ABSTRACT
“Every ‘One’ - a Crowd,
Making Room for the Excluded Middle”
Dorothea Olkowski
University of Colorado
dolkowsk@uccs.edu
The law of non-contradiction enforces a binary mentality according to which a proposition must be either True or False. In modern symbolic logic, what is false is symbolized by the addition of a negation symbol to a proposition that has been affirmed as true. Ontologically, this corresponds to non-being. Contemporary philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilles Deleuze, have recommended replacing the idea of non-being with that of difference which is inherently affirmative, the product of differentiation and not negation. Nevertheless both WIttgenstein and Deleuze ultimate defend the law of non-contradiction, the former because if non-being is Otherness, then there is no way to discriminate between being and non-being, and the latter, because the logical contradiction encountered on the level of perception and sensation are precisely that singularity, the sensible encounter that drives one to think. Yet, there are thinkers who have proposed a logic in which the so-called excluded middle is allowed. This paper will examine the effects of such a proposal, especially the notion that a logic that allows the excluded middle produces a notion of the subject that is neither purely identified with true propositions nor with a subject that is a singularity formed by a multiplicity of differentiating forces, for both remain true to the law of non-contradiction. Instead, this paper will look at the possibility of an affective, sensible and thinking subject that is defined as a crowd by admitting the excluded middle. In this manner, every point of view will be defined as a crowd phenomenon and all identities will be understood to be crowd identities that are generated by both human and non-human phenomena.