Conley Dimensions of Iconicity - (Deleuze and The Baroque Diagram)

Deleuze and the Baroque diagram
Tom Conley
Harvard University
In Gilles Deleuze’s writings the diagram is protean form, at once a compo-

sitional principle, a philosophical operative, and a creative process. Mixing
writing and drawing, the diagram is an intermediary shape between an object
conceived and an object realized. A composition of abstract traits, lines, zones,
and even patches of color, its generative character is the object of Deleuze’s
readings of Francis Bacon’s paintings (in Logique de la sensation), while its
poetic, political and philosophical virtue is studied in his work on Michel
Foucault (especially Foucault, published in 1986), for whom the diagram is a
map of possibility, of a devenir exceeding an “archive” or historical repository
of forms. Diagrams inhere in the very texture of Deleuze’s writing, notably
where he appeals to his mentor-poets, Henri Michaux and Herman Melville.
For this end a study of the cartographic “diagram” of the Galapagos in
Melville’s “Encantadas” (of the Piazza Tales) caps this short essay.
1. Introduction
Copyright © 2017. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
The words that follow are aimed to sort through some of the inflexions of the
concept and practice of the diagram in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. The guid-
ing hypothesis is that, by way of the philosopher Deleuze, who has commanded
uncommon attention over the past four decades, “diagram” becomes something
of a skeleton key; or better, a passe-partout that unlocks doors giving onto utopian
spaces, virtual reading rooms perhaps, whose occupants are free to consider aes-
thetics and politics as one and the same thing. 1 In this way the diagram becomes
1. In North America and certain parts of Europe a cottage industry has grown around the work.
Perhaps because the writing tends not to seduce, it seems less an object of adulation than that of
Derrida and his progeny. That a journal (Deleuze Studies), a series of monographs on his work
(at the University of Edinburgh Press), an annual international symposium (lately in Cologne,
Lisbon, and soon in India) are dedicated to the work attests to its visibility.
doi 10.1075/ill.15.09con
© 2017 John Benjamins Publishing Company
Bauer, Matthias, Zirker, Angelika, Fischer, Olga, and Ljungberg, Christina, eds. 2017. <i>Dimensions of Iconicity</i>.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Accessed August 8, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from rice on 2023-08-08 05:58:28.
154 Tom Conley
utopian. 2 If the hunch (perhaps a more fitting synonym for “hypothesis”) has vir-
tue, it is that everywhere the diagram constitutes a guiding principle and process:
principle, insofar as the diagram allows the philosopher to mediate perception
and evidence, in other words, sensation and fact, which can be taken to be at once
physical and psychic; process, insofar as the diagram can be countenanced – in
affiliation with a title engraved in the minds of American students of the 1950s and
1960s, Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style – as a mode or manner, a “style”
of thinking and writing. 3 By this it is meant that Deleuze’s writing can be seen
and read diagrammatically: within the grammar that carries the meaning, there
are embedded “lines” or markers plotting the sentences and, at the same time,
engaging a way of seeing writing on the same plane as its meaning, that would be
ostensibly invisible. In the process a relation, effectively a field of tension, develops
between the mapping of the writing and the writing itself. Such is the ongoing
process that mobilizes the diagrammatic principle.
2. A graphic relation set between thinking and its physical shape
Deleuze enjoys asking questions that, preferring not to answer, he asks us to pon-
der. In most likelihood, writing in the wake of Sartre (Qu’est-ce que la littérature? /
What is Literature? 1950 [1948]) and André Bazin (Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? / What
is Cinema? 1985 [1958]), the one an existential philosopher and the other an exis-
tential film critic, Deleuze was prompted to title his final major work Qu’est-ce que
la philosophie? / What is Philosophy? (Deleuze & Guattari 1994 [1991]). Written on
the heels of one of his most difficult, yet most seductive, enigmatic, and enthus-
ing essays, at once philosophy, mathematics, topological theory, and art history,
namely Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque / The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993
[1988]), What is Philosophy? extends what he engages in in his reading of the au-
thor of The Theodicy and The Monadology. Set at the middle of Le Pli, one of the
2. All the more insofar as Christina Ljungberg’s (2012) recent studies of the diagram find ref-
erence in Thomas More’s Utopia. This paper, it is hoped, will sustain her reflections in Semblance
and Signification from a different angle (Ljungberg 2011).
3. Shaping generations of its readers, the book was a no-nonsense disquisition on the art of
writing clearly, concisely, even with economy: William Strunk, The Elements of Style (1959), with
revisions, and introduction, as well as a new chapter on writing by E. B. White, a contributor
to The New Yorker, and the author of the enormously popular children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web
(1959) with illustrations by Garth Williams. It may be that in the context of children’s literature,
Williams’s drawing illustrating the cobweb the spider weaves to save the life of the pig, in whose
webbing are woven the words “some pig”, would qualify as a utopian diagram.
Deleuze and the Baroque diagram 155
crucial chapters, titled “Qu’est-ce qu’un événement?” / “What is an Event?”, begs

