Brian Rotman
brotman@lsu.edu
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
Parallel computers are the future of computing. Period.
John Koza, Stanford University
It is the great irony of life that a mindless act repeated in sequence can only lead to greater acts of absurdity, while a mindless act performed in parallel by a swarm of individuals can, under the proper conditions, lead to all that we find interesting.
Kevin Kelly Out of Control
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 moving through time wheeling, swooping, fanning, contracting and returning on itself, "Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky", as Richard Wilbur has it, 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 perhaps 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 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 ever imagined? Is each of us made up of a flock of lesser creatures inside our heads? Perhaps. But the fact of their flocking, the emergence of a routine or algorithm with a complex dynamical profile, from the simultaneous, identical and simple activity of individuals, carries something essential of what I want to say here about two ways of being, the individual self and the collective other, 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 technoscientifically inflected culture.
one after another/ many at once
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 exemplified 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 (showing) and words (telling); the use of diagrams,
charts or maps against ideograms and symbols in mathematical writing;
presentational versus discursive modes in Susan Langer's articulation
of the basic vocabulary of symbolic forms; the wiring of components
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 within their particular domains, are not 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 or one can
employ more intense forms of parallelism such as a picture within
the picture or the deployment of layers (of paint, content, brushstroke)
superimposed upon each other; likewise within a linear mode such
as a narrative or the one dimensional space of a melody one can
use parallelist presentational means such as depiction and elaboration
of the scene or the introduction of harmony or one can embed further
narrativization, 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
Nonetheless, once level of discourse or context has been specified,
the parallel/serial duo inevitably points to an unbridgeable opposition
dividing a field of content or signifying practice into irreconcilable
spaces.
Thus, to return to the examples listed above, consider the ancient
standoff between the verbal and the pictorial; a standoff that
in Western culture has deep iconophobic roots in the biblical
interdiction of graven images and resulting iconoclasticisms and
in Platonic distrust of images for being, as simulucra of simulacra,
doubly untrustworthy. For William Mitchell it tokens a deep and
ongoing battle fought on a wider terrain: "The dialectic
of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs
that a culture weaves around itself. What varies is the precise
nature of the weave, the relation of warp to woof. The history
of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance
between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself
certain proprietary rights on a 'nature' to which only it has
access." [529] On this understanding there can be no winner
in such a battle, and refusing the Hegelian idea of 'dialectic',
no healing of the rift between the two through some overarching
unification. Rather the struggle between word and image has to
be seen as carrying the "fundamental contradictions of our
culture into the heart of theoretical discourse itself."
Langer's discursive/presentational opposition embeds that between
words and pictures within a general theory of symbolic forms which
explicitly foregrounds the duo of serialism and parallelism considered
here. Thus the discursive form of communication, typified by language
and the use of numbers, shares the character of words in having
" a linear, discrete, successive order, ... strung together
like beads in a rosary; beyond the very limited meanings of inflections,
which can indeed be incorporated in the words themselves, we cannot
talk in simultaneous bunches of names". [76] Counterposed
to this is the presentational mode, typified by pictures, which
are precisely not discursive: "They do not present their
constituents successively, but simultaneously, so the relations
determining a visual structure are grasped in one act of vision".
[86] It is this capacity to handle more than one item at once,
to be able to cognize an idea, say, with internal parts, one which
has relations inside relations, which "cannot be 'projected'
into discursive form", that constitutes what is peculiar
to presentational communication.
Before going on, let me note the inherent and inescapable reflexivity
which surfaces in any discussion or elaboration, such as the present
account, of the two modes. What gets said or shown -- and the
issue is already there in that alternative -- will necessarily
be organized discursively or serially as a narrative, an enumeration,
an itemized ordering of the material and so on, and/or parallely
as a presentation, a depiction, an imaged showing, and so on.
Here I switch between the more or less discursive, serial dominated
narrative text illustrated by visuals and the more or less presentational,
parallel dominated exhibition of glossed and captioned visuals.
The switching is deliberate. It is designed to witness a two-fold
reciprocity of status and action between the two modes. Firstly,
and the point will emerge as I go along, that large scale or underlying
changes and reconfigurations of one mode are inseparable from
such changes in the other. Secondly, that in any particular artefact
wherein these modes are being seen to operate, for instance the
present account of them, they do so intertwined with each 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 co-occurrent with and facilitated by
a massive and ongoing application of serial-based digitization.
