visual 1,
2 Juxtaposing frames: stomach-cancer demographicsI thus drew steadily nearer to the truth ... that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
They roll
Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky
An Event
Richard Wilbur
Dusk: a familiar sight: hundreds of starlings perched high in
the trees. Startled, they lift off in a ragged, dark mass. Almost
immediately they become a flock, a single thing that moves through
time wheeling, swooping, fanning, contracting and returning on
itself in one co-ordinated fluid gesture to land again in the
trees. How do they do it? Are they like a chorus led by a conductor?
Is each starling programmed to fly behind a leader in battle formation?
Is the possibility of those arabesques an ancient piece of wisdom
written, perhaps, into a starling's DNA? Has evolution selected
starlings who naturally flock? Apparently none of the above. The
effect -- less complex in origin and more profound in implication
than any of these -- is the result of each starling following
the simple rule of keeping the same distance from its neighbors.
Do the starlings have any inkling of how majestic and beautiful
their flocking is? Is there a starling sublime? Are human collectives
-- social as much as biological -- more like a mass of starlings
than we have ever imagined? Is each one of us made up a flock
of lesser creatures that fly in formation inside our bodies? I
do not know. But the fact of their flocking, the emergence of
a sequential algorithm with a complex dynamical profile from the
simultaneous and identical and simple activity of individuals,
carries something of what I want to say here about two ways of
being, the individual self and the collective other, and about
two ways of occurring or proceeding, the simultaneous mode and
the sequential, and about the connection between the two; that
is, the circuits linking simultaneity/seqentiality and self/other
within contemporary technoscience.
Let me start with the two ways of occurring: the serial
mode which consists of doing one thing after another (the whole
flock forming itself and moving through time) and the parallel
mode (each starling flying in concert with the others) doing many
things at once. The first mode instanced in narratives, routines,
rituals, algorithms, melodies and timelines; the second in scenes,
episodes, harmonies, contexts, atmospheres and images. Parallelism
concerns co-presence, co-occurrence, simultaneity whilst serialism
concerns linear order, sequence, process. Counting, listing, lining
up and telling are essentially serial; collaborating, displaying,
getting together and assembling are parallel.
The opposition has many familiar instances: the ancient stand-off
between pictures and words, and its appearence in showing versus
telling or in mimesis as opposed to diagesis within classical
accounts of narration; the use of diagrams, charts or maps against
ideograms in mathematical writing; presentational versus discursive
modes in Susan Langer's articulatation of the basic vocabulary
of symbolic forms; the way components can be wired in parallel
as opposed to series in an electric circuit; the phenomenon of
harmony and the production of chords "simultaneous sounding
of notes ... known as vertical music" distinct from
"horizontal music" of melody and rhythm through
time (Oxford Dictionary of Music); the distinction between cardinal
numbers -- pure quantities -- and ordinal numbers -- pure orderedness
-- in arithmetic; the distinction in film editing between parallel
montage (two sequences intercut to produce simultaneity of action)
and Eisenstein's sequential montage whereby meaning is created
through the serial juxtaposition of frames.
visual 1,
2 Juxtaposing frames: stomach-cancer demographics
These binary divisions, however fundamental and self-contained
they appear, are not at all absolute; each is relative to a given
level or practice or context or medium. Thus, to cite an obvious
example, within a parallel mode, in a painting for example, one
can employ serial effects, ranging from pictorial story-telling
to the explicit use of words and as well as more intense forms
of parallelism such as a picture within the picture; likewise
within linear discourse one can use parallelist presentational
means such as depiction and elaboration of the scene as well as
further discursive ones, and so on.
visual 3 Thomas Eakins/Edward
Muybridge 1885 -- boy images all at once or one after the other
visual 4, 5 Mel Bochner:
"Language is Transparent" (1969/70) -- serial and parallel
versions
Note the inescapable reflexivity inherent in the opposition: any
discussion, such as the present account, of the two modes will
necessarily be organized serially as a narrative, an enumeration,
an itemized presentation and so on, and well as parallely as a
presentation, a depiction, and so on. Here I switch between a
serial dominated narrative text illustrated by visuals and a parallel
dominated exhibition of glossed and captioned visuals. The switching
is deliberate, intended to witness a certain reciprocity of status
as well as action between the two modes -- in the sense (which
will emerge as I go along) that changes and reconfigurations of
one mode are inseparable from changes in the other.
visual 6, 7 Chuck
Close: "Paul" 1994 -- second degree pointillism
My interest here is the explosive growth of parallelist and visualist
thinking within contemporary, technology-based culture; a growth
generally recognized to be predicated on and simultaneous with
a massive serial-based action of digitalization. It is the claim
here that this rampant visualism and the mounting parallelist
mode of thought accompanying it are the beginning symptoms and
collateral efects of a deep-lying, complex revolution -- far beyond
any question of 'mere' technological changes -- in what it means
to be human.
visual 8, 9 Chuck
Close: "Eric" 1990
No secret that human nature (the phrase already innocent, nostalgically
distant) is melting, running off in unpredictable directions.