us to wonder if in general, from the beginning to the end, Deleuze was in fact an
ontologist wondering what indeed is the force that inspires the interrogative ten-
or of “what is”. And, in turn, if the question can be asked, and if its answer is as
complex as we might believe, how can the reflections that ensue be mapped? Here
the diagram intervenes as a graphic relation set between the confusion inhering
in “thinking” or wondering about the nature of things and the physical shape of
a studied reflection that responds to the question.
3. Unlocking areas of sensation
Where Deleuze invokes the principle of the diagram he refuses recourse to ety-
mology to explain what he “means”, even if it goes – and in the work it indeed goes
without saying – that diagraphein, “to mark out by lines”, is implied in the usage.
Early on in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze 2003), in a close reading
of the paintings, he notes how the artist often includes a diagram or intermediate
drawing within the field of the finished canvas. The lines that intervene in the
play of colors and forms suggest how the painting is developing and, at the same
time, how the work can be looked at both as a finished-unfinished form and as an
embodiment of an ongoing, correlative constructive-destructive creative process.
Deleuze calls these diagrammatical configurations “an operative set of a-signify-
ing and non-representative lines and zones” and, too, “traits and color patches”
that “unlock areas of sensation” (2003: 83). They keep the painting from lapsing
into a lull of representation while simultaneously drawing a sense of ordered force
out of a chaotic mass. Deleuze describes the artist’s outlines or emblems of color-
ed forms as what, abstract in nature, can be at once in what regards figuration
an ordering of chaos, “a catastrophe” and a germ of rhythm or violent disorder. 4
4. The intermediate character of the painterly diagram
The diagram changes figurative scale. In Bacon’s work it can be a mouth drawn
extending from one end of the sitter’s head to another, or it can even be the space
of a desert, a Sahara of sorts, that emanates from the portrait of the sitter, “as if
4. The French edition (see Note 5) includes black and white and color reproductions of the
paintings and is thus a benchmark. Jakub Zdebik (2012) alertly discusses the pages on Bacon in
the epilogue. Others who work along the same aesthetic line include Elizabeth Grosz (2008) and
Anne Sauvagnargues (2013).
156 Tom Conley
the two parts of the head had been drawn and quartered with an ocean”, or as if “a
unit of measure were changed by replacing figurative units with micrometric, or to
the contrary, cosmic” counterparts (2003: 65). He calls the lines of a diagram “ir-
rational, involuntary, accidental”, bereft of representative, illustrative or narrative
functions. They are the “confused sensation” felt in the birth both of the subject
and the object, the painter and the painter’s work. The lines trace interstices and
chart zones of figural possibility. Pertaining to chaos and catastrophe (in topology
a dynamic folding of a webbing), the diagram assures a generation of form. Unlike
a code, a method, or an operative principle, the painterly diagram is “sensational”
in its appeal to a tensile, even nervous condition of the genesis of the work that
begins over and again before the spectator’s eyes. Neither of the optical character
of abstract constructions nor of a manual or “mannered” quality in action paint-
ing, the diagram is a line endowed with contour, what Deleuze calls figurative
possibility and affective force seen and felt prior to figuration.
By means of the painterly diagram (that in the visual field of Bacon’s work,
neither diminutive nor dominant, controls the chaos in the arenas in which the
figures are shown), a pictorial experience begins over and again (pace Paul Valéry),
toujours recommencée. The intermediate character of the diagram allows the work
to embrace a “non-figurative chaos”, in other words, to become the site of an event
when in fact the play of pigment on the lightly saturated canvas – the warp and
woof of the weave are visible when the painting is seen close up – can be imagined
as a moving stratigraphy that allows the fuscum subnigrum of originary disorder
to be discerned and located. When Deleuze shows how painters differ in their
“manner of embracing this non-figurative chaos” and how they account for the
“pictorial order to come” (2003: 65), the diagram becomes a heuristic principle that
enables optical space to be distinguished from the “manual or tactile” elements.

