Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines - N. Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles English Department University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles CA 90095-1530 Narrating Bits: Encounters between Humans and Intelligent Machines Thanks to Lev Manovich’s seminal discussion in The Language of New Media, database and narrative are now often considered to be in a competitive relation with one another. Important as Manovich’s analysis has been in launching a productive line of inquiry, his construction of the narrative/database dyad is nevertheless plagued by certain intractable problems. The centrality of the narrative/database dynamic to new media, and especially to electronic literature, makes rethinking it an urgent concern. Addressing the problems in Manovich’s analysis opens the way to a different view of the relation and a crucial re-positioning of it. In this essay I propose an alternative interpretation of the narrative/database configuration as a dynamic between narrative and a new term that I call possibility space. I develop the epistemological and ontological implications of this configuration through close attention to narrative theory and expand the theoretical scope of interactions in which the dynamic can engage. The result, I argue, is a more nuanced and powerful set of terms with the potential significantly to revise contemporary understandings of narrative. In addition, the re-defined and re-positioned dynamic proves a flexible, wide-ranging framework through which to understand experimental contemporary practices in both print and electronic literature. One set of problems arises from slippages in the way Manovich deploys the term “database.” His initial usage references database in its technical sense: “database is defined as a structured collection of data. The data stored in a database is organized for

2 fast search and retrieval by a computer and therefore, it is anything but a simple collection of items” (218). As his argument progresses, however, he moves from this technical definition to a much broader sense of the term, as when he acknowledges that “not all new media objects are explicitly databases” (221), but he nevertheless treats them as such by conflating databases with “data structures” (223). The ambiguities deepen when he announces that “as a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list” (225), a characterization at odds with his earlier recognition that a database must order its terms according to specified parameters to be searchable. In his argument’s later stages, databases become indistinguishable from data, as when he claims that narratives within new media environments “on the level of material organization . . . are all databases” (228). As a result of these slippages, he is able to claim that databases can be found in any computer environment whatever, making them virtually ubiquitous.1 Narrative, by contrast, is by and large limited in Manovich’s description to its appearance in formal art objects such as novels, films, and to a lesser extent computer games. Only so is he able to conclude that the surprise is not the pervasiveness of databases but “why the other end of the spectrum—narratives—still exist in new media” (228). This construction ignores the pervasiveness of narrative in everyday life. Jerome Bruner, for example, highlights research indicating that a mother typically tells her young child some kind of narrative about twenty times an hour, or roughly once every three minutes. Narrative figures prominently virtually everywhere humans communicate and congregate—in TV news, Sunday sermons, family reunions, coffee breaks, city buses, gossip, and much more, so it is no surprise to find it everywhere on the Web as well,

3 from chat rooms and blogs to news sites and email. Moreover, Manovich claims that new media objects “on the level of material organization” “are all databases” (11). In human history, narratives are much older than electronic databases and considerably older than databases in any form. Many anthropologists argue that narratives may be nearly as old as humanity itself, as suggested by the narratives structures emerging from pre-history through myth, epic poetry, and creation stories.2 One of the purposes narrative may have served in human evolution is its implicit ability to create models of other minds and, more generally, models of the world. In its emphasis on causality, agency and temporal progression, narrative provides not just specific explanations but frameworks for explanations that allow people to understand and predict how other people and the world around them will act and react. Seen in this light, narrative in its historical and evolutionary role was a powerful tool for shaping as well as expressing human subjectivity and sociality—and it remains so today. By contrast, databases are much newer and depend for their widespread importance on the ability to collect and organize data as well as transmit, search and retrieve it. Although one could point to encyclopedias dating back to the classical period as early forms of databases, as Manovich does, it was not until the eighteenth century and the birth of statistics that databases in their modern sense emerged in census records, medical data, and the like.3 Moreover, it was not until the twentieth century, and especially the advent of the digital computer, that databases became central cultural forms.4 Although databases are indeed pervasive in the contemporary period, as Manovich says, they should not be seen as identical with data. On the contrary, the very qualities that make them indispensable for some problems also virtually insure they will

4 be more or less unsatisfactory for others. No sooner is a database established than users discover its limitations, for it allows searches only according to the specified parameters, and users invariably discover other ways in which they want to interrogate the data in ways impossible with the given database form.5 Connolly and Begg, for example, in their influential textbook Database Systems give “some cold facts about database software development projects by corporations,” including that 80-90% do not meet their performance goals, 80% are delivered late and over budget, 40% fail or are abandoned, and less than 40% fully address training and skills requirements (270). Although humans design and build databases, databases are brought into the world as artifacts through technologies of data compilation, storage, transmission and retrieval, which have their own constraints and possibilities deeply affecting how databases are built. In this sense the database has two parents, as it were, and both affect the offspring’s nature—the humans whose needs the database serves, and the machines that create and implement it.6 One way to look at the contemporary database, then, is as a site where the encounter between humans and intelligent machines is performed and enacted in precisely defined ways that are, moreover, designed for mass consumption rather than creative uses. The database is a cognitive framework for dialogue between its two parents, a staging ground where two very different modes of thought interact, sometimes productively, sometimes with frustrating miscommunication and inefficiency. But databases are only part of the story. Paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld’s notorious remark, we can characterize information using three categories: data that are known (in his redundant formulations, known knowns), data that are known to exist but about which no information is currently available (known unknowns), and data that are

5 neither foreseen in general outline nor known in particular (unknown unknowns).7 A database contains only data that is known and instantiated in a particular form. It does not contain other information expressed in modes of organization foreign to its specific structure, nor does it contain anything currently thought but unknown in particular, or even more revealingly, anything that is both unthought and unknown.8 The database, in short, represents only a small slice of actual and potential data. A more capacious term, possibility space, allows room for all three of these epistemological categories. In a narrative context, knowns correspond to the content of the narration. Known unknowns refer to outcomes possible within the world the narrative delineates but not articulated within a given narrative. For example, someone chooses the door concealing the lady, which leads to a certain outcome; although he does not choose the door concealing the tiger and so that outcome is not narrated, it is a known possibility and hence a known unknown. Unknown unknowns refer to possibilities that could appear within a narrative system but are neither explicitly articulated nor anticipated as possible outcomes. Any narrative system capable of generating emergent phenomena can create unknown unknowns, for the very idea of emergence implies that the interaction of multiple agents and components can result in unanticipated behaviors at the global level that can not be predicted from the parts alone. Computer simulations generating narrative content are examples of narrative systems that can produce emergent phenomena if appropriately structured. These systems are data generators, not databases. Shifting the emphasis from database to possibility space enables both a more precise and deeper comparison with narrative. Because the term is capacious, it allows us

