references to binary opposition in Pynchon's novels

[jbor]

[...] Perhaps she'd be hounded someday as far as joining Tristero itself, if
it existed, in its twilight, its aloofness, its waiting. The waiting above
all; if not for another set of possibilities to replace those that had
conditioned the land to accept San Narciso among its most tender flesh
without a reflex of a cry, then, at least, at the very least, waiting for a
symmetry of choices to break down, to go skew. She had heard all about
excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever
happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? For it was now
like walking among matrices of a great digital computer, the zeroes and ones
twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick,
maybe endless. Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a
transcendent meaning or only the earth. [...] Ones and zeroes. So did the
couples arrange themselves. At Vesperhaven House either an accommodation
reached, in some kind of dignity, with the Angel of Death, or only death and
the daily, tedious preparations for it. Another mode of meaning behind the
obvious, or none. [...] For there was either some Tristero behind the
appearance of the legacy America, or there was just America [...]
                                                (_Lot 49_, pp. 125-6)

Prairie went shivering in with her hands under her friend's arm, while
around them, in the uniform commercial twilight, plastic flowed, ones and
zeros seethed, legends of agoramania continued. [...] (_Vineland_, p. 329)

[...] Where were Secretaries James and Foster and Senator Joseph, those dear
daft numina who'd mothered over Oedipa's so temperate youth? In another
world. Along another pattern of track, another string of decisions taken,
switches closed, the faceless pointsmen who'd thrown them now all
transferred, deserted, in stir, fleeing the skip-tracers, out of their
skull, on horse, alcoholic, fanatic, under aliases, dead, impossible to find
ever again. [...] (_Lot 49_, p. 71)

"Beyond the Zero" (_GR_, p. 1)

[...] But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something,
Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico,
survive anyplace in between . Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he
imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some
are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours,
bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two
states: waking or sleep. One or zero. "Summation," "transition,"
"irradiation," "concentration ," "reciprocal induction" -- all Pavlovian
brain-mechanics - assumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to
Mexico belongs the domain *between* zero and one -- the middle Pointsman has
excluded from his persuasion -- the probabilities. [...] (_GR_, p. 55)

Pavlov was fascinated with "ideas of the opposite." Call it a cluster of
cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure
from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission. . . . (_GR_, p. 48)

[...] Shoestring funding may have been why Jamf, for his target reflex,
chose an infant hardon. Measuring secretions, as Pavlov did, would have
meant surgery. Measuring "fear," the reflex Watson chose, would have brought
in too much subjectivity (what's fear? How much is "a lot"? Who decides,
when it's on-the-spot-in-the-field, and there isn't time to go through the
long, slow process of referring it up to the Fear Board?). Instrumentation
just wasn't available in those days. The best he might've done was the
Larson-Keeler three-variable "lie detector," but at the time it was still
only experimental. 
  But a hardon, that's either there, or it isn't. Binary, elegant. The job
of observing it can even be done by a *student*.
  Unconditioned stimulus = stroking penis with antiseptic cotton swab.
  Unconditioned response = hardon.
  Conditioned stimulus = x.
  Conditioned response = hardon whenever x is present, stroking is no longer
necessary, all you need is x.
  Uh, x? well, what's x? Why, it's the famous "Mystery Stimulus" that's
fascinated generations of behavioral-psychology students, is what it is. The
average campus humor magazine carries 1.05 column inches per year on the
subject, which ironically is the exact mean length Jamf reported for Infant
T.'s erection. (_GR_, p. 84)

"But have you never played with a clockwork doll?" the man insisted, the
voice muffled through the door. "A doll which does everything perfectly,
because of the machinery inside. Walks, sings, jumps rope. Real little boys
and girls, you know, cry: act sullen, won't behave." His hands lay perfectly
still, long and starved-nervous, one on each knee.
  "Bongo-Shaftsbury," the other began. Bongo-Shaftsbury waved him off,
irritated.
  "Come. May I show you a mechanical doll. An electro-mechanical doll."
  "Have you one--" she was frightened, Waldetar thought with an onrush of
sympathy, seeing his own girls. Damn some of these English-- "have you one
with you?" 
  "I am one," Bongo-Shaftsbury smiled. And pushed back the sleeve of his
coat to remove a cufflink. He rolled up the shirt cuff and thrust the naked
underside of his arm at the girl. Shiny and black, sewn into the flesh, was
a miniature electric switch. Single-pole, double-throw. Waldetar recoiled
and stood blinking. Thin silver wires ran from its terminals up the arm,
disappearing under the sleeve.
  "You see, Mildred. These wires run into my brain. When the switch is
closed like this I act the way I do now. When it is thrown the other--"
  "Papa!" the girl cried.
  "Everything works by electricity. Simple and clean."
  "Stop it," said the other Englishman.
  "Why, Porpentine." Vicious. "Why. For her? Touched by her fright, are you.
Or is it for yourself."
  Porpentine seemed to retreat bashfully. "One doesn't frighten a child,
sir." 
  "Hurrah. General principles again." Corpse fingers jabbed in the air. "But
someday, Porpentine, I, or another, will catch you off guard. Loving,
hating, even showing some absent-minded sympathy. I'll watch you. The moment
you forget yourself enough to admit another's humanity, see him as a person
and not a symbol--then perhaps--"
  "What is humanity."
  "You ask the obvious, ha, ha. Humanity is something to destroy."
                                                    (_V._, pp. 80-1)
 
[...] the solemn binary decisions of these agents [...] (_GR_, p. 441)

[...] Frenesi [...] understood her particular servitude as the freedom,
granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history
and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able to go on
defining moments only, simply, by the action that filled them. Here was a
world of simplicity and certainty no acidhead, no revolutionary anarchist
would ever find, a world based on the one and zero of life and death.
Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths....
                                            (_Vineland_, pp. 71-2)

[...] it would all be done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood
for weightless, invisible chains of electronic presence or absence. If
patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths,
if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record
by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be
represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one
level at least -- an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO. It would take
eight human lives and deaths just to form one character in this being's name
-- its complete dossier might take up a considerable piece of the history of
the world. We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as
hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune, And the only thing
we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What
we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies
beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. (_Vineland_, p. 90)

[...] Everything in the Creation has its equal and opposite counterpart.
[...] (_GR_, p. 555)

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