcoming of the autonomous economy is possible without the communicative praxis. It is this connection between communicative praxis and communism in its turn constituted by the connection between proletarian revolution and modern poetry - which essentially characterizes the social criticism of Debord.'s. For him, it is about opposing the reified society, from the daily social struggles, the search for "a direct communication (...) which can, thus, transform the world according to his wishes."23
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The present article is based on the doctorate thesis under the title Reification and languange in Andre Breton's and Guy Debord's (PUC-SP, 2005). This article was received in August, 2006 and it was approved in September, 2006.
1 "It was necessary for us to resume the critique of the political economy understanding it in an accurate manner and combating 'the society of the spectacle'", says Debord (Notes pour servir à l'histoire de l'I. S. de 1969 a 1971, p. 95). To this affirmation, we have to add another, in which Debord bases his theory on the internal discussion about the vanguards of the World War II. "Fifteen years previously, in 1952, four or five scarcely recommendable people from Paris decided to search for the supersession of art ( ) The supersession of art is the 'North West Passage' of the geography of vraie vie that had so often been sought for more than a century, beginning especially with auto-destructive modern poetry." (DEBORD. Préface à la quatrièmme édition italienne de La société du spectacle [1979], in: Commentaires sur la société du spectacle [1988], p. 130-131).
2 DEBORD. La societé du spectacle. From this point onwards the references of this book will be made along the text itself, with the indication of the initials in brackets and of the paragraph in question.
3 MARX. O capital, p. 125, t. I/1. As appearance of capital, the circulation of commodities and money is not the false aspect, to which there opposes a genuine instance (in this case, the production of capital), as a simplistic metaphysical concept would be supposed. For Marx, "It is therefore impossible that outside the sphere of circulation, a producer of commodities can, without coming into contact with other commodity-owners, expand value, and consequently convert money or commodities into capital. //It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation" (p. 138). It is precisely in this sense that the sphere of circulation is the form of the apparition of capital, the apparent instance which necessarily composes it.
4 MARX. O capital, p. 71, t. I/1.
5 Ibidem, p. 73.
6 Ibidem, p. 72.
7 Ibidem, p. 71.
8 PERNIOLA. A estética do século XX, p. 82.
9 In this sense, his reflection on social appearance in the advanced capitalism does not only consider the visibility of the mercantile product, but also its "aesthetics", its "appearance". This is just a determination - cf. § 15 of A sociedade do espetáculo of this broader movement of domination of the lived through the fetishistic reification of value. He does not even centrally considerer the tendency really existent of the cultural production of late capitalism which concerns products sensorily "visible", centred on "image" and on "sight", as it is pointed out, in a sympathetic manner, although unilaterally, by F. Jameson (A cultura do dinheiro, ensaios sobre a globalização, especialmente p. 87 et seq. e 114 et seq.).
10 As regards this critique, cf., among others: DAUVÉ. Kritik der Situationistischen Internationale; BLANC, L'Internazionale situazionista e il suo tempo.
11 MARX. O capital, p. 141, n. 41.
12 JAPPE. Guy Debord, p. 189. In History and Class Consciousness, work which Jappe relates, with reason, to The Society of Spectacle, there exists already this nexus between contemplation and expropriation of the communication, nexus to which, however, Jappe did not attach much importance to in his analysis.
13 AGAMBEN. Violenza e speranza nell'ultimo spettacolo, p. 14-15. In this same perspective of analysis, O. Virno emphasizes that, under the category of the spectacle, what is at issue is the mode of production, in which "human communication became commodity." Hence, according to Virno, the interpretation between wage labour and expropriation of human communication expressed, in Debord's thoughts, the demand that the critique of capitalism must comprehend the critique of the instrumental conception of language, in such a manner that "the abolition of the wage labour" is also constituted, essentially, in "freedom of language" (VIRNO. Cultura e produzione sul palcoscenico, p. 19-26).
14 This is not the place to develop this issue, but it may be said, concisely, that the category of common language in Debord assumes to a certain extent a metaphysical feature, in the same sense in which are the gleiche Sprache, "equal and common language", in The Theory of the Novel (Lukács), e de Erfahrung, "collective and communicable experience", in The Narrator (Benjamin). In all these cases, it is a question of indicating a passage, a transition and a non-fixedness of the present historical experience. This relationship between the categories of common language in Lukács, Benjamin and Debord, I developed it better in Reification and Language in Guy Debord (Fortaleza: EdUECE, 2006).
15 DEBORD. uvres cinématographiques complètes 1952-1978, p. 35.
16 It is in the negative and critical nature of the destruction of language, in and by modern art, as well as in communicative and anti-hierarchical experiences of the working class movement that Debord justifies the historical perspective of the communicative language. This does not concern, therefore, the common language of the pre-capitalist communities, as M. Löwy interprets, for whom in Debord there would be found a "protest against capitalist/industrial civilization in the name of the past values" Consumé par le feu (Le romantisme de Guy Debord), Lignes, Paris, Harzan-Lignes, n. 31, 1997, p. 163. Debord does not even start working, in his critique of the reified language, on the positive assumption of a "human essence", as A. Jappe thinks and for whom the situationist's position as for the reification "evidently supposes the existence of a "human essence" which may be used as a parameter to determine what is "sound" and what is "alienated" (Guy Debord, p. 51).
17 ADORNO. Teoria estética, especialmente, p. 56; Ästhetische Theorie, p. 68.
18 HABERMAS. Teoría de la acción comunicativa, especialmente o tópico IV "De Lukács a Adorno: La racionalización como coisificación", p. 437.
19 DUARTE. Expression as foundation, p. 63.
20 It is even possible to point out a terminological demarcation between the "communicative acting" kommunikatives Handeln), conceived by Habermas, and the communicative praxis, conceived para Debord, a demarcation which precisely translates the conceptual differences above mentioned. Philologically, I want to draw attention to the dialectical-critical filiation of the category of praxis, present in Debord, which is distinct from the more neutral category of acting ((Handeln), present in Habermas; thereupon, for Habermas' choice of the German terms Kommunikation, kommunikativ and their derivatives objects of criticism in German dialectical tradition, moreover in Adorno to determine the "acting" which he has in view, quite distinctly from the Mitteilung, a nearly metaphysical term which, in this same dialectical-critical tradition, expresses a strong and authentic sense of communication.
21 MARX. O capital, p. 76.
22 All the King's men, Internationale Situationniste, n. 8, jan. 1963, p. 31.
23 Ibidem, p. 31.