6 to understand in broader ways its epistemological categories and their ontological implications. In addition, it encourages us to think of narrative not as a natural enemy but a co-evolution partner in creating complex conceptual ecologies in which many different kinds of relationships are possible. These include competition, of course, but also cooperation, symbiosis, parasitism, hyperparasitism, and so on. Having sketched out the functions that the term “possibility space” can serve, I turn now to compare its implications with the assumptions embedded in traditional narrative theory. As we shall see, juxtaposing possibility space with narrative suggests crucial modifications when it is conceived as the “other” of narrative.

Assumptions Embedded in Narrative Theory The binary established by the Russian formalists of fabula and sjuzhet followed the distinction, dating back to what Gerard Genette calls the “pre-history” of narratology, of story and plot.9 Mieke Bal defines fabula as the “material or content that is worked into a story,” while the story itself is “defined as a series of events” (7). This definition is more or less echoed by Genette, Seymour Chatman, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, and others. The sjuzhet, on the other hand, is the order of appearance of the events in the work itself, or at Chatman, quoting Boris Tomaskevsky, puts it, “’how the reader becomes aware of what happened’” (20). Different theorists transpose these older terms into binaries with slightly different inflections, including story and discourse (Chatman), fabula and story (Bal), and story and narrative (Genette), who sees both these terms deriving from a third term, narrating. As these examples show, there is no consistent terminology; Chatman’s story corresponds to Bal’s fabula, while her story corresponds to

7 his discourse. In the interest of clarity, therefore, I will use the older formalist terms fabula and sjuzhet, which at least have the virtue of avoiding confusion. Virtually every major theorist of narratology has emphasized that only the sjuzhet is literally present in the text; the fabula is a contingent construction created by the competent reader, aided by her tacit knowledge of narrative and cultural codes. Complementing the claim by structuralists that fabulas show consistent deep structures across genres and time periods (folk tales, myths, dramas, etc. in different eras), narratologists tend to focus on sjuzhet, either implying or explicitly claiming that the form of the narrative comprises a system capable of signifying meaning, over and above what the fabula or content of the narrative conveys. Genette is cautiously emphatic on this point: while many critics concern themselves with the analysis of narrative content, narratology as such, considered as a theoretical discourse, “remains (provisionally?) the property solely of the analysts of narrative mode” (1998, 16). So much is this the case that Rimmon-Kenan, writing a chapter on the fabula (in her terms, story), feels compelled to explain her decision to treat the fabula in isolation. “Users cannot produce or decipher stories without some (implicit) competence in respect of narrative structure, i.e. in something which survives paraphrase or ‘translation,’” which fact she uses to justify as a “working hypothesis” the “preliminary assumption that story-structure or narrativity is isolatable.” She is quick to add, however, that this “does not amount to granting any undisputed priority, whether logical or ontological, to story over text (if forced to decide, I would rather opt for the latter)” (8). Nevertheless, as Rimmon-Kenan’s “working hypothesis” suggests, the readerly activity of constructing a fabula from the sjuzhet is ubiquitous in literary criticism and in

8 reading generally. Once constructed in the reader’s imagination, the fabula is then, in a backward feedback loop, used to interpret and understand the sjuzhet. Consider Benjy’s narrative in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury; has anyone made sense of this sjuzhet without constructing a fabula that allows a translation of sorts to take place? Many other narrative fictions, particularly postmodern and experimental novels, illustrate the point, including such major works as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Joseph McElroy’s Plus. Even narratologists rely on this dynamic; the very fact that they continually remind their readers that the fabula does not exist in the text testifies to the strength of the illusion. Less disciplined by narratological theory than these critics, many readers derive from their work of fabula-construction the inference that the sjuzhet is somehow the “distortion” of the fabula that must be straightened out fully to comprehend the text. In this sense, the fabula is seen as more robust, more ontologically grounded, than the sjuzhet, which is interpreted as a view of the fabula seen through a lens that never renders it exactly as it would be “in reality.” The scare quotes are meant to gesture toward the obvious, that the “reality” of a narrative fiction is an invention. Yet in the emphasis on causality, agency, and consistency of the relation between narrating and narrator, narratives mimic those qualities of reality that make it susceptible to systemic analysis, which is to say, those qualities that make reality “real.” Chatman is eloquent on this characteristic of narratives. Asserting that narratives have qualities of wholeness, transformation, and self-regulation, he argues that every transformation must yield another possibility within the narrative system and not something outside that system. “Only certain possibilities can occur. Further, the narrative will not admit events or other kinds of phenomena that

9 do not ‘belong to it and preserve its laws.’ Of course certain events or existents that are not immediately relevant may be brought in. But at some point their relevance must emerge, otherwise we object that the narrative is ‘ill-formed’” (21-22). Contrasting narratives with random bits of cocktail chatter, he says that if we assembled such excerpts, we “would clearly not have a narrative (unless we insisted upon inferring one . . . ). The events in a true narrative, on the other hand, ‘come on the scene as already ordered,’ in Piaget’s phrase. Unlike a random agglomerate of events, they manifest a discernible organization” (21). In this view, orderliness is not merely inherent in the form of narratives but actually constitutes a narrative as such. Whatever a narrative’s content, then, its form implies a stable ontology for the arena in which it operates and in this sense generates a more or less stable ontology expressed through the reader’s construction of its fabula. Moreover, the inextricable entwining of fabula and sjuzhet guarantees that this will always be an ontology constituted through, and indissociable from, the subjectivity (or subjectivities) “seeing” and “saying” the world. In the very act of interpreting the “distortions” that the sjuzhet implies, readers interpolate another assumption, namely that those “distortions” shed light on the perceptions and mind of the narrator and/or focalizer, as appropriate to the narrative situation. Indeed, Mieke Bal puts this activity at the center of her theory of narrative. “To talk about narrators . . . is to impute agency to a subject of narration, even if this subject is not to be identified with the narrator. Actors, in the fabula, are the subjects of action. This attention paid to subjectivity is, indeed, the basic tenet of the theory presented in this book. It is meant to insist on the complex manner in which narrative communicates” (11). Moreover—and this is so obvious that

