no grammar in opposition but there if there omnipresent successful intermediation. --Stein, How to Write are so many things to say at one time and this one of them. --Stein, Narration: Four Lectures In final paragraph of her last completed composition, on Atomic Bomb, Gertrude Stein wrote: Everybody gets so much all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This nice story (1) (II 823). It difficult to see how in 1946 atomic bomb could have been a nice story, and on Atomic Bomb has typically been considered peripheral work. But despite its brevity and its opacity, I argue, an important final statement of Stein's thinking about technology, information, and epistemology For Stein, bomb is not at all interesting, not any more interesting than any other machine, and machines are only interesting in being invented or in what they do, so why be interested. ... That has to be secret makes dull and meaningless. Stein's response to bomb quiescent, but also skeptical, suspending judgment (and consequently fear) in face of multiplicity of unforeseeable outcomes. In immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Holocaust, Stein refrains from apocalyptic pronouncements. Rather than make direct proclamation on nature of bomb, she instead offers reflection on how saturated world not only with information, but also with fear: There so much to be scared of so what use of bothering to be scared. Though may now sound like something of truism, Stein's statement Everybody gets so much all day long that they lose their common sense bears complex relation to her life and work. After exploring Stein's thinking about overload at length, I return to on Atomic Bomb at conclusion of this essay. (2) It tempting to imagine Stein having read in July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush's influential As We May Think, most significant and widely read article on growing problem of saturation in immediate postwar period. (3) As We May Think explores role of scientists in war, and suggests it physicists who have been thrown most violently off stride by the making of strange destructive gadgets (101). The last sentence of Bush's introduction in The Atlantic had originally read Now, as peace approaches, one asks where [scientists] will find objectives worthy of their best (1O8). (4) What preoccupies Bush most centrally are new requirements and possibilities for storage and retrieval that emerged from war effort. He proposed Memex, proto-computer filing system, as means by which scientific and practical might be indexed in order to address problem of overload.5The central problem facing researchers that growing mountain of research. But there increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator staggered by findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers--conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. (101) Though there no evidence that Stein was aware of emergence of modern computing within military projects supervised by Bush, Alan Turing, Norbert Wiener, and others. on Atomic Bomb suggests that Stein too recognized increasing difficulty in immediate postwar period of sorting through vast amounts of information. Information an uncharacteristic word in Stein's earlier writing, occuring only three times in The Making of Americans, and rarely thereafter. More typically, she speaks of knowledge or of knowing. Stein's use of information in Reflection prefigures slightly changing nature of word in late 1940s. …
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Jan 1, 2017
Tyrell Haberkorn 
Open Access