It is the claim here that this rampant visualism and the mounting
parallelist mode of thought of which it is a part 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.
The result: posthumanity. Implicated in ways still awaiting recognition
as agents of consciousness alteration and yet to be mapped and
adequately articulated is the computer, some of whose more visible
effects -- simulatory practices of artificial intelligence, ongoing
extensions of virtual/artifical being, and multiple creations
of artificial life -- are redefining 'nature' as art, the artificial
as an ever moving default, and the 'human' as an ongoing, up-for-grabs
project with no fixed boundaries and no identifiable telos. We
are creating 'selves' in the resulting space, inside the triangular
enclosure bounded by our two billion year old bodies, the culturally
inflected, conscious persona associated with them, and the never-ending
dream of release from the here-and-now situatedness of these ancient
bodies -- with their lovingly familiar and growingly ridiculous
organs of sense, desire and waste -- through the distributed and
fragmented and illusorily weightless technopleasures of cyberia.
visual 10 British
Airways ad: picture in picture -- cabin staff as
nipple
Without question, something large, unquantifiable and unknown
is emerging, beginning to make itself felt across human culture
on the outside of our skins 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 of many superimposed
states collapse into a singular present? Or is what we are talking
about many futures, a plurality of fates, co-occurent, superposed
and 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 literally preposterous prospect: our two billion
year multi-cellular, physical substrates being directly influenced
by an It/They from the future. 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, remember
the future 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, gaze at images, dance,
gesture, forget what has always been called the past, laugh, get
bored, get high, get angry, run around on two legs, have orgasms,
imagine, get drunk, pick flowers, cry at universal sadness, watch
clouds come and go, watch ourselves go mad and die. And not in
that order. Or any order. But somehow or other -- and this is
my lesson here -- increasingly all at once.
Once, not so long ago, little more than generation in fact, there
was a clear and distinct binary, an absolute opposition of self
versus non-self. An I/me consciously and securely present to myself,
fully defined and ranged against an external, collective other;
an autonomous first person, indivisible, privately interior, invariant
nucleus of being versus a they, an amorphous shifting collectivity
of third persons outside my skin. The variable for such a subject,
for a self which could range indifferently and arbitrarily over
the social other, was the abstract pronoun 'one'. Since the Renaissance,
a whole social fabric, associated legal code and apparatus of
moral responsibility, a system of private ownership and individual
rights and duties has been constructed to rest on such a 'one'.
Now in cyberia the I/me-unit is disintegrating, the one who says
"I" is no longer singular, but multiple: a shifting
plurality of disbursed, distributed and fragmented personae. The
I bleeds outwards into the collective, and the collective introjects,
insinuates and internalizes itself within the me. What was privately
interior gives way to the public, the historical, the social.
What was the world enters the individual soul as personal destiny.
The result: disjointed and ultimately unconvincing introspection,
dizzying syncretism, the fibrillation of desire as we move back
and forth across the boundary of an ongoingly constructed real,
and the wild promise of a future dance in the memories of the
cyborged and robotized descendents of our body-selves.
Cyberia's offerings, the computer-driven, facilitated and autologically
furthered cause-effects central to Western technoscience, are
of course a breaking story. Evidently, the ongoing development
of computer architecture and software, with all the structures
of desire and intentionality folded into their functionality,
and the new socio-cognitive possibilities of imagining, doing
and thinking thereby created, are to be with us for some time.
In particular, two such large-scale developments within computer
science in recent years have come to dominate the computational
scene. Interestingly, of these two cause-effects one is serialist
and the other parallelist. First, the digitizing of analogue forms
and the consequent rise of object-oriented programming languages;
second, the move to parallel processing and the decentralized
and distributed functionality inherent in it. These changes are
linked in various ways and are, I claim, fundamental components
of the circuit joining contemporary technoscience to the ongoing
reconfigurations in human 'nature' that surround us. Though I
shall touch later on the process of digitization, my chief interest
here is the move to parallelism and in particular the visualism
associated with 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
within human culture this shift in computing signifies as cause,
effect and co-occurrent phenomenon.
A noteworthy fact about the introduction of computers in the period
1930-50 was how easily and naturally human computers -- which
is what people who calculated were called -- 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.