Implicated in ways yet to be mapped and adequately articulated
is the computer, some of whose effects -- the simulatory practices
of artificial intelligence, artifical being, artificial seeing
and artificial life -- are redefining 'nature' as art, the artificial
as default, and the 'human' as an ongoing, up-for-grabs project
with no identifiable telos. We are creating 'selves' in the triangular
space between ancient bodies -- belovedly familiar eyes, legs,
nose, mouth, ears, tongue, hands, orifices, glands and organs
of desire and waste -- culturally inflected, socially-mediated
conscious persona associated with them -- and never-ending dreams
of release from the here-and-now situatedness of these bodies
through the distributed and fragmented technopleasures of cyberia.
visual 10 British
Airways ad: picture in picture -- cabin staff as nipple
Unquestionably, something large, unquantifiable and unknown is
emerging, beginning to make itself felt across human culture and
inside our heads. What is it? And -- grammar aside -- is it an
'it', an inevitable effect and replay of the all-powerful attractor,
the singularizing It of Western monotheism, and not a 'they'
that is/are emerging? Is the future really singular, determinate,
and already there, whatever we do? Or does it, like a quantum
plurality collapse into a singular present? Or is what we are
talking about many futures, a plurality of fates, co-occurent,
simultaneously present all the time?
And could one or more of these futures impinge on the present,
on our now-moment? Again grammar obstructs saying how the what-'is'-not-yet
can visit us, make something happen that wouldn't otherwise have
happened, produce an event in our here-and-now present.
Contact with a/the future isn't difficult to imagine -- it keeps
happening in the movies -- so why not for real? Perhaps
such a one/many future has already visited us and caused (as it
were) this paragraph to be written.
A scary, exciting maybe ridiculous prospect: our two billion year
multi-cellular, physical substrates being directly influenced
by the future, by the It/They. It sends a new fear and desire
through these very bodies. True, we can't -- fleshed out in our
present form -- walk through doors, appear transparent, or live
without ingesting all manner of vegetable and chemical stuff.
In the present epoch our ghosts need to eat, defecate, love, talk,
cause pleasure, feel pain, stare at images, dance, gesture, remember
the future, laugh, get bored, get high, write words, run around,
have orgasms, imagine, get drunk, get mad and die. And not in
that order. Or any order. But somehow or other -- and this is
my lesson here -- all at once.
Once, not so long ago, little more than a few generations in fact,
there was self versus other. An I/me consciously and securely
present to myself, defined and ranged against an external, collective
other; an autonomous first person: indivisible, privately interior,
morally responsible versus the they, an amorphous collectivity
of third persons outside my skin. Now in cyberia the I/me-unit
is disintegrating, the one who says "I" is no longer
singular, but multiple: disbursed, distributed and fragmented
personae. The I bleeds into the collective, and the collective,
society, culture, introjects, insinuates and internalizes itself
within the me. The result: blurred, disjointed and ultimately
unconvincing introspection, dizzying syncretism, various levels
of ontological fibrillation as we move back and forth across the
boundary of the real, and an as yet incalculable robotization
of the body-self.
Cyberia's offerings, the computer-driven, facilitated and autologically
furthered cause-effects central to Western technoscience, are
a breaking story. Evidently, the ongoing development of computer
architecture and software (with all the structures of desire and
intentionality folded into it) and the new socio-cognitive possibilities
of imagining, doing and thinking thereby created, are to be with
us for some time.
In particular, two large-scale changes have dominated the computational
scene in recent years. First, digitalization and the consequent
rise of object-oriented programming languages; second, the move
to parallel processing and the decentralized and distributed effects
inherent in it. These linked changes are, I claim, fundamental
components of the circuit joining contemporary technoscience to
the ongoing reconfigurations in human 'nature' that press upon
us. Though I shall touch later on digitalization, my chief interest
here is the move to parallelism and in particular the visualism
made possible by and facilitating it. By which I mean the shift
on the part of computer engineers, scientists and roboticists
from computation conceived and implemented as a serial process
of one move at a time in ordered, linear sequence to computation
as parallel process consisting of many moves, independent but
connected, occuring simultaneously. I am interested in the momentous
-- epochal -- transformation in human culture this shift in computing
signifies in terms of its role as cause, effect and co-occurrent
context.
A noteworthy fact about the introduction of computers in the period
1930-50 was how easily and naturally human computers were,
as James Bailey puts it, "annihilated by their electronic
counterparts." It's as if we had been waiting for these linear
devices all along. And so, according to Bailey, we have. Note
that his title First We Reshape Our Computers, Then Our Computers
Reshape Us insists on our circular relation to technology
in which we are both agent and object, and in this he honors a
parallel type of causation, the A -> B -> A feedback cycle
that operates in all self-organizing and self-creating systems.
visual 11 from
Imagologies: Parallel causation: "As art becomes
a business, business becomes an art. These two developments
are inseparably interrelated. The commodification of the work
of art reflects and extends the aestheticization of the commodity."
In contrast, his subtitle The Broader Intellectual Impact of
Parallelism reverts, by positing a one-directional, linear
model of influence through the use of "impact", to the
traditional idea of serial cause and effect.
We built machines, he tells us, that "inherited all the sequential
ways of expressing and formulating science that had developed
over twenty-five hundred years" [67], machines that perfectly
matched the exigencies of one-step-at-a-time human computers;
and, one can add, perfectly dovetailed with the one-thought-at-a-time
picture of our interiority delivered to us through introspection.
