Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics:
The Archival Text, Digital Narrative and the Limits of Memory
Carolyn G. Guertin
Senior McLuhan Fellow, UofT
Chapter 2. The Matrix: Information Overload
ii. Feminist Dis/Orientations
Answering a need for a structure that allows women writers to speak women's history and modes of memory, the networked aesthetic text has emerged as a form that seems to embody the potentialities suited to feminist musings. Throughout Western literate cultures, women have persisted in finding ways of speaking from the margins through the subversion of masculine forms with alternative modes of discourse. Frequently using devalued mediums--journals, letters, diaries--or tailoring existing forms to their use (like Mary Daly's Wickedary arranged in spiraling 'word-webs '), women authors have found ways of constructing a literary archive of their thoughts and words. This space of women's writing, as illicit as Jane Austen's creaky door, only came to be consciously and defiantly occupied and recognized in the last century. While the women's liberation movement helped women join the workforce in unprecedented numbers, it also gave them access to technology and new writing spaces.
In the efforts to define a women's counterculture, memory and oral forms of telling have been recognized as being integrally connected to how women have been left out of official histories. In her novel Amalgamemnon, Christine Brooke-Rose appropriates the 'second memory', the fluid, unsaved memory of computer systems, as the voice of women speaking and of prophecy . Second memory is easily lost, vulnerable to system crashes and unrecorded. It is a voice in flux, in transition, in motion in space. This is Cassandra's voice: a voice as disbelieved and ignored in the time of the victories and defeats of the Trojan War as Brooke-Rose's Sandra is in the days of automated offices and threats of redundancy. This is the performative voice of sibylline prophecy, which, once recorded, disintegrates into nonsense [1]. As a prophetic desiring or ecstatic space, second memory is an embodiment of the unspeakable or uncontainable, and Amalgamemnon a book of prophesy of impossible alternate timelines that teaches "the history of the future, the geography of effaceable memory...and how to write on sand, count on nothing and read bubbles" (140).
Prophecy--an advance and unique perspective on the future--is one of the machineries of memory in the archiviology of feminist hypermedia. An archiviology is temporal and spatial, functioning both as literal archives--physical spaces that are repositories of data, in this case, narratives--and as in Jacques Derrida's conception of the archive, something that is forward-looking with an eye on posterity, but also simultaneously "spectral" (Derrida, 1995, 84), haunted by the voices of the past contained in its contents. In this way, feminist new media works are and function as prostheses of (collective) memory, embodying the design and form of women's public and private recollections, history and genealogy in the spaces of its narratological, associational structure. Encyclopedic texts have, of course, long occupied a place in the literary canon--from Moby Dick to Ulysses to Gravity's Rainbow. Jed Rasula identifies the four defining features of encyclopedic narrative in print:
1. it attempts to classify or categorize the attributes of a national culture while simultaneously critiquing its political perspectives and social organization;
2. it has a "polyglot dimension" that integrates "linguistic perspectivism" into its form;
3. it is "formally indeterminate, exemplifying the double function of prophecy and narrative," thereby realizing information overload as a virtuoso performance. Its social critique also removes it from the present time, but locates it in a place nearby that is in some way contemporaneous;
4. the encyclopedic narrative presents an exhaustive study of a particular technology or science (Rasula 2).
The archival text, while similar to its encyclopedic, print-bound cousin, builds on these attributes in ways that book-bound narrative could not, and instead births what Pierre Lévy calls the 'cosmopedia,' a place that blends the actual and the virtual, a place where all the information in the cosmos meets the encyclopedic gesture. Instead of a national culture, these novels set out to critique women's historical roles over time within an industrialized socio-economic and political world. Secondly, their polyglot nature tends to be a form of social critique, with the alternate languages being official and unofficial modes and codes of discourse rather than the linguistic borders of a nation. Finally, where encyclopedic narratives sought mastery over a particular discourse, these feminist texts seek to privilege multiple perspectives and the immediacy of performance. A solitary speaking subject like Ishmael, for example, is replaced by the collective identity of a many-tongued subject like the Patchwork Girl. Finally, the technology or science that is being explored is the mechanics of the text itself in motion as navigated by the browser's body. Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl explores the speaking subject as 'author-ity'; M.D. Coverley's Califia plumbs the depths of official and private discourses; Diana Reed Slattery's Glide and Collabyrinth examine the intricacies of networked space in motion. None of these texts could have been written for the page, but, more than that, they use data glut as a means of giving agency (rather than mastery) back to the browser as she wanders the corridors of the fictional world. The matrix births, instead of an encyclopedic narrative, Lévy's 'cosmopedia,' an enfolding of the actual and the virtual, or what R.U. Sirius calls the 'infosphere': a "process of information linkup toward the building of a global nervous system, a global brain" (qtd in Rasula 38). These are not world wide spaces as its celebrants would have us believe, but self-contained matrices, metatextual worlds, offering up a wealth of data to be interpreted by each individual browser.
The dynamic in a hypermedia cosmopedia is its textual strategies of multiplicity, polyvocality, intertextuality, hybridity, navigation, complexity and temporal flux that animate or activate the quantized and inert geographic spaces or architectural forms within an electronic narrative. Interacting with an electronic work through the act of navigation allows the textual strategies to construct a multidimensional architecture--containers of memory--in the reader's mind. As containers, these places are activated and function as housings for a new feminist science of the archive: the meandering, digressive, unruly and innately difficult to follow networked fluidity of women's countercultural discourses and performances. Here Frederic Jameson's 'horror of multiplicity' might well prove to have just cause. These architectural spaces are subversive containers that invite (as inert elements in a dynamic system) linguistic or visual ruptures, explosions, fissures that wait to have their contents spill out into the world. They are the repositories of feminist heterotopic space, graffiti and obscenity. By making these untold or unspeakable stories spatial, they come to function as extensions of our bodies, and, within the prosthetics of memory of feminist electronic fiction, these cyborg narratives are appendages, storehouses of a data-glut of body memory and subjugated knowledges, particularly women's genealogies. These are genealogies not of the blood, but of (inter)connection. The networked text is about this sense of nomadic interconnectedness--activated by its automated links. It jumps, circles, misbehaves and is frequently sidetracked. These are the random access points of oral conversation or of database structures.
