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PDF Deleuze and The Diagram Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization Deleuze Ebook Full Chapter
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Deleuze and the Diagram
Jakub Zdebik
www.continuumbooks.com
The author has asserted his/her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
EISBN: 978-1-4411-7872-5
2011049275
Acknowledgements viii
Notes 196
Bibliography 224
Index 231
I would like to thank Daniel Vaillancourt and Calin Mihailescu for their
invaluable guidance, feedback and encouragement. Gary Genosko has
been tremendously helpful with his commentaries, insights and advice.
Jonathan Murphy has been especially instrumental in the making of this
book: his comments were constructive, patient and helpful. I would like
to thank Andrew Pendakis for reading through the manuscript. Colette
Stoeber edited the manuscript with precision and efficacy and for this
I thank her. I would like to thank Sarah Campbell, Colleen Coalter and
Rachel Eisenhauer at Continuum for the opportunity to publish my work
and for their support. Elżbieta, Zbigniew and Magda have always been
there and supported me and for this I thank them. And, of course, I would
like to thank most of all Barbara. Without her tireless and constant support
this book would not have been possible. I am forever in your debt.
Earlier versions of some chapters or chapter sections appeared in various
journals. Permission to reprint was kindly granted by The Semiotic Review of
Books, The Brock Review and ESC: English Studies in Canada .
unformed, the state of flux, the dynamic, the movement towards actualiza-
tion. It also deals with organization, forces at work in social and cultural
constructs; it is a way to travel from one system to another. The diagram
allows a glimpse of the state that comes before the formation of an object,
and of what goes into its formation. In a cultural object such as a painting,
for example, the theory of the diagram offers something more than typical
hermeneutics because it searches for essential states of abstraction within
the actual figuration of an image. It also shows the far-reaching connec-
tions at play in a work of art, and the multiple parts that come to work in
its assemblage. The theory of the diagram is based on a philosophical con-
cept devised by Gilles Deleuze, who was inspired by Michel Foucault.
This chapter is divided into two major parts. First, I will look at two defini-
tions of the diagram as they appear in Deleuze’s Foucault. After a brief sum-
mary of these passages, I will show how architecture and cartography are
fundamental to the conceptualization of the diagram. In the second part, I
will pinpoint the locations of the diagram in Deleuze’s corpus. This is impor-
tant because Deleuze does not dedicate a single work to the diagram. His
presentation of the diagram remains indefinitely unformed – from its first
to last appearance in Deleuze’s corpus, the diagram changes shape. First
mentioned in an essay on Foucault titled ‘Écrivain non: un nouveau car-
tographe’ (1975), it then appears in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and Francis
Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981) and is later developed in more detail in
Foucault (1986). Taken all together, these texts seem to form a small system
revolving around the notion of the diagram. And this system has a circular
form: starting and looping back onto Foucault after a process of transfor-
mation. By tracing the sources of the concept of the diagram, I will provide
an introductory map of the diagram’s situation in Deleuze’s thought – and,
by extension, this map will reveal the diagram’s characteristics.
In Foucault , the book in which he finally explains the workings of the dia-
gram most completely, Deleuze defines his concept twice. The first time,
the diagram is a new informal dimension; the second, it is a display of rela-
tions as pure functions.
system to the next without the need to follow any similarity of form and
it can intermingle with other functions, giving two incongruous systems
their respective operative fields. In this way, the diagram is not merely a
simple model that traces similarities between things, but is also a genera-
tive device that continues working once embodied:
The diagram makes abstracted function pass from one formation or sys-
tem to the next. In this way, it is a virtual map behind heterogeneous for-
mation not only irreducible in its actual form, but also heterogeneous in
its level of materiality: like prison and the penal code, an architectural
structure and a set of laws.
must be following the path of the actual plan of the building, and a con-
ceptual diagram, which is devoid of value and meaning because it is pure
abstract function. But the architectural diagram reveals the becoming of
forms and how they function – their processes. The diagram is not a struc-
ture; instead, it traces the flow of forces that are part of a rigid organization
of a particular building. It shows forces at play in a structure, but not the
structure; it shows the stages before a form comes into being, but not the
form; and because it is something that must be embodied, it is not isomor-
phic with the final product.