Interestingly, the very title Bailey gives his account reflects
the duo that interests us here. Thus, the main title, First We
Reshape Our Computers, Then Our Computers Reshape Us, insists
on our circular relation to technology in which we are both subject
and object, cause and effect. In this it honors a parallel (or
'horozontal' or 'recursive' or 'circular') type of causation,
in that the labels 'cause' and 'effect' are interchangeable and
designate actions that are co-occuring. The phenomenon, whose
basic and common form is a feedback cycle, occurs when event A
produces an effect B which in turn causes a change in A, and so
on; it can be seen to operate in all self-correcting (self-organizing,
self-creating, autopoeitic) 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, Baileys's subtitle, The Broader Intellectual Impact
of Parallelism, reverts, by positing a one-directional, linear
model of influence or "impact", to the traditional idea
of serial causality in which what is designated as cause is always
separate from and strictly precedes its 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
and supported by neurologically-based models of consciousness.
Not only did we automatically and unconsciously 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; a cognitive technology
that notwithstanding its focus on instantaneous change and apparatus
of diagrammatics to go with it -- is a linearizing mode of thought
par excellence.
The sequentially structured von Neumann machine that we call the
'computer' is an ideal simulacrum, then, of a certain conception
-- itself highly abstracted and idealized -- 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 to choose parallel computation, or more exactly,
parallel and distributed machine-architecture along with operating
systems and programs which allow one to 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].
A statement that is hardly decisive and needs much qualification
to be correct. Certainly, it is very easy to hook up components
in an electrical circuit -- in parallel or in series -- and more
difficult to organize people in this way. But this does not mean
that people are not good at thinking in parallel or in series
or that it is not natural for them to do so. What is misleading
here is not distinguishing "people" as a separate individuals
who think as individuals and "people" as a collective
which thinks qua collective.
The point is important and needs elaboration. The conception of
human intelligence and thought, embedded in contemporary developmental
psychology, artificial intelligence and cognitive science -- 'cognitivism'
-- is individualistic: it understands thinking, primarily and
more or less exclusively, as something taking place inside individual
mind/brains. In order to maintain this perspective it has to assign
to 'context' all else relating to the cognitive scene. According
to such a methodology the context needs to be controlled for as
background in theoretical and laboratory accounts but plays no
imporatnt and certainly no constitutive role in the thinking process.
Which means that the cognitivist approach necessarily assigns
a subsidiary role to everything outside the individual's skin
from the material means of thinking (writing and other tools)
to the sociocultural relations in which individuals habitually
operate. Over the last dozen or so years this understanding has
come under increasing attack. Researchers who have observed how
people think in practice have come up with a very different picture,
one that insists that what is marginalized into a vaguely defined
and all embracing 'context' is, on the contrary, a crucial element
in how humans think. Such cognitive ethnography argues that not
only is thinking always socially and culturally situated but that
it being so is how it happens.
Thus, according to one such researcher, anthropologist Ed Hutchins
in Cognition in the Wild, it is vitally necessary to distinguish
"between cognitive properties of the sociocultural system
and the cognitive properties of a person who is manipulating the
elements of that system". [362] In other words, the sociocultural
relations among people in a group engaged in thinking collectively
are an essential part of the cognitive abilities of those individuals.
For Hutchins, as well as for other cognitive ethnographers and
ethnomethodologists, mapping the relation between forms of intelligence,
between individual and social cognition, is a vast and as yet
dimly perceived project, since virtually all contemporary discussions
of real and artificial intelligence subscribe to the systematic
misperception underlying cognitivist accounts.
The relevance of all this to the present attempt to understand
the connection between parallelism and thinking should be clear.
Once it is recognized that all social collaboration is a form
of thought and all thought socio-culturally situated, it makes
coherent, usable and justifiable sense to understand parallel
computing as the machinic 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. The situation
is not, as Bailey has it, that parallel computers represent a
feature of electrical circuits rather than human thinking. In
a way, just the opposite is true: society, history, culture are
parallel processes. Like the activities of our cells, our organs,
our bodies and brains, they consists of a multitude of co-occurring,
simultaneous and interdependent activities. In particular, regardless
of natural properties of electrical circuits, humans engage in
parallel thinking all the time -- whenever they collaborate (literally
or virtually) -- and they are by this very process continually
restructured and remade as individual thinkers.