10 it falls below the radar of most narratologists—the subjectivity constituted through the act of narrating is presumed to be human (leaving aside those rare narratives that purport to be written with a non-human narrator and/or focalizer, in which cases it could be argued that they inevitably import anthropomorphic assumptions and indeed must to so to be legible to human readers). The human sensibility informing narratives comes close to the surface in Genette when he puts himself on record as denying the possibility that there could be a narrative without a narrator. Narrative without a narrator, the utterance without an uttering, seems to me pure illusion. . . . I can only therefore set against its devotees this regretful confession: ‘Your narrative without a narrator may perhaps exist, but for the forty-seven years during which I have been reading narratives, I have never met one.’ Regretful is, moreover, a term of pure politeness, for if I were to meet such a narrative, I would flee as quickly as my legs could carry me: when I open a book, whether it is a narrative or not, I do so to have the author speak to me (1998, 101). To recapitulate where this (de)tour through narratology has taken us, we can say that narrative through its conjunction of fabula and sjuzhet implies the existence of a more or less stable ontology, whatever its content; that ontology is inextricably tied up with the subjectivities of the minds seeing and saying the world; and those subjectivities are human (or human-inflected). No doubt these are some of the qualities Manovich had in mind when he argued that database and narrative are natural enemies. What happens to this dynamic, and the assumptions embedded in narrative theory and narrative itself, if we juxtapose narrative not to database but to the possibility space? As I shall argue, the

11 juxtaposition puts pressure on all three of the major assumptions noted above. At the same time, it creates new kinds of transformations that break open the “closed” system of narrative as it has been conceived in narrative theory. The result? Either a revision of narrative theory, or the admission of hybrid forms of which narrative theory has not taken sufficient account. Genette gestures toward this possibility when he reminds us, “Every day Nature and Culture breed thousands of ‘monsters’ that are as fit as fiddles” (1998, 129).

Versions of Possibility Spaces As indicated earlier, one version of a possibility space contains “known knowns.” Perhaps the most pervasive instance of this version is the database. When database is combined with narrative, it distorts the narrative form and pushes it toward the threshold of being “ill-formed,” at which point theorists such as Seymour Chatman question whether it can remain a narrative at all. Recall Chatman’s suggestion that the far side of that threshold can be represented by the randomness of cocktail chatter bits that have no relevance to each other. Suppose that we form a database of such conversational fragments and put them into dynamic interplay with narratives. The result would be something like Stuart Moulthrop’s Reagan Library, a hybrid form between narrative, game, and database. In Reagan Library, a user’s first visit to a screen results in a “word salad,” a mélange of fragments. Most of the fragments have been randomly assigned to the screen by an algorithm drawing on a database of such fragments. Some of the fragments, however, are anchored to that screen and become part of a coherent narrative that gradually emerges as the user visits the screen a second, third, and fourth time (small

12 squares at the screen’s bottom indicate how many times that screen has been visited). Upon the fourth visit, the screen consists of a coherent narrative that will not change further during that play of the work. This technique creates a kind of half-full/ halfempty ambiguity, for one can either view the “word salad” as richly suggestive noise stimulating creative possibilities, or an annoyance to be zipped through as soon as possible to as to get to comprehensible narrative. The characters narrate their stories in split screens, the bottom half of which are devoted to text, while the top halves are navigable images displaying clickable icons amidst enigmatic landscapes. There is no indication which icon leads to which of the four world levels (designated by the colors red, black, white, and blue), so navigation has a random element recapitulated verbally by the “word salad” of the database fragments. In performing a boundary between database and narrative that the user crosses and re-crosses many times in the course of viewing the work, Reagan Library foregrounds the respective pleasures and functionalities that database and narrative can offer. The database fragments gesture toward a large body of cultural material and invite the reader to speculate on its significance to the work; the narratives give the pleasure of participating in the virtual worlds of the characters. Since the database fragments operate according to an algorithm, the work also enacts an encounter between the human desire for stories and machine intelligence. The dynamic is suggestive of a zero-sum game, for as the narrative coherence increases, the database fragments decrease. This dynamic is complicated by the “Notes” screens, which give crucial information about the cultural, informatic, and linguistic contexts of the narratives. The more the user visits the “Notes” screen, the more the information on the screen disappears, thereby setting up an economic exchange in which fullness of

13 information must be paid for by replacing replicable machine memory with fallible human recall (that is, as the information disappears users are forced to fall back on their recollections of previous screens rather than have the computer “remember” the information for them). It is not a coincidence that individual and cultural memories are crucial issues in this work. Named for a victim of Alzheimer’s, a national institution of remembrance, and a storehouse of cultural documents, the work has many narratorcharacters whose memories are impaired or altogether gone, as if miming for us the erasures of cultural and collective memory that the Reagan era represented for many progressive thinkers. Other versions of possibility spaces are hypermedia/hypertext fictions using links and layers to create multiple reading pathways. A fairly conventional link strategy is employed in Caitlin Fisher’s These Waves of Girls, winner of the 2001 Fiction Award from the Electronic Literature Organization, which narrates coming-of-age stories for lesbian girls. Linking goes between text passages used in combination with frame graphics, sound files, and images; navigation is controlled by sidebar menus and linked words and images within the text. Strictly speaking, the work does not use a database as such to provide text, images and sounds, but rather Flash files embedded within html encoding. The effect is primarily narrative; machine intelligence enters only to complicate and extend the narrative possibilities by allowing multiple reading pathways and different narrative orderings. Significantly, the narrative content is also conventional, in the sense that the narratives are focalized on characters whose humanness is never in doubt.

