Gertrude Stein has often been dubbed "The Mother of Modernism," though there is a sense in which she also spawned a great deal of the plurality of postmodern society, not to mention the disembodied eclecticism of the Internet. It is tempting to imagine what she would have made of the information superhighway; one suspects the idea of downloading a Picasso would have appalled her, though she probably would have relished having her own web-site. My analogy is, of course, a playful one, but less absurd when we consider the ways in which the Internet has fulfilled modernist dreams, even turning them, in some cases, into postmodern nightmares.

Indeed, cyberspace is in many ways the logical end to an extensive project which Stein-- amongst others--began at the turn of the century; a project in which a coherent sense of time, memory and history are rejected in favour of non-narrative modes of representation. The early modernists were instrumental in developing an art of the pure sign, or an art in which the concrete materials--words, paint--become the artist's subject matter. Stein famously favoured verbs rather than nouns, because verbs can be 'mistaken', and shifters (linking words), because their meanings change depending on the context in which they are used. In her famous essay Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose, Mabel Dodge praised the intuitive way in which Stein: "[chose] words for their inherent quality, rather than for their accepted meaning," a prescient observation in light of the work of Jacques Derrida, who recently proposed a science of the concrete written sign called grammatology.

Stein's interference with the means by which language communicates owes much to her theories on time, memory, history, and narrative, all of which she considered pleasant human concerns, but ill-suited to the creation of master-pieces. To avoid the corrupting influence of time on her writing, Stein devised the "continuous present"; a state in which each moment has its own emphasis and each word lacks external reference. In retrospect this fragmentation of reality via the destruction of the linear model was the ambition of the modern age, and one which, happily for Stein, also made it impossible to repeat oneself (she preferred the term "insistence"). What I find fascinating about her work is the great extent to which she pushed the boundaries of a-historicism, and in many ways this makes her seem very contemporary, especially given that a rejection of the grand historical narrative is the main tenet of postmodernism.

That the Internet is partly responsible for our so-called 'incredulity of metanarratives' is beyond question. The hall-of-mirrors reality of the information superhighway offers us such a diverse range of cultural experience, that one cannot help but question the validity of a single, overarching notion of history. The on-line environment, often termed VR or Virtual-Reality, does not exist in any physical space; it transcends time and offers no organic, coherent sense of the past. As such it also has something in common with Stein's 'continuous present'. What's more, the VR landscape (cyberia) is populated entirely by computer-generated phenomenon and, while creating the illusion of an interactive parallel universe, has no relation to anything outside itself. There is no set narrative or linear journey through the web because the links allow users (or cybernauts) to choose an infinite number of paths--a method that was in fact modelled on the cognitive processes of the human mind. Stein's philosophical treatise entitled The Geographical History of America (1936) seems prophetic in light of these developments. In it, she describes the human mind using a global metaphor: the land seen from an aeroplane. "The human mind," she says, "has neither identity nor time," it is: "Flat land seen from above." Human nature, on the other hand, is represented by its inability to transcend a single viewpoint; it is the land seen from the ground.

The late twentieth century has since seen the explosion of cyberspace technology, and with it, a phenomenon which makes possible a geographical history of the whole world. Whether or not our current state of what has been termed "zapped-out hyper-modernism" is a good thing, or how much of the Internet can be considered "Useful Knowledge" remains to be seen. For my part, I would like to think that Stein would have embraced the Internet with alacrity. It relies, after all, on a very Steinian tautology: the only unity worth having is a unity of plurality.

Annette Rubery, B.A., M.A., is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Warwick, UK

Copyright Annette Rubery 1998

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