Thus, if cognitivism is misconceived and the approach of the ethologists
nearer to what actually happens when people think (and I believe
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) as singular, makes
the sequential/parallel opposition a fundamental crucible 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
digitization 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 instantiation
of serial/parallel, and move to other arenas. I want to give various
examples of the duo in operation. What will emerge from these
is how the two poles operate together, impinging on each other
as a combinatorial tool everywhere from our pre-mammalian origins
to presentday culture. Thus, not only is the serial/parallel opposition
a widespread organizing and creative principle across various
humanistic, artistic, mathematical, technoscientific, linguistic,
and epistemological practices, but it is also to be found within
biological systems as a hard wired functioning binary.
In his "cognitive ethology of human culture", by which
he means the construction of a temporal framework for the development
of human metality, evolutionary biologist Merlin Donald, in Origins
of the Modern Mind, puts memory and knowledge storage as the fundamental
agent of change and structure. Thus, when he 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], he invokes a long accepted binary within
cognitive psychology: contrasting 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.
In terms of human semiosis, episodes and procedures corespond
to the opposition between pictures and words, between the parallel
co-occurrence of the information in a scene and the sequential
delivery of speech. The two forms, found in birds as well as all
mammals, employ entirely different neural mechanisms, are morphologically
distinct and functionally incompatible: "Whereas procedural
memories generalize across situations and events, episodic memory
stores specific details of situations and life events" [151].
Of course, identifying the opposition here in no way claims for
it a total coverage of the field of memory, and indeed, with the
advent of language a third, conceptual form of memory emerged.
But whilst this adjoined, re-organized and in much of culture
dominates the more primitive substrate it found, it 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, in his discussion of the two conceptual
moves needed to handle whole numbers 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]. The first refers to the one-to-one
correspondence whereby the elements of one collection are matched
or tallied with those of another; the second refers to the process
of ordering the elements into a sequence as part of counting them.
Thus correspondence allows one to judge which of two collections
has more elements in the absence of any need (or ability) to count
them; succession determines how many elements are in each collection.
Thus number is a serial/parallel construction. But, as Dantzig
declares, the opposition is implicated throughout mathematics
and beyond. Certainly, serial (succession) as against parallel
(correspondence), in the form of dependence of one thing on a
given other versus independence of two co-occurrently given things,
is fundamental to the construction of all post-Renaissance mathematics.
As such it is, for example, 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 founds the idea of a random variable
in the theory of probability. More primitively, as indicated 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, there is 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: there is
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 Kuratowski's
formal definition of the former in terms of the latter.
visual 19 Mel Bochner:
"Repetition: Portrait of Robert Smithson" 1966
Not only do "the two principles permeate ... all exact thought",
and prove to be "woven into the fabric of our number system",
but they also -- well outside the field of mathematics or of so-called
exact thought -- form a ubiquitous and formidable constitutive
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 combinatorial 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.
By way of elaboration consider three examples: the code of Western
classical music, the language of traditional arithmetic, and the
code of 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. They
are manufactured via 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 amounts to a vast algebra of forms: compositions
which arise from the different ways musicians have formulated
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 press harder on the phenomenon behind these examples,
namely the possibility of otherwise of serial/parallel interchange,
and 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, an unanswered
or even unanswerable question, whereby an horizon of the machine
is revealed; and with this emerges the impossibility of running
the machine from within, as before without reference to the presence
of its external features. For Western classical music 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 to the orthodox account of infinity, and the subsequent
emergence elaborated in Ad Infinitum ... the Ghost in Turing's
Machine of non-infinitistic, in fact non-Euclidean arithmetic.
In natural language, the opposition of serial and parallel is
a basic -- intrinsic and constitutive -- binary. It appears, as
a very general linguistic distinction according to the Glossary
of Semiotics, as the opposition of syntagmatic ("relationships
... of linear, temporal sequence") and associative or paradigmatic
("relationships [which] do not as such occur in time [but]
make up an array of possibilities"). Or again, according
to Roman Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language, as a completely abstract
and general feature opeative at all levels of speech: "The
concurrence of simultaneous entities and the concatenation of
successive entities are the two ways speakers combine linguitic
constituents." [73]. Jakobson goes on to observe that "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 functions 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 (the so-called
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 brain morphology, Western classical music,
mathematics, spoken human language, and quantum physics, as well
as the original instance of computing we started from, demonstrate
the importance of the parallel/serial duo, as a creative and organizing
principle across many terrains. Further, as is evident from the
depth at which it operates and the dynamics it gives rise to,
the duo acts like a zero sum game. By which I mean not that there
is some hidden equilibrating force or larger matrix of control
ensuring their balance, but that by virtue of their mutual enfolding
within specific cultural practices changes -- of status, scope,
attributed importance, aesthetic worth, semiotic transparence
-- to one pole are accompanied by changes in the other. It follows
from this that the shift to parallelism being charted here will
be associated, as we shall see, with a countervailing, newly emergent
form of serialism.