14 Fisher’s text in this sense contrasts with Moulthrop’s, for in Reagan Library the characters, with their memory losses and gradual emergence amidst “noise” that seems to come from outer space, already gesture toward the posthuman. Texts like Moulthrop’s are cousins, if not siblings, to Oulipo works that use algorithms and textual constraints to generate narratives. Whether implemented in the computer or not, algorithms embody mathematical procedures and thus are foreign to the kinds of human perceptions represented in traditional narratives. It is no accident that writers interested in breaking out of the circumference of human perception generate texts that are often hybrids between database and narrative. Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (La vie mode d’emploi), with its exhaustive database-like catalogues of the contents of apartments, bookshelves, coffee tables, wall decorations and basement storehouses, employs a narrator who is made to disappear as much as possible into the anonymous, unlocatable voice that Genette identifies with zero focalization (73). Another example is John Cage’s use of “chance operations” in his linguistic compositions. Murearu, for example, was composed by subjecting passages from Henry Thoreau’s journals (particularly those having to do with music, silence, and sound) to I Ching operations, which were also used to determine the pronouns of the focalizers and the varying size and nature of the typefaces. The point of such “chance operations,” from Cage’s perspective, was to do an end-run around human intentions and thereby open the composition, and the composer, to non-human forces greater than human desire and agency could encompass. Even so human-oriented a critic as Genette feels the appeal of such procedures. Quoting from narrator’s comment in Borges’ Library of Babel that “’It is enough that a book be possible for it to exist’” (121), Genette contemplates working out a table of combinations

15 in which all possibilities for narrative would be exhausted. After commenting that “This proposition will not, I hope, be taken too literally,” he continues: “For me, what is important about it is not this or that actual combination but the combinatorial principle itself . . . [creating] constellations in which every parameter can a priori come into play with every other . . . without being in too much of a hurry to proclaim definitive incompatibilities” (1998, 129). The implication that narrative is human-bound while database gestures toward the non-human can serve as a transition from works using “known knowns” to those focusing on “known unknowns” and, at still further remove, “unknown unknowns.” For example, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia crosses and re-crosses the boundary between “known knowns” and “known unknowns.”10 Unlike the frame and link structures of These Waves of Girls, where controlling the text is easy and links are clearly identified by different colored text, Lexia to Perplexia uses multiple layers and animations to overlay text and graphics onto the initial textual surface, often obscuring text underneath. The cursor is very “nervous,” responding to minute motions that may not be intentional on the user’s part, evoking the feeling that this text is not entirely under human control. Moreover, the layered and “hidden” nature of many passages makes it likely that any given user will not be able to discover all of the text, introducing the possibility of “known unknowns”—that is, passages that are knowable in principle but not in practice. As the text moves beyond narrative into a hybrid form combining narrative fragments with graphics, cryptic announcements, and elaborate screen designs (all signifying textual components but not narrative in the usual sense), the textual content plays with voices, still recognizably human, anticipating a transformation into hybrid subjectivities where

16 “local” bodies connect to “remote” bodies by mingling with the computer apparatus in a process appropriately called “remotional” (Lexia to Perplexia/Double Funnels). Other examples of texts generating “known unknowns” are simulations that use interactive functionalities to create new (and therefore unknown) combinations of plot developments and outcomes. The simulations differ from the multiple reading paths created by links because they are not prescripted in advance but rather emerge interactively through encounters between virtual agents. Jonathan Gratch has developed software to create such emergent outcomes, one version of which generates on-the-fly narrative dialogues between two virtual roommates using algorithms to satisfy their own goals while also responding to each other’s desires. Such variables as competitiveness/cooperativeness and aggression/passivity can be adjusted to achieve different outcomes via different routes. Other versions of the software are used in military training simulations created by Gratch and his co-authors under the auspices of the Institute for Creative Technologies, a joint venture of the University of Southern California and the U. S. Army, in which live participants interact with virtual agents to arrive at different outcomes for various military scenarios. Michael Mateas’s interactive drama Façade, a collaboration with Andrew Stern, creates similar “known unknowns” by using knowledge-based conversational agents leading to multiple emergent possibilities. Scripted in ABLE, a programming language Mateas developed, Façade’s narrative progresses through a series of dramatic “beats,” with each “beat” comprising a narrative unit. Façade is an especially interesting example because it embodies the design constraint of following a traditional narrative arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Contrasting his model with work like Gratch’s that

17 allows strong autonomy for the virtual agents, Mateas notes that with strong autonomy, “agents chose their next actions based on local perception of the environment plus internal state corresponding to the goals and possibly the emotional state of the agent” (2003, 2; see also Mateas, “Expressive AI; A Hybrid Art and Science Practice,” 2001). The stronger the agent’s autonomy, the less likely it is that the story as a whole will be well-formed as a narrative. Mateas made the decision to create instead “weakly autonomous characters which are tightly coupled to a more deliberative story-guidance framework while still maintaining the reactivity necessary for real-time interaction” (2001, 2). The agents, in other words, can act only within an overall AI architecture that ensures the narrative will have a recognizable and indeed rather traditional shape. The decision is part of his overall project of “building an image of the human in the machine” (2001, 1). “Expressive AI” is in his view “a way of exploring what it means to be human by building systems,” a perspective that assumes from the outset narrative coherence and form (2001, 1). Rather than push the boundaries of what it means to be human by creating hybrid forms that enact the encounter of humans with intelligent machines, his work constrains the boundaries within which the virtual agents can act so as to guarantee that recognizably human narratives will emerge. Further along the spectrum are works using self-evolving programs to create “unknown unknowns,” where even the AI architecture can evolve in ways not foreseen or predicted by its creators. With genetic programs able to change their own algorithms, there is no guarantee that anything like traditional narrative forms will emerge. Indeed, part of the point of creating such simulations is to open the possibility that something entirely unexpected will be created. At present there are, to my knowledge, no verbal

