[This is the second part of a larger article on database in new media.
The first part entitled "Database as a Genre of New Media" appeared in
RHIZOME DIGEST: 10.29.98. -LM]

The Semiotics of Database

As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and
it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a
cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).
Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the
same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make
meaning out of the world.

We should not expect that new media would completely substitute
narrative by database. The history of culture does not contain such
breaks. Similarly, we should not expect that new media would completely
substitute narrative by database. New media does not radically break
with the past; rather, it distributes weight differently between the
categories which hold culture together, foregrounding what was in the
background, and vice versa. As Frederick Jameson writes in his analysis
of another shift, in this case from modernism to post-modernism:
"Radical breaks between periods do not generally involve complete
changes but rather the restructuration of a certain number of elements
already given: features that in an earlier period of system were
subordinate became dominant, and features that had been dominant again
become secondary."1

Database - narrative opposition is the case in point. To further
understand how computer culture redistributes weight between the two
terms of opposition in computer culture I will bring in a semiological
theory of syntagm and paradigm. According to this model, originally
formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure to describe natural languages such
as English and later expanded by Roland Barthes and others to apply to
other sign systems (narrative, fashion, food, etc.), the elements of a
system can be related on two dimensions: syntagmatic and paradigmatic.2
As defined by Barthes, "the syntagm is a combination of signs, which has
space as a support." To use the example of natural language, the speaker
produces an utterance by stringing together the elements, one after
another, in a linear sequence. This is the syntagmatic dimension. Now,
lets look at the paradigm. To continue with an example of a langauge
user, each new element is chosen from a set of other related elements.
For instance, all nouns form a set; all synonyms of a particular word
form another set. In the original formulation of Saussure, "the units
which have something in common are associated in theory and thus form
groups within which various relationships can be found."3 This is the
paradigmatic dimension.

The elements on a syntagmatic dimension are related in praesentia, while
the elements on a paradigmatic dimension are related in absentia. For
instance, in the case of a written sentence, the words which comprise it
materially exist on a piece of paper, while the paradigmatic sets to
which these words belong only exist in writer's and reader's minds.
Similarly, in the case of a fashion outfit, the elements which make it,
such as a skirt, a blouse, and a jacket, are present in reality, while
pieces of clothing which could have been present instead - different
skirt, different blouse, different jacket - only exist in the viewer's
imagination. Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit; one is
real and the other is imagined.

Literary and cinematic narratives work in the same way. Particular
words, sentences, shots, scenes which make up a narrative have a
material existence; other elements which form an imaginary world of an
author or a particular literary or cinematic style and which could have
appeared instead exist only virtually. Put differently, the database of
choices from which narrative is constructed (the paradigm) is implicit;
while the actual narrative (the syntagm) is explicit.

New media reverses this relationship. Database (the paradigm) is given
material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is de- materialised.
Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real, syntagm
is virtual. To see this, consider the new media design process. The
design of any new media object begins with assembling a database of
possible elements to be used. (Macromedia Director calls this database
"cast," Adobe Premiere calls it "project", ProTools calls it a
"session," but the principle is the same.) This database is the center
of the design process. It typically consists from a combination of
original and stock material distributed such as buttons, images, video
and audio sequences; 3-D objects; behaviors and so on. Throughout the
design process new elements are added to the database; existing elements
are modified. The narrative is constructed by linking elements of this
database in a particular order, i.e. designing a trajectory leading from
one element to another. On the material level, a narrative is just a set
of links; the elements themselves remain stored in the database. Thus
the narrative is more virtual than the database itself. (Since all data
is stored as electronic signals, the word "material" seem to be no
longer appropriate. Instead we should talk about different degrees of
virtuality.)

The paradigm is privileged over syntagm in yet another way in
interactive objects presenting the user with a number of choices at the
same time - which is what typical interactive interfaces do. For
instance, a screen may contain a few icons; clicking on each icon leads
the user to a different screen. On the level of an individual screen,
these choices form a paradigm of their own which is explicitly presented
to the user. On the level of the whole object, the user is made aware
that she is following one possible trajectory among many others. In
other words, she is selecting one trajectory from the paradigm of all
trajectories which are defined.