The claim, then, that we need to flesh out comes to this: two
co-occurrent, synergistic transformations -- the ongoing move
to parallel and distibuted computing and the explosive growth
in visualization -- are reconfiguring contemporary technoscience.
The effects of this emergent parallelism as it circulates through
cultural space are being felt at every level from how we read,
write, and see to the ways we understand ourselves as 'selves'.
And that, in the process of its unfolding this parallelism is
giving rise to a hitherto unavailable, and yet to be adequately
identified, serialism.
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
collective cognition. This was recognized by computer engineers
some time ago. As B. Chandrasekaran observes in Natural and Social
System Metaphors for Distributed Problem Solving: "It is
clear that distribution of processing or computation is an intrinsic
characteristic of most natural phenomena ... . Social organizations
from honeybee colonies to a modern corporation, from bureaucracies
to medical communities, from committees to representative democracies
are living examples of distributed information processing embodying
a variety of strategies of decomposition and coordination. Computation
in biological brains, especially in their sensory processors such
as vision systems, displays a high degree of distribution. There
is substantial evidence that higher cortical functions are also
computed (and controlled) in the brain in an essentially distributed
mode ... ." [1].
Observe that, unlike many of its social and biological precursors,
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 distributed hardware is a natural choice, but not essential,
and parallel proceedures can be made to run -- with varying degrees
of difficulty and artificiality to be sure -- on serial machines.
The separate, distributed computing elements can vary greatly.
They can be fully autonomous computers wired together in a network
distibuted within a building, across a country or in different
parts of the planet. They can be simple, stripped down computers
hard wired to each other to form a supercomputer like the Connection
Machine. They can be specialized computational engines, limited,
at their most basic, to simple finite state mechanisms or automata
governed entirely by local rules. Or they can be virtual versions
of these, simulated engines within the memory of a single computer.
This last, usually called Cellular Automata (CA), has proved to
be an extraordinarily fecund computational, explanatory and investigative
technoscientific tool. The flocking behaviour of starlings we
encountered at the beginning, as well as aspects of the behaviour
of ants or bees in a colony, or cars in traffic patterns, are
all examples of situations that can be illuminatingly modelled
by a CA: thus, each starling is identified with an individual
cell and the requirement to keep a fixed distance from its neighbors
is its local rule; and likewise for the distributed behaviour
of ants and bees. A quite different example of a CA comes 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, including
their habitats and ecosystems together with the simulation of
evolutionary possibilities open to them; the invention and simulated
creation of compounds, alloys and molecules with specified properties
and functionality; pattern recognition and learning behaviour
within expert systems via 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 distributed
biosocial and biological phenomena, in particular collective 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 perspective 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, as we saw earlier from the critique of cognitivism,
have scarcely begun 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.
Once, the stained glass window of the medieval cathedral was the
holder and transmitter of religious knowledge; then, at the end
of the 15th century, this function was replaced by the printed
book. Now, the image is poised to retrieve the primary role and
as the chief means of storing, communicating and processing technoscientific
knowledge.
We are entering the age of that which can be visualized. The upsurge
in the multiple use, production and processing of images, their
strategic importance across a wide terrain of disciplines, and
the still growing cognitive impact of pictures, graphics, diagrams,
plans, models, graphs, illustrations, tables, ideographs, charts,
simulations, figures, and 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. The computer screen is
the stained glass window of our time.
How has this come about? And why, after many centuries in which
the alphanumeric word-and-number amalgam has enjoyed unchallenged
epistemological and semiological domination of our culture, should
it give way to the image?