Best outlined in the study of Bacon, the aesthetic character of the diagram – where
stress is placed on its processual virtue – also happens to be part and parcel of its
historical and political character where transformation includes both painting
and an ethics of practice. “We might say”, he notes later on in discussing Bacon’s
“Painting” of 1946, “that the diagram causes us to go from one form to another,
for example from a form-bird to a form-raincoat”. The diagram is not in what we
might imagine to be, born of the bird’s wing, nervures of the struts on which the
fabric of umbrella extends, but rather a “blurry zone” [zone brouillée], a dark area
of its underside out of which emerges jaws, teeth and whitish chin of a face that
would be staring at the viewer (cf. Deleuze 1981, Vol. 2, plate 30).
Adepts of Deleuze’s studies of aesthetics have little difficulty in moving from
his treatment of one medium to another. The layerings in Bacon’s paintings share
much with the stratigraphies the philosopher detects in the sum of Alain Resnais’s
cinema. What smacks of a mix of line and color on Bacon’s canvases seems close
to what Resnais does in films where time, space and surface are forever commin-
gling. The director, he says, sketches out a “detailed cartography of the places”
(Deleuze 1989: 121) in which the narratives unfold. With drawings implicit or
visibly present in the moving images, the cinema becomes “un établissement de
véritables diagrammes” [an establishment of veritable diagrams]. In their geolo-
gy or temporal stratigraphy, when seen placed one over the other, the films bear
witness to “the sum of the transformation of a continuum, a piling of strata or the
superimposition of coexisting sheets [of time]. Maps and diagrams subsist as the
integrating parts of the film” (Deleuze 1989: 127). 5 When reading and seeing the
films in the criss-crossings of sound, writing and moving images, we ourselves,
he adds, “invent” a continuity of “transversal connections” or communications
among the different sheets, and with them we weave a sum of relations that cannot
be localized (Deleuze 1985: 162). 6
Perhaps the strongest epistemic treatment of the diagram is found in the final
flourish of the first section of Foucault, Deleuze’s (1986) study in homage to the
eponymous friend and author who had died only two years earlier. First published
as an essay in Critique (1975), the aptly titled “A new cartographer?” crowns the
end of the first section. In it, Deleuze engages a close reading of the regretted writ-
er’s Surveiller et punir (1975), a study of the birth of the modern prison. As does
every reader of Foucault’s book, he too happens upon an abrupt conclusion that
seems to be a call to arms, not a peroration but, rather, an appeal to fight for reform
of the carceral condition in which, then and even more now, billions of humans
are confined. 7 Rather than summing up his study of the prison-systems that began
in pre-revolutionary times, the author (Foucault, but in the indirect discourse it
could also be Deleuze) hears “le grondement de la bataille” [the rumbling of the
battle] and is compelled to stop: “J’interromps ici ce livre” [Here I interrupt this
book] (Foucault 1975: 360). The gesture attests to discontinuity, to breakage, indeed
to rupture and recoil that also mark Foucault’s writing of history. The ending be-
comes a conclusion fitting for what Deleuze makes of the concept of a “diagram”
in the political design he discerns at the basis of Discipline and Punish.
5. This is the original quote: “l’ensemble des transformations d’un continuum, l’empilement
des strates ou les superpositions des nappes coexistantes. Les cartes et les diagrammes subsistent
donc comme parties intégrantes du film” (Deleuze 1981: 158). Unless otherwise indicated all
translations are mine.
6. Along this line, I have sought to find where the diagram is a composite unit of sound and
writing or image and text that has a close relation with the work of Maurice Blanchot (cf. Conley
2011: 163–76).
7. [orig.] “bien que ce soit elle qui fasse voir, et qui fasse parler”, quoted in Deleuze (1986: 51n38).
158 Tom Conley
Up to that point Foucault, he notes, distinguishes the concept of the archive