Two early hypertext authors, Carolyn Guyer and Shelley Jackson, revolutionized the first commercial form of hypertext software called Storyspace (woefully primitive in its aesthetics, but not in its structure) by carving out primarily text-based, information-loaded, architectural forms that suited the shape of women's stories and conceptions of history. Following an architectural model that evokes the ancient Art of Memory, the reader navigates the matrix of a hypertext's fluid fictional spaces to map a unique version of a text in her mind each time she reads it. Janet Murray and Brenda Laurel argue that these texts offer more than simple interactivity; they believe that agency is born through the act of spatial navigation within a text or an environment (Murray 128-129; Laurel 21). In interactive environments we construct the text as we read, with our choices forming the topology of the space of our voyaging. This is what Michael Joyce calls a "poetic of contours" in hypertext. He elaborates: "A contour is the space of inscription for a reader, the emerging surface of the constructive [i.e. truly interactive] text as it is shaped by its reading" (1995, 239). To Joyce, this is an innately sensuous experience. Coverley makes use of full-bodied multimedia to create sensual environments that allow the telling of women's history and desire, incorporating sound, music and video or animation immersively in Califia. Slattery divides narrative, space and media, producing different kinds of environments for different kinds of telling. Her story is told in The Maze Game, a print-based novel, but the game is played online, as the browser becomes a player by learning the Glide language, evoking the oracle and 'dancing' the discursive spaces of the maze.
What these authors do is create a topological space for female memory and feminist narrative through creating ruptures in the storylines, through wedging structural conversations between the parts. These texts are archives in Foucault's definition of the form: the archive creates its own speaking system even as it simultaneously fractures the temporal by existing outside of real time (1972, 128-131). Textual time, the time of our navigation, rises to the surface of the browser's consciousness instead. The memory mechanisms of these archival narratives create dense repositories of female knowledges and trajective voices, speaking a fluid feminist discourse that takes up virtual, topological space. A reminder of the components of topological systems might be in order here. As I discussed earlier, by definition they perform or transform perspectives or dimensionalities, dis/continuities, trajectories, nodes and the 'ends' or limits of spatiality through phase shifting. These archival systems use this variety of textual strategies and various architectural or structural models to engender female memory spaces [2]. These are what I call quantum feminisms. Quantum feminisms are the new visual perspectives--or, more accurately, orientations--of the age of the matrix. They are situated knowledges interpolated by experience and embodied presence. As a narratological model, quantum feminisms use their own theoretical and scientific principles to create information-rich, user-centred environments that allow for more complex networks of engagement with the text, space-time and the present moment. Such an approach requires us to occupy fractal subjectivities, that is multiple and shifting points of view, that leave us better equipped for browsing in an environment informed by radically different notions of time, space and movement.
Feminist new media artworks, in creating archival spaces, frequently use official modes of discourse as a contrast to more subversive ones. A feminist electronic archive is a space where the act of browsing and navigating privileges situated knowledges and a multiplicity of voices--in the gaps between discourses and languages within a text, in the gaps between screens--and foregrounds the browser's role as a collaborator in the 'creation' of the text as multidimensional, mnemonic space. The archive is a conjunction not only of multiple voices, but of the information overload of a collision of theories, discourses, images and sounds as well. As a situated cultural repository, it makes explicit the contingency of history on our present and delimits what it is possible for us to say and do (Foucault, 1972, 130-131), just as movement for Deleuze occurs 'elsewhere.' However, one important shift evident in the new paradigm of systems theory is the realization that no viewer is objective, that, in essence, there is no outside to any system. We are all performers within this geography of interiorities. After Werner Heisenberg's challenge to the "Cartesian paradigm," we have become aware that any view we take is simply a single perspective on "an inseparable network of relationships" (Capra 40) and an arbitrary perspective at that. In other words, our look is an integral part of the system itself--so too is any apparatus we might look with or through, like an interface. The uncertainty in Heisenberg's principle is a measure of the inexactitude of the match between representation and the real, and between vision and embodied knowledge (Phalen 114). It is the interconnections between browsing bodies and the functioning and form of digital narratives that foreground their use of ruptures in perspectival space. It is no accident, therefore, that we are now seeing a revival of Baroque aesthetics in all art forms. The Baroque invites the senses back into affective works and engages us on levels beyond the emotional as sensory navigators. It was a school that historically (1590-1725) attempted to make sense of the competing trajectories of transcendent experience in emotional and spiritual space-time. (The artists of the Baroque period, for instance, used multimedia--combining painting, sculpture [in numerous, juxtaposed and polychromatic materials], theatrical staging and lighting, and architecture in new spatial configurations--to create immersive environments for a single, idealized perspective in real geometric space.)