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Chris Brown Parodies Sam Smith's 'Stay With Me' [Video]
Of all artists to cover Sam Smith, Chris Brown was not one of the first to come to mind. Still, we were pleasantly surprised to hear the troubled singer croon those opening notes — that is, until he changed up the rest of the chorus.
Taking to Instagram, Brown posted the selfie video with no other caption than "lol," letting the spoofed lyrics to do the talking.
"Oh, won't you stay with me?" Brown starts off singing, letting those a cappella notes hit you right in the feels before bursting into the parody. "'Cause I bought your new weave."
"Now, I didn't spend my cheese," he continues, looking serious as he leads into the last line: "B—-, you owe me." Yikes!
Is Brown's 'Stay With Me' cover a possible dig at his ex Karrueche Tran, or just a silly parody? The jury's still out, but you can decide for yourself by watching the vid above.
See Chris Brown + More Celebs' Yearbook Photos

subset: commoncrawl


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After a safety negotiates his own rookie deal, the traditional businessmen of the NFL find themselves in serious trouble
Everyone in the class of the 2013 NFL draft has now been signed, with nary a holdout lasting more than a day or two. And all drafted players are under contract without the opportunity to renegotiate until 2016 at the earliest. Not only is the four-year length of these contracts mandated, the amount of money for each pick is also predetermined, which is leading to some uncomfortable conversations about agent fees.
When I left the agent business in 1999—just days after losing Ricky Williams as a client to the clutches of Master P—I was already starting to hear people challenging these fees, especially for rookie contracts. The questions from players, their advisers and their family members have only accelerated since the 2011 CBA.
Prior to the most recent CBA, there was some room with rookie contracts (especially for first-rounders) to add incentives such as player options and voids, guaranteed salary advances and escalator clauses that would act as a "second rookie pool" in a legal circumvention of the rookie cap. These loopholes are now decisively blocked.
Now that we're in year three of the CBA "correction" for rookie contracts, teams, agents and players have all come to a stark realization: the amount of compensation in rookie contracts is predetermined by draft position. As a top union official told me, "A trained monkey could negotiate these contracts."
Thus, "negotiators" for 2013 rookies simply cut and pasted numbers from the corresponding pick in 2012, which had been cut and pasted from the corresponding pick in 2011. Most of these contract negotiations have taken minutes to complete, and the pace of signings for this year's draft class was the quickest ever.
For example, let's compare the 15th overall pick—the Saints' Kenny Vaccaro out of Texas—to the same draft slot in each of the past two years.
The small difference in the total value has nothing to do with teams drafting, in order, a center (the Dolphins' Mike Pouncey), a defensive end/linebacker (the Seahawks' Bruce Irvin) and a safety—it's due only to annual increases in minimum salary per the CBA. This striking similarity can be seen throughout the draft.
Based on the figures above, if an agent were to charge the maximum allowable fee of 3%, he would stand to make approximately $280,000 over the life of the deal. In contrast, if an agent/attorney were to charge in another fashion, perhaps an hourly fee of, say, $500 an hour (with a conservative estimate of 20 hours to negotiate the deal) that fee would approximate $10,000.
Do players even need agents in today's NFL?
Safety Matt Elam, the last pick in the first round, didn't use one to negotiate with the Ravens. Elam merely signed for "the slot"—$6.767 million over four years, with a $3.3 million bonus to sign—with three years fully guaranteed and a partial guarantee on the fourth-year. (The two picks above him, Travis Frederick of the Cowboys and Alec Ogletree of the Rams, had the same structure in the fourth year of their deals.) Had Elam used an agent to negotiate that same contract, the 3% fee would have cost him over $200,000.
I corresponded with Elam through email and asked him about his nontraditional choice. His response: "I did meet with a lot of agents, but negotiating my contract without one was ultimately the best business decision for me. Once I was drafted it was clear what my contract would be valued at."
As to negotiating with Ravens' vice president Pat Moriarty, Elam wrote: "It was definitely an educational experience. I had a small team of people that helped me with researching comparable deals and determining the language that I wanted to make sure was in there. I was on the phone with Mr. Moriarty and, honestly, it was a very easy negotiation. I know my contract in and out and I think that makes me a more invested member of the organization."
And as to whether his situation may be a model for other incoming rookie players, he responded: "With the slotting system, the contract negotiation is the easy part. As soon as you become eligible for the draft people are pushing for you to make decisions about your agent, financial adviser, etc. There's no rush. I benefited from taking my time to determine the best way to form my team. I'm obviously very happy with the results."
Time will tell if the "Elam model" becomes more common in the negotiation of rookie contracts. I know there isn't a lot of sympathy out there for plight of agents, but they do provide real and valuable services.
Despite preset numbers in contract negotiations, agents can provide extra value by wrangling small "wins" to counter the teams' leveraging its contract structure and stated policy, the offset language (see sidebar), offseason injury protection, workout bonuses, bonus deferrals and cash flow.
Further, there are non-negotiation services that most agents handle for rookies:
• Arranging training and interview preparation for the Combine
• Coordinating Pro Day workouts and interviews
• Managing the player's family and friends
• Providing a credit line for income prior to signing a contract
• Reviewing lease and other documents presented to the player
• Being a trusted adviser and counselor
Although these services are valuable and facilitate the transition into the NFL, they are managerial and rendered disproportionately during a player's rookie season. I am now hearing from players in the 2011 or 2012 draft classes who are wondering why they continue to write checks to their agents for cookie-cutter contracts. To them, the agent's pre-draft services are a distant memory.
And what are those fees exactly? Although agents guard their fees with extreme secrecy, my sense in speaking to several of them is that few, if any, are receiving the maximum 3% for rookies, especially at the top of the draft. This is due to two main reasons: the lack of negotiation required and the competitive nature of the marketplace. After seeing what Elam did, there will be even greater downward pressure on these fees.
The agent business, as I constantly tell hordes of young people wanting to enter it, isn't a Hollywood movie. There are now approximately 800 certified agents for 1,800 NFL players, not counting another 250 aspiring agents sat for the NFLPA entrance exam last week. It is a business that is difficult to enter and even harder to sustain success in. As a former agent, I have seen many burn out quickly. I still marvel at the relentlessness of the few who have achieved prolonged success.