and that of the diagram. The former is understood as accumulated knowledge of
things past, a conceptual repository in which chronicles of ways of thinking and
doing can be accessed: not merely a municipal or national archive, but rather an
inherited mass of cognitive practices into which subjects are born, that shape the
ways masses think and feel in the conscious and unconscious registers of their
lives. Archives contain evidence of the “discursive” and “visible” formations that
have shaped subjectivity. By contrast, the latter is not what has been but what,
drawing its force and from the archive, can become. Earlier in the essay Deleuze
writes: “[t]he diagram is no longer the auditory or visual archive; it is the map,
the cartography coextensive with the entire social field. It is an abstract machine.
[…] It is an almost blind and mute machine, even though it is what is at the crux
of seeing and speaking” (Deleuze 1986: 42). It can be understood that the dia-
gram is a re-drawing, an implementation, as it were, of pieces, of bits and parts of
things taken from an archive that suddenly coordinate and then, within (or even
unbeknownst to), a general sphere inaugurate different modes of thinking and
doing. The diagram belongs to a creative process that, perhaps by trial and error
or experience as such, that informs life and that, anyone of utopian leaning would
hope, seeks to change it for the better. And later:
a diagram is profoundly unstable or in flux, endlessly mixing materials and func-
tions so as to constitute mutations. Finally, every diagram is intersocial and in a
process of becoming [en devenir]. It never functions to represent a pre-existing
world, it produces a new type of reality, a new model of model of truth. It is nei-
ther a subject of history, nor what looks over history. It makes history by undoing
preceding realities and meaning, constituting as many points of emergence or
creativity, unexpected conjunctions, improbable continuums. It passes history

with a becoming [Il double l’histoire avec un devenir.]. (Deleuze 1986: 51)
It is hardly by chance that the diagram is affiliated with cartography, implied to