Not only did we unthinkingly model 'computer' on an individual
human calculator/thinker, but we also had long structured science
accordingly, choosing what to investigate and how to think about
it, by the same token of individual performance.
visual 12 human computers -- digital
technology Theatrum Arithmetico-Geometricum 1727
True, such structuring of technoscience had a confirming pragmatic
loop allowing navigation and warfare to give celestial mechanics
and ballistics central billing in the mathematical agenda of the
17th century; but also true that these mathematical concerns were
amenable to being treated by sequences of calculations, they were
linear problematics that begat calculus -- that linear mode of
thought par excellence -- to solve them.
The sequentially structured von Neumann machine that we call the
'computer' is an ideal simulacrum, then, of a certain conception
of an individual computing/thinking self. Even more is this so
with the idealized construct, the Turing machine, that grounds
the presentday scientific/theoretical study of computation; a
machine whose construction and entire mode of working is seen
to be linear, sequential, one-dimensional.
The alternative is parallel computation -- machine-architecture,
operating systems and programs which calculate many things at
once.
visual 13, 14 formation
of a thunderstorm after 15 and 45 minutes. Recall: first synoptic
weather map made in USA in 1842 within two years of introduction
of telegraph -- sequential info transmission device par excellence.
A choice which Bailey conceptualizes in terms of base-level hardware:
"Parallel computers are organized much more directly around
what electrical circuits are good at than they are around what
people are good at. "[68].
True, but hardly decisive and potentially misleading in not distinguishing
"people" as a plurality of separate individuals who
think and "people" as a collective which thinks qua
collective. If one sees these as different (so that one can usefully
relate them), then it makes sense to understand parallel computing
as the idealization of collaborative rather than individual intelligence:
the collective doing of lots of (simpler) calculations at once,
instead of an individual doing of one (more complicated) computation
at a time.
Mapping the relation between these forms of intelligence, between
individual and social cognition, is a vast and as yet dimly perceived
project, one that is, according to anthropologist Ed Hutchins
Cognition in the Wild, systematically misperceived in virtually
all contemporary discussions of real and artificial intelligence.
.... If his assertion is correct (and I think it is, though I'll
not justify that here), then understanding parallel computing
as the inscription of the collective onto a site long assumed
(implicitly and uncritically so) as singular, makes the sequential/parallel
opposition a fundamental source of cultural difference: one whose
dynamics are as crucial to understanding technoscientific practice
as the division of labor is to theorizing the social. The site
in question -- the computer -- both as person and as machine,
is where a form of parallelism ultimately disruptive of the very
idea of an 'individual person' is emerging.
John Von Neumann (though apparently not Alan Turing) was aware
of the important potential of parallelism and tried unsuccessfully
in the 1950s to produce a workable form of parallel processing
(but the problem of synchronization sunk him). Of the two major
projects that used computing during WWII -- simulation of nuclear
chain reaction in the Los Alamos Atomic bomb project (an effort
which included von Neumann) and cracking the German military's
cypher code at Bletchley in Great Britain (whose star turn was
Turing) -- the first asked for a parallel approach (simultaneity
via cascading action is definitional of such reactions) and the
second a serial one (codes operate via opaque strings of symbols
communicated sequentially).
But however vital for computer science, and fundamental for cyberia,
the serial/parallel difference, either in relation to the switch
in computational mode or in terms of the massive programme of
digitalization to be discussed below, is ultimately no more than
a choice between one technology and another -- an engineering
distinction that appears to be of limited and provincial significance.
What could it have to do with human interiority and consciousness?
How could it be linked with the self, subjectivity, I/we and the
It/They that come(s) from the/a future?
To respond, and to show what might be at stake in such a question,
I want to back off from computing as the prime site of difference,
the arena of instantiation of serial/parallel and move to other
arenas. I want to give various examples of the duo of parallel
and serial in operation, the two poles running together opposing
and impinging on each other and operating as a combinatorial tool
everywhere from our pre-mammalian origins to presentday culture:
biologically wired, at many levels, as well as active across various
humanistic, artistic, mathematical, technoscientific, linguistic,
and epistemological practices.
In his "cognitive ethology of human culture" evolutionary
biologist Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, characterizes
the highest form of pre-lingustic mental achievement as that of
apes -- "unreflective, concrete, and situational" --
their lives "lived entirely in the present, as a series
of concrete episodes." [149]. Invoking a long accepted binary
within cognitive psychology, he contrasts the episodic
memory of such lives with the more archaic form of memory, the
procedural, that preserves sequences of actions, schemas
and algorithms for doing things.
visual 15 topological sequence
-- turning an innertube inside out
visual 16 topological map --
London Underground 1996. Perhaps the first of its kind: designed
1931, tried out 1933, immediately loved, understood, used by public
without explanation.
