EVENT POSTPONED - What is a Diagram?

From the Greek for ‘writing across’ or 'through', the ‘diagram’ opens up the idea of writing, or representation, in relation to power and desire. Something of this meaning is retained in even the most conventional uses of the term ‘diagram’, when referring to the effort to represent, in linear, schematic or legible form, something that is by nature more inchoate or opaque. In an expanded sense, then, the diagram poses the question of the way in which the work of art holds in tension forces of systematization and material; efforts at ordering, legibility, and making visible.

A short survey of its applications reveals that the ‘diagram’ has been used by art historian Benjamin Buchloh, among others, to name a specific paradigm in twentieth-century drawing, that re-ordered drawing practices from Dada, through the machine reliefs of Eva Hesse, and on to the present day. The diagram, most famously in the form of the Greimas square, had a place in the absorption of French theory into the humanities in the 1970s and 80s, enabling art history of that era to move beyond connoisseurship and formalism and develop an expanded range of theoretical approaches and ideas. In contemporary informatics, the ‘diagram’ is understood as part of a problematic of ‘data visualisation’, and as contributing to the techniques of population management and control known as ‘data analytics’. From the perspective of philosophy, Gilles Deleuze used the idea of the diagram variously in his thought, from describing the ‘bachelor machines’ of Anti-Oedipus, to the reorganization of the body as disarticulated organs, connected by vectors of desire and compulsion, to describing the convulsed and material ‘body of paint’ in Francis Bacon’s paintings.

What – if anything – connects all these uses of the diagram? Does the diagram have an essential connection to conditions of visuality and visualisation in the modern era? Does the diagram tell us something about the nature of the image under capitalism, or indeed, about the ways in which the condition of the image has been expanded? Does attending to the problematic of the diagram help us understand the significance of the functions of line, to traverse, to connect, or to be broken? How do contemporary artistic practices reference these meanings and uses? What does the diagram mean today?

Abstracts

Tamara Trodd, ‘Roni Horn: This Is Desire’

In an important essay of 2006, Benjamin Buchloh proposes the diagram as a paradigm that disrupts drawing practice in the work of many artists, first in the early twentieth century, then again in the 1960s. Buchloh means by the diagrammatic mode the mechanization of line, and the breaking of drawing as trained, intuitive expression; and understands this more broadly as representing the wider forces of administration and rule to which we are subjected within capitalism. A more Deleuzian understanding of the digram, however, would understand it as a sheerly material force, the place of the irruption of desire. This paper proposes a Deleuzian reading of the diagram as the force that breaks the drawing, exploring the meaning of this through the practice of Roni Horn.

Kamini Vellodi, ‘Diagrammatics as a Proto-Aesthetic Paradigm’

It is tempting to read Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the diagram as it is set out in his 1981 text Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation as an endorsement of a modernist aesthetic paradigm that restores to sensation and force a definitive role within the task of painting and the register of the pictorial.  But for Deleuze, diagrams are not diagrams of form; nor do they have any specific purchase on painting, or even works of art. Instead, they are generative maps of sensations that cross heterogeneous regimes of signs, and construct new reality. This latter, more radical, sense of Deleuze’s concept of the diagram is presented in Deleuze’s work with Guattari. In this paper I outline Guattari’s contribution to the concept of diagrammatics, drawing on his notions of the proto-aesthetic paradigm and the machine. The diagrammatic, proto-aesthetic paradigm refers not to ‘institutionalised art’ but rather ‘to a dimension of creation in a nascent state, perpetually in advance of itself’. Elucidating this definition, I will explore how diagrammatics might function as a paradigm for production in a contemporary technological age, beyond painting, and perhaps even beyond art.   

Sam Rose, ‘Two Ways to Diagram a Painting’

How might a painting be diagrammed? The early twentieth century put forward one standard view, of what Richard Wollheim later called the ‘manifest formalist’ mapping of the work of art. This relies largely on intuition to diagram the significant formal or rhythmic features of the painting. Much criticised, and even later satirised by artists like Roy Lichtenstein, manifest formalism implies that the paradigm diagram of a painting is a line drawing made over a black and white two-dimensional reproduction of the original. But Wollheim also suggested another view, a ‘latent formalism’ that would map the underlying grammar of the artwork (even though Wollheim himself thought this theoretically questionable). In this paper I ask how the history of engineering drawing and computer vision, alongside John Willats and Paul Smith on projection systems and pictorial grammar, might be used to think in new ways about the potential and limits of this possibility. Investigating this question may also lead to some speculations on the possibility of description that goes beyond ekphrastic irreducibility to a more quantitative, numerical, or even digital, mode.

Chris Speed, ‘Smart Contract as Diagram’

Whether to describe technical assemblages or to visualise the flow of information, internets make for interesting starting points for considering diagrams. After all, few diagrams have proven to be as irrepressible as Baran’s 1964 image that was developed to describe the resilience of decentralised systems over centralised. However, as internets have become more complex and much more a part of our lives, diagrams have struggled to commensurate the non-representational practices that accompany apps or smart appliances, with the user flow plans, business models, and stack structures that allow them to perform. As society faces a further turn toward decentralisation, that of banking through blockchains, this paper explores a role for the diagram in making sense of the ‘smart contracts’ that will produce the next internets and productions of space. Smart contracts can be understood as computer code that performs a specific protocol to facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract between parties. Interested in recovering the body in enacting diagrams of digital networks, this paper will describe and reflect upon a series of recent experimental workshops that sought to involve participants in the design of smart contracts. Manifest as walking experiences that use computer code to reorganise relationships with a cities architecture, the paper reflects upon the enactment of code and the implications for and against compliance.

Harry Weeks, ‘Reading Capital Through Diagrams’

This paper examines the use of diagrams as a means of reading Marx’s Capital Vol. I, drawing on the examples of David Harvey’s Reading Marx’s Capital lectures and the work of Capital Drawing Group, a reading group based in London made up of four artists who produce illustrations for each chapter of Capital. These practices are discussed in light of Althusser’s discussions of reading in Reading Capital and Deleuze’s work on the diagram.

Stephanie O’Rourke, ‘How to Diagram a Rock’

Many have claimed that we live in a new geological epoch marked by dramatic, widespread, and irreversible human impact on the environment, an era ushered in roughly two hundred years ago with the Industrial Revolution. The turn of the nineteenth century was much like our present moment, insofar as it sought new ways to visualise and conceptualise the relationship between human life and the environment. In this paper, I look to the paradigmatic diagram of early geological thought: the stratigraphic column. I consider what particular configuration of space, matter, and time this diagrammatic mode articulates, and, ultimately, how stratigraphy qua diagram encodes and delimits certain kinds of knowledge.