Other types of interactive interfaces make the paradigm even more
explicit by presenting the user with an explicit menu of all available
choices. In such interfaces, all of the categories are always available,
just a mouse click away. The complete paradigm is present before the
user, its elements neatly arranged in a menu. This is another example of
how new media makes explicit the psychological processes involved in
cultural communication. Other examples include the already discussed
shift from creation to selection, which externalizes and codifies the
database of cultural elements existing in the creator's mind; as well
as the very phenomena of interactive links. New media takes
"interaction" literally, equating it with a strictly physical
interaction between a user and a screen (by pressing a button), at the
sake of psychological interaction. The psychological processes of
filling- in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification - which are
required for us to comprehend any text or image at all - are erroneously
equated with an objectively existing structure of interactive links.

Interactive interfaces foreground the paradigmatic dimension and often
make explicit paradigmatic sets. Yet, they are still organized along the
syntagmatic dimension. Although the user is making choices at each new
screen, the end result is a linear sequence of screens which she
follows. This is the classical syntagmatic experience. In fact, it can
be compared to constructing a sentence in a natural language. Just as a
language user constructs a sentence by choosing each successive word
from a paradigm of other possible words, a new media user creates a
sequence of screens by clicking on this or that icon at each screen.
Obviously, there are many important differences between these two
situations. For instance, in the case of a typical interactive
interface, there is no grammar and paradigms are much smaller. Yet, the
similarity of basic experience in both cases is quite interesting; in
both cases, it unfolds along a syntagmatic dimension.

Why does new media insist on this language-like sequencing? My
hypothesis is that it follows the dominant semiological order of the
twentieth century - that of cinema. Cinema replaced all other modes of
narration with a sequential narrative, an assembly line of shots which
appear on the screen one at a time. For centuries, a spatialized
narrative where all images appear simultaneously dominated European
visual culture; then it was delegated to "minor" cultural forms as
comics or technical illustrations. "Real" culture of the twentieth
century came to speak in linear chains, aligning itself with the
assembly line of an industrial society and the Turing machine of a
post-industrial era. New media continues this mode, giving the user
information one screen at a time. At least, this is the case when it
tries to become "real" culture (interactive narratives, games); when it
simply functions as an interface to information, it is not ashamed to
present much more information on the screen at once, be it in the form
of tables, normal or pull-down menus, or lists. In particular, the
experience of a user filling in an on-line form can be compared to pre-
cinematic spatialised narrative: in both cases, the user is following a
sequence of elements which are presented simultaneously.

A Database Complex

To what extent is the database form intrinsic to modern storage media?
For instance, a typical music CD is a collection of individual tracks
grouped together. The database impulse also drives much of photography
throughout its history, from William Henry Fox Talbot's "Pencil of
Nature" to August Sander's monumental typology of modern German society
"Face of Our Time," to the Bernd and Hilla Becher's equally obsessive
cataloging of water towers. Yet, the connection between storage media
and database forms is not universal. The prime exception is cinema. Here
the storage media supports the narrative imagination. We may quote once
again Christian Metz who wrote in the 1970s, "Most films shot today,
good or bad, original or not, 'commercial' or not, have as a common
characteristic that they tell a story; in this measure they all belong
to one and the same genre, which is, rather, a sort of 'super-genre'
['sur-genre']."4 Why then, in the case of photography storage media,
does technology sustain database, while in the case of cinema it gives
rise to a modern narrative form par excellence? Does this have to do
with the method of media access? Shall we conclude that random access
media, such as computer storage formats (hard drives, removable disks,
CD-ROMs), favors database, while sequential access media, such as film,
favors narrative? This does not hold either. For instance, a book, this
perfect random-access medium, supports database forms, such as
photo-albums, and narrative forms, such as novels.

Rather than trying to correlate database and narrative forms with modern
media and information technologies, or deduce them from these
technologies, I prefer to think of them as two competing imaginations,
two basic creative impulses, two essential responses to the world. Both
have existed long before modern media. The ancient Greeks produced long
narratives, such as Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey; they
also produced encyclopedias. The first fragments of a Greek encyclopedia
to have survived were the work of Speusippus, a nephew of Plato. Diderot
wrote novels - and also was in charge of monumental Encyclop