18 simulations that meet this criterion. There are, however, visual narratives that have elicited verbalizations of the narrative progression constituted by animated images (and underneath the images, the evolution of the code on which the images are based). Perhaps the most successful is Karl Sim’s video animation Evolving Virtual Creatures showing virtual creatures engaging in game-like activities to control an object that resembles a hockey puck.11 Both the morphology and neurology of the creatures have self-evolved, with neither being explicitly determined by the creator. The program uses artificial selection to test each generation of creatures as they strive to achieve some goal. Specified fitness criteria determine which of the creatures is most successful. Variations of this creature’s “genetic code” are then calculated to create the next generation of creatures, which undergoes similar testing and selection. When the different species of creatures are then put in competition with one another, the result is a contest that follows a recognizable narrative arc of having a beginning, middle, and end. Unlike Mateas’ Façade, however, the narrative emerges spontaneously, its recognizable trajectory being a result of the game-like context. Moreover, in Sims’ video compilation of this work as a whole, a larger narrative arc focusing on the creatures’ development emerges as they selfevolve to become increasingly efficient and sophisticated in their designs. Part of the difficulty of creating a verbal parallel to Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures comes from linguistic constraints on syntax and grammar.12 Whereas any motion that works in the virtual environment is permitted in Sims’ simulation, for a language-based simulation, variants resulting in verbal nonsense would far, far outweigh linguistically competent utterances, making undirected evolution a much trickier proposition than it is for Sims’ virtual creatures. Nevertheless, the idea of an intelligent

19 machine that could self-evolve along lines unforeseen by its human creators, while still retaining the capacity to communicate to humans, has been imagined by Stanislaw Lem in his novella “Golem XIV.” Indeed, the whole point of that narrative is to create the simulacrum of an intelligence whose nature cannot be grasped by its human interlocutors, although the text’s language must necessarily assert rather than perform this fact. As the technology moves closer to being able to make the transition from known unknowns to unknown unknowns, the possibility space grows larger and, as such, potentially puts more pressure on traditional narrative form. Even in its more conservative guise as a space of known knowns and/or known unknowns, however, it still has the capacity to interact with narrative in ways that significantly shift the grounding assumptions constituted by the traditional critical dyad of fabula and sjuzhet. Having fleshed out the concept of possibility space by the preceding examples, I turn now to consider its epistemological and ontological implications.

Contrasting Possibility Space with Narrative In contrast to narrative, possibility space is likely to be governed by combinatorics rather than linear causalities. In hybrid or complex forms both linear causality and combinatorics are usually in play, so the distinction is one of emphasis and priority rather than absolute separation. In an evolving adaptive simulation, for example, there is generally some kind of causal relation between one generation of virtual creatures and another, but combinatorics also enter strongly into the algorithms. In Sims’ Evolving Virtual Creatures, for example, the genotype of one generation is used as the starting point for variants—determined by combinatorics—of the second generation. Narrative,

20 on the other hand, is fundamentally and centrally causal. Brian Richardson in Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Narrative voices a consensus view when he writes, “Cause is one of the most significant and fundamental aspects of narrative” (14), even if, as he goes on to say, its subtleties and complexities are under-theorized in narrative criticism. When narratives “plot against probability,” as Richardson notes of postmodern fictions such as Angela Carter’s Wise Children and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, they approach the threshold of chance events from the presupposition most readers will have that somehow these events will turn out to be causally related after all. In general, we can say that the more works move along the spectrum from known knowns to unknown unknowns, the more important combinatorics are likely to be in generating the possibility spaces in which a large number of unforeseen variants, events and outcomes can arise. Related to the central role of causality in narrative are its evolutionary and historical functions of creating frameworks that allow humans to interact robustly with their environments, including crafting models of how other minds and the world in general work. Whereas narrative capitalizes on and reinforces human presuppositions that make the world make sense, possibility space carries the scent of the non-human, the algorithmic, the procedural, the machinic. The contrast can be seen by recalling yet again the narrator’s comment in Borges “Library of Babel,” “It is enough that a book be possible for it to exist.” Unlike narratives in the real world, a book in the Library of Babel need not make sense (as indeed the overwhelming majority do not), and it need not convey to readers anything about how the world works. Considered as a representation of a possibility space in which all the possible combinations of alphabetic symbols are

21 instantiated in books, the Library of Babel shows with cruel clarity how inhuman such a combinatorics would be for human purposes and desires. As long as narratology is dominated by the theoretical dyad fabula-sjuzhet (including the variants discussed earlier of story, discourse, narrative, narrating, etc.), it retains an almost unavoidable presupposition of realism embedded in narrative form (whatever the narrative content), for the fabula is related to the sjuzhet through the assumption that the sjuzhet takes place within the storyworld expressed through the fabula. Of course, although the fabula logically precedes the sjuzhet, the sjuzhet factually and chronologically must precede the reader’s construction of the fabula. Nevertheless, according to the testimony of the innumerable readers and most writers, the construction of the fabula remains an indispensable aid in creating, representing, and interpreting the sjuzhet. What happens, then, if the sjuzhet is understood to be generated from a possibility space rather than a fabula, as in the (admittedly extreme) case of the hypothesized books in the Library of Babel? Readers may and probably will continue to construct a fabula (as the narrator in Borges’ fiction does to explain the existence of the Library), but the power of this construction to convey an ontology is weakened. Underwriting the existence of the sjuzhet is not the assumption of a prior storyworld, with its more or less convincing ontology, but merely the operations of a possibility space running through all possible permutations, some of which are understood as being realized in the sjuzhet. Consequently, as the possibility space cooperates, competes, and otherwise engages with narrative to create fictions, readers move from the relative ontological security of the fabulasjuzhet inference to the more ontologically unstable progression: possibility

22 spacesjuzhet(fabula). Unlike trying to imagine an infinite storyworld—a project before which the imagination trembles-- it is quite easy, as Borges shows, to imagine an infinite possibility space. Given the information the narrator of that fiction provides, the number of books in the Library of Babel can be calculated to be of the order of magnitude of 1075, a quantity greater than the number of atoms in the universe. Although one may easily write this number and calculate it almost as easily, it is quite impossible for the imagination to encompass what such a magnitude means in human terms, because it so far exceeds the compass of normal life and experience. No wonder, then, that many inhabitants of the Library choose to throw themselves down the infinite stairwells in despair, for they are trapped in a truly inhuman space. Although the possibility space can have such ominous overtones, it can also be understood as opening the human to the unthought and unrecognized otherness of a universe much bigger than human conception can hold. This is the promise of emergent adaptive simulations—that we can program our machines to create what we ourselves did not conceive as such. Even databases embody a weak form of this promise, for they order and make searchable and retrievable amounts of information that would overwhelm unaided human perception. An optimistic interpretation of the infiltration of narrative by possibility space, then, is that humans are now able to go beyond their evolutionary inheritance into realms that cannot easily be imagined or represented by the human mind alone. When the ancient technology of natural language is combined with the capabilities of intelligent machines, ontology may become unstable but the scope of epistemology is increased, potentially immeasurably so. Complex Ecologies