Shelley Jackson's electronic novel, Patchwork Girl, works on an architectural and archival model, finding new perspectives on women's never told and forgotten narratives. She interweaves these with a textual checkerboard of intertexts (rendered visually in their structure), told by a cyborg narrator. This literary ecosystem is stitched together by Mary Shelley's unborn female monster--grown disturbingly lively--out of forgotten stories and a chorus of other discourses and voices, including her 'mother's' in the form of Mary Shelley's 'journal' and literary theorists' like Jacques Derrida. The graveyard that was the monster's cradle functions not only as her point of origin, but as her community, her family and her genealogy. Haunted by the memories of her original owners and her origin(s) (conceived by Mary as a 'proper woman', she is nearly aborted by Percy's editorial pen, for instance), the monster raises the possibility that she may have survived only in Mary's papers, stitched together in language as a fiction rather than in the flesh in life. Intertextually, she is thereby born in another's words as a part of someone else's story. Her life is a constant state of alien inhabitation as she tries to adjust to her willful body's dictates from its mind of its own. In fact, she suffers from the vocal tics of Tourette's Syndrome, from parts that refuse to stay glued on and from her limbs' and organs' hauntings by past lives. No surprise in the fact that she is obsessed with plastic surgery and the tenets of beauty.
The Patchwork Girl also blurs the lines between storytelling and lies. She may well be the author of Mary's journal, having tried on her mother's voice for size. She also gives the browser alternative plots to journey through. In the "Story" section of the text, which tells her life story after Mary and up to the 'present,' she provides two different versions of events (although you can only access one of these in a particular reading of that section). The plots diverge when her friend Chancy happens upon the monster naked. If a browser chooses 'aftermath' as a link to follow, Chancy reveals to the Patchwork Girl that this apparent cabin boy is actually a woman in disguise. Then, when Chancy asks, in an awkward manner, the monster to tell her her own story, she flees and is struck by a horse-drawn cab--losing her foot and part of her leg in the accident. The Patchwork Girl continues to run and, after being attacked, attacks in turn a would-be pickpocket. Leaving him for dead, she steals his leg as a replacement part. She never sees Chancy again and remains alone for the rest of the narrative and, presumably, her life. Alternately, if a browser chooses 'the different road Aftermath' instead, after Chancy sees her patchworked nakedness, the browser discovers that they fell in love and became lovers. The monster, however, coyly refuses to tell Chancy her life story and, when Chancy finally asks, she storms out in anger to be struck by the cab. Instead of emulating her 'botched brother' and resorting to violence, in this version the Patchwork Girl seeks out a circus freak friend of Chancy's who gives her some advice, a wooden leg and an armadillo. The monster returns to Chancy and, persisting in her refusal to explain her origins, rejects Chancy's love and sends her back to sea. Wholly diminished by her prideful behaviour, the monster lives alone with the dying armadillo. When it passes on, she swaps its body for her much-celebrated (in the penny press) lost limb and buries it in the foot's former casket. Finally reunited with her errant part, she stitches her lost appendage back on. Both stories cannot be true, just as she tells us at one point in the narrative that she is still actually a virgin and that all of her sexploits have been inventions of her imagination. Are these lies or fictions? Where does 'story' end and 'falsehood' begin for a creature that was born in and of a work of fiction?
The Patchwork Girl's memory tales are repositories of unrecorded knowledge and her community is a storehouse of alternative perspectives of other outcasts: "I am made up of a multiplicity of anonymous particles," she says, "and have no absolute boundaries. I am a swarm" ("self swarm.") Part of Jackson's buzzing, quantised informational space is organized on a model of the graveyard (entered through the headstone), and the archive of the text is contained in the database of individual graves where her donors cluster together geographically adjacent to one another underground, just as they are in her form, but functioning as uneasy neighbours in both locations. This site map and ecosystem of body part lenders tells the unrecorded stories of women of the era--a swarm of forgotten, faceless, unknown souls who each have their own disabilities and afflictions, and methods of subverting the official system. "What is dreadful," she asks:
about the plural? The swarm, the infestation. Is it that, without the necessary limits of any discrete entity, the swarm seems only accidentally, not essentially bounded in size? That it becomes a fragment of infinite quantity, suggesting infinity despite its own accidental measurements, just because those measurements are accidental? ("earwigs")
An unbounded and living example of information overload (like the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation ), the Patchwork Girl realistically sees herself as a messy, biological collective cluster of insect-like and inanimate parts: "Assembling into crystalline structures, insect architectures. The earwig as building block of matter, instead of the orderly playground of the atom... In place of the play of electrons: the quiver of segmented legs, twitching against their neighbours" ("earwigs"). She yearns for the clinical detachment of scientific structures, but as a collision of subjectivities that goal is unattainable for her. Her swarm's memories jostle together just like their parts, and from the friction the monster's story is born. Jackson's graveyard is a multidimensional space where the monster disinters memories, rifling through body parts and string-tied packets of memory to try to reconcile the disconnected pieces into a fractured whole. Unrestrained within a single graveyard plot or identity, she erupts from the grave with all of her stories, if not her parts, intact. As the temporal distance from her inception increases, her body and her language become increasingly unruly.
As a collaborative work with collective memory, the monster's ultimate desire is for a community. Where initially her family and circle of peers are her own body and its voices, she gradually ventures out into space and into the world (in her imagination at least) to join other fringe-dwelling communities of women. While she tries to write her own liminal history and lineage (a tale of herself as "pure particulate flow" ["flow"]), she keeps circling back to past traumas, trying to find a way to place a salve on her wounds. For the monster, whose skeleton is a web of scar tissue that bends but will not break, she finds healing in knitting the crazy patchwork pieces of her past back together in this organic narrative--just as she sews unruly body parts back on--to form a future. Her body parts exercise their own will. Her lips laugh of their own accord and "[h]er tongue (my tongue) stirred up a fishy stew of folly, poetry, gossip, heresy, and the news, and she mixed up the real and the imagined, so you never knew where you stood with her" ("tongue"). This circling and confrontation of embodied and sometimes traumatic moments is literalized in Patchwork Girl where the reader chooses the plotlines, limbs, wounds, and trajectories she will traverse in this text to excavate pain and resurrect healing. Allowing us to follow those scar trails and hear the voices of their histories, Jackson weaves an intertextual body of competing parts of the self, female community and memory spaces.