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Why I Left 60 Minutes
The big networks say they care about uncovering the truth. That's not what I saw.
Ernest Hemingway famously said that "the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it." He was talking about the novelist, I suppose. But his dictum applies to the investigative journalist, in spades. It is the born reporter who insistently, even masochistically, clings to the notion that things are not what they outwardly seem and pursues the hidden truth in any situation even when other people prefer to ignore it. For most people this simply is not normal human activity.
Imagine discovering that a paid FBI informant may have actually killed a civil rights worker during one of the most famous civil rights marches in U.S. history? Or that a top county public school official had put 23 of his relatives on the payroll, sexually harassed female employees and separately had informed the parents of handicapped students that their children couldn't attend school. Or uncovering the fact that the most famous divorce lawyer in America had been literally raping his clients. Or that the (then) biggest savings and loan fraud in the U.S. was actually an inside job, in which a banker had allowed his financial institution to be defrauded as he received millions of dollars from the perpetrators. Or that a presidential campaign co-chairman had helped teach white supremacist groups how to develop a militia capacity. In Washington, D.C., especially in Washington D.C., an investigative reporter's shit detector must be mighty.
Story Continued Below
I'll admit it takes a strange sort of zeal to spend months or years on a single subject, to accept rejection by scores of sources, to weather threats—everything from the very real possibility of being thrown from a second-story window to being stalked outside my hotel room to million-dollar lawsuits and almost universal calumny—all in dogged pursuit of obscured information. Despite having spent a lifetime with this peculiar form of affliction, I'm sure I can't fully explain it.
But when I embarked on this profession, I was in many ways prepared for all that—for the threats, the lawsuits and the general hostility. That was just the cost of doing business. What I didn't foresee, what floored me and frustrated me, was that sometimes the biggest obstacles in the pursuit of what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth" came from the inside—from my bosses and my bosses' bosses who, despite their professed support, had no real interest in publishing the hardest-hitting stories.
In October 1977, a few weeks before I turned 24, after a brief make-or-break meeting with the reporting unit's leader where I pitched half a dozen potential national investigative stories that apparently resonated with him, I was hired as a "reportorial producer" for a fledgling "Special Reporting Unit" at ABC News. This was my dream job.
Over my six-and-a-half years at ABC, I investigated everything from attempted presidential assassinations to unsolved crimes from the civil rights era, from prospective Supreme Court nominees to FBI misconduct, from Washington corruption scandals such as ABSCAM to the 1980 presidential campaign. I remain proud of my work during these years, which provided my continuing education about the United States and the world, about national and local politics and news gathering, about internal corporate machinations and duplicity, about truth and airbrushed truth (and the best techniques for distinguishing the two).
Yet over time, the work was becoming enormously frustrating. The Special Reporting Unit was disbanded after a year, and I was reassigned within the ABC Washington Bureau. Independently, I had begun to conclude that, generally speaking, network television news (in that pre-Internet age) was disconcertingly tethered to the front-page news judgment of the nation's most respected newspapers. When I would propose exclusive stories up the ladder, for example, I would frequently receive notes back saying, "I haven't read this in the New York Times" as the rationale for not pursuing them.
It became painfully apparent over time that network television news was not especially interested in investigative reporting, certainly not to the extent or the depth of the best national print outlets. In fact, the most trusted man in America around this time, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, had told Time magazine something in 1966 that still rang true more than a decade later: that "the networks, including my own, do a first-rate job of disseminating the news, but all of them have third-rate news-gathering organizations. We are still basically dependent on the wire services. We have barely dipped our toe into investigative reporting."
Gradually, television's daily editorial insecurity vis-à-vis the older print world and its own tepid commitment to enterprise journalism caused me to conclude that all three major networks were mostly interested in the illusion of investigative reporting. Breathless, "exclusive" coverage of the latest government report (preferably ahead of the other networks), replete with "revelations" and "findings"—all unabashedly piggybacking on the investigations of others, official reports by inspectors general or congressional committees, criminal or civil court records—could create the aura of an aggressive news organization, for much less money (and fewer libel suits) than actually doing the original reporting. I found it sobering to realize that the news organization I worked for didn't consider the work of finding the actual truth about a complicated situation economically efficient or even necessary.
The absurdity of this faux-investigative game reached its nadir for me one day when I was asked to follow up on a wire service report about former president Lyndon Johnson. Someone with personal access to Johnson when he was Senate majority leader in the late 1950s had just asserted under oath that he had on more than one occasion given Johnson envelopes of cash. I was explicitly asked to "check it out" for that evening's news program.


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Narcissistic Startup Founder Asks the World Whether He Should Attend Harvard
Should Mike Moradian get a Harvard MBA? Or should Mike Moradian forever change education with his awesome web startup? Mike Moradian is tortured by this decision, so he has asked the nation to think about what will make the brightest possible future for Mike Moradian and then to get back to Mike Moradian with a recommendation. Don't you already want to help?
Moradian is the guy behind the websites CampusBuddy and the newly launched CollegeBudget, an e-commerce solution targeting the university market and leveraging Moradian's pre-aggregated collegiate audience to bootstrap collective social buying, student loans, daily d.... bzjksaakkkkkkkkkk
Sorry, we fell asleep there for a minute onto our keyboard. Anyway, should Moradian do this boring online college startup thing in order become an obscenely wealthy member of the American plutocracy, or should he go to the Harvard School of Business (where he was accepted in December, GO MIKE YAY) in order to become an obscenely wealthy member of the American plutocracy? Surely you have an opinion on this, which is why Mike is thrusting a survey upon every unfortunate college student who visits to one or more of his websites to rent books or leverage their university academic metadata or whatever.
Why crowdsource his future, aside from the ego gratification of involving the entire world in this decision? For the good of the country, Moradian writes:
It affects you too! The cost of college has spiraled out of control... I want to make a difference now and help students save real money... If I'm going to skip out on Harvard to do this, I need to know that America is behind me.
So far, America does indeed appear to be behind Moradian. Even though this seems like a naked publicity stunt for CollegeBudget, Moradian got a nice writeup in TechCrunch, which wonders what this reveals about college education and personal decisionmaking in the context of inexpensive social graph survey techniques, etc.; and he's attracted a nice collection of supportive comments, including a guy from HBS who says, "we will miss you if you don't [attend]." No wonder Moradian was named the best young entrepreneur of 2010: He knows how to dress up obsessive self interest as a national cause, just like the pros.
[Photos via CollegeBuddy.com, MikeMoradian.com, Facebook]


