Plotting the Database
The cultural explosion of database logic continues to challenge notions of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic art. The line Manovich draws,”database and narrative are natural enemies,” is not about the incompatibility of two tendencies, but about how a communicative act falls on a spectrum. At one end is the modularity of the database and the at the other, the linearity of narrative. Narrative forms have always slid along these and many other spectrums. Typically, a narrative such as a novel or movie, presents a constrained and sequential selection of data (a plot) from a broader paradigmatic set that is the narrative's source material, drafts, story elements, timelines, cultural contexts, etc. Alternately, a database foregrounds the relational aspects of data and datasets and hides narrative sequencing. But a computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plots. Much of serial television that is online provide users with tagged and networked episodes that build very linear plots. And plotted narratives can have database-like depths of modularity, recursion and intertexuality--Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow.
Despite the slipperiness of terms, the usefulness and pleasures of plot, as a structural and unifying narrative device, is significantly weakened in a computer’s networked and modular environment. Search, fast retrieval, user control of temporal ordering--the qualities that make databases unique--leave standard plot effects, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective. Without plot, what holds a database narrative together as a conceptual and experiential whole? What models in contemporary and past narrative forms can help us invent a more affective-expressives poetics for the design of narratives on a database; a poetics less reliant on plot devices, cause/effect chains and central conflicts? Plotless narratives, or forms that ignore, dismantle, or diminish the structural role of plot, can also engage the attentive mind as single entities (stories). Cohesiveness comes less through the codes of mimetic construction--the propping up of a world--and more through the patterns, gaps, rhythms and repetitions in the material surface of the work. In other words, through the interface.
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