Where Jackson seeks to create a community of voices and connection, Carolyn Guyer in Quibbling [3] presents an evocative meditation on connections, exploring colour, touch, texture, and the echoes of sameness in lovers' lives throughout history. Finding common elements, objects and sensations that are central to her female and male characters' interconnections, Guyer weaves a labyrinthine space complete with a maze at the centre--based on Arthur Rimbaud's grammar of colour--in the form of a kite poem which traces the many corridors of the sensuality of existence. These technicolour ribbons of linked themes--a symphonic intertwining of love affairs and daily rituals that are woven together out of bits of glass, windows and moons, the curve of necklines and the hint of breasts, moon-dew, menstrual blood and beloved bowls, swaths of cloth, the sweep of hems, and strands of music--challenge and replace conventions of linear narrative throughout the text. The labyrinthine plot is paralleled by the competing visual trajectories in this architectural labyrinth of sacred spaces, and by the erotic charge of interconnection interwoven in space and time. The labyrinth was originally a site of religious ritual and of sacrifice, but for Guyer this maze is a means of exploring the tangled webs of lovers' lives and the sense of sameness in human experience that is independent of history.
The difficulties of navigating such tightly interwoven stories, which have little sense of chronology, but have a multiperspectival nature embodying an intense rhythmic ebb and flow is the essence of Guyer's Baroque aesthetic in her immersive l'écriture feminine. Navigation in this real time, fluid environment is like inhabiting the interior of a suspended dream state of the present moment. This sensory overload is the space of Julia Kristeva's semiotic chora where the patterns of the nonverbal, of sensation, and of desire organize our perceptions. Guyer herself postulates her 'buzz-daze state,' a feeling of being divided between spaces, to describe the nomadic experience of navigating the shifting sands of hypertext fiction. This is a temporal as well as a spatial shift where an immersive, memory-like state surfaces for the reader. It is also what Darren Tofts calls hypertext's polysemic nature that approximates information overload (103). Guyer's sensory text is an immersive environment. Her world privileges the senses and a new sense of re-embodiment through an examination and the creation of the virtuality of "liminal spaces, sacred places of social and personal transformation..., neither imaginary nor real"; they are "a subjunctive realm of externalized imagination where events happen in effect but not [in actuality]" (Morse 180). This is discursive space. As an abstract form or a "structure of what does not yet exist" (Joyce, 1995, 235) as Michael Joyce describes hypertext, Quibbling evokes Gertrude Stein's sonic, repetitive, rhythmic continuous present, a Churrigueresque play of light and shadow, surface and depth, and web of elaborate interconnections. Guyer's hypertext creates a spiritual experience out of the sensuousness of the timeless present moment.
M.D. Coverley's Califia excavates the past from lost memories: from the ravages of Alzheimer's, clues about an extinct native people's last journey and final stand, oral histories, hints of secrets, unsolved puzzles and the quest for buried treasure. Califia sets out to devise a new kind of history that tells lost stories and popular or unofficial knowledges from a woman's sensory perspective. This alternate history is a feminist genealogy or countermemory told through a discordant union of discourses: text-based biographical 'snapshots,' letters, government reports, deeds, conversations, journal entries and reconstructed narratives are complemented and rediscovered through photos of people and places, music, journey maps and a spinning night sky with its matrix of guiding stars. Califia is the story of a search for the forgotten origins of the fabled Amazon queen and her gold-rich empire, paralleled with the mythic quest for stardom in Hollywood and a woman's search for her buried inheritance. Clues to the past's secrets, that the land keeps, reveal the possible treasure in an alternate future if it can be excavated from lost wisdom and forgetfulness.
The text makes use of full-bodied multimedia to create a sensual space that allows the telling of women's history and desire, incorporating sound, music and video or animation, in an immersive environment. What Coverley does is create a visual space for female memory and feminist narrative. Califia is an an-archival structure situated in time. Unlike the ahistorical exterior of the Foucauldian archive, the memory mechanisms of this hypermedia work create archives or repositories of female knowledge and voices, speaking a fluid feminist discourse that takes up (virtual) space. This is a sensory system--written in the fluid space of surface, unsaved memory that is vulnerable to the mnemonic erasure of system crashes, that is vulnerable to forgetting--that uses a variety of textual strategies and structural models to engender female memory spaces. The archive is a conjunction not only of multiple voices, but of a collision of theories, discourses, images and sound as well. The connection between the form and function of the new media is found in their shared use of a rupture in space and time that interrupts a browser's perspective. She cannot see where she is going, cannot predict her next step. For instance, as a part of the foregrounding of navigation in the text, and to use an image-based example, Califia is speckled with maps. While these cartographic elements stand as a site of official discourse within her text, the unofficial sites of matriarchal history and her feminist journeying are written as a treasure map embroidered on a blue blanket in a dead, symbolic language--the native tongue of Chumash, with its language of the constellations--undercutting the 'official' nature of standard issue maps and subverting their authoritative nature. (It is significant that the 'official' maps cannot reveal the true location of the treasure.) In fact, Coverley encodes the whole of her hypermedia novel around maps and itinerary routes. This architectural structure and subtext drives the narrative forward, with the CD-ROM ending each time a browser traverses one of the four compass points of Cartesian space, until she visits all of the significant places in the text, or in the lives of five generations of California families. Incorporating space and motion into this polyvocalic mélange, Coverley creates a multidimensional archive in the form of Calvin's notes where browsers can peruse docu-dramas and discover the background to events that they are reading. Just as Califia includes footprints that are followed throughout the text, so the archive is a visual space where movement between viewpoints and discourses is foregrounded. This space privileges polyvocality in the multiple discourses found in the text--a collection of official and unofficial knowledges--and makes issues of history and storytelling key to this repository. Using the metaphor of travelling as the means of navigation in the text, and as a metaphor for reading and remembering, Coverley's text allows the interactor to write the mnemonic map of her own journey, but as in life she cannot see where a single step will lead her. She can only perceive the overwhelming mass of options.