be not a representation of space but a practice of abstract drawing deployed for
tactical and locative ends – to inform its users how and where they “are” and how
to manage – and to engineer – in the strong sense of the term – a spatial practice;
in other words, a way of moving and shifting location, of turning places into
existential spaces, perhaps an unbounded space in which “becoming” is possible:
say, a space in which the labor of struggle for social ends can be engaged. 8 Adds
Deleuze in what can only be a concluding flourish:
8. Here Michel de Certeau’s (1990) sense of cartography, understood as a diagram, is clear, both
in the chapters on Foucault and on “spatial stories” (see 75–81 and 175–180).
And, from one diagram to another new maps are drawn. Thus there is no di-
agram that, next to the points it connects, [lacks] relatively free or unlinked
points, points of creativity, of mutation, of resistance. From them we can begin
to understand the entirety. It is from the ‘struggles’ [luttes] of every epoch, from
the style of the struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or
their re-concatenation over and above discontinuities. Indeed everyone attests
to the way that the line from the outside of which Melville spoke, with neither
beginning nor end, an oceanic line that cuts across all points of resistance, and
that rolls, bumps into diagrams, forever as a function of the most recent. What a
curious torsion of the line that was 1968, the line with a 1000 aberrations! Hence
the triple definition of writing: to write is to struggle, to resist; to write is to be-
come; to write, is to make maps, ‘I’m a cartographer’. (Deleuze 1986: 51)
Abstract as it could ever be, the political diagram is inferred to be one in which
a creative instinct “maps” an ever-ongoing struggle. Complicating or causing the
concept of the diagram to fold over and upon itself, Deleuze’s work plies aesthetics
into politics and vice-versa. The effect is found in the shift from a fairly clear expla-
nation of the relation of the diagram with its correlative, the archive, to the curious
formulation of the “line from the outside”. What is going on when, all of a sudden,
the name “Melville” drops into the text? And how and where does a serendipitous
moment, “1968”, play in the configuration? And what about a line-as-diagram
“with a 1000 aberrations”? And, finally, what about the quotation from Foucault
that calls writing a cartographic operation?
It can be immediately inferred that the line from the outside, la ligne du de-
hors, could be the line on an imaginary map enthusiasts of Melville, like those of
Charles Darwin for the voyage of the Beagle, might chart of the writer’s travels in
the years 1839–44: from New York, at age twenty, as a common sailor on a trip to
Liverpool and, after five weeks on the British Isles, a speedy return; on January 3,
1841, departure from Fairhaven on the Acushet, a schooner taking him around
Cape Horn and to the south Pacific; his jumping ship on the Marquesas Islands
in 1842 where he spends three weeks with natives before boarding a whaler, the
Lucy Ann, bound for Tahiti; and soon after when he takes part in a mutiny and is
incarcerated in Calabooza Beratanee; the episodes of beachcombing before joining
another whaler that brings him to Honolulu; working as a clerk for four months
before joining the crew of the United States that delivers him to Boston in the
autumn of 1844. If drawn over or plotted through the fiction, the line would cut
through Typee (1846), Omoo (1847), Mardi (1849), Redburn (1849), White-Jacket
(1850), Moby-Dick (1851), and the Piazza Tales (1853–55), which include “Benito
Cereno” and “The Encantadas”. But it would be a line drawn from the inside,
from within the constructions of biographers (see, e.g. Hershel Parker 1996, 2002).
160 Tom Conley
From the outside, the line would be of philosophical inflection, sensed to be, like
the Gothic line, having neither beginning nor end, the line of “empathy”, a line of
feeling that Deleuze admires in Wilhelm Wörringer, a line that neither encloses
nor is enclosed.
5. The Melvillian diagram
A keener clue might be found where the diagram and the concept of difference and
repetition converge. In “Bartleby ou la Formule” (“Bartleby or the Formula”), one
of the few essays Deleuze writes at length on Melville, attention is drawn to the
effects of a scrivener’s deadbeat iteration, “‘I would prefer not to’”, uttered passively
and almost mechanically in response to the demands his superior makes of him
in an office on “Wall-Street” (cf. Melville 2002 [1853]). “‘I would prefer not to’”
carries force for the reason of being literal: nothing can be made of it outside of its
utterance (heard) and inscription (seen) in the medium of the novella. The formula
forces the reader to stay within the “walled” confines of the text and thus to treat it
as “dead” writing. As a diagram “I would prefer not to” (how often we mutter it in
the routine of the administrative bureaucracies in which we are mired!) would be
a dissonant particle, a “non-representative zone” in the text that calls in question
what readers would expect to be its mimetic foundation. Both in and outside of
the story, the formula becomes an intermediate form that “captures” and sums
up the tale at the same time, as aphorism, it carries a virtue of negativity into any
context in which its user utters it.
The Melvillian diagram, found as such in the scrivener’s task of copying, that
both Bartleby and Flaubert’s couple Bouvard and Pécuchet seem to share, finds a
correlative in what the narrator of the fourth sketch of “The Encantadas” (Melville
1856) relates in describing the Narborough and Albemarle Islands. Conceived as
an emblem, to be seen and to be read, the “Sketch Fourth”, subtitled “A Pisgah
View from the Rock”, follows a chapter devoted to the birds populating the vol-
canic islands and the fish swimming about a porous labyrinth of lava beneath the
surface of the sea. The reporter-narrator climbs Rodondo Rock, an island of stone
surging 240 feet above sea level, on whose summit he has a view of the entirety of
the world around him. “Ten miles from the Equator”, looking over a “boundless
watery Kentucky”, he casts he gaze upon the two islands from what could be both
cavalier (bird’s eye) and ichnographic (perpendicular) points of view:
Narborough and Albemarle are neighbors after a quite curious fashion. A familiar
diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood:
Cut a channel at the above letter joint, and the middle transverse limb is
Narborough, and all the rest is Albemarle. Volcanic Narborough lies in the black
jaws of Albemarle like a wolf’s red tongue in his open mouth. (Melville 1856)
“A familiar diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood”: if a “neighbor-