23 As mentioned earlier, the range of interactions between narrative and possibility space extend far beyond the antagonistic and competitive relation that Manovich suggests for narrative and database. Jason Nelson’s Dreamphage illustrates the complexity of these interactions and the subtleties of their dynamics. The work is introduced by an initial screen, narrated by Dr. Bomar Felt, setting up the work’s premise: an unknown virus is infecting the human population, its telltale symptom being monologic dreams the victims experience. Night after night, an infected subject dreams the same dream, which appears with increasing frequency; within a few weeks, the disease progresses to coma and the death. The clue to the virus’s nature, Dr. Felt suggests, may lie within the dreams. Proceeding from this screen, the user encounters a series of framed rectangles within rectangles within rectangles, within which swirl images of pages sometimes partially obscured by irregular polygons, which vaguely suggest viral fragments floating in the fluid interior of a cell. Since the images that appear in this dynamic display are interfaces to other parts of the work, this interactive animation functions as a graphic realization of a possibility space. The user can bring the swirling pages into visibility either by clicking on small icons at the corners of the rectangles or holding down the cursor and moving it up or down the screen. The pages present brief clinical notes written by doctors who have examined infected patients. Deeper layers can be accessed by clicking on the pages, which takes the user to the “books” in which the patients’ dreams are recorded. The “books” are images representing print documents, with turnable pages that the user manipulates by laboriously catching a corner with a cursor and “flipping” the page over. This

24 navigational strategy performs what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation, the re-presentation of one medium in another (here a book in a digital medium). The character-focalizers in the books describe surrealistic scenes focusing on coupons for one, office furniture for another, love and cattle for a third. Since the dreams are expressions of the virus, it is not clear whether the narrator is the infected human or the virus, or perhaps a hybrid of the two, in which case the voice can be understood as a remediation of viral thoughts articulated through a human subject. Moreover, the two remediations here performed, the remediation of the book by the computer and the virus by the human, are teasingly connected by some of the links contained within the books. One link leads to a passage suggesting that “single cells or even biological tissue becomes like a ‘brainstuff’ made out of Cray supercomputers,” thereby establishing a connection between the biological activities of neural cells and the data processing of intelligent machines. The series of associations then goes something like this: brain cells are like computers; brain cells direct the behaviors that create the books; computers remediate the books and so indirectly remediate the articulations associated with the brain cells; the virus infects the brain cells and causes the host to write the books; in indirect fashion, the virus thus inhabits the computer as well as the brain; the host expresses herself/himself through the computer, which in this sense becomes the medium in which the infected patient, now part human and part virus, becomes a legible subject of the narrating, which itself becomes an irresolvable compound of human, virus, and machine. On one of the swirling pages there is even the suggestion that this hybrid condition is the virus. As the machinic becomes entwined with the human, narrative moves from the causal sequences typical of traditional storytelling toward the combinatoric algorithms

25 typical of possibility space. The results are quasi-narratives that strive to capture all possible combinations within causal sequences, as if unwilling to abandon either causality or combinatorics. Everything is connected to everything else through the combinatorics of the dreams, which form for any given patient a sequence that repeats without being a repetition, for as one of the doctors notes, patients do not experience the dreams as copies, even though in some sense they are all the same dream. Another doctor notes that “all of the dreams I have recorded refer to ‘Connections’ between ropes of the lives. A cure might be found by untying these knots, burning their frayed ends.” As the comment suggests, in addition to the connections between a single person’s dreams, there are also connections between one person’s dreams and those of all the other infected people. If interpreted as a causal chain (a probable inference, given the centrality of causality to narrative), this structure leads to propositions like the following from one of the dream books: And by sunlight I mean those sparkling particles the super-intelligent viruses manipulating the fiery burst we call the sun use to control our, deceivingly harmless, aquarium fish. But then that’s another story now isn’t it. Moving on, this substance holds our world and all the other worlds together. It makes us sad and happy and hungry for humping. Sometimes this goo [next page] but love has nothing to do with goo. Instead love is governed by a complex system of ropes and wires haphazardly connected to cattle in the Texas panhandle. Lucky for us it seems the cattle2 haven’t yet discovered their power over love (Dreamphage, Book 4, “Angrybo/vine/dis/ease).

26 The footnote2 leads to a window with the cryptic comment, “makes cows sleep,” which opens to another window telling us “Henry lost his herd to paranoid software.” The ontological instability of the fabula that a reader might construct from this bizarre series of connections is palpable, from viruses in the sun to fish in the aquarium to human sexual desire to Texas panhandle cattle (and this is only a partial list, as the narrative interjection “but that’s another story now isn’t it” indicates). Through its (sometimes very funny) absurdities, the fabula is revealed as subordinate to some other kind of ordering principle, which the work visually and verbally associates with the possibility space. Moreover, the trope of a mysterious virus spreading by unknown transmission mechanisms and expressing itself through dream-narratives suggests that the possibility space is infecting the fabula. In this case, the transmission mechanism is nothing other than the hybrid human-computer subjectivity that is both the subject and object of the narrating. How might we describe the relation of narrative and possibility space in this work? Partly antagonistic, insofar as the infection of the fabula by the possibility space distorts the presumed shape of narrative and causes it to be, by conventional standards, “ill-formed”; partly symbiotic, in the sense that this infection lets the work do more than it otherwise could; partly parasitic, in that the virus both expresses and transmits itself through the narratives, which may serve the virus’s own purposes rather than those of the host; partly mimicry, for as the dreams progressively invade waking life, they mime what they displace, so that (as one of the doctors notes) life itself becomes a kind of dream; and partly hyperparasitic, in the sense that the work as a whole can be seen to parasitize the parasitism of the virus to re-define what a narrative can be.