The two forms, found in birds as well as all mammals, employ entirely
different neural mechanisms and are incompatible: "Whereas
procedural memories generalize across situations and events, episodic
memory stores specific details of situations and life events"
[151]. With the advent of language a third, conceptual
form of memory emerged which adjoined, re-organized but in no
sense obliterated the episodic/procedural couple.
visual 17 Carlo
Ginzburg (member of the Paris-based group of artists known as
fractalistes) "Chaos Fractal" 1985-6 -- inverse
pointillism
Mathematics: an entire subject organized around and predicated
on the serial/parallel opposition. As Tobias Dantzig Number:
The Language of Science observes: "Correspondence and
succession, the two principles which permeate all mathematics
-- nay, all realms of exact thought -- are woven into the fabric
of our number system." [9]. Certainly, the parallel (correspondence)
versus serial (succesion) opposition -- via the opposition of
dependence/independence -- is fundamental to the construction
of all post-Renaissance mathematics. It is the founding abstraction
of co-ordinate geometry, as well as that of an algebraic variable
and the notion of a function; it institutes the separation of
independent and dependent events and hence the idea of a random
variable in the theory of probability. More primitively, the parallel
is the all-at-once magnitude of cardinal numbers, their determination
as unordered collections or combinations against the sequential,
counted-into-being ranking of ordinals or permutations.
visual 18 Mel
Bochner: "Theory of Sculpture" 1970 -- using the same
signs to denote ordinal positions and cardinal piles
On the relation between ordinal and cardinal "two, the anecdote
of the clocks: A man heard the clock strike two times one day,
just as he was falling asleep, and he counted like this: "One,
one." Then, when he realized how ridiculous that was, he
said, "The clock has gone crazy: it struck one o'olock twice!"
Quoted in George Ifrah From One to Zero [24] Or again:
the difference, crucial in the theory of sets between the ordered
pair (a,b) and the unordered pair {a,b} of two objects, and the
propriety (discussed by mathematical logicians) of defining the
former in terms of the latter.
visual 19 Mel Bochner: "Repetition: Portrait of Robert Smithson" 1966
As Dantzig avers -- "the two principles permeate ...
all exact thought", they are "woven into the
fabric of our number system" -- the serial/parallel duo is
a ubiquitous and constitutive combinatorial principle. Put differently,
the interplay of parallel and serial principles in the manufacture
and replication of concepts gives rise to an enormous idea machine,
a tool or technology that permits the signifying, patterning,
imagining -- constructing/discovering -- of an unsurveyable plenitude
of 'objects'. Objects whose viability and creative potential lie
precisely in the way they neutralize the very difference between
serial and parallel that allowed them to be brought into existence.
Let me elaborate this last point.
Consider three examples: the codes of Western classical music,
traditional arithmetic, and the mathematical theory of infinite
sets. In each case the 'objects' making up the code -- musical
compositions, integers, infinite numbers -- arise from an initial
formal constraint, a principle of equality or interchangeability
that operates as a built-in insistence that -- despite the evident
opposition between them upon which music, arithmetic, set theory
are founded -- any parallel object be equivalent to a serial one
and vice versa.
In classical music, with its enormously rich but intensely specialized
mass of composition based on key harmonies, this folding of serial
and parallel into each other is correspondingly complex and detailed.
At bottom, however, it consists of ways of re-writing and arranging
sequential progressions into simultaneous chords and spilling
harmonies over time to be the successive notes of arpeggios and
the like.
In traditional arithmetic the principle of ordinal/cardinal interchangeability
is so ingrained, and the proliferation of objects so effortless,
that it's difficult to detach the principle of parallel-serial
interchangeability from the familiar idea of 'whole number'. Thus,
not only is it too obvious to even remark that an ordinal is necessarily
a cardinal, but the reverse is unasked: why can every collection,
however named or described or defined -- and independently of
any method of achieving such a thing -- be 'counted' into a sequence?
What hidden necessity guarantees the possibility -- the eventuality
-- of totally ordering anything nameable?
In the theory of infinite sets ordinals are defined to be sets
and so are automatically possess a cardinal magnitude, whilst
the reverse is precisely the content of the notorious axiom of
choice, the axiomatic principle needed to guarantee that all sets
can be well-ordered. No exaggeration to point out the possibility
of this cardinal/ordinal interchange as the constitutive armature
of Cantor's infinite arithmetic: certainly without it the entire
theory of sets as developed during the twentieth century would
be impossible.
One can push these examples of interchange further and thereby
identify what might be called an horizon effect: in each
case the technology of production, the means of creating the plenitude
of objects, is subject to an insurmountable limit or problematic,
an unanswered/unanswerable question, whereby an horizon of the
machine is revealed; and with this the impossibility of running
the machine from within as before. For Western classical
musical composition the system of vertical-horizontal equivalences
collapsed early in the 20th century, when the key-based harmonies
which controlled the chord/arpeggio trade-off were repudiated
by a movement appropriately calling itself serialist. For
set theory the horizon of the machine was revealed through the
proof in 1963 of the independence of the continuum hypothesis,
which left unsolvable and essentially unresolvable the question
of the magnitude of the continuuum (as well as the independence
of the axiom of choice that allowed the question of this magnitude
to be posed). For the classical integers and their arithmetic
the horizon -- less obvious, more contentious and needing considerable
groundwork to reveal it -- arises from the challenge of what I've
called counting on non-Euclidean fingers, and the subsequent emergence
elaborated in Ad Infinitum ... the Ghost in Turing's Machine
of non-infinitistic arithmetic.
