II. Thought Sculptures
But my own work wasn’t simply a database.

One of the first things I came to know when I began to share my dissertation widely with readers was that, more often than not, my readers read nodes and not links; these reluctant bricoleurs read the words and quotations, the elements of the database, but not its structure or associative method of organization.

The lexias or screens full of text were understood as the “real” content of the dissertation and the structure itself – its contours, its conventions, new ground I’d hoped it might break – was largely unintelligible to many of them. For some months I understood the work as a catalogue of losses – the loss of polemic, of certain kinds of rhetorical gestures, of mastery.

While I believe even now we can begin to talk about a new grammar and aesthetics of digital media, I had undertheorized, I think, the ways in which readers – expert readers of linear texts – would experience this hypertextual work.

The intellectual core of the hypertext, and one of the most interesting aspects of hypertextual writing to my mind, is the constellation of ideas held aloft by the technology – the linked and coded concretization of the weaver’s constellation I visualize as a thought sculpture. I have always seen my texts as three dimensional, sculptural. Perhaps this is why linear forms always felt one step removed from my writing process. I would build a set of notes with many linkages and then work hard to flatten it all out again to construct a persuasive, two-dimensional essay form. My understanding of the constellation and its philosophical and political importance emerges from my reading of the Frankfurt school: when we want to understand an object of interest – in the case of my doctoral work, for example, feminist hypertext theory – we must not look directly at the object, fetishizing the concept. For Walter Benjamin, the constellation is a multidimensional form: the arrangement or configuration in which a variety of concepts, models, ideas or other materials takes shape (in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” for example). In Adorno’s extension of the idea, the constellation holds contradictions in tension and is addressed this way: “as a constellation theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers” (163). Sounds very hypertextual.