Of course, images (however they might be scanned electronically
or 'read' by sequential eye movements) are single gestalts and
hence quintessentially parallel objects. In this they are in direct
contrast to text-type seriality, so that their usurping of words
and numbers and consequent 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 numerical data via parallelism gets
is poosible via digitization. As we know, it is now possible to
digitize any piece of information or item of recorded or represented
sense whether in words, pictures, graphics, sounds, or executable
content. This means that virtually everything and anything from
a word, a gesture, the shape of a rose, an individual human's
genes, the state of the market, all of Western music, a map of
the galaxy, pictures of Venus to any conceivable computer program
can be recorded, transmitted and processed as some huge sequence
-- 1101001010000 ......101010100000100111001 -- of zeros and ones.
Digitization is in essence counting. It thus appears as an extreme
form of sequentiality. Certainly, the immediate effect of digitization
is to serialize and make discrete what was parallel and continous:
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 the creation of sequences via digitization is merely 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 digitization,
the contemporary explosion of images is a massive and as yet unstoppable
process of going parallel.
The fundamental importance of the emergent visualist paradigm,
both in relation to the demands of technoscience and on a more
general cultural level, is being widely recognized:
For example, Nicholas Negroponte being digital observes the educational
shift away from "compulsive serialist children" and
takes it as accepted and beyond doubt that "our future adult
population [will be] simultaneously more mathematically able and
more visually literate." [220]
For example, Tim Lenoir in Visions of Theory talks of the 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 alphabeticism and a metaphysics of disembodiment.
The unlimited additivity and combinability of the image, the juxtaposibility
of any image with any other, require and are in the process of
engendering, delivery systems and devices for porting parallelism
into our heads: essentially techno-innovations for double or multiple
seeing.
visual 24 videowall:
Bob Marley in concert
According to Merlin Donald, the development of external memory and thinking devices that has played such a role in the evolution of all kinds of cognition achieves a spectacular and radically new level in the case of humans. This is because the sheer plasticity of our brains means that our immersion in technology allows us to re-configure our neural connections all the time. Which means that all these artefacts, from windowed screens to hypertexts are re-wiring the very brain/minds that imagined them. In this way we are facilitating the emergence of a larger -- collectivized, distributed, pluralized -- "intelligence" by allowing ourselves to become more 'othered', more parallelist, more multi, less individualized -- able to see, think, enjoy, feel and do more than one thing at a time.
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 assemblage 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 disorder created by childhood abuse, which automatically
links it to FAQs from schizophrenia to alt.abuse.transcendence.
I'll mention two books.
First Person Plural by Stephen Braude, acquiesces in this origin
of Multiple Personality in abuse and understands the phenomenon
as the disruption of a natural unpathological, unitary self. The
vocabulary of pathology and the need to justify the naturality
of a single personality leads him to theorize the necessary existence
"of an underlying synthesizing subject". Braude is an
analytic philosopher with a conventional -- that is to say in
the present context enlightenment -- epistemological agenda, so
no surprise to his polemic against the possibility that being
plural or multi is anything other than deviancy; a departure from
a prior (Kantian) subject which is the condition for the possibility
of any (rational) thought.
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. Though a sharply
argued and historically focussed analysis, Hacking's take somehow
missed the contemporary point: even if, as he maintains, sufferers
from the syndrome are creating and fitting their symptoms to pre-given
diagnosis, we're still left with the questions: why these symptoms
right now? Why, in other words, the irruption of this kind of
multiplicity within presentday culture?
Can we not think of multiple co-existing personalities as a parallel
phenomenon contrasted with it sserial version, one single self
after another of the born-again? One body with many -- up to 96
so far -- persona/identities or "alters" differently
related: most claiming to be solo, but some aware of their co-inhabitants,
some genuine fully worked out personae, but most persona-fragments
and generic functions, such as 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.
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 presentday 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.
It is worth observing here that at least one account of multiple
personality, a neurological-based picture that evidences clinical
and hypnosis findings, sees it as part of an underlying multiplicity
of brain function. Thus, for Oakley and Eames, in The Plurality
of Consciousness, the syndrome is a divergence form a normal and
ongoing mental parallelism: "It seems likely that the multiple
parallel streams of conscious activity [i.e. activity we are aware
of], which are implied by the multiple personality data, are no
different from those which are present in normal individuals ...
. The difference in the multiple personality case is that these
processes can be attached to different self-represntations, and
so when re-reprented are revealed as the thoughts of different
individuals. When only one self-representation is available to
self-awareness all conscious processes, covert of othewise, is
attibuted to a single 'me'." [237] On this account, then,
multiples whilst undeniably aberrant, are closer to all of us
than we have ever, from the perspective of a natural, unfractured
singularity, imagined.