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Murray backs off military pension cut
Sen. Patty Murray is distancing herself from a cut in military pensions in the budget deal she brokered with Rep. Paul Ryan.
Her unease about a key element of her own deal, which passed the Senate on Wednesday and is now headed to President Barack Obama, comes amid a backlash from veterans groups and Senate defense hawks that has put her and her colleagues in a tough spot going into an election year.
Story Continued Below
Murray's response: The pension cut isn't final.
"We wrote this bill in a way that will allow two years before this change is implemented so that Democrats and Republicans can keep working to either improve this provision or find smarter savings elsewhere," she said on the Senate floor this week.
( PHOTOS: Senators vote on budget deal)
"In other words," she added, "we can and we will look at other, hopefully better ways to change this policy going forward."
Her stance provides a major opening for opponents of the cut to work to get it tossed out or replaced with alternate savings — an effort that could weaken the budget deal and force vulnerable senators to continue defending their support for an agreement that would provide sequester relief for federal agencies at the expense of veterans.
"We're probably going to lose this fight, but we will win the war," Sen. Lindsey Graham, who voted against the budget deal, declared to a group of veterans on Tuesday — vowing to take this fight into the next year.
( PHOTOS: Paul Ryan through the years)
The South Carolina Republican won't face much resistance from Murray, who left her perch this year as chairwoman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee to lead the powerful Senate Budget Committee. The Washington state Democrat made clear on the Senate floor this week there is time to replace the pension cut before it kicks in at the end of 2015, though she hasn't endorsed any specific plan for change.
She's also promising a "fix" next year that would exempt all disabled veterans. And at least one person close to the issue is pointing a finger at Murray's Republican counterpart, the chairman of the House Budget Committee.
"This was something that Ryan pushed for," said a source close to the negotiations, discussing the issue on the condition of not being identified.
( Also on POLITICO: Senate passes budget deal)
Ryan's backing of the provision would make sense, given that he's long called for major reforms to federal pensions. But an aide to the Wisconsin Republican sidestepped the question on Wednesday, noting the two budget committee leaders both agreed to the terms of the deal.
Under the two-year agreement, working-age military retirees would see their pensions increase at a slower pace, with their cost-of-living adjustments pegged to the rate of inflation minus 1 percentage point. Once they turned 62, they would go back to receiving adjustments pegged to the full rate of inflation.
The provision, expected to save about $6 billion over the next decade, has sparked outrage among Senate defense hawks — some of them facing tough reelection battles. It has also mobilized powerful advocacy groups for service members and veterans, including the Military Officers Association of America, which contacted every Senate office this week with a blunt message: Don't single out those who've sacrificed for their country.
Behind the scenes, though, some are celebrating the pension cut as an unexpected victory. The defense industry, in particular, stands to gain from the deal, which would provide $63 billion in sequester relief over the next two years, split between defense and nondefense programs.


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There's little doubt that the 20th century was full of technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries that changed history.
But the 21st century could go one step further, and investors need to be ready to see the opportunities in technologies that create a new market or disrupt an existing one.
In the last decade, we've seen iTunes turn the music industry on its head. The emergence of smartphones such as the BlackBerry and the iPhone, along with the social media revolution, has transformed the way we communicate.
What will be next? Research analysts at Citigroup have been investigating the innovations that could challenge the status quo.