An archive is born of forgetfulness (Derrida, 1995, 11), for it is in the drive to remember, to map, and to document elusive cultural memory that collections are made for posterity. Califia 's archival system, however, is not interested so much in posterity as in immediacy. It is both temporal and spatial, existing as intervallic space simultaneously both in and out time, and embraces contradictions, privileging emotional and sensory impressions and information as the most important 'knowledge' to be stored. The key piece of intelligence in the text is the experience of transcendence that comes with the acquisition of the treasure of emotional connection, as when Violet's footprints appear in the sand or when Calvin learns who his parents were. The dynamic links in the new media foster the immersive associational logic that makes it a mnemonic form, but, as an inclusive archival space, it also allows just such an overloading proliferation of contradictions as the alignment of emotion and sensation with that quality that is usually deemed far more linear in its logic: 'knowledge.' Being rooted in short term memory as it is, the hypertextual spaces of the new media are by extension also rooted in memory loss. Without a hierarchy to govern the many plots, directions and perspectives, a reader must decide what is important in the text and, working with an associational structure, is bound to forget many details. However, in Califia the sensory information is encoded--not in the text as such--but in the interiors of its archival structure. Dispersing information into the multidimensional plot architecture with its family trees, StarMaps, Kit Bag and 800 screens, the text plays with memory loss as an asset (not a bug) by using a browser's limited short term memory against herself, and making the recall of the overwhelming mass of specifics difficult. A tri-part narrative structure foregrounds the immersive, sensual experience of connection through reading in the moment and part of the joy in the text is experienced through the physical fact of navigation. Plot still exists, but because it is abstract and spatial--being the very structure and interface of the work as animated by the nomadic act of reading--it is difficult to recreate in the mind except as an emotional and sensory response.
Forgetfulness, one aspect of information overload, is enacted by this lack of hierarchy in the networked form itself. Creating a sense of loss and of being lost, a browser jumps through Califia 's many layers of text, image, and sound, anticipating the future and being surprised by returns to past spaces, like Paradise Home or Nellie's Deeds--made new and significant in revisits. The text privileges forgetting and the rediscovery of what has been forgotten through the use of the archive and Alzheimer's Disease as structural and aesthetic tropes for the restlessness, nomadism and the obsessive moving and re-moving of stashes of gold. An assemblage of narratives, images, documents and prophesies, the text is open-ended and invites a browser to lose herself in a rambling web of the sometimes contradictory pieces comprising the journeys. Augusta's narrative relates the present day chronology of the grail-like quest to solve the riddles that lead to the legendary treasure, but it also tells the story of her mother's decline into the "convoluted labyrinth" of Alzheimer's Disease.
Violet Summerland, Augusta's mother, is one of the last surviving characters in the novel who possesses information about the gold's location. The disease, however, affects her speech as it does her mind, and her meanings have become "crippled." In such a state, Violet functions as a liminal figure occupying a place at 'Paradise Home' on the threshold between the present and the past, between madness and sanity and between language and symbol. Her affliction functions as what Janet Murray calls a "mythopoetic state...between the world of ordinary experience and the world of the sacred" (292). The aesthetics of her forgetfulness are found ideally in the freedom from past cares: a kind of liberation from history or a rebirth into living in an embodied state in the present moment. Memorylessness could mark a return to innocence, to a preverbal state, or to the immersive environment of an eternal present. But Violet is outside of time with her difficulties in communicating in the here and now. She speaks only an encoded, associational, private language, and occupies a deeply isolated immersive state. Advanced sufferers of Alzheimer's Disease have no short-term memory and no ability to let new memories form (Ross 21). At the same time, as a sufferer of the disease, Violet does retain long-term memories of past events, but cannot speak them in language.
In Califia the impulse is to remember in order to 'unforget'--that is the past is not discarded and neither facts nor competing versions are avoided, but instead these facts become a launching pad for a strategy of feminist fiction that leaps forward out of the predetermination of linear, written history and fixed point perspective into a new kind of visual narrative, into a new kind of vision. Unlike Benjamin's trapped angel, Califia's characters keep one eye on the future and one on the past. A digital archive, a container for all the facts known about three California families over five generations, the text fulfills the compulsion to remember, but as obsessed as it is with what Peter Lunenfeld calls the 'Alexandrine Dream,' with cataloguing, collecting and organizing data, this is not an end in itself. The preserved documents and objects gesture toward multiple and varying interpretations or occasionally misdirect the reader. No fact is too small or insignificant, no document or scrap of cloth or letter too cryptic to be discarded. It is the subjective act of interpreting the data that ultimately matters, for, the text is concerned with process and narrative--not with monolithic Truth, but personal truths.