In natural language, the opposition of serial and parallel is
a basic -- by which I mean here constitutive -- binary. It appears,
according to the Glossary of Semiotics as syntagmatic ("relationships
... of linear, temporal sequence") as opposed to associative
or paradigmatic ("relationships [which] do not as such occur
in time [but] make up an array of possibilities"). Or again,
Roman Jakobson Fundamentals of Language "The concurrence
of simultaneous entities and the concatenation of successive entities
are the two ways speakers combine linguitic constituents."
[73]. "The fundamental role which these two operations play
in language was clearly recognized by Ferdinand de Saussure. Yet
of the two varieties of combination -- concurrence and concatenation
-- it was only the latter, the temporal sequence, which was recognized
by the Geneva linguist." [74], a fact which, according to
Jakobson, stems from Saussure's immersion in the traditional belief
"qui exclut la possibilité de prononcer deux elements
a la fois" [75]. Evidently, the serial/parallel duo is operative
at all levels of speech: phoneme as simultaneous bundle of distinctive
features, syllable as succession of phonemes, the inherent parallelism
of intonation/gesture, the combined linearity and simultaneous
unity of utterances, and so on.
A final example: twentieth century physics. There is the well
known parallelist phenomenon of superposition in the standard
(Copenhagen) interpretation of quantum physics, where all the
mutually contradictory states of a quantum system, ghost tendencies
that Heisenberg called potentia, are taken to be simultaneously
present but unrealized. This is opposed to an actual or 'real'
state of the system resulting from a measurement (collapse of
the wave function), where such actualities are understood as occurring
one after the other. What can legitimately collapse the parallel
into a serial, what in other words constitutes a measurement is
a major mystery -- the so-called 'measurement problem' -- for
such a view. Interestingly, the main rival theoretical model of
quantum events, the many-worlds interpretation, eschews superposed
parallel tendencies and so eliminates the measurement problem.
By positing one totally determined, unghostly state at a time
in each of a multitude of 'simultaneously occurring' worlds, it
replaces parallel unreal occurrences in one world with real occurrences
in parallel unreal worlds.
These examples, from evolutionary brain morphology, Western classical
music, the whole fabric of mathematics, spoken human language,
and modern physics, as well as the original instance of computing
we started from, demonstrate that the dynamics of the parallel/serial
duo is an intrinsic and significant creative principle across
many terrains.
The emerging parallelist paradigm
The claim then is this: Two co-occurrent, synergistic formations
-- the move to parallel computational practices and the explosive
growth in visualization -- constitute an emerging paradigm within
contemporary technoscience.
Parallel computational practices separate tasks, data, instructions
and memory and distribute them -- in various different ways --
between separate but interconnected elements, which perform their
operations simultaneously. The idea is natural, obvious and immediate;
which is to be expected if parallel computing is the inscription
within the computational act of certain familiar (natural, obvious,
immediate) forms of social cognition. Observe this inscription
is fundamentally a question of software -- the computation is
cognized, designed and specified in parallel terms -- regardless
of how it is implemented. Of course, implementing it on parallel
hardware is a natural choice but not essential and parallel proceedures
can be made to run -- with varying degrees of difficulty to be
sure -- on serial machines.
The separate computing elements can be anything from an autonomous
computer (giving rise to networks and particular configurations
eg the Connection machine), through specialized computational
engines, down to the most reduced simple finite state mechanisms
subject to entirely local rules. This last, usually called Cellular
Automata (CA), has proved to be an extraordinarily fecund computational
and explicatory technoscientific tool. The flocking behaviour
of starlings is an an example of a situation modelled by a CA
-- where each starling is identified with an individual cell and
the requirement to keep a fixed distance from its neighbors is
its local rule.
A quite different example from fluid dynamics: The Navier-Stokes
equation in that subject, a major triumph of 19th century partial
differential calculus, summarises the behaviour of an incompressible
fluid. It turns out to be simulatable by a not very complicated
CA which uses a hexagonal grid: each cell of which models a single
drop of fluid subject to the flow in and out of it along the six
directions governed by identical local rules. (See Brosl Hasslacher
Parallel Billiards and Monster Systems.
visual 20 Rene
Magritte: "Golconda" 1953 -- parallel fluid cells in
the large
Parallel computational methods, which include all kinds of distributed
and decentralized processes (see Mitchell Resnik Turtles, Termites,
and Traffic Jams) are increasing at almost an exponential
rate in cognitive science, evolutionary theory, complexity studies
and throughout technoscience from the level of abstract theorizing
through heterogeneous modelling and simulation projects to base-level
engineeering practices.
These include the generation of artificial life forms, habitats
and evolutionary possibilities; the invention and simulated creation
of compounds, alloys and molecules with specified properties and
functionality; pattern recognition and learning behaviour within
expert systems; simulation techniques using connectionist and
neural networks; and genetic algorithms that evolve, refining
their ability to solve a problem through the feedback of the results
of repeated trials.
On the understanding that parallel computing inscribes social
cognition, one would predict this explosion of use to be open
ended: what is created is work, designs, proceedures and routines
not previously doable or often even thinkable from the persepective
of individualized cognition. On the other hand, it follows that
the effects, consequences and cultural disruptions inherent in
parallel thinking are not easily predictable, since collective
cognition is heterogeneous, unschematized, and emergently different
from individual thought in ways that remain to be articulated.
visual 21
Imagologies: mal gré lui?