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The Quest for Randomness
By Scott Aaronson
Determining whether numbers truly can have no pattern has implications for quantum mechanics, not to mention the stock market and data security.
Determining whether numbers truly can have no pattern has implications for quantum mechanics, not to mention the stock market and data security.
One of my favorite Dilbert cartoons features a lizardlike creature that's billed as a "random number generator," but that only ever seems to spit out the number nine. Dilbert asks his guide, "Are you sure that's random?" The guide replies, "That's the problem with randomness. You can never be sure."
It's funny (at least to me), but is it true? Can you ever be reasonably sure that something is random, in the same sense you can be reasonably sure something is not random (for example, because it consists of endless nines)? Even if a sequence looked random, how could you ever rule out the possibility that it had a hidden deterministic pattern? And what exactly do we mean by "random," anyway?
These questions might sound metaphysical, but we don't need to look far to find real-world consequences. In computer security, it's crucial that the keys used for encryption be generated randomly—or at least, randomly enough that a potential eavesdropper can't guess them. Day-to-day fluctuations in the stock market might look random—but to whatever extent they can be predicted, the practical implications are obvious. Casinos, lotteries, auditors, and polling firms all get challenged about whether their allegedly random choices are really random, and all might want ways to reassure skeptics that they are.
Then there's quantum mechanics, which famously has declared for a century that "God plays dice," that there's irreducible randomness even in the behavior of subatomic particles. To Albert Einstein, the only logical conclusion to draw was that quantum mechanics is incomplete, and physicists should keep looking for a better theory. Today, it's often said that quantum mechanics won the debate and Einstein lost. But on what grounds, exactly? Is it conceivable that Einstein will be vindicated after all?
The obvious way to check whether a sequence is random is just to throw some statistical tests at it. For example, suppose we were interested in the randomness of the following sequence: 314159265358979323846264338327950288419716...
As a first step, we could check whether the digits 0 through 9 appeared with approximately equal frequency, among, say, the first million digits. Passing such a test is clearly necessary for randomness, in the sense that, if the digits really were drawn completely randomly, and we looked at a million of them, then with overwhelming probability we would see roughly 10 percent zeros, 10 percent ones, and so forth. On the other hand, passing this test is not sufficient for randomness—because, for example, the decidedly nonrandom sequence 012345678901234567890123456789... also has the right digit frequencies.
So for an improved test, we could check whether the 100 consecutive two-digit pairs—that is, 00 through 99—occur with frequency close to 1 percent. A truly random sequence would pass this test almost surely. And it's also more effective than looking at single-digit frequencies alone. But again, once we know that the test involves looking at two-digit frequencies, it's easy to fool the test. For example, consider the following sequence, which was proposed in the 1930s by David Champernowne (then an undergraduate classmate of computing pioneer Alan Turing) and which simply consists of all the positive integers written out together: 123456789101112131415161718192021222324...
You might enjoy proving that not only does Champernowne's sequence have the same two-digit frequencies as a random sequence, it also has the same three-digit frequencies, the same four-digit frequencies, and so on. Yet clearly the sequence isn't random.
A moment's thought will reveal that the problem is completely general. For example, the first sequence above seems to pass virtually every statistical test for randomness ever devised—until, that is, you notice that it is the digits of pi. With that single realization, the sequence flips from completely unpredictable to completely predictable. The same would be true for, say, the digits of the square root of two, or any other random-looking sequence that we can nevertheless specify by a rule.
Indeed, let me now argue that no matter how clever you are in devising a statistical test for randomness, an adversary will always be able to find a deterministic sequence that passes your test. If nothing else, such an adversary could say the following:
Let S be the set of all sequences of, say, one million digits that are declared to be random by your test. Presumably S is nonempty, because something had better pass your test! So for my sequence, I'll simply pick the first sequence in S, when the sequences are viewed as numbers and arranged in ascending order. By hypothesis, that sequence passes your test, yet I just specified it deterministically!
The situation is not quite as hopeless as it sounds. In the 1960s, a beautiful field called algorithmic information theory was developed. This field almost (but not quite) lets us cut through the arguments, and gives a test for individual sequences such that, if they pass the test, then they must have been generated randomly.
The starting point is a paradox that goes back to the beginnings of probability. Consider a coin that landed heads every time you flipped it. Would you eventually conclude the coin was crooked? Of course you would—just as Dilbert suspected the random number–generating lizard that always output nine! On the other hand, you'd probably find nothing wrong if you saw the following sequence of 30 heads and tails: T H T H H H T H H H H T T H H T H H T H T H T H T H T T H T.
The paradox is that a fair coin is exactly as likely to produce this sequence as it is to produce 30 heads in a row. Both sequences have the same probability, namely, 2 -30 (base 2 numbers are used because there are two options here, heads or tails).
French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, considering this puzzle in the 1800s, realized that a run of 30 heads is special or meaningful in a way that another sequence is not. If we instead asked for the probability that we'd get a sequence that was just as random-looking and patternless as the one above, the probability would be almost 1.
The trouble is, how do we formalize the concept of a sequence of numbers being random-looking and patternless? This is where three mathematicians—Andrei Kolmogorov, Ray Solomonoff, and Gregory Chaitin—come in. In the 1960s, they independently proposed a measure of the inherent randomness of a sequence, which today we call Kolmogorov complexity (no, the name isn't historically fair, but "Kolmogorov-Solomonoff-Chaitin complexity" is an unwieldy mouthful). Informally, the Kolmogorov complexity of a sequence x, abbreviated K ( x ), is defined to be the number of bits in the shortest computer program whose output is x. To illustrate, a sequence such as 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 can be described by a computer program much shorter than itself, namely:
print 80 zeros
Thus the Kolmogorov complexity of the sequence is much smaller than the number of bits in the sequence, denoted | x |. By contrast, a random sequence of 1s and 0s, such as 10110011011010011101010000100110111110111001011011100011010011000110010011111011, will almost always have a Kolmogorov complexity close to the length of the sequence itself. This complexity arises because, if you try to write a program to output the sequence, you'll find that the program has to contain the whole sequence (or something equally long) as part of its code:
print "10110011011010011101010000100110111110111001011011100011010011000110010011111011"
The notion of Kolmogorov complexity lets us neatly resolve the paradox from before. When should you suspect a coin of being crooked? When a sequence x of flips of the coin satisfies K ( x ) « | x |. In other words, you should suspect a coin if and only if there exists a pattern to the coin flips that can be described by a computer program using substantially fewer bits than the sequence of coin flips itself. And crucially, at least in cases with many coin flips, it doesn't matter which programming language you use, because the choice of language will affect the program's length only by an additive constant that doesn't depend on x .
So the real problem is that the Kolmogorov complexity is impossible to compute. To clarify, you can certainly write a program that looks for the shortest one that outputs x . But how do you know when to stop? What if there's an even shorter program out there? It turns out that we can never be sure we've found the shortest one.
The proof of that fact is inspired by a famous riddle called the Berry paradox, after a librarian who apparently told it to mathematician Bertrand Russell. Consider asking for "the first number that can't be described using 12 words or fewer." But we just described the number, and we did so using only 12 words!
In our case, suppose, contrary to assumption, that there were an algorithm that computed the Kolmogorov complexity K ( x ) of any string x . Also, suppose the algorithm required n bits to write down.
If we took all possible strings of bits arranged in lexicographic order (0, 1, 00, 01, 10, 11, 000, 001, etc.), I claim we could write a program to find the first string y such that K ( y ) ≥ 2 n . The program will simply run the algorithm on each string in succession, and stop when it finds the first string y that satisfies the requirements. Furthermore, the program will require slightly more than n bits to write down: n bits for the algorithm, plus a few additional bits to control the "repeatedly calling the algorithm until we find y " part. However, this means we just described a program that computes y, and that (for large enough n ) is less than 2 n bits long! It follows that K ( y ) < 2 n , which contradicts the fact that K ( y ) ≥ 2 n. We conclude that the program to compute K ( x ) could never have existed in the first place.
Even though Kolmogorov complexity can't be computed, it still has huge conceptual applications to ensuring something is random. The starting point for those applications is yet another puzzle. How can you produce a string of numbers—even just one—that has high Kolmogorov complexity?
There's one easy way to do it: Pick a string randomly! If you choose a string of n bits completely at random, then there's an overwhelmingly good chance that it will have Kolmogorov complexity close to n, because of what's known in the trade as a "counting argument." There are 2 n strings of n bits (again, base 2, because there are two options for bits, 0 or 1), but it turns out that there are at most 2 k +1 – 1 possible computer programs of k bits or fewer (less, actually, because most strings don't correspond to any valid program). By definition, each program can produce at most one n -bit string as its output.
You should suspect a coin is crooked if there exists a pattern to the coin flips that can be described by a program using substantially fewer bits than the sequence of flips itself.
But if
is even a little bit smaller than
50), then 2
1 will be vastly smaller than 2
. So we conclude that there simply aren't enough short programs to go around: If you choose an
-bit string
at random, then you'll almost certainly have
) approximately equal
The crucial point is that picking randomly turns out to be the only way to generate strings with high Kolmogorov complexity.
To give a real-world example of this phenomenon, consider file compression programs such as gzip. These programs make files smaller by exploiting regularities in the data to be compressed, such as the same words appearing over and over. But you can't compress a random string, because the data are already free of computable regularities (or in other words, the string has maximal Kolmogorov complexity). As an interesting aside, in 2002, a company called ZeoSync made headlines with claims that it had a breakthrough algorithm that could compress arbitrary data. In interviews, however, the company's founder was never able to answer questions such as: What would happen if you fed a compressed file back into the compression program, and so on ad infinitum? Would the file get compressed to nothing? The company disappeared a few months later.
Do I sense that you're still underwhelmed by this? Does it all feel circular to you—like a complicated way of saying "if something is random, then it's random"? Sure, we've replaced a "metaphysical" question (i.e., whether events are determined or random) by a purely mathematical question (i.e., whether a description of the events has high Kolmogorov complexity). But it might not be obvious that we gain anything from that trade! Let me give a concrete example that helped convince me that the trade is beneficial.
Over the past five years, my student Alex Arkhipov and I have been studying a rudimentary type of quantum computer, called a BosonSampler. Such a device's entire computation consists of generating a stream of identical photons, sending the photons through fiber-optic cables and a network of devices that split the photon beam, and then measuring the photons to see where they ended up. This being quantum mechanics, where the photons land will in general be random—but if you know how the beamsplitter network was set up, then at least in principle you can calculate the probability of any given outcome (for example, "one photon at location A, three photons at location B, no photons at location C...").
The problem is that we don't know how to do anything useful with a BosonSampler—not even anything nefariously useful, such as breaking cryptographic codes. Indeed, the only thing BosonSamplers seem to be good for is the tautological task of simulating themselves!
So why bother to study them? The reason is that, even if BosonSamplers are useless, Arkhipov and I were able to give strong evidence that simulating them with a classical computer is hard! More precisely, we showed that under widely believed hypotheses in theoretical computer science, no efficient classical algorithm could sample from the same probability distribution that a BosonSampler does. So if we merely wanted to give direct experimental evidence that quantum computing is possible— that is, that the physical world can do something exponentially faster than our existing computers—then BosonSampling might offer a more direct path than building a full-fledged universal quantum computer. For that and other reasons, BosonSampling could be a stepping-stone toward more useful forms of quantum computing.
In the last year, the first BosonSampling experiments were actually done, by groups in Rome, Oxford, Vienna, and Brisbane. The current experiments involve only three photons, so can easily be simulated using a classical computer. To exceed the capabilities of classical computers, one would probably need to use 20 to 30 photons, but getting that many photons to arrive at the detectors simultaneously presents major experimental challenges.
What does any of this have to do with recognizing randomness? Well, BosonSampling is an unusual problem, one where the goal is not to calculate some specific answer, but to sample according to a certain probability distribution. So a question of principle arises: Given a purported BosonSampler, how could a skeptic ever know whether the machine worked?
Sure, we could always run the machine over and over, collect a massive amount of statistics, and then check whether the statistics matched the theoretical predictions. The problem is that we'd have to run the machine a number of times that grew exponentially with the number of photons. Even with just 8 or 10 photons, we would already be pushing the limits of the experimenters' patience. So we might wonder: Is there any way to check whether a BosonSampler works using only a small number of measurements (say, 100)?
For this purpose, it would be useful to have a search problem, in which the computer's goal is to output any string of bits with specified properties. The answers to search problems are easier to check than sampling problems. Indeed, a BosonSampler already solves the search problem of finding photon configurations that appear in the distribution with nonzero probability. However, these two problems still aren't equivalent to each other, because a search problem only requires finding any possible solution, whereas a sampling problem needs a likely configuration as its output. But how do we formalize the concept of a photon configuration being likely or typical?
It probably won't surprise you that this is where Kolmogorov complexity comes to the rescue. Building on work from the 1970s, in 2011 I showed that, given any sampling problem, one can define a search problem that's computationally equivalent to it. This means that if one problem is efficiently solvable by classical computers then both of them are, if one is efficiently solvable by quantum computers then both are, and so on, for every other reasonable model of computation. The trick is the following: Given a probability distribution, we consider a search problem that amounts to "Find a string that occurs with large probability in the distribution and also has large Kolmogorov complexity."
Using tools developed in the 1970s, one can show that, if a computer program manages to find a string that satisfies both of the above properties, then the program can only have done so by sampling from the distribution. In this way, Kolmogorov complexity lets us switch the goal from sampling a distribution to outputting a fixed string with specified properties.
Let's return to the question raised by the Dilbert cartoon: Is it ever possible to be sure something is random? If we make no auxiliary assumptions whatsoever, the strict answer is no. At some metaphysical level, any sequence claimed to be random—no matter how patternless it looked—could have been determined (by God, the initial conditions of the universe, or whatever) to be precisely what it is. However, we can come closer to that ideal than one might have thought possible—in effect, saying "If these numbers aren't random, then some fundamental assumption has to collapse."
In this article, the assumption was that any regularities in nature are computable, so that they correspond to low Kolmogorov complexity. In my next column, I'll discuss quantum mechanics and a famous theorem called the Bell inequality, and how they let us generate random numbers under the sole assumption that it's impossible to send signals faster than light. Notably, the latter approach won't suffer from the problem of uncomputability—so unlike Kolmogorov complexity, it will actually lead to practical methods for generating guaranteed random numbers.
Scott Aaronson will continue this discussion in the July–August issue's Technologue column.
Click "American Scientist" to access home page