hood” is in question, the diagram would be the “sketch” of a topographical map.
Yet it is a printed majuscule, an E turned downward that makes Albemarle the
vertical column and two “feet” of the letter and Narborough the middle stroke.
Visual and lexical forms are conflated. In the following paragraph, insofar as the
list of fauna that inhabit the island 9 is set to resemble a gazetteer or descriptive
legend to a map or an image, the visual shape of the greater sketch confirms that
the letter-as-diagram could be the image, inscription, or central panel of an em-
blematic device. It is not far-fetched to read thus the description of the two bays
(named Weather and Lee) on either side of Narborough within the enclosure of
Albemarle. The narrator recounts that when sperm whales were discovered calving
in the two bays their hunters blocked the entrance to either side “and so had the
leviathans very neatly in a pen” (Melville 1856), in a sort of enclosure that the ring
of pen confuses with the writing instrument that has drawn the alphabetic figure
of the two islands and the waters surrounding them.
9. “If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in round numbers, the sta-
tistics, according to the most reliable estimates made upon the spot:
Men none
Anteaters unknown
Man-haters unknown
Lizards 500,000
Snakes 500,000
Spiders 10,000,000
Salamanders unknown
Devils unknown
Making a clean total of 11,000,000
exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, anteaters, man-haters, and salamanders”.
(Melville 1856)
162 Tom Conley
As was suggested about the nature of Bartleby’s “formula”, the literal aspect
of the turned letter E-as-island indeed qualifies it to be (a) what at once is in and
outside of the text, and (b) what draws attention to the intermediary process – to
the print itself, to what elsewhere is invisible or goes without indication, to what
is unconscious or unknown – that qualifies the Encantadas as textual “sketches”.
Grosso modo, the “diagram” that Melville deploys would be what Deleuze is getting
at in his treatment of Bacon and in what he suggests by la ligne du dehors. Yet if,
fitting for the Galapagos or Encantadas, Melville’s is an oceanic line boundlessly
traversing all barriers, bumping into, splitting, bifurcating thus becoming-dia-
gram, how does it come to be associated with the torsion of “1968”, a line with
“1000 aberrations”? As the very aspect of Melville’s text has shown and signified,
the date might embody another formula, an emblem or a Baroque concetto, in
other words, another diagram of lexical and textual virtue. Falling into the essay
unannounced, “1968” would refer to the “May of 44 days”, the utopian revolution
whose best effects lay in a now-bygone promise, the mention of which in 1986
could be interpreted as nostalgic, melancholic or wistful, but in Deleuze’s embrace
of le devenir, a sign, too, of the potential of becoming. 1968 would be the graphic
correlative of the trait of an endless line from the outside, a line with neither be-
ginning nor end, that conceivably would be infinity, like Melville’s “E”, turned at
a 90° angle when confused with the integer “8”. Thus,
would be latent diagram, even a Moebius strip, within the numerical date referring
to the moment that a momentary solidarity of intellectuals and students engaged
struggle against what has since become an increasingly unfettered economic con-
dition of intolerable disparity between the world’s rich and the world’s poor.
6. Cartographic writing
In its polymorphic configuration, 1968 gets mixed with Henri Michaux, nomadic
poet who intervenes and whose language invents and generates new and other, no
less utopian spaces. Author of the “line of a 1000 aberrations!” to which Deleuze
alludes, Michaux lives his life “in the folds” of being, he configures himself as a
point of a line that happens to be everything and nothing: “Un point, c’est tout”:
such the title of one of Michaux’s poems. And so, if a reading of the words that
follow “1968”, the exclamation point [!] capping the “mille aberrations” would be
just that: a horizontal line juxtaposed to a point that would be a cross-section of a
line, in other words, a “tout”, an entire world. For Deleuze, Michaux (1962: 31–32)
is the emblematic poet who uses language to open onto new vistas. Michaux writes:
“However, I really need to travel. Oh, if I could only live on a ski-lift, ever advanc-
ing, ever into new countries, progressing over spaces of great silence”. 10
Intervening as he does with the allusion to Melville and the fabled month of
May, Deleuze (1962: 51) interrupts the reflection on Foucault and the politics of the
diagram. The latter is now commuted into writing, cast not as a noun, “écriture”,
but as écrire, to write, an infinite nominative, like le devenir, that carries potential
and promise: “[É]crire, c’est lutter, résister; écrire, c’est devenir; écrire, c’est car-
tographier, ‘je suis cartographe’”. [To write means to struggle and resist, to write
is to become, to write is to make maps: ‘I’m a cartographer’]. The open-ended form
of the sentence, the thrice-repeated écrire, finally inflected with mapping, capped
by a quotation from an interview of 1975 in which Foucault projected himself
as a worker and an artisan, suggests that the form and force of the writing are
diagrammatic: it opens spaces, it is visible, it is of an intermediate design, it is a
webbing or a gridding, it is perhaps even of mathematical inflection, but by all
means it meshes poetry and politics.
At the end of Foucault (Deleuze 1986), the figures to whom Deleuze had al-
luded suddenly return, and so also does the concept of the diagram, now shown
exceeding terror or catastrophe. The “line” that had been the matter and process
of the diagram becomes the thread or fil rouge, the commanding trace or draw-
ing, in which aesthetic and political diagrams are conflated. What had seemed
to be a gratuitous or freely associated connection in the flourish ending “A New
Cartographer” returns as a refrain or a ritournelle – with a difference.
Terrible is the line that mixes all the diagrams, above the very storms, Melville’s
line whose two free ends envelop every embarkation in its complicated meanders,
that when the time comes, opens upon horrible contortions and always risks
carrying a man away when it releases; or else Michaux’s line “with a 1000 aberra-
tions”, at a growing molecular speed, “a cart driver’s whip strap in all of his fury.”
However terrible it may be, it is a line of life that is no longer measured according
to relations of force and that carries man off and beyond terror.
(Deleuze 1986: 130)
The writing line that includes diagrams within its motion and passage would move
through and, in its virtual revolutions, offer release. Utopian, to be sure, the line
that draws and redraws diagrams invents space that elsewhere, in Qu’est-ce que la
philosophie? Deleuze (Deleuze and Guattari 1994 [1991]) marked – it can’t be put
otherwise – no less diagrammatically in his reading of the title of Samuel Butler’s
10. “J’ai pourtant tellement besoin de voyager. Ah, si je pouvois seulement vivre en télésiège,
toujours avançant, toujours en de nouveaux pays, progressant sur des espaces de grand silence”
(Michaux 1962: 31–32).
164 Tom Conley
Erewhon. “Nowhere” spelled backwards, ‘erewhon’ is a utopia, a non-place, whose

