Going Parallel

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.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

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, to become a flock, a single thing moving through time, wheeling, swooping, fanning, contracting and returning on itself, "Like a drunken fingerprint across the sky" (Richard Wilbur), to land again in the trees. How? Are they a chorus led by a conductor? Is each starling programmed to fly behind a leader in formation? Is the possibility of those arabesques an ancient piece of wisdom written, perhaps, into a starling's DNA? Has evolution selected starlings that 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, in any event, 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 the individual self and the collective other, and about the circuits linking the modes of simultaneity/sequentiality and the polarities of self/other within contemporary technoscientifically inflected culture.

One after Another: Many at Once

Let me start with the two modes: the serial, which consists of doing one thing after another (the whole flock forming itself and moving through time) and the parallel (each starling flying in concert with the others) doing many things at once. The first mode is 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.

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...