But an architectural diagram must be compared to the conceptual dia-
gram. Deleuze and Guattari’s diagram is not part of the history and rep-
resentation of architecture and therefore their concept of the diagram
remains detached from architectural practice. The Deleuzoguattarian dia-
gram is able to discover new dimensions because it is free from the burden
of representation.24 Eisenman provides a concise definition of Deleuze’s
diagram:
The diagram, then, is both form and matter, the visible and the articu-
lable. Diagrams for Deleuze do not attempt to bridge the gap between
these pairs but rather to widen it – to open the gap to other unadorned
matters and functions that will become formed. Diagrams, then, form
visible matter and formalize articulable functions.25
our thoughts. It does this by being generative – it creates new vistas instead
of simply representing what is already there. And being connective is part
of its function as a conceptual tool.
The map should be perceived as lines and traits that connect the men-
tal landscape to the outside world in an interweaving network. Deleuze
explains the connection between map and diagram in Negotiations :
The notion of diagram is put on the same plane as the map. A map is
described as dynamic according to its essential trait, the line. Or rather,
any lines can make a map. Accordingly, the new dimension can be
wrenched from a multiplicity and made to fluctuate between heterogene-
ous ensembles.
In ‘What Children Say?’ Deleuze is showing the dynamic aspect of map-
ping in relation to memory-dependent psychoanalysis. Deleuze’s concept
of the map is an alternative to the redundant psychoanalytic approach
to reconfiguring the psychic space: ‘They have to put away their maps,
underneath which there is no longer anything but yellowed photos of the
father-mother.’31 Children are made to rely on photographs instead of
their mapping instincts. Contrasted to the photograph, which repeats real-
ity, the map is generative of difference.
In A Thousand Plateaus, the map is also opposed to static tracing, which
behaves like the representational photograph:
The connections made by the map are always full of potential for new con-
nections. Maps are superimposed, and new connections are made. This
idea of the superimposable map is explicitly part of the definition of the
diagram in Foucault :
Maps, on the contrary, are superimposed in such a way that each map
finds itself modified in the following maps, rather than finding its origin
in the preceding one: from one map to the next, it is not a matter of
searching for an origin, but of evaluating displacement.33
We can draw a map of the places where the diagram appears in Deleuze’s
corpus. In ‘Écrivain non: un nouveau cartographe’ (1975), Deleuze writes
for the first time about the diagram, a concept he found in Foucault’s
Discipline and Punish . The diagram returns in Mille plateaux (1980) in the
context of a theory of language. A year later, Deleuze writes about the dia-
gram from an artistic point of view in Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensa-
tion (1981). Finally, Deleuze revisits his essay from 1975 and adds to it in
Foucault (1986). Starting and ending with Foucault, Deleuze seems to close
the loop on the diagram – in effect, tracing a small system of the evolving
concept.
When Deux régimes de fous came out in 2003, two other texts that deal with
the diagram became available: ‘Désir et plaisir ’, written in 1977 but not pub-
lished until 1994, and ‘Sur les principaux concepts de Michel Foucault ’, written
in 1984 and later incorporated in Foucault .
The concept of the diagram, without being named as such, also comes
up in other sources. ‘What is a dispositif ?’ describes the diagrammatic func-
tion using the word dispositif instead of the diagram that Foucault used in
Discipline and Punish . In ‘Bartleby, and the Formula’, an essay in Essays Critical
and Clinical , zones of indiscernibility take on the role of the unformed
dimension. Of course, in What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari describe
the plane of immanence. There, the plane fulfils a diagrammatic role:
Deleuze and Guattari write about geographic landscapes of the mind and
abstract architectures. The plane was, however, already announced as a
possible alternative to the diagram in Foucault .39 Finally, The Fold seems to
pick up the concept of folding where Foucault left off.