27 To flesh out the argument, I have constructed a list of other works in which the interactions between narrative and possibility space exemplify the dynamics of competition, cooperation, symbiosis, mimicry, parasitism and hyperparasitism. Whether or not the reader agrees with these classifications is somewhat beside the point, for most of the works partake of several dynamics, which in any event can be interpreted in various ways. Rather, I want to illustrate the broader claim that the complex ecology generated by the interaction of narrative and possibility space in Dreamphage is characteristic of many contemporary print and electronic works. I mentioned earlier that reliance on the fabula/sjuzhet dyad, along with the presuppositions it entails, are ubiquitous in literary criticism, as in reading more generally. The juxtaposition of narrative and possibility space not only creates new opportunities for narratology but also for critical inquiry. Normally literary criticism is published in journal or book form; other critics (sometimes) read these publications and reply, usually in other venues and diverse time frames varying from several months to several years after the initial publication. As a result, there is no possibility for interactions that would change the original piece in view of readers’ reactions, objections, extrapolations, queries, and modifications. In this sense each work exists in isolation from the others, crystallized in the form in which it reached print. With electronic media, however, new versions can easily be created and put to alongside or in place of the original piece. Moreover, the time lag between electronic publication and a reader’s reply is cut from months and years to hours or days. Already online publications such as the Electronic Book Review are taking advantage of these digital capabilities to reenvision how scholarly publication can take place. Vectors, a new online journal edited

28 by Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson and based at the University of Southern California, is pushing the envelope further through its commitment to publish multimedia criticism, that is, criticism in digital media that engages in practices that would not be possible in print. In its electronic version, this article is part of that experiment. Criticism sometimes takes narrative form, and when it does, it can rightly be said to imply a fabula, a universe of understanding and discourse. The fabulas implied by different pieces of criticism can have substantial overlap, but they can also have important differences— differences set into stone (i.e., wood pulp) by the publishing conditions described above. What if we imagine criticism proceeding not through a sjuzhet that implies a fabula, but as a possibility space? Suppose a the possibility space capacious enough to allow a large number of instantiations, as well as modifications that change its nature, making it an emergent adaptive system. Further suppose that an expression of the possibility space is subject to instant re-arrangement, re-interpretation, and re-engineering by other participants. It becomes, in other words, a kind of playing field on which many different games may be played and (more significantly) different kinds of games can evolve. This is the concept for the electronic version of “Narrating Bits,” done in collaboration with Erik Loyer, a Los-Angeles-based Web designer and creative writer who has authored a number of electronic literary works, among them Marrow Monkey and Chroma. The possibility space for “Narrating Bits” is defined by all of the words in the article arranged under the beginning letters, with spaces between letters indicating the number of words under a given letter. The narrative view gives the entire text, appropriate to the narratological premise that the narrating cannot be adequately

29 described by paraphrase. “Focalization” (here used rather loosely) is referenced through the section headings; clicking on a given section brings that text into view. Additional functionalities invite users to create their own focalizations, which might consist of rearranging or modifying central concepts, using different examples that would lead to different implications and conclusions, or using the possibility space to create a different instantiation. The point of the experiment is not so much to use criticism in an entirely new way, for critics have always built upon, modified, and transformed each other’s work. Rather, it is to create a flexible interface that would allow critical exchanges to be visualized and experienced as dynamic interplays that resemble the give-and-take of a good conversation rather than staking out “positions” and waiting months or years for responses. The larger goal is to open new possibilities for understanding the changing roles of narrative in a digital age, when the age-old ability of narrative to shape and express human subjectivity is coming into intimate contact with the capacity of intelligent machines to store, process, and generate massive amounts of data. I hope that readers of this print article will find the concept of a critical possibility spacer sufficiently enticing to check out the electronic version (www.marrowmonkey.com/vectors/nar). I cannot imagine a human world without narrative, but I can imagine narratives transformed and enriched by their interactions with possibility space in the complex ecologies of contemporary media and culture.

Complex Ecologies Generated by the Interactions of Narrative and Possibility Space Cooperation: Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual

30 Possibility space defined by the apartment building, its inhabitants and contents; narrative emerges amidst listing of data from possibility space. They cooperate in creating a meta-narrative. Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars Alphabetic entries in three books of the Dictionary provide the data for the possibility space; narrative emerges from correlations between characters and actions in the different books and different entries. They cooperate in creating a meta-narrative. Caitlin Fisher, These Waves of Girls Typical of narrative patterns that come from following links; possibility space defined by manifold of all possible narrative trajectories. Narrative remains fragmented, connections are thematic, to which the architecture of the possibility space contributes. M. D. Coverley, The Book of Going Forth By Day Possibility space defined by ancient and modern Egypt, as well as tripartite division of the soul in ancient Egyptian religion. Coherent narratives united by concepts instantiated in graphics, navigation and architecture of possibility space. Competition: Stuart Moulthrop, Reagan Library Possibility space defined as the four world levels plus the Notes; narrative emerges through focalizations on the different characters; suggestion of meta-narrative in symbolic connections between

31 themes of different levels. Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn Narrative coherent but interrupted by Tourette’s syndrome outbursts from protagonist Lionel Essrog. These fragmentary and often obscene involuntary tics define a linguistic and psychological possibility space that competes with controlled articulations. Parasitism: Jason Nelson, Dreamphage The dream-virus infects humans and starts hijacking their dreams for its own (unknown and therefore ambiguous) purposes. MEZ, ][(ad)] [Dressed in a Skin Code Parasitizes email messages, chat rooms, etc. for narrative fragments that are then “mezanglled” by interjecting coding expressions and punctuations to create a hybrid discourse. Hyperparasitism: Talan Memmott, Lexia to Perplexia The narrative fragments focus on hybrid machinic-human subjectivities in which the human has been parasitized by the machine, but it then weaves these fragments into a meta-narrative accessible to persistent and astute users. Mark Hansen, Listening Post An art installation that exhibits a random series of sentences from internet chat rooms across a grid of 252 LCD screens as they are simultaneously read by voice synthesizer. The installation thus first parasitizes human narratives and converts them into database

32 form, then hyperparasitizes the database to re-deploy them as narrative collages. Mimicry Jason Nelson, Dreamphage Computer screen images that mimic the appearance and functionalities of a book. Chomskybot An applet, created by John Lawler, Anthony Aristar, and John Sowa, that generates sentences solely on their syntactical properties by randomly combining phrases into a sentence. The passages are taken from Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957). The applet thus mimics Chomsky’s prose to generate passages that sometimes appear to make darkly enigmatic sense.

