Matt asked me to elaborate on some things following my presentation on narrative and database last Wednesday.
For initial comments, read on. Or to skip directly to the "creative component," follow this URL [NOTE: the material is kind of R-rated. So if you're in a G-rated kind of mood...]:
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~byrnejo/querido/
Text proper starts here.
I’m a big-time narrative guy. Before beginning the doctoral program at Maryland, I was in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Maryland. I have one novel nearly finished and hope to write quite a few more. At the same time, I make my living as a practitioner of the digital arts, as a graphic and web designer, and in addition have a number of “new media” projects in the works. All this (narrative) is to say is that I’m very deeply invested in the distinctions and relationship between narrative and database that our friend Lev Manovich discusses in The Language of New Media.
Initially, when I read Manovich’s chapter on narrative and database, I was a confused. I found him a little fast-and-loose with his terms and his argumentation muddy. After all, he calls database and narrative “correlates” (218), “complementary” (223), and “symbiotic” (223), but then later calls them “natural enemies” (225) and “two competing imaginations…two essential responses to the world” (233). So are they symbiotic or natural enemies? Or could they be both, symbiotic enemies, as it were? I think just that possibility alone is enough to forgive Manovich his verbal prestidigitation and spur one to slog through his muddy argumentation. And then find that perhaps he is not so tricky, and his argumentation not so muddy, after all.
From my reading, there are three different ways to see the relationship between narrative and database.
1. One is a parallel, non-interacting relationship. This, of course, is the traditional—or pre-digital-age—relationship between the narrative and database. I do my work on the computer, creating a web page using a number of different multimedia elements, dipping into myriads of databases as I do so; but when I want a narrative, I step away from the computer and I pick up a book—Jane Austen’s Emma, for instance—and read. In this sense, the database and the narrative are “two competing imaginations.”
2. But, as we know, we can’t keep these two competing imaginations from stepping on each other’s toes. It’s possible, even, to teach them how to dance with each other. This is the second way of looking at the relationship between database and narrative: as an interactive, “complementary” relationship. It is a relationship between a database and an algorithm that acts upon that database. Manovich cites the computer game as an example of such a relationship. “In a game, the player is given a well-defined task—winning the match, being first in a race, reaching the last level, or attaining the highest score. It is this task that allows the player to experience the game as a narrative” (222). The task is an algorithm that constructs a story-line for the player, out of the possibilities offered by the game-makers and/or masters, said possibilities comprising the database.
For Manovich, the exemplar par excellence for this interactive relationship is film. “Cinema already exists right at the intersection between database and narrative,” (237). This is particularly true of the film editing process, as the editor creates a narrative by splicing together film-stock. “During editing, the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films that could have been constructed,” (237).
I have two small quibbles with this particular part of Manovich’s discussion. One is that he cites Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera as the ultimate example of the merging of narrative and database. But then, in doing so, he seems to conflate “narrative” with “argument”: “Vertov’s film [is] motivated by a particular argument, which is that the new techniques of obtaining images and manipulating them…can be used to decode the world.” I have no problem with this argument except to say that it is an argument and not a narrative per se. I do not find Manovich’s conflation helpful—rather the opposite: the relationship between rhetoric and database is quite different than that between narrative and database, and deserves its own realm of discussion.
My second quibble is this: if a film editor can create a narrative out of a database of film-stock (or, more figuratively, “a unique trajectory through...conceptual space ”), than why can’t a book editor (including the author-as-editor) create a book out of a database of words, themes, genres, or so-called grand, or cultural, narratives? In this sense, the narrative-database relationship pre-dates the new media moment, which is partially what I was trying to get at with our in-class exercise.
3. A third way of discussing the relationship between database and narrative is to see their roles reversed. This brings us to the discussion of paradigm and syntagm, and Manovich’s insight that in new media, the two switch places. In new media, the “[d]atabase (the paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialized” (231).
