CoL49 (6) Either ... or ...

[Michael Bailey]

Paul Mackin wrote:

> The proposition that Tristero exists may NOT be true.
> But does that necessarily have to mean it is false?
> By a little bit of alchemical magic we can turn bad shit into good shit.
> May the excluded middle reign!

never really sought to understand what the excluded middle was before.

However, I just ran across a definition in David Foster Wallace's book
on infinity:
"...two rules of inference are especially important.  The first is
known as the Law of the Excluded Middle (LEM).
By LEM, a mathematical proposition P must be either true, or, if not
true, false."

He also (not surprisingly, considering the source) footnotes this with
"....(Except while we're at it, let's confess that we're using 'LEM'
in an informal way
that also comprises the *principle of bivalence*.  Letting 'LEM'
connote the whole schmeer
of Two-Valued Logic is fine for our purposes, but be advised that it's
not 100% rigorous.)"

 this ties into "ones and zeroes" which we see fairly often,
and perhaps in a context of semi-rejection, in V., in CofL49, and also Vineland.
And is a major theme of GR.  Come to think of it, AtD riffs on the
pedestrian nature of accountancy's
numbers that drive Vibe, versus the larger realm of complex numbers
that Kit and Yashmeen - when
not distracted by political concerns - encounter and thrive in.

Vineland, my personal favorite, talks of how these bits can be
accumulated to make an angel...
redeeming the LEM by using it to simulate an analog experience?

Oedipa's vague understanding of LEM - "bad shit" - is tantamount to saying,
things aren't that simple, in human experience.
Rejecting binary logic in terms of "does or doesn't the Tristero exist?"
but also, perhaps, the duality of Tristero/non-Tristero?  (since
W.A.S.T.E. thrives inside Yoyodyne,
mustn't there be some kind of relationship not mutually exclusive?)



-- 
"Far out.  What did it mean?  I haven't the foggiest, except to say
that massive frivolity was heavily involved all around."
- Art Kleps