Going Parallel
BESIDE ONESELF

I 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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