text:
Kim Kardashian's Witnesses Konfirm That Kris Humphries Knew Just What He Was Getting Into
Try as he might, Kris Humphries is having a mighty hard time proving fraud in his attempt to annul his marriage to Kim Kardashian.
The reality starlet and most fragrant flower compiled a pretty diesel list of witnesses for their neverending divorce case, and it seems like K. Humph is going to have his work cut out for him proving he wasn't well aware of their prenup details.
TMZ reports that Kardashian's attorney, Laura Wasser, assembled an Avengers-style team of people involved with the prenuptial agreement to prove that Humphries went into their marriage with his eyes wide open.
Sources also revealed that Humphries and K. Dash constantly bickered over the minutiae of the agreement, so it's not like he can feign complete ignorance of its implications now.
Further, Humphries seemed just as intrigued by the business angle of their 72-day union as Kardashian was. (But let's be real, probably not as intrigued as Kris Jenner, who's on the witness list, was.)
Other witnesses include two managers and a court reporter who was present when the agreement was being hashed out and signed.
Humphries already lost a lawyer in the case, which has lasted far longer than the marriage itself, because it's pretty impossible to prove that he was defrauded into walking down the aisle. Especially when he was on hand to re-shoot his proposal so Kardashian would like her face better.
Looks like K.H. has got more than just size in common with Goliath, because K.K.'s slingshot and rocks are appearing to actually be nukes. Give it up, bruh.