I thought our work in class, looking at the two different 9-11 websites (particularly "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood") showed quite well how this works. Instead of being given upfront an authored, or “authorized,” story, we’re given a database of stories to choose from, from which we (the reader) must do most of the heavy-lifting, narratively-speaking. In that sense, the author is really the constructor of the database, and the reader is the constructor of the story. This foregrounds the freedom of the reader, but also strips the “authority” from the author, such that in new media we may need to discard the term “author” altogether—which is, as Foucault pointed out, merely a social construct after all, which chimerically changes (or disappears) given differing social realities.
Which finally brings me to the “creative component” of this discussion, mentioned above. Manovich’s insight on the paradigm-syntagm reversal in new media has caused me to re-work one of my primitive new media creations. I “published” it online a few months ago, and spent a lot of time thinking about the multimedia aspect of the project (photographs at this stage), but very little on the database aspect—until now. Inspired by Manovich, I’ve created another version of my story, one which foregrounds the database and backgrounds the linear story-line, creating in effect another “interface” to my database of narrative “possibilities.” I offer to you the option of choosing the linear version or the database version. You may make your choice by following the link below.
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~byrnejo/querido/
Posted by Joseph at March 13, 2004 04:49 PMThe story is fantastic. I'm forwarding it to a friend who just had an intense doomed love affair in Buenos Aires. Something about that city!
I think that Manovich gives a lot of elasticity to the term "narrative," perhaps too much... it doesn't always end up meaning "story," more sort of "linear chain of events." I'm still kind of enamored of the idea that, instead of database and narrative (both of which terms depend on existing media), we should talk about the spatial and temporal forms of new media. The "database" version of your story is thus spatial -- we can see all the events laid out in a grid, without a path -- and the "narrative" version is temporal -- we see it in order. Even if we were able to choose entirely what order to pieces were viewed in without having to go back to the main database, the path would still be temporal because it would comprise the order in which we viewed the elements. Of course, the "database" that Manovich refers to isn't always strictly spatial -- I mean, it's often only an implied database, and is never viewed even in virtual space. So I guess what I'm saying is that database is a new media object figured in three dimensions, and narrative is the same object figured in four.
Posted by: Jess at March 15, 2004 02:39 PMManovich's articulation of the competition between narrative imagination and a database imagination is a neat way of encapsulating a lot of the anxieties that come with "digital studies." We come to Susquehanna hall because we're narrative people; database people spend their time curing cancer and whatnot. (That's obviously a simplificiation and a generalization, and Joseph points to some ways in which the two terms are really much more fluid in their relationship; but bear with me.)
For my part, I'm fascinated by what might be called a database _aesthetic_. Not data but our _representations_ of data ("lines of light, like city lights receding"). You see this on the Atlas of Cyberspace site--if you think these images are "cool" that's more than just an incidental response. Clusters and constellations of data, Borgesian labyrinths of encylopedic lore forming and reforming in the reticulations of the network (i.e., Google's inexorable pages of ranked hits, line after line of effortlessly articulated paratextual commentary), virtual worlds without end . . . this isn't just about "access" to "information" (there's that transcendental signifier again)--it's about a representational shift, lodged in the tuples and arrays marking postmodern computer science that's arguably as fundamental as the advent of linear perspective in the Renaissance.
We're already beginning to see the beginnings of database _art_ (check out www.potatoland.org for example); how might we begin to talk about a database aesthetic?
{Very nice, Joe. Jess and I spent a bit talking about the site at coffee house the other night. I'm wondering if the site can be set up to further highlight the database/narrative tension. Thanks for sharing. Poignant.}
Posted by: ED at March 17, 2004 11:20 AMAs I read this piece I was thinking of Maonovich's claim that "although interactive interfaces make explicit paradigmatic sets, they are still organized along the syntagmatic dimension" (232). After viewing the database version of Joseph's piece, I have to question if that's true. Suppose you were to just view the set of pictures without the accompanying text. The pictures could be arrranged in a number of different ways, according to a number of different criteria, like the size or color of the objects contained within the picture or the presence of a certain person within the picture. Creating a narrative may not be the intent at all, yet each different arrangement would indeed result in a narrative of some sort. In this case, the syntagmatic organization is the result of the database output, not the cause of it. Or maybe the syntagm and the paeradigm are one and the same.
Posted by: Christina at March 17, 2004 06:06 PM