"While marking the closure of the western metaphysical tradition,
deconstruction also signals the opening of the post-print culture.
Deconstruction remains bound to and by the world of print that
it nonetheless calls into question. What comes after deconstruction?
Imagology."
visual 22: Mark
Taylor + Esa Saarinen front cover Imagologies
No page numbers -- more or less.
Modish end-of-the-book-ism? Yes and no. But more than iconoclastic
academy- and canon-bashing in the name of the new, the upsurge
in the multiple use, production, processing and cognitive impact
of images -- pictures, graphics, diagrams, plans, models, illustrations,
ideographs, charts, simulations, figures, maps -- in place of
linear text and sequential calculational/descriptive procedures,
is so vast as to represent a deep, widespread and irreversible
transformation of the contemporary informational and communicational
scene.
How has this come about?
Of course, images (however they might be scanned by sequential
eye movements) are single gestalts and hence quintessentially
parallel objects (in contrast to text-type seriality), so that
their proliferation within an emergent parallelism is not unexpected.
According to Bailey "It is no accident that the fields of
scientific visualization and parallel processing have emerged
in the same decade. They are, in a sense, two sides of the same
coin." His idea being that the analogy between an individual
number and an individual pixel and the need to process large amounts
of information, makes it inevitable that parallel processing is
the "most natural and logical way to generate and manipulate
those fields of data" on the computer screen [82].
In any event, visualizing data via parallelism gets its power
from the data-izing of visuals made possible by digitalization.
As we know, it is now possible to digitalize any item of information,
recorded or represented sense whether words, pictures, graphics,
sounds, or executable content. This means that virtually everything
and anything -- a word, a gesture, the shape of a rose, an individual
human's genes, the state of the market, all of Western music,
... , a visual of the surface of Venus, any conceivable computer
program, can be recorded, transmitted and processed as some huge
sequence -- 1101001010000 ......101010100000100111001 -- of zeros
and ones.
Digitalization is counting. It thus appears as an extreme form
of the serial. Certainly, the immediate effect of digitalization
is to serialize what was parallel: a picture, for example, is
converted from a simultaneously presented gestalt to a sequence
(or sequentially presented list of sequences) of 0/1 bits that
can be sent down a telephone line. As a consequence, the resulting
digital entity can be an 'object' able to manipulated and exchanged
with other such objects within object-oriented programming languages
designed for this purpose.
But serialization is a vehicle, the means in the case of visualization
to a parallel end. The sequence of bits represents an image for
transmission and manipulation, but it doesn't replace it. The
opposite in fact: the saturation of contemporary culture with
images and their multiple and accelerating employment within all
forms of communication and information exchange constitutes a
visualist revolution, an insistence on thinking with and through
pictures that challenges the text-bound, serial-based print protocols
of Western culture. Thus, though reliant on digitalization, the
contemporary explosion of images is a massive and as yet unstoppable
process of going parallel.
The fundamental importance of the emergent visualist paradigm
in relation to technoscience is being widely recognized:
For example, Nicholas Negroponte being digital observes
the educational shift away from "compulsive serialist children"
and takes it as read that "our future adult population [will
be] simultaneously more mathematically able and more visually
literate." [220]
For example, Tim Lenoir Visions of Theory which talks of
emergence of new scientific methodology, a visualization- and
simulation-driven conception of theorizing in organic chemistry
and biomedicine as a form of "computer-generated science",
in which "visualization is theory".
visual 23 space
junk theory -- visualization of garbage items 10cm or over: shrapnel,
frozen faeces, screwdrivers, ...
For example, Michel Serres Origine de la geometrie which
discusses the various ways in which the materiality of diagrams,
mechanical calculators, and the like change not just the execution
but the meaning and epistomological status of calculations which
use them.
For example, Brian Rotman Post Calculus on the role of
graphing calculators in the demise of calculus as we know it,
and Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality
which links the suppression of visually based signs in 'rigorously'
presented mathematics to a metaphysics of alphabeticism.
The unlimited additivity and combinability of the image, the juxtaposibility
of any image with any other, require and engender delivery systems
and devices, techno-innovations double seeing, for porting parallelism
into our heads:
* windowed environments and user interfaces that
replace serial keystrokes by graphics and allow many 'windows'
to be open and active simultaneously.
* PIP (Picture In Picture) facility for a tv which opens
a window in the screen permitting two separate images to be displayed
and controlled simultaneously.
* videowalls -- arrays of separately programmable screens
on which several different but linked narratives can be displayed
and interpreted simultaneously.
visual 24 videowall:
Bob Marley in concert
* object-oriented languages which counterpose the linear
flow of procedural programming languages by foregrounding the
manipulation of (co-occrrently and paradigmatically) available
objects.
* hypertext pages which depend on object-oriented languages
to deploy sound, image, text and executable content in any order
or combination and which are linked to other such pages in webs.