literal reading, backwards and forwards, yields new and other spacings: nowhere,
he notes, can be glossed or spaced as now here: now, here, becoming becomes.
Like Melville’s ligne du dehors, like Michaux’s ever-aberrant lines, like “1968”,
and like the “triple definition of writing” as struggle, as becoming and as mapping
(Deleuze 1986: 51, see quote mentioned earlier), Erehown is the very object it would
otherwise represent. It is closer to being an object than to being a representation
of an object, and as such, between text and image, a diagram, it thus engages our
experience of language and of the world in unforeseen ways. 11
In a context such as ours, which focuses on the creative potential of iconicity,
where the diagram might be taken as a practical means and object of investigation,
it may be that, entirely impractical, entirely utopian in its aesthetics and politics,
what Deleuze does with it opens it onto an area of rich, unending, and ever-on-
going reflection.
References
Bazin, A. 2004. What is Cinema? transl. H. Gray; Intro. J. Renoir; Foreword D. Andrew. Berkeley
CA: University of California Press.
Bender, J. & Marrinan, M. 2011. The Culture of Diagram. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.
Butler, S. 2002 [1872]. Erewhon. New York NY: Dover.
de Certeau, M. 1990. L’invention du quotidien, 2 Vols, L. Girard (ed.). Paris. Editions Gallimard.
Conley, T. 2011. Deleuze and the filmic diagram. Deleuze Studies 5(2): 63–76.
doi: 10.3366/dls.2011.0016
Deleuze, G. 1981. Logique de la sensation. 2 v. Paris: Éditions de la Différence.
Deleuze, G. 1986. Foucault. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, transl. T. Conley. Minneapolis MN: Uni
versity of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-image, transl. H. Tomlinson & R. Galeta. Minneapolis
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, G. 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, transl. D. B. Smith. Minneapolis MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, M. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Prais: Éditions Gallimard.
Foucault, M. 1978. Discipline and Punish, transl. A. Sheridan. New York NY: Vintage.
Guattari, F. & Deleuze, G. 1994. What is Philosophy? transl. H. Tomlinson. London: Verso.
Grosz, E. 2008. Chaos Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York NY:
Columbia University Press.
Leibniz, J. G. 1951. The Theodicy. 〈www.gutenberg.org/files/17147/17147-h/17147-h.htm〉 (19
October 2016).
11. Such is the description of a diagram in John Bender and Michael Marrinan’s The Culture of
Diagram (2011: 21).
Leibniz, J. G. La monadologie. 〈www.gutenberg.org〉