33 Works Cited Argyros, Alexander J. A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel,” Ficciones. Translated by Anthony Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press, 1969. Pp. 79-88. Bruner, Jerome. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Cage, John. “Mureau,” M: Writings, ’67-72. Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1974. Pp. 35-56. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978. Connolly, Thomas and Carolyn Begg. Database Systems. New York: Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2002 (1995). Coverley, M. D. The Book of Going Forth By Day. . Fisher, Caitlin. These Waves of Girls. . Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. ----------. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Gottschall, Jonathan and David Sloan Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005. Grusin, Richard and Jay David Bolter. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Hayles, N. Katherine. "Simulated Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us." Critical Inquiry 26, no. 1 (Autumn 1999): 1-26. ----------. Writing Machines. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Landau, Misia. “Human Evolution as Narrative.” American Scientist 72 (1984): 262-268. ----------. Narratives of Human Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Lawler, Jon, Anthony Aristar, and John Sowa. Chomskybot. . Lethem, Jonathan. Motherless Brooklyn. New York: Vintage, 2000. Loyer, Erik. Chroma (2001). . ----------. The Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998). . Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. Martin, James. Computer Data-Base Organization. Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977 (1975). Mateas, Michael. “Expressive AI: A Hybrid Art and Science Practice.” Leonardo: Journal of the International Society for Arts, Sciences, and Technology 34(2) (2001): 147-153. ----------. “Research Statement.” .

34 Memmott, Talan. Lexia to Perplexia. . MEZ (Mary-Anne Breeze). ][(ad)] [Dressed in a Skin Code. . Moulthrop, Stuart. Reagan Library. . Nelson, Jason. Dreamphage. . Perec, Georges. Life: A User’s Manual. Translated by David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine, 1988. Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Richardson, Brian. Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2002. Sims, Karl. Evolving Virtual Creatures. [paper in pdf] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=192167. ----------. [video of animation] . Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Werner, G. M. and Michael G. Dyer. “Evolution of Communication in Artificial Organisms,” C. G. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer, and S. Rasmussen, eds. Artificial Life II. Redwood City CA: Addison Wesley Publications, 1991. Pp. 659-687.

35 Endnotes

In her study of database textbooks over the last quarter century, Sarah Richardson makes this

1

observation: “The 1977 text [James Martin, Computer Data-Base Organization] teaches theory that has not yet been realized beyond specialized applications and opines about the larger importance of the database in the future tense. The 2002 text [Connolly and Begg, Database Systems], in contrast, addresses an audience whose world is so imbued with the everyday uses of the database, including everyday purchases on credit cards, store inventory maintenance, travel reservation tools, internet searching and shopping, university student information systems, and library indexing, that the importance of the database to society is seen more in its ordinariness, its ubiquity in our day-to-day lives, than in its extraordinary potential implications,” unpublished manuscript. I am indebted to Sarah Richardson for her help in researching the evolution of textbooks on databases from the 1970’s to the present.

2

Among the theorists arguing for a central role of narrative in human evolution are Alexander

J. Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order; Mark Turner, The Literary Mind, focusing on the narrative genre he calls the parable; and Misia Landau, “Human Evolution as Narrative,” which both reviews some of the claims for the importance of narrative in human evolution and also treats the technical literature of evolution as itself a field rich with narratives, and her book-length study on the same topic, Narratives of Human Evolution. Also relevant is the forthcoming essay collection, The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. 3

See Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the

Age of Reason and Resolution, 1700-1850, especially on the development of demographic data and statistics; a useful synthetic study that carries the story into the nineteenth century is Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900.

4

In 1977, James Martin already could see that databases would become ubiquitous, with

significant consequences for social and cultural practices: “In all walks of life and in all areas of industry, data banks will change the realms of what it is possible for man to do. In centuries hence, historians will look back to the coming of computer data banks and their associated facilities as a step which changed the nature of the evolution of society, perhaps eventually having a greater effect on the human condition than even the invention of the printing press” (2). 5

Hence the growing emphasis on data-mining, for it is designed to interact with data not

formatted so as to allow searches of the kind it wants to carry out. 6

Another way to make this distinction is between those humans who understand and have

access to machine architectures and those who do not. In her comparison of database textbooks, Sarah Richardson notes the strong distinction made between “sophisticated” and “naïve” users. She writes, “the relational model found its success in part by offering, in addition to the general practicalities of data independence for application development, a conceptual approach to databasing that restricts the general user’s view and potential to meddle with the data and its structure and systems. In database rhetoric, the user is regarded warily, and a great deal of work is directed towards ensuring that the user’s interaction with the data is constrained to a range of anticipated operations and views, and further, that the user is unaware that this is the case. The language of ‘internal’ and ‘external’ views, definitions, and realities is one way that both textbook authors conceptualize this dual-reality approach to databasing” (28). 7

Donald Rumsfeld, “As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we

know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know” (Department of Defense news briefing, February 12, 2002), cited in “The Poetry of D. H. Rumsfeld” by Hart Seely, .

I am indebted to Nicholas Gessler for this observation.

8

Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, p 14. In this book Genette replies to criticisms

9

of his earlier text Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Although his theory is therefore contained almost wholly in the first volume, the second book is useful in that he more fully explains his rationale and reasoning for the theory. I will therefore quote more frequently from the second book, although my comments presuppose an understanding of his first book as well. 10

For a fuller discussion of Lexia to Perplexia, see N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines.

11

For a more detailed analysis of Sims’ work and its solicitation of anthropomorphic responses

by viewers, see N. Katherine Hayles, "Simulated Narratives: What Virtual Creatures Can Teach Us.” 12

For an indication of the difficulties, see G. M. Werner and Michael Dyer, “Evolution of

Communication in Artificial Organisms.”