I use the word constellation with a nod to Benjamin and Adorno, among others, then, but it’s different here in new media. How? Crucially, because this particular constellation has been coded, because the linking structure, however complex, is saved in computer memory, I can return to it, and I can share it with you.

In the case of my dissertation, the web of original lexias, quotations, and imagery and sound put into conversation was held together by more than 17,000 links. While it is sometimes assumed that “links are directly analogous to prose transitions, page sequence or other connective structures in print” (Slatin, 871), as Burbules points out, there are different kinds of links that signal different kinds of associations: metaphors, metonymy, association not by similarity but by contiguity, synecdoche, antistasis, identity and catachresis: “novel, strange instances might spark reflections just as revealing and delightful as those one recognizes more readily” (111). The linking structure, in other words, was an integral part of the intellectual work necessary to produce the text.

Indeed, the linking structure – the ability of this writing technology to hold the all-at-onceness of theory as we build it, to communicate this constellation of ideas, and crucially, to have readers encounter and explore them (though never unmediated, of course) – is, I believe, one of the most theoretically interesting aspects of hypertext writing.

I associate this hypertext, in part, with the scaffolding of the academic enterprise, the unconscious of the philosophical line, whose communication, I suggest, has real academic, theoretical, and aesthetic value: the concretization of a web of signification – the constellation of ideas held aloft by the technology through its linking structure. While it’s true that much digital work is increasingly televisual, time-based, and linear, that many new texts employ software like Flash and Director in ways that do not showcase classic hypertextual structure, and that some texts consist solely of unordered lists, in my own work and in the work of many others, links continue to be crucial to the writing/thinking practice. It is for this reason that simply learning to read archives or databases will not always be enough.

It won’t be enough because to concentrate only on the dataset in our reading practices is potentially to miss the structure coded by the author and to miss entering into a relationship with that artful labour. This structure is what I’m calling the thought sculpture – the invisible intellectual labour that demands a new kind of literacy and one that risks remaining unintelligible to readers even though its contours have been given what we might call a certain kind of materiality through coding. This is a very important innovation, then: conceiving of the navigational apparatus not simply as a way to get around the text, but the navigational apparatus itself as a signifying component of the text (Hayles). And so we need to focus on finding ways to make the digital constellation intelligible to us. We will learn to read archives and datasets, yes, but we must also explore ways to teach ourselves to read and write and theorize the navigational apparatus, this thought sculpture, too – its contours, its grammar, its possibilities … its poetry.