Diagramming Guattari/Deleuze

You can say what you like about D and G (and these days people do), they certainly inspire diagramming. I thought it might be useful to bunch some of these together here. Not only are they often interesting diagrams, they often diagram diagramming. Of course, other workshoppers might consider the diagramming of other thinkers.

Here’s a diagram of Guattarian semiotics, from Gary Genosko’s Guattari Reader, via Janell Watson’s ‘Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling‘ in the exceedingly excellent Fibreculture Journal. It’s Guattari’s ‘Place of the signifier in the institution’ (from Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader, edited by Gary Genosko: Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996, p. 149). Those who know me know I’m not an OOO’er but that doesn’t mean I don’t think this Larval Subject post on ‘Double Articulation: Notes Towards a Theory of the Genesis of Objects‘, which also includes the diagram below, isn’t interesting. It is!

Here’s a Brian Holmes’ diagram of Guattari’s thinking, also found in his ‘ESCAPE THE OVERCODE:  Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies, or the Pathic Core at the Heart of Cybernetics‘. This version is taken from a great post elsewhere by Anna Munster on ‘The image in the network’, ‘that attempts to work with the processual relations involved in the shaping of new subjectivities of collective enunciation’

Here is a discussion of the rhizome and architecture. It contains this rather nice rhizome illustration—a complex diagram from many perspectives.

Here’s a diagram from Laura U. Marks site, which ‘synthesizes a monist aesthetics from Henri Bergson, Deleuze’s work on the fold, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, the triadic logic of C.S. Peirce, medieval Isma‘ili thought on latency and manifestation, and Ibn Sînâ and Deleuze on the univocity of being’. More information here!

Here’s Sean Smith’s diagram of the molar and the molecular from his fabulous SportsBabel blog. It’s actually a diagram ‘theorizing basketball, written after reading Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.’

Meanwhile there’s a rather blurry version of the score with which the ‘Rhizome’ chapter of A Thousand Plateaus begins here. The rest of this post looks kind of interesting (although I haven’t read it really) … there are quite a few more diagrams. In fact, they seem to be everywhere.

The next link is to the famous Deleuze “Diagramme de Foucault”, with the fold and all. There’s the more famous panopticon diagram down the page. This is from one of my favourite blogs, Pirates and Revolutionaries, a post on ‘Foucault and Deleuze in Nikolas Rose’s “Authority and the Genealogy of Subjectivity’.

Here’s a machinic assemblages from another of my favourite blogs, Fractal Ontology. It’s a post on spectral realism, titled simply ‘Spectral.’ Among other things, this post discusses ‘pure diagrammatic force.’

From the Anarchist without Content blog we get Foucault’s 17th and 18th century version of the ‘Order of Things’.

If you go to this page, Beth Metcalf’s ‘Hjelmslev’s Univocity’, she diagrams de Saussure’s semiology versus Hjelmslev’s ‘semiotic net’.

And it’s really worth going to Mark Ngui’s drawings of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus. That’s from the fabuously excellent Inflexions journal. There’s more here.

Here’s a 2007 post by Brian Holmes, ‘The Potential Personality: Trans-Subjectivity in the Society of Control‘. This has a great diagram of ‘initial characteristics of an artistic resistance to the control society’. And it also discusses the diagram of the swarm.

Finally here’s a great diagram on a blog post by DAYglo Writing. It’s really quite beautiful and I encourage you to go to the large version here. It’s diagramming an ‘energy island’ in relation to Guattari’s Three Ecologies. The project proposes ‘a new layer of decentralized systems that attempt to instigate new subjectivities through open source interaction. It starts with an independent, yet non-linear energy network. This network converges at separate hubs that then will contain new typologies for open source living’

That seems a nice way to finish this post.

when diagrams become sonorous

John Cage’s diagrams are not simply or even visual but more importantly generators of music and sonic process. The image below is a flattened score made up of 20 pages of notations and relations. Here the diagram’s relationality is both worked on and released. To perform the sounds one has to generate the relations of the score vertically through an implied ‘z’ axis and then extensively to sonic properties (pitch, volume, timbre etc) in a determined manner ( but which also allows for the indeterminate becoming of the diagrams relations). This seems interestingly connected to Guattari’s notion that both mathematics and music are asignifying systems not at all related to language but rather are purely made up of forces and functions.

Here’s an extract of text from the Media Art Net online database about the image below which is a flattened diagram of Cage’s score for ‘Fontana Mix’ from 1958:

“«Fontana Mix» consists of a total of 20 pages of graphic materials: ten pages covered     with six curved lines each, and ten sheets of transparent film covered with randomly-placed points. In accordance with a specific system, and using the intersecting points of a raster screen, two of the pages produce connecting lines and measurements that can be freely assigned to musical occurrences such as volume, tone color, and pitch.”

score for 'Fontana Mix' John Cage 1958

Sonic Electricity and the Diagram

Intensive Thinking has a very nice post on Sonic Electricity … which begins with this quote from Deleuze and Guattari (A Thousand Plateaus):

[A technological] plane is not made up simply of formed substances (aluminium, plastic, electric wire, etc.) or organizing forms (program, prototypes, etc.), but of a composite of unformed matters exhibiting only degrees of intensity (resistance, conductivity, heating, stretching, speed or delay, induction, transduction …) and diagrammatic functions exhibiting only differential equations or, more generally, “tensors”.

A series of great videos follow (Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda etc), so it’s worth following the link above. Here’s one of those videos here, from Ryoji Ikeda’s work (I really love this work, though I’ve never seen it in a gallery).