Or perhaps the diagram was there before Foucault and Foucault . In
Difference and Repetition , Deleuze already introduced us to the notion of
plicature (which operates through a series of foldings) in conjunction with
Geoffroy St-Hilaire. Also in Difference and Repetition , Deleuze discusses the
Kantian schema he likens to the diagram years later. And lastly, Manuel
DeLanda identified proto-diagrams in Deleuze’s use of nineteenth-century
Foucault as a cartographer
‘Écrivain non: un nouveau cartographe’, published in 1975 in Critique, is a
book review of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish , and the title can be trans-
lated as ‘Not a writer: a new cartographer.’ In one section of the essay,
Deleuze refers to the chapter in Foucault’s book describing the Panopticon
as ‘one of the most beautiful’.41 The panoptic model – seeing without being
seen – is an abstract model that can be applied to a variety of concrete
spaces organized around surveillance and control. The abstract architec-
ture of the panopticon consists of a science of control in which the visual
field is converted into a field of knowledge.42 The schema of this system is
‘Power – (perception) – knowledge.’43
Deleuze tells us that panopticism is a machine defined by a pure func-
tion: ‘It is a machine, which works, but a very special type of machine.
It is defined by pure function, independently of sensible configurations
and categorical forms where this function incarnates itself.’ The function
of seeing without being seen is also defined: ‘It is defined by pure matter,
independently from qualified substances into which this matter enters.’44
Matter here is human multiplicity, a multiplicity that needs to be control-
led. Panopticism is, in effect, an abstract machine. An abstract machine
is pure function and pure matter. It abstracts forms that hold functions,
and dissolves substances that qualify matter. This, Deleuze writes, is the
diagram.45
The diagram is likened to a map: ‘The diagram, it is the map,
cartography.’46 The diagram is a particular kind of map that is coexten-
sive with the social field. It operates an exhaustive grid. The diagram puts
into work relations within a multiplicity, a multiplicity that it organizes and
that is, observes what he has imagined, to see whether some ardent desire
is there to be discerned.47
The abstract machine is the diagram of the assemblage. And content and
expression are variables of the assemblage. This is a way to show that lan-
guage is a construction that plugs into a social field.
[W]e may distinguish in the abstract machine two states of the diagram,
one in which variables of content and expression are distributed accord-
ing to their heterogeneous forms in reciprocal presupposition on a
plane of consistency, and another in which it is no longer even possible
to distinguish between variables of content and expression because the
variability of that same plane has prevailed over the duality of forms,
rendering them ‘indiscernible’. (The first state relates to still relative
movements of deterritorialization; in the second, an absolute threshold
of deterritorialization has been reached.)57
Deleuze and Guattari see the diagram as having two successive states. In
the first state, content and expression can still be distinguished. At this
stage, the diagram is representational enough to be communicated. To
this stage, we can compare the notion of tracing which made up part of
the duality characterizing the rhizome. The tracing is representational in
relation to mapping which indicates pure potentiality. The second part of
this duality is here described in different terms in the second state of the
diagram. In the second state, absolute deterritorialization is attained and
content and expression are rendered indistinguishable. We are at a level of
total abstraction. This is not to say that the elements of the previous state
have disappeared; rather they have become incorporeal. What is important
here is that Deleuze and Guattari are describing the representational pos-
sibility of the diagram in relation to the limitations of language, which is
not abstract enough to fully contend with the degrees of variability within
assemblages. If we take, for example, a graph or a chart, a diagrammatic
drawing is not completely representational nor is it absolutely abstract, we
These painterly distortions are diagrams. These marks, or traits, ‘are irra-
tional, involuntary, accidental, free, random. They are nonrepresentative,
nonillustrative, nonnarrative. They are no longer either significants or sig-
nifiers: they are a-signifying traits.’62 These traits disturb the preordained,
clichéd organization of the painting. The diagram is a set of non-represen-
tational lines or zones and its function is to be suggestive.63 Deleuze says
The diagram seems to cover over a zone and then redistributes traits from
one form to another, or, as is the case with Painting, the same form is top-
ologically distorted. The diagram distributes ‘formless forces’.72 The dia-
grammatic function is something that changes shapes from one stage to
the next based on the function of contraction within a visual field. Batt
explains the double movement of expansion and contraction that occurs
at this stage.73 The diagram can thus be considered a kind of synthesizer
modulator: it ingests, digests and redistributes.74 This modulation of the
diagram creates new possibilities in the visual field for a form. The form
can be redistributed, organized differently, depending on the heterogene-
ity of the assemblage of its traits.
Between the visible and the articulable a gap or disjunction opens up,
but this disjunction of forms is the place – or ‘non-place’ as Foucault puts
it – where the informal diagram is swallowed up and becomes embodied
[incarner] instead in two different directions that are necessarily divergent
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