text:
The roledn keyword specifies that access to a targeted entry is granted or denied if the user binds using a DN that belongs to a specific role. The roledn keyword requires one or more valid distinguished names, in this format:
roledn = "ldap:///dn [|| ldap:///dn]... [|| ldap:///dn]"
The bind rule is evaluated to be true if the bind DN belongs to the specified role.
Characters that are syntactically significant for a DN, such as commas, must be escaped with a single backslash (\).
The roledn keyword has the same syntax and is used in the same way as the groupdn keyword.


text:
Title: The Transall Saga
Author: Gary Paulsen
Pages: 248
Cover Rating: 3/5
Character Rating: 5/5
Plot Rating: 4/5
Overall Rating:4/5
I have to say that I am not normally a big sci-fi fan when it comes to reading books. But lately I have been really enjoying sci-fi. The other day I even bought two Star Trek books!!!! I am surprising my self daily. hehehe. Anyway, I really liked this book. I thought that it was done phenomenally. The characters were AMAZING!!! He did not really have to tell about them much for you to understand them. You found out more by their actions, which I greatly enjoyed. I thought that Gary Paulsn did a WONDERFUL job, once again. I HIGHLY recommend this book to his fans, and to fans of sci-fi.
Mark Harrison thinks he's just going mountain climbing, but as he hikes he is struck by a mysterious beam of light that transports him to what appears to be a different world. In this world is a jungle that he has to learn to survive in, dangerous animals he must defend himself from, and eventually when he meets people he must learn about their culture and adapt there.
(I did copy and paste that paragraph about the plot, but did not do the whole thing because I think it gave away to much of the story line, so sorry for the short plot description. Oh, and if you are interested in this book, PLEASE do not read any other descriptions of the book, It is best to be read when you don't know all the details, so NO READING THE STORIES DESCRIPTION!!! (this means you Bostan!!! I think you will really like this book.)


text:
Crossings Trigger Anti-Immigration Rallies
Activists Stage Protests Across Southern California and Throughout the Nation, Drawing New Support in Call for Crackdown
The influx of thousands of Central Americans into the U.S. has energized anti-illegal immigration activists who organized rallies across the country in recent days.
"How can we afford to take care of other countries' poor? Americans are going hungry without jobs and no one is attending to them," said Herbert Baker, a chiropractor standing atop a highway overpass in Los Angeles hoisting an American flag and a sign that read "Stop Illegal Immigration."...


text:
Sea Animals Outline Tangram Card
Outlines of sea animals (sea monster, dolphin, sea turtle, stingray) made from tangram pieces. Tangrams, invented by the Chinese, are used to develop geometric thinking and spatial sense. 7 figures consisting of triangles, squares, and parallelograms are used to construct the given shapes.
animal, animals, Chinese puzzle, dolphin, dolphins, geometric figures, geometrical pieces, geometry, monsters, parallelogram, parallelograms, polygon, polygons, problem solving, problem-solving, puzzles, quadrilateral, quadrilaterals, sea monster, Sea turtle, shape, shapes, square, squares, stingray, stingrays, tangram outline, tangrams, triangle, triangles, turtles
Florida Center for Instructional Technology Clipart ETC (Tampa, FL: University of South Florida, 2009)


text:
Exploring an Ensemble-Based Approach to Atmospheric Climate Modeling and Testing at Scale. Procedia Computer Science. 108:735-744.. 2017.
Fine-root growth in a forested bog is seasonally dynamic, but shallowly distributed in nutrient-poor peat. Plant and Soil.. 2017.
A global Fine-Root Ecology Database to address below-ground challenges in plant ecology. New Phytologist.. 2017.
Global land carbon sink response to temperature and precipitation varies with ENSO phase. Environmental Research Letters. 12(6):064007.. 2017.
Global pattern and controls of soil microbial metabolic quotient. Ecological Monographs. 873252298143604408820103353132748116253296051321198332824951112784858335223816862712844241176352377732612051722(33):429-441.. 2017.
Global patterns of drought recovery. Nature. 548120552650044912911053915264037164349213639132911663293417411117447125110348372561527126110118(7666):202-205.. 2017.
Global synthesis of the temperature sensitivity of leaf litter breakdown in streams and rivers. Global Change Biology. 23192852231429214283485128141711219056969167178654163075852535509669583588158018341650390434621225829192774827617963364927365487(8):3064-3075.. 2017.
Grand Challenges in Understanding the Interplay of Climate and Land Changes. Earth Interactions. 21(2):1-43.. 2017.
Gross primary production responses to warming, elevated CO 2 , and irrigation: quantifying the drivers of ecosystem physiology in a semiarid grassland. Global Change Biology.. 2017.
How is wood-based pellet production affecting forest conditions in the southeastern United States? Forest Ecology and Management. 396:143-149.. 2017.
An ice sheet model validation framework for the Greenland ice sheet. Geoscientific Model Development. 10(1):255-270.. 2017.
The impact of alternative trait-scaling hypotheses for the maximum photosynthetic carboxylation rate ( V cmax ) on global gross primary production. New Phytologist.. 2017.
Informing climate models with rapid chamber measurements of forest carbon uptake. Global Change Biology. 2316555116452426193914187201519477291555545542209432950973197131161832198445(5):2130-2139.. 2017.
The interaction between nitrogen and phosphorous is a strong predictor of intra-plant variation in nitrogen isotope composition in a desert species. Biogeosciences. 14(1):131-144.. 2017.
Interactions between land use change and carbon cycle feedbacks. Global Biogeochemical Cycles. 31(1110):96-113.. 2017.
Interactive posters: A valuable means of enhancing communication and learning about productive paths toward sustainable bioenergy. Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining. 11315113970450930(2518221):243-246.. 2017.
An intermediate-scale model for thermal hydrology in low-relief permafrost-affected landscapes. Computational Geosciences. 4852011271041081326138910153825301536403810527851045182257238198437291. 2017.
Introduction to a Virtual Issue on root traits. New Phytologist. 215292051220820220317720321535220520920517203213213210211208204200207215204208205210180203208205206210208206205211428(1):5-8.. 2017.
LIVVkit: An extensible, python-based, land ice verification and validation toolkit for ice sheet models. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems. 910111304982311324646126(216374525221552055):854-869.. 2017.
Long-term Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics at SPRUCE Revealed through Stable Isotopes in Peat Profiles. Biogeosciences Discussions. :1-23.. 2017.
A metadata reporting framework (FRAMES) for synthesis of ecohydrological observations. Ecological Informatics.. 2017.
Microbial Community and Functional Gene Changes in Arctic Tundra Soils in a Microcosm Warming Experiment. Frontiers in Microbiology.. 2017.
A new process sensitivity index to identify important system processes under process model and parametric uncertainty. Water Resources Research. 5361151341445151527852841457495049541447325235529201535161173650511051815050182252325652965504435448544941(49512459521246):3476-3490.. 2017.
Nitrogen processing by grazers in a headwater stream: riparian connections. Freshwater Biology. 62(1):17-29.. 2017.
Nonlinear CO 2 flux response to 7 years of experimentally induced permafrost thaw. Global Change Biology. (91):3646-3666.. 2017.