All these artefacts are re-wiring the very brain/minds that imagined
them and facilitating the emergence of a larger -- collectivized,
distributed, pluralized, socialled -- "intelligence"
by allowing us, as individual agents, to become more 'othered',
more parallelist, more multi -- able to see, think, enjoy, feel
and do more than one thing at a time.
paraselves and multi-IDs
visual 25 Rene
Magritte: "Not To Be Reproduced" 1937 -- as if it were
possible, even in principle, to avoid duping oneself
Am I beside myself or are their two or more of me/us? Can I --
can 'one' (but one can't say 'one') -- have more than one identity?
"Now we are one, or two, or three" A recent headline
from the New Scientist acknowledges our widespread pluralization,
and the multi-disciplinary, multi-cultural, multi-tasking, multi-plex
environment we inhabit. It could easily be the title of a piece
on cognitive science's idea that the mind is not and never was
a single agent, but an asemblage of different and competing agents;
or a report on neuroscience's understanding of the mind/brain
as a many-sided modular organ whose morphology indicates two or
three or more independent functioning units; or a human interest
piece about the recent increase in the number of people doing
two things at once like using mobile phones and wrecking their
cars.
In fact, it's about Multiple Personality or Dissociative Identity
Disorder. MPD/DID is a hot topic with many books, hundreds of
articles, debates, etc., made ultra hot by the (widely accepted)
view of it as a condition created by childhood abuse, which automatically
links it to FAQs on topics from schizophrenia to alt.abuse.transcendence.
I'll mention two books devoted to it.
First Person Plural by Stephen Braude, acquiesces in this
origin of MPD in childhood abuse and focuses on a defence of the
priority and unassailable unity "of an underlying synthesizing
subject". Braude is an analytic philosopher. His epistemological
agenda rests on a conventional enlightenment philosophical outlook;
so no surprise to his polemic against the possibility that being
plural or multi is anything other than deviancy; an abnormal departure
from a prior natural (Kantian) subject.
The abuse etiology is directly challenged, however, by Ian Hacking
Re-writing the Soul which situates the multiple personality
effect within a history of memory, locating it in the "conceptual
space for the idea of multiplicity" [179] constructed by
French medicine in the 19th century, used by patients to describe
their symptoms and then looped back through the doctor/patient
circuit into confirmatory evidence of a disease. A sharply argued
and historically focussed analysis that somehow missed the contemporary
point: even if MPD sufferers are creating and fitting their symptoms
to pre-given diagnosis -- essentially Hacking's point -- we're
still left with the questions: why these symptoms and why
right now?
MPD/DID -- parallel persona against serial persona of the born-again?
One body with many -- up to 96 so far reported in the literature
-- persona/identities or "alters". These come differently
related: most claiming to be solo, but some strangely aware of
their co-inhabitants, some genuine fully worked out personae,
but most persona-fragments and generic functions, eg The Angry
One, the Innocent Child, etc. Maybe schizophrenia opens here
into a generalized obverse of itself: instead of the original
unity -- we were all one once -- become split and fragmented,
we have an originary collectivity mainfesting as a barely -- and
not necessarily -- unitizable ensemble: Stevenson's multifarious,
incongruous denizens or, in a less peopled way, in William James'
idea that "the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous
possibilities." A theme reprised a century later in the accounts
of mind given by the pholosopher Daniel Dennett as well as the
computer scientist Marvin Minsky.
If, as Louis Sass Modernism and Madness has it, schizophrenics
were the sensitives, the "town criers of modern consciousness
... existing not just as a product of but also a reaction
against the prevailing social order" [372], too easily
able to internalize their rent and disordered times, then perhaps
the MPD/DID multiples are their successors: emblems of the multiplex
instabilities of 21st century psychic reality whose ur-myth is
nearer to Osiris than Oedipus. This is not to deny that multiples
aren't strange, aberrant, frequently traumatized and needing help,
but rather to leave open a richer, more functional account of
their etiology, and suggest that their aberrance might serve,
at least for now, as "the best paradigm we have for postmodern
consciousness" [Steven Shaviro Doom Patrol, ch14]
and, beyond that, might presage an inescapable aspect of future
normalcy.
If multiples deny the indivisible subject and the one self one
body equation from within, then MUDs or Multiple User Domains
effect the inequality externally. Though both uncouple the self/body
unit (powerfully contested site of contemporary reality that Allucquere
Stone focus on in The War of Technology and Desire), the
virtual (or cyber or net or web) communities that emerge from
MUDs have no history of deviancy attached to them (which is not
to say they can't be quickly pathologized via the vocabulary of
cults, covens, and the like), and as a result pose a more complex
and less easily dismissed effect of pluralization.
Wherever a collective presence is constructed, from primitive
bulletin boards and conference calls to sophisticated chat rooms
on the net, virtual presences, call them verts, arise from
a separation between the physical substrate and the persona: the
body parked at the terminal or jacked into a VR rig and the self,
ranging solo around simland, or engaged in any manner of intimacies
anywhere on the net with sundry other disembodied, masked and
anonymized verts. In these contexts, the Rastafarian usage "I-and-I"
for "we" takes on a special ambiguity, since the first
person 'I' is neither plural nor singular but an archaic misnomer
for an emergent I/me/us construct.
