I. Databases
My doctoral dissertation, Building Feminist Theory: Hypertextual Heuristics, explored the intersection of feminist and hypermedia theories and was written in HTML and a software program called Storyspace for stand-alone CD-ROM. It was an exploration, in hypertext, of the resonances and productive couplings between digital writing technologies and feminist theories and the dissertation used feminist and hypertext theories to build a new kind of text, a text that sought a form homologous with excentric knowedges.

Implicit in the title was the claim that the process of shaping this hypertext was itself a form of feminist theory production – that theory was “built” both by the structure of the dissertation and as an effect of reading. For example, the reader was challenged to choose her own pathways through the material from among many others I had coded; to build the text from fragments. No two readers were likely to have read the same screens in the same order.

I think of this text as my text of jouissance, which Barthes identifies as “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts,” that “unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, . . . [and] brings to a crisis his [sic] relation with language” (14). In other words, it was a text that very few people seemed to enjoy. Two years ago when hypermedia theorist Lev Manovich published his much anticipated book The Language Of New Media, I returned to my doctoral work to think about the “unpleasure” I had caused.

In his book, Manovich posits the database as the culture’s new symbolic form and the unordered list, the archive etc., as a challenge to traditional narrative. He goes so far as to suggest that “database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (225). He goes further to suggest that we may even call the database a new symbolic form of the computer age, a new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world.

Building Feminist Theory was composed of over fourteen hundred lexias, or screens of text. While I wrote my dissertation long before Manovich published this piece, a database was, in effect, what I had produced – a large database and instructions for reading across it. In short, one of the things I had learned in the process of producing Building Feminist Theory: Hypertextual Heuristics was to answer the call of the new symbolic form. In terms of emerging literacies, then, I agree with Manovich that we must learn or relearn to read archives and databases.