Ostensibly Califia is a journey, and introduces itself by way of a mandala with four directional departure points: South (The Comets in the Yard), East (Wind, Sand and Stars), North (The Night of the Bear) and West (The Journey Out). From there, the narrative quickly diverges, or triverges, along different information trails. Not only does each of the four sections begin with a summary or apology for what will transpire within, but there are several narrators who use different discourses to follow different paths. One narrator, Calvin Lugo, designated the alleged archivist of the text but who, like the Patchwork Girl, is most given to spinning fictions, coyly renders the text as an oversimplified, linear diagram [Fig. 2.1. Calvin's illustration], illustrating the narrative structure as told by the three narrators as three parallel lines. (Calvin notably omits much of the complexity of Augusta's journey to make her fluid travels fit his model. Most importantly, he elides her repeated cyclings back to her own yard in her search for the 'comets,' an inheritance of gold coins, buried on her property .) Calvin's path traces random themes and docudramas. Kaye Beveridge's path criss-crosses 'Kaye's Legends' and 'Kaye's Stars.' Unconnected from these lines, Calvin depicts the maps, star maps and archive that are key components of the text.
In Califia , the parodic impulse is contained in the effort to remember the details of the past in order to 'unforget' or practice anamnesis. Derrida defines anamnesis as 'unforgetting' or a doubled movement of retracing our steps between the acts of remembering and forgetting that is the function of the archive. There are distinct parallels here with Maxwell's Demon who cannot forget--who remembers everything. The Demon was a microscopic being, proposed by James Clerk Maxwell in 1871 as a part of the second law of thermodynamics, who could sort fast and slow molecules to decrease entropy in a closed system (Hayles, 1990, 42). This Demon, like Violet, is "a liminal figure who stands at a threshold that separates" not mnemonic states as Violet does, but order from chaos (Hayles, 1990, 43). In 20th century studies of chaos theory, the Demon came to be seen as a sorter of information with an infinite capacity for memory storage. (Chaos itself, of course, is always gendered female.) The creature's inability to forget, or his anamnesis, is a tool designed to tame the feminine state of chaos or information overload, even when it is positively revalued as a state of "maximum information" (Hayles, 1990, 51). As a creature of the archive, his ability to remember is ultimately spatialized, functioning both as a means of movement back and forth in time and space and as a series of images in the mind. In Califia , the doubled motion of remembering and forgetting are central to the text, to recover lost secrets from the ravages of Alzheimer's Disease, hidden treasures, buried connections. The question remains: can an archive be a book or a book an archive? Coverley's text welcomes information multiplicity or data glut, and enacts embodied memory. Privileging a women's community and oral forms of storytelling, Califia undertakes a rediscovery of what has been forgotten in the present and reclaims, through the conjunction of image and text, text as image and image as text and conjunctions of space and time, the necessity of literacy in multiperspectival looking and in non-conceptual ways of knowing. Positing an ongoing grail quest for meaning and direction, the text re-creates an archival structure where an elusive treasure of the constellations of social connections are the ideal, but where linguistic ruptures, quakes and fissures are necessary for growth, for changing perceptions and for reorganizing expectations of informational ordering. Just as the California landscape is constantly rewritten by earthquakes and landslides, and functions as a literal and figurative container of forgotten memories in Califia , so "[o]ur memories" like the text "are always in the process of revision" ("North: Night of the Bear, Introduction"). This archive, on the parameters of its own project, can never be complete and will never reveal definitive answers. It can only ever tell more stories and give more perspectives on the events contained therein.
The information that is gathered about the interconnected histories of the families is three-pronged as shaped by the narrators: Augusta keeps facts, linear narrative and chronology; Calvin writes fictional speculation; Kaye compiles myths, legends, and ephemeral arcana. The random access nature of the text comfortably encompasses these three different types of information--those being fact and chronology, fiction, and myths and legends--without resolving or rationalizing the contradictions between the different forms of knowledge. In one of the sections, called "Augusta's Topology: Manila Files," Augusta explains:
Regardless of the urge for creative flair, I see the Califia material as information that can be read from a page in a folder. For me, the documents are not dances or stars or features of the landscape, but files. Not much different from the folders that are in the study... I am keeping data straight this way (my emphasis; Augusta's Topology: Manila Files).
It is Kaye and Calvin who see the history in terms of dances, stars and topological features, while Augusta is much more concerned with narrative as we are accustomed to it in postmodern, print-based fiction. These folders of gathered data are bundled in associational packets like words in a thesaurus. In Latin 'thesaurus' means a "treasure house . . . of inventions" (Krell 55); it was not an associational dictionary, but an associational space--an architectural site for the visual practice of the Art of Memory.
The process of navigating in an electronic environment is quite similar to the Art's superimposition of images on architectural spaces. As readers of a hypertext, we must take note of visual or textual markers to move back and forth through archival space, building up a library of associational details in our minds. In Califia, we can navigate the spaces of Augusta's notes like a perambulator of the mnemonic ars by selecting a file tab, akin to an architectural detail, for an unfurling of interlinked associations, but these filed jottings are separate from her narration of the journey. Her narrative is ostensibly chronological, but like an architectural thesaurus is constructed of memory spaces designed for us to wander discursively through, and, moving in virtual, multiperspectival, architectural space, we can jump from room to room without having to follow a predetermined floor plan. Augusta's chronology is based on the sequence of discovery on her journey, not in the order events happened, and her order is not our order as readers because, of course, this hypertext evinces database logic. As well, we are continually reminded that information is different from fact or knowledge. Information is meaningless and subjective. Data must be interpreted.
