I. CONSTELLATIONS

A constellation is a circuit, and so its definition is not found in the stars at its vertexes, but rather in the connections between them. This is the basis for Adorno’s notion of “constellation”, in which an arrangement of celestial bodies serves as metaphor for the nature of conceptual meaning:

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.

To put it another way, concepts are not islands; they don’t exist in isolation from each other, nor do they have clearcut frontiers. They’re surrounded by and tethered to associated ideas that are as integral to to its meaning as its signifier is - all concepts lead to other concepts, all words are bound to other words. This is how meaning is constructed: through connection. No word has a lone, unequivocal definition: apples are red, but they can also be green, and they’re related to sweetness, and the original sin, as well as childhood memories of fruit salad for dessert. Every concept is surrounded by narratives, both social and personal, and so the search for precise meanings is futile. What Adorno points to here is the complexity of language, communication, and the way we navigate our environment; our experiences and knowledge shape our understanding of the world into a web of semantic connections that intertwine endlessly with one another. Any signifier contains/is encircled by various other abstractions, be it in the form of obvious, direct connotations, or even personal experiences and biases of a given subject.

This is also the philosophy behind hypertext literature.

It was during the 90’s that electronic literature really took off, mainly through the medium of hypertext fiction. Works like Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson and These Waves of Girls by Caitlin Fisher sought to explore the creative possibilities of technology, and did so with the hyperlink as their main tool. This feature, however, was not used merely as a fanciful device intended to make these works into a technological curiosity; in hypertext literature, the link is not an accessory to what is written, but rather its very foundation. The structural and technical elements of hypertext fiction are intrinsically tied to the premise of connection that its medium offers - the hypertext is a net, a circuit, a constellation in a much more tangible sense than that of semantic meaning. Hypertext is built without a fixed core, rather, it’s a sequence of scattered pieces that are entwined through association, much like Adorno’s theory, to create its essence, its meaning, not from a concrete piece of information, but by the sum of its parts.

These works present us with fractured narratives that mirror their format in the stories they tell; in Patchwork Girl, for instance, the collection of mismatching fragments that is the plot parallels the protagonist’s identity, taking the reader/player through a scavenger hunt of memories that make up the fabric of the tale, much like the main character’s maker scavenged human parts to piece together her body. In These Waves of Girls’ case, the chaotic web of interconnected episodes is meant to reflect the confusing, dislocated nature of memory, an exploration of the protagonist’s story as she reminisces on trivial yet pivotal scenes of her experience, and so, in a way, we reminisce with her.