Ljungberg, C. 2011. Unbinding the text: Intermedial iconicity in Peter Greenaway’s Prosperous’
Books. In Semblance and Signification [Iconicity in Language and Literature 10], P.
Michelucci, O. Fischer & C. Ljungberg (eds), 369–388. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
doi: 10.1075/ill.10.21lju
Ljungberg, C. 2012. Creative Dynamics. Diagrammatic Strategies in Narrative [Iconicity in
Language and Literature 11]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/ill.11
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virginia.edu/~hyper/Melville_En/encant04.html〉 (20 March 2014).
Michaux, H. 1962. Vents et poussières, 1955–6. Paris: Éditions Gallimard.
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University Press.
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University Press.
Sartre, J.-P. 1950. What is Literature? transl. B. Frechman. New York NY: Philosophical Library.
Sauvagnargues, A. 2013. Deleuze and Art, transl. S. Bankston. London: Bloomsbury.
Strunk, W. 1959. The Elements of Style, with revisions, and introduction, and a new chapter on
writing by E. B. White. New York NY: Macmillan.
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Zdebik, J. 2012. Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization. New York
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Conley Dimensions of Iconicity - (Deleuze and The Baroque Diagram)

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Deleuze and the Baroque diagram

In Gilles Deleuze’s writings the diagram is protean form, at once a compo-

2. A graphic relation set between thinking and its physical shape

crucial chapters, titled “Qu’est-ce qu’un événement?” / “What is an Event?”, begs

3. Unlocking areas of sensation

4. The intermediate character of the painterly diagram

enables optical space to be distinguished from the “manual or tactile” elements.

Up to that point Foucault, he notes, distinguishes the concept of the archive

creativity, unexpected conjunctions, improbable continuums. It passes history

It is hardly by chance that the diagram is affiliated with cartography, implied to

5. The Melvillian diagram

“A familiar diagram will illustrate this strange neighborhood”: if a “neighbor-

Erewhon. “Nowhere” spelled backwards, ‘erewhon’ is a utopia, a non-place, whose

Deleuze, G. 1986. Foucault. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Leibniz, J. G. La monadologie. 〈www.gutenberg.org〉

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