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NEMA's incandescent lamp shipments index showed a precipitous decline of 40.1% compared to the same period last year. Moreover, the index reached a value of 49.3, a new record low for the series. On an annual basis, incandescent lamp shipments during 2012 were down 18.3% — erasing a 16.4% gain for 2011. Compact fluorescent (CFL) lamp shipments dipped slightly during 2012 to an index value of 176, a change of 0.3% versus 2011. Meanwhile, halogen A-line lamps continued to make inroads as a viable alternative lamp source increasing by 88.3% over last year.
Halogen A-line lamps more than doubled their share of the combined incandescent-CFL-halogen A-line market during 2012, climbing to 3.8%. The market share of CFLs increased 2.8% over last year to 22.8%. Traditional A-line incandescent lamps declined to a share of 74%, matching their lowest level since 2010.


text:
Jaimie - Running Hat
Designed By: Blue Ox Fitness
- Design Details
- Size Chart
- Product Details
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|Adjustable Drawstring:
Our customers tell us this product:
runs small
fits perfect
runs large
Great performance running cap for marathons, 5Ks or just getting a little exercise on the trail.
- 100% polyester waffle weave fabric
- Unconstructed
- 7 panel
- Matching color mesh side vents
- Self-fabric sweatband
- Back elastic drawstring
- PLEASE NOTE: White ink is not available on this item. If our art or your upload contains the color white, it will not print and be reflected as the color of the item.
- Hand wash cold. Do not wring dry. Line dry.
- Do not bleach
- Do not iron
- Do not dry clean
- All measurements are provided by garment vendor; vendor tolerance for all measurements is +/-10%
- All provided measurements are in inches
Earn 10.77% when you sell this item.
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text:
Find Renville County, Minnesota utilities. Utilities provide information on public services including electricity (power and light companies), oil and gas (home heating and cooking), waste and sewage companies.
There are 4 Utility Companies in Renville County, Minnesota, serving a population of 14,798 people in an area of 983 square miles. There is 1 Utilities per 3,699 people, and 1 Utilities per 245 square miles.
In Minnesota, Renville County is ranked 10th of 87 counties in Utility Companies per capita, and 34th in Utility Companies per square mile.
Fairfax City Utilities Office 112 1st Street Southeast Fairfax, MN
Renville-Sibley Co-Op Power 103 Oak Street Danube, MN
Xcel Energy Minnesota 19 Franklin, MN
Xcel Energy 815 East Lincoln Avenue Olivia, MN
Renville County Utilities are business enterprises that provide essential public services including electricity, natural gas, water, and sewer services in Renville County, MN. Because of the infrastructure required to deliver services, a monopoly is often the most economical way for an utility service to operate. Renville County Public Utility Companies serve all of the customers for a particular service in Renville County.You may contact Utilities for questions about:
Utilities in Renville County, Minnesota may be publicly owned enterprises or private companies. In both cases, the primary source of revenue supporting the Utility is user fees paid by customers. In the case of publicly owned Utilities, the assets of the Utility are owned by the Renville County Government Utilities Department, but it operates as a self-sustaining public enterprise supported by its own revenues rather than relying on taxes to fund operations.Public Utilities Commissions in Renville County, Minnesota
In Minnesota, Utilities are regulated by the Renville County Public Services Commissions or Public Utilities Commission. Public Services Commissions are necessary when monopolies exist or in cases where competition is very limited, to ensure that Renville County consumers receive safe, reliable, and reasonably priced services from competent and financially viable companies. Renville County Utilities must receive approval for the rates they charge and they are also required to demonstrate to the Renville County Public Services Commission that they have plans to maintain an infrastructure capable of supporting current and future demand for services.Electric Utilities
Renville County Electric Utilities are the most likely to function as a hybrid of monopoly and competitive services. Only one system for transmitting and delivering electricity to customers is feasible in a given service area such as Renville County, MN. Therefore, transmission and distribution of electricity operates as a monopoly and customers do not have a choice when selecting their Renville County electric power company. However, the electricity in the Renville County electric grid may come from numerous suppliers.Water Utilities
Water Utility Services in Renville County provide potable tap water directly to residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional customers through a distribution system.Sewer Utilities
Renville County Sewer Service Companies receive wastewater from customers via sanitary sewers at a wastewater treatment plant. The Sewer Utility treats the wastewater to reduce pollutants before it is released into Renville County waterways.Natural Gas Utilities
Renville County Natural Gas Companies are essentially local distribution companies that deliver natural gas, received from large capacity interstate or intrastate pipelines, to individual customers through small diameter distribution pipelines.


text:
By Allen Wolf|2014-06-16T18:31:05-08:00June 16th, 2014|Comments Off on browsers1
About the Author: Allen Wolf
Allen Wolf is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and board game creator. His debut novel, Hooked, was named a winner in the Book of the Year Awards. He's also a fan of Disneyland, chocolate, and spending time with his wife and two kids.
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