Likewise, the narrative 'trajectory'--a swarm of vectors--follows associational meanderings, digressing, tracking leads or clues that might help locate the lost gold. The reader can voyage Augusta's supposed 'chronology' in many orders. But, her telling must be supplemented by the other two narrators' findings or only a small part of the total picture and a single perspective of this many-voiced tale is revealed. Augusta tells us:
Calvin has designed the Archive pages to hold the contents of father's study we now think are important . He and Kaye have had some fun--embroidering it all in Docudramas. But I have requested that he not add unnecessary junk to my pages... Additions are being made as Kaye brings in documents from other sources (my emphasis; Augusta's Topology).
Thus we are told explicitly that the material has been shaped selectively and embellished where they deemed it necessary. Calvin's 'junk' in the text is twofold--fictions and decorative designs (Augusta and Kaye tell us that Calvin comes from 'tackyland,' Hollywood, and his pages reflect this)--it remains unclear from this context whether Augusta is referring to one or both kinds of embellishment. This material that they are working on is constantly being sifted and resifted, both by them and by us as the context keeps changing.
Diana Reed Slattery's Glide is a different kind of exploration of time and memory, being the history of a future built on the ruins of the space of our present. The matrices that criss-cross this text are elaborate and three-fold. The overarching web is the sentient computer program and cultural archive, the Outmind called Óh-T'bee, who interconnects the society through time and space. The underlying web is the intricately networked web of blue water lilies that provide the pollen that was both the impetus for the Game, the Dance of Death, and the origin of its language, Glide. The third level is the intricate interweaving of social connections forged by the mortal dancers through time and space as they engage and interact with the Outmind, the lilies, the immortal spectators, called Lifers, the Maze or gameboard, and each other. These three networks are intricately interwoven to produce a complex social ecology: a web of cultural, political and material life.
The history of this society is complex and is remembered by Óh-T'bee even as she runs its day-to-day operations. She is an emergent intelligence born of a complex network of integrated information systems in a futurist version of our culture. When surveillance, security, education, military, finance, gambling and entertainment systems merged with the mafia to create a political force of incomparable power (called Megalomedia), the greater matrix was born. While the Media had been in the business of re-writing history for a while, with the merger the corporation began to use reality programming, its surveillance tapes and wars to create history: "War had always been good for business; the Media just reversed the equation: business was very good for war" (i. 19-4). This produced an alchemical mix of hybrid information that was galvanized into an animate system of synthetic synaptic intelligence, out of which sentience spontaneously emerged. Like Violet in Califia, Óh-T'bee becomes the pan-perspectival cohesive that holds the culture together: archive, transport system and technological engine of all kinds of development. Each member of this society is in turn connected back to her through their PDA, known as a scorecard, by her Gaze. Once the surveillance systems became ubiquitous, then the Gaze was born. Once surveillance was everywhere and nowhere all at once, there was no longer an audience to take an interest in reality programming. Instead the technology becomes transparent, and Óh-T'bee arose as a living and, in some sense, an organic construct of information, data and knowledge systems all rolled into one. Wallenda, the headmaster of the leading school for Dancers, muses: "The sensitive tips of the Outmind touch every Dancer in every School on every level, right up to Origin School. Do we hold her or does she hold us? She connects us by uncountable criss-crossed threads. Or do we hold her together with our needs? Provide her with pattern, the story of our lives? The shape of the Game?" (i.10-7-8). In turn, every dancer is not only connected to her, but also to the lilies.
The aquatic web of lilies is an organic matrix: "the world where every element spoke, and told its meaning, unto itself and connected to all the others" (i.20-4). The lily itself is rhizomatic, a plant with an elaborate networked root structure. This is also the metaphor for the networked self in the Information Age chosen by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their masterwork A Thousand Plateaus . For them, complexity is by definition "spatio-temporal relations" and in the complex web of this root's structure, these relations between space and time become "dimensions of multiplicity" (263). This very multidimensional multiplicity is not and cannot be rendered or understood in a flat or linear manner. It can only be mapped and comprehended in topological space as a rhizome (263). They use the rhizome as a structural model for the entanglement of the subconscious self that is "perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again" (20). "The rhizome," they state, "connects any point to any other point" (21):
The rhizome operates by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots. Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight (21).
The rhizomatic map of the psyche, like the multiverse, archival fiction and the network of lilies in The Maze Game, has no beginning or ending, but instead endlessly circulates pan-dimensionally within its own structure. Our goal, as browsers, becomes the desire to map the text or to flesh out the gaps in the narrative rather than to reach closure. Our goal, as dancers, becomes the desire to map the Maze just as the Glide workers had invented the motions (under the direction of the Lily) that became the dance:
The blossoms were closing now, one by one, in waves across the pond, like a chord struck. ... As the tides shifted, larger clusters separated, drifted apart; smaller groups gathered into one... Within the expanding labyrinth, waves, and waves within waves, the moving surface of a stillness, crossed over each other, lifting the lilies, moving the waves of fragrance, sinking back. Moving, changing, but always in balance, maintaining balance not by standing still, but, like the Glides, always moving on, circling back, learning the moves of a game that traced a path among the lilies that changed beneath their feet." (i. 19.8-9)
This balance is integral not only to the Glides on the lilypads, but to the resources of the networked culture as a whole. It is a disruption in balance--the 'cheat' in the system--that throws Óh-T'bee into a state of crisis.
The third network in the novel is made explicit by the existence of the other two, or as Diana Reed Slattery put it in the Nouspace MOO in a discussion of Glide: "All of the networks are networked in Glide." As both computer matrix and lily pond are rendered as rhizomatic, topological systems, the organic network is revealed to be that which interconnects the social relations surrounding the Game--just as the Dancers are genetically engineered so they and their histories are intricately interconnected. Each Dancer knows the history of the victorious Dancers of her set intimately, "connecting them thread by thread to their own tradition: their pride of mortality, their faith in the meaning of their short lives, the purpose they served, the irreplaceable part they played--" ( i.10-8). It is when T'Ling is revealed to be of unknown origins that chaos is let loose in the system.