Thus, just as parallel computation writes collective cognition
into a thinking machine understand for millenia as an individual,
so multiples and verts do the same for the consciousness machine
and its software we call the psyche: they effect a corresponding
inscription at the level of appearence and experience. it is this
phenomenological collectivization that answers to the I-and-I.
visual 26
Loiue Psihoyos: "Five hundred channels" 1995 -- compare
David Bowie as tv-watching alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth
said to have been (and still be) Philip K. Dick's favorite
movie.
But, as we know, the experiential and the collective fold into
each other: being socially thought, mobilized and used is co-creative
with the psyche -- a phenomenon that seems difficult to theorize
in any general way outside a techno-ecology of the mind/brain.
Thus Merlin Donald in his study cited earlier of the evolution
of intelligence argues that the key principle of biological and
social evolution of cognition is the symbiosis of cognitive
collectivities and external memory systems, a linkage that allows
new cultural formations and technologies to reconfigure the thought
diagrams inside (as we still say) our heads.
The same basic claim, but in a more technologically focussed and
theoretically elaborated manner, is made by Pierre Levy who not
only urges that "toute une société cosmopolite
pense en nous" (a thesis that surely recalls Vygotsky's analysis
of thought as internalized speech), but talks in specifically
computational terms of a "collective subject ... multiple,
heterogeneous, distributed, cooperative/competitive and constantly
engaged in self-organization or autopoeisis". Levy too insists
that we interpret intelligence in the context of an eco/technological
model; one which points in an explictly anthromorphic direction.
Thus, Levy sees humans as neurones, on their way to forming a
planetary hypercortex, the brain of Gaia's daughter whom/which
he calls Anthropia.
visual 27 social
thought -- Japanese baseball crowd with megaphone hats
In this ongoing upheaval, the old mono-individual, the one-thing-at-a-time,
linearly progressing unitized self, with a sequential memory and
timeline history, is disappearing.
visual 28, 29,
30 Chuck Close: "Self-Portrait"
1993
Along with it goes the conception of a single truth, a single
path to that truth, a single future, a single viewpoint, a single
deity. Monotheism, the One True God, the mono-id, the monadic
as pattern of the world, is dying. Emerging in its place is the
possibility of a new plurality of truths and futures: beings with
an awareness of our/their multi-directional itinerary.
We are starting I believe -- haltingly, with confusion, pain,
wonder, inevitable fuckups, and moments of intense pleasure and
surprise -- to become multi-beings, able to be beside ourselves,
able to be multiplex in ways we're only just beginning to recognize
and see the need to articulate.
At the same time as this parallel subject replaces the old individual,
a new collective seriality, a new unitary construct, is being
created -- is emerging as the current vocabulary has it -- at
the level of the planet. This construct, an incipient global presence
under no necessity to ever be conscious in any human sense, or
to be understandable within the categories of God or Godess (either
old testament sun god or new age earth godess) that we have hitherto
imposed on our conception of extra-human sentience; and under
no necessity to know (insofar as it can be said to 'know') us
as individuals, is perhaps already in the/a future -- though such
a formulation is necessarily incoherent: particularly so if such
an It/They is seen from some transcendental point outside the
human object -- the you/me/us subjectivity -- bearing witness
and giving birth to it.
No question any more that an event -- global, all penetrative,
encompassing, inescapable -- is arriving and being bidden by us
to happen. Within this event we are going parallel and becoming
plural in ways and for the reasons I've tried to indicate. We
are surely living through tumultuous, dizzying times; times spanning
a seismic jump in human existence and consciousness as momentous,
epoch-making and far reaching as the invention of writing or --
as some would have it -- the advent of spoken language itself.
Could such a thing, being thrown here yet again, but this time
outside the comforting linear bounds of language's poetry, be
possible?
* * * * *
REFERENCES (in order of
citation)
Robert Louis Stevenson, "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"
(Penguin 1979)
Richard Wilbur, "An Event", New and
Collected Poems (New York, 1989)
James Bailey, "First We Reshape Our Computers,
Then Our Computers Reshape Us: The Broader Intellectual Impact
of Parallelism", Daedalus, Winter 1992
Ed Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (MIT 1995)
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (Harvard
1991)
Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science
(New York 1954)
George Ifrah, From One to Zero (New York 1985)
Brian Rotman, Ad Infinitum ... the Ghost in Turing's
Machine (Stanford 1993)
Vincent Colapietro, Glossary of Semiotics
(New York 1993)
Roman Jakobson + Morris Halle, Fundamentals of
Language (The Hague 1971)
Brosl Hasslacher, "Parallel Billiards and Monster
Systems", Daedalus, Winter 1992
Mitchell Resnik, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic
Jams (London 1995)
Nicholas Negroponte, being digital (New York
1995)
Tim Lenoir, "Visions of Theory" (to appear)
Michel Serres, Origine de la géométrie
(Paris 1993)
Brian Rotman, Post Calculus (to appear)
Brian Rotman, "Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics,
Writing, and Virtual Reality", South Atlantic Quarterly
94 (2) 1995: 389-415
Stephen Braude, First Person Plural (NY 1991)
Ian Hacking, Re-writing the Soul (Princeton
1995)
Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness (New York
1992)
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrol (http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom)
Alluquere Stone, The War of Technology and Desire
(MIT 1995)
Pierre Levy, La virtualisation de l'intelligence
et la constitution du sujet (www.univ.paris8.fr/~hyperion/pierre/virt7)
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