If multiples deny the indivisible subject and the equation of
one self with one body 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, for example, Allucquere Stone focuses 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, and as a result pose a more complex and less
easily dismissed effect of pluralization than those with multiple
persona.
Wherever a collective presence is constructed -- from primitive
bulletin boards and conference calls to sophisticated chat rooms
on the net, and so on, verts -- virtual presences -- 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 and useful ambiguity, since
the first person 'I' is neither plural nor singular but an archaic
misnomer for an emergent I/me/us construct.
Thus, 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 -- what might be called a phenomenological collectivization
-- at the level of 'individual' perception and experience. In
this, they realize in well-defined, repeatable socio-technologic
form, a pluralized I/me.
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 of course, there is no separation here between interior and
exterior: the experiential and the collective fold into each other.
All thought, even the most private, individual and enclosed is
social. Being socially present, 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.
It is in this sense that one should interpret Merlin Donald's
contention that the key principle of the biological and the social
evolution of cognition, i.e. so-called individual thought, 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 theoretically elaborated manner,
is made by Pierre Levy who urges that "toute une société
cosmopolite pense en nous". A thesis that surely has to be
related, if only to clarify the novelty of Levy's technological
focus, with Vygotsky's conception of thought as internalized speech
and Bakhtin insistence on the heteroglossia of all language. Levy
also talks, in specifically computational terms, of a "collective
subject ... multiple, heterogeneous, distributed, cooperative/competitive
and constantly engaged in self-organization or autopoeisis".
And he too insists that we interpret intelligence in the context
of an eco-technological model; one which points in an explictly
anthromorphic direction. Thus, Levy deploying a metaphor that
is now becoming commonplace in discussions of the emergent possibilities
of the Net, projects humans as neurones, on their way to forming
a planetary hypercortex. An organ he sees as 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. Or rather, the hegemony, the
undisputed authority and automatic pre-eminence, of such a singularity
is giving way.
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 backtracking, fuckups, resistance, 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, vast and
as yet unnamed and unseen 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; under no neccesity to be
understandable within the categories of God or Godess (either
old testament sun god, new age earth godess or daughter thereof)
that we have hitherto imposed on our conception of extra-human
sentience; and under no necessity to know or love us (insofar
as it can be said to 'know', love' and such like) as individuals,
is perhaps already in the/a future. Though this 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?
* * * * *
James Bailey, "First We Reshape Our Computers, Then Our Computers Reshape Us: The Broader Intellectual Impact of Parallelism", Daedalus, Winter 1992
Stephen Braude, First Person Plural (NY 1991)
Vincent Colapietro, Glossary of Semiotics (New York 1993)
B. Chandrasekaran, "Natural and Social System Metaphors for
Distibuted Problem Solving", IEEE Transactions on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics, vol SMC-11, (1), 1981
Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (New York 1954)
Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind (Harvard 1991)
Ian Hacking, Re-writing the Soul (Princeton 1995)
Brosl Hasslacher, "Parallel Billiards and Monster Systems",
Daedalus, Winter 1992
Ed Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (MIT 1995)
George Ifrah, From One to Zero (New York 1985)
Roman Jakobson + Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague
1971)
Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (London 1995)
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York 1951)
Tim Lenoir, "Visions of Theory" (to appear)
Pierre Levy, La virtualisation de l'intelligence et la constitution
du sujet (www.univ.paris8.fr/~hyperion/pierre/virt7)
William J.T. Mitchell, "What Is an Image?", New Literary
History, Spring 1984, XV (3), 503-537
Nicholas Negroponte, being digital (New York 1995)
David Oakley & Lesley Eames, "The Plurality of Consciousness"
in Brain and Mind (Ed. David Oakley) (London 1985)
Mitchell Resnik, Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (London 1995)
Brian Rotman, Ad Infinitum ... the Ghost in Turing's Machine (Stanford
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
Louis Sass, Modernism and Madness (New York 1992)
Michel Serres, Origine de la géométrie (Paris 1993)
Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrol (http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom)
Robert Louis Stevenson, "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" (Penguin
1979)
Alluquere Stone, The War of Technology and Desire (MIT 1995)
Richard Wilbur, "An Event", New and Collected Poems (New York, 1989)