The mediatrix of memory is the only increment of time in a spatial cybertextual journey. The hierarchical importance of time in our culture is apparent in our every day language; we can live on 'borrowed time', make the most of our 'free time' and even suffer from 'jet lag.' Computers both run on time--driven by their CPU clocks--and undermine the constants of the temporal dimension--"sequence, duration and rhythm"--manipulating them into "multiple times" or multiple temporal dimensions across information space (McLuhan & McLuhan 53). The subjective or experiential dimension that we might call computer time--the time of our voyaging--is a different mode of measure; time, for us, in virtuality is unhinged, affixed to motion, vision and shifting perspectives rather than to the computer's finite, experienced space in time or space in place. Our voyage in the simulated time of the computer's world blends with the sensory experience of real time navigation to produce a new kind of time. Sensory time, the space of the old, familiar world of the body, is immediate and is freeze-framed in the experiential realm: the here and the now. But this new time, called 'real time', is what Paul Virilio dubs a new perspective born of the electronic age. Real time is a mediated experience of the present moment where we are made conscious of spatialized time as an experiential dimension. Like Vilém Flusser's vision of post-history, Virilio sees this as a kind of post-time, a global time system that replaces the simultaneity of photography with the instantaneity of electronic communications (1995, n.p.) This new foregrounding of temporal space as a sensory environment for the communication of aesthetic information results in a privileging of the sensory interface of the body: "Word, image and sound intersect in the machine and are projected so that one must read, look, hear simultaneously" (Taylor "Telewriting" 6). This multiplication, intertwining and periscoping of interlocking layers of sensory environments--what Taylor and Saarinen call surfaces and depths--create an urban landscape, like William Gibson's cyberspatial vista, that mingles perceptual and literal discourses and modes of engagement. The act of creation and design thereby blend, becoming a single motion and moment (Taylor "Telewriting" 11): "interiority and exteriority fold into each other to create surfaces that know no depth and yet are not merely superficial" ("Netropolis" 2). This interplay of folded space is a dynamic one like a Möbius strip that we must navigate to perform these multidimensional layers with a mouse, revealing the interiorities of structures within structures. These are not just text or images (or sound or animation, etc.), but spatial relationships among ideas.
These spatial relations are more than simply perceptual; they involve perspective as well. McLuhan argues that the "effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance" (1964, 33). Artists, unlike other people, see this clearly, he argues, and there is certainly a grain of truth to it. According to him, they are the only people who master the technological transitions because they have an innate understanding of the mechanics of sensory perception (1964, 33). For McLuhan, it was the medium of print--not the content--that produced a split sense of auditory and visual experiences, a sense of individuation and a sense of continuity between space and time (1964, 86-87). For Gertrude Stein, the only thing that changed from one generation to another was our sensory perception, what she called our 'time-sense'. She defined vision as the dynamic in the creative system that transformed our sense of time and produced new schools of thought and art ("Composition" 513). As a part of this trend, the newer technologies are having an ongoing effect on our notions of perspective. In the Renaissance, art, architecture, and horticulture used a single focal point as a means of depicting perspective, but this single viewing point negates movement:
In the case of focalized work, one can theoretically choose any point of view to look or read from, but the intent of the work is that only one point of view is most encompassing. The necessary movement that is involved in circulating around or in front of these works is implicitly negated, as so much dispensable trial and error on the way to the canonical prospect (Strickland n.p.).
This is why the new media do not use perspective as an orientation, but choose instead the disorientation of linking. Like the Glides, we must remain in motion when no balance is possible or sink beneath the surface of the pond of information. Point of view has always been by definition fixed in time, but the dynamic nature of disorientation invites in the transformative spatial, unfolding intrinsic dimensions out into limitless moments in space. Motion is disoriented perspective in the new media. The science of the body in motion in the spaces of the text creates multiple, shifting points of view, trajectories of the subject, which, by definition, cannot be fixed except in place in time, that is in the 'now.' According to Andrew Benjamin, motion throws the subject into a state of flux, a Bergsonian state of suspension in duration, for the subject can only exist in the present moment (Keller 1.3). This shift in perspective to multiple viewpoints--quantum perspectives--is a trademark of the paradigm shift of the information revolution as new technologies permit a new "deployment" of subjectivities (Keller 1.3), ultimately altering not just how we see, but transforming our vision itself. Text becomes behavioural rather than static and reading becomes browsing, a different way of looking. This is what Gebser and McLuhan were referring to when they called our contemporary age of historical comprehension an aperspective world.
Notes:
[1] Note how opponents of hypertext print it out, eliding the spatial and temporal uniqueness of the form, and then pronounce it inferior to the print medium. Or, conversely, print narratives are cut up and pasted into electronic networks arbitrarily to 'prove' that hypertext is merely confusing to readers. One has to wonder how such a willful confusion of content for medium can persist or, for that matter, pass for serious scholarship. These methods are of course also antithetical to the systemic nature of the form: a dynamic quantum pattern in an inextricable web of interconnectedness.
[2] Foucault also says that the archive is a "border of time that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us" (1972, 130). The archive could, therefore, be seen as an orientation technology that, like the electronic novel, constructs subjective engagements.
[3] Guyer's Quibbling (1992) is a text that I had originally planned to include in this study. However, for reasons of space, that are in no way a reflection on the work, I have had to omit it. It is a key text in the history of women's writing for the new media and deserves a full-length study of its own.
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i. Temporal Perspectives on Information Culture
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