## John Ó Maoilearca (2006). *Thinking in Diagrams*. : Continuum. > [!INFO] > Type:: [[]] > Title:: Thinking in Diagrams > Author(s): [[John Ó Maoilearca]] > Year:: 2006 > Tags:: > DOI:: > Citekey:: maoilearca_thinking_2006 > ZoteroURI:: [Open in Zotero: Thinking in Diagrams](zotero://select/items/@maoilearca_thinking_2006) > ReviewedDate:: [[2023-05-16]] ## Citation ```latex [@maoilearca_thinking_2006] ``` ## Related ```dataview TABLE file.aliases AS "Title" FROM [[@maoilearca_thinking_2006]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ``` ## Summary - ## Annotation This book has tried to establish ==[[Alain Badiou|Badiou]]==, at least in *Being and Event*, as the thinker of the pure outside and ==Henry== as the thinker of the pure inside: in terms of their purity, their puritanism even, they merge into each other. (10) - ![[page23image10313440.png]] - [[Giorgio Agamben]] concludes his own essay on ‘Absolute Immanence’ with a diagram mapping the history of modern philosophy. - the parallels and non-parallels between Deleuze, [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]], Henry, and Laruelle are not transcendent representations but diagrammatic interventions. - Nor is the diagram a way out of philosophy (*sortie*, *Ausgang*)…But it is the *out-line*of philosophy, what picks philosophy out from the non-philosophical background while also tying its figure to its background conditions. - the philosophical diagram is the pre-philosophical, - not the subject leaving philosophy but unforeseeable subject-matters [[becoming]] philosophical. And it works as a draw- ing, a process, a procedure, a temporary moment in between; not the shape of a thing but the outline of a process (of thinking). - The relationship between text and image, word and graph, has been a recurrent theme in the recent study of cultural representation from - Nelson Goodman - and Ernst Gombrich - to Roland Barthes - and W.J.T Mitchell (who coined the phrase ‘diagrammatology’). - Randall Dipert(whose ‘world as graph’ thesis is as all- encompassing as Badiou’s view of set-theory) - Dipert1997, p.329: ‘the concrete world is a single, large structure induced by asingle, two-place, symmetric relation, and thus best analyzed as a certain sort of graph’; Châtelet 2000; Peirce 1933. - ==Gilles Châtelet== (who has probably done more than any other figure to theorise the philosophical use of the diagram) - C.S. Peirce (whose use of existential graphs borders on the metaphysical) - ![[page6image10362176.jpg]] - Diagrams have long been useful in teaching and learning logic (Euler and Venn diagrams), computing, economics, architecture, physics and learning itself (‘mind-maps’), of course, - but now their foundation to all understanding has been highlighted through research in cognitive science and visual studies. - Diagrams are ‘problem solvers’ because they ‘automatically support a large number of perceptual inferences, which are extremely easy for humans’. - Larkin and Simon 1987, p.98. - Diagrams may also be central to the mental imagery debate and possibly even Fodor’s ‘language of thought’ thesis, both of which indicate massive problems for Sartre’s position that images are not *in* the mind but are precisely what transcend the world by negating it – the ‘illusion of immanence’ argument – but none of these *psychologies* are relevant here: we are not interested in the question of the immanence of the diagram *to* the mind but in the diagram as immanence in itself (or not) – the immanent being of the diagram – and so its adequacy to expressing a philosophy of immanence. - The use of diagrams in the philosophy of science has also been gathering interest, especially in the work of [[Bruno Latour]] and Gilles Châtelet. - See [[Bruno Latour|Latour]], 1987 and Châtelet 2000. - See also Knoespel 2000, the introduction to Châtelet’s work, on Châtelet’s relation to diagrammatology, the discipline Knoespel describes as ‘the phenomenological analysis of diagrams and diagrammatic practice in science’ (p.ix). We think this is already a biased description, however. ### Badiou - Badiou is one of the most graphical of contemporary philosophers. - His language is already replete with spatial metaphors…But he also supplements these proto-drawings with numerous figures. - ![[Badiou-what-is-love-schema-theoryleaks.jpg]] - 바디우 다이아그램의 특징 - Badiou did not follow Lacan’s topological matheme, - favouring rather the ==numerical== over the ‘geometrical’ (broadly speaking) and the ==set-theoretical== even more over the numerical. - * In ‘Subject and Infinity’ (Badiou 1992, pp.287–305), Badiou engages with Lacan’s mathematicism in *Encore* and *..ou pire*, but only its numericity, 1, 2, and especially infinity, which he critiques as intuitionist and pre-Cantorean. - Being as being is expressed most purely through sets alone, anything else is appearance. - Significantly, [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]]’s categories are *==descriptive==* rather than axiomatic (as set theory was), - they are not based on a decision or ontological commitment to found the world in such and such a way, but on a ==description of the world==, what [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]] also calls a sort of ‘geometry of truth’. - Moreover, in this light, [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]] sees no difference between a transcendental logic and formal logic: ‘every logic, he says, is a logic of appearance’. - Badiou wants to fuse together what Kant held apart: the phenomenon is the noumenon. - I quote again from a preparatory study for the *Logiques des mondes*: ‘Formal logic is a diagrammatic approach to transcendental logic: a particular section of transcendental logic.’ - See Badiou 2006,p.333; Badiou 2004a, pp.173, 174. - What is interesting is that [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]] believes that in his latest work he is proceeding from Being ([[Ontology]]) to appearance (phenomenology) by going from set theory to category theory, that is, by going from sets to diagrams (like the one above). ### Deleuze - This is because, in fact, Deleuze tends to think of the diagram itself as virtual or as a virtual process – only *potentially* concrete or actual. - We can look to both *The Logic of Sensation*and *A Thousand Plateaus*for this rendering. For him, a diagrammatic depiction of a theory is one that modulates a theory, that is to say, ==it abstracts a theory==. - A philosophy has its own ‘==abstract machine==’ or ‘diagrammatic machine’ that dynamically outlines the functions or processes, the relations or differences, within and between theories. - abstract machines of *A Thousand Plateaus* are also diagrams, - ‘the aspect or moment at which nothing but functions and matters remain. A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression.’ - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 141. - The diagram is what ‘retains the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them’. Diagramming raises a trait to its highest power, it ‘carries it off’. - * Deleuzeand Guattari 1987, pp.141,142 - it is striking that they are neither wholly iconic nor symbolic. (Maoilearca, 174) - in their in-between depiction, instantiate that which they supposedly look like or symbolise. The examples from *A Thousand Plateaus*on the topic of facialisation are fascinating to look at and think with in this regard. (174) - ![[page19image78154592.png]] - Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia* (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 183. - *The Fold* - In *The Fold*as well, Deleuze provides diagrams, hand-drawn in the original French text, that are further examples of this in-between state, ==being neither icons nor symbols of Baroque architecture==. - ![[page19image78153552.jpg]] - They simply are little pieces of the Baroque that also ==tell us something about the Baroque, about what the Baroque *does*==. - ==But, despite this clear role of instantiation in his usage of the diagram, the diagrams are still not theorised as actual in Deleuze.== - As he writes in *The Logic of Sensation*, diagrams are at best ==proto-actual==. - a ‘germ of order or rhythm’, and that which ‘==begins the act of painting==’. The diagram ‘is a possibility of fact – it is not the fact itself’. It is what modulates or subtracts from the Virtual. - * Deleuze 2003, pp.102, 110. - ==Yet, Deleuze contends that diagrams are concrete conditions of the actual, whilst still not themselves being actual.== - The language of the diagram is analogical, working productively through modulation. - The diagram is again irreducible to either symbol or icon. It is not a code either: Bacon’s geometry ‘attests to a high *spirituality*, since what leads it to seek the elementary forces beyond the organic is a spiritual will’. - ==These forces are haptic rather than optical, tactile rather than visual.== - The diagram is not just an outline, but involves the fullness of colour – as sensation – too. Following Cézanne, ==Bacon pursues an analogical use of geometry,== but analogy here is not understood as resemblance so much as modulation, ==subtraction==. ==The Diagram subtracts==. - * Deleuze 2003, pp.66–67, 76–78, 85–86, 46. In *Foucault*(Deleuze 1988a, p.37), - Deleuze describes how ‘the diagram acts as a non-unifying immanent cause which is coextensive with the whole social field: the abstract machine is like the cause of the concrete assemblages that execute its relations; and these relations take place “not above” but within the very tissue of the assemblages they produce’. - This ‘within’ is another subtraction, perhaps one bordering a little perilously on an essence. - Deleuze provides a figural and actual geometry that (on the page) is between abstraction and resemblance, between symbol and icon, between mathematics and art, and, we would say, between [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]] and Henry. - Rather than think of the diagram as Knoespel does, namely as the ‘trace of a mental process that we may pursue through cognitive or phenomenological analysis’, - Knoespel 2001,p.156. - I want to see the diagram metaphilosophically and immanently, as thinking for itself, relating seemingly disparate philosophies through its intrinsic ability to outline thought. - Form becomes content when its movement is arrested to stand for something beyond, a virtual. - Hence, the diagram will have to alter perpetually. And while it does, at least for a moment, the diagram’s actual movement eludes the trap of virtualisation, of standing for Truth as and when the letter becomes the symbol. - Eventually, we will illustrate the way in which a diagrammatic metaphilosophy might progress, using a thinking that is both formal but also aware of its affective and perceptual origins (as spatialised thought), - to see the relationship between Virtualist and Actualist philosophies, and finally to outline the pure ==Actualisms of Henry== (pure Affect) and ==[[Alain Badiou|Badiou]] (pure Idea)== as virtual poles between which a metaphilosophical movement, itself actual, can run. - Or there is the very spatial origin of many word-meanings, by which one could create pictures of a thought using the Derridean method of re-literalising (metaphorical) words into their spatial roots (whether or not that basis is itself rooted in the movements of our body). - There is no movement ‘in general’ in the diagram, but always a movement of sorts. The moment is a *moment-um*that only grammar and reflection split into ‘movement vehicle’ or ‘velocity mass’. ### Digrammatology as an archaeology of diagrams. - This kind of diagrammatology follows the lead of Aby Warburg’s anarchistic ‘iconology’ or ‘montage-collision’. - As a method of decontextualisation, it marginalises historical provenance and cultural context in favour of sheer appearance, ==uncovering kinships between images based on their elements, their relative motions, and their juxtapositions in an almost cinematic manner.== - For Deleuze, however, almost the opposite is the case: when nothing appears similar, everything really is (pluralism monism). - Between his works *Difference and Repetition*and *Francis Bacon*, Deleuze sharply altered his views about analogy. - Between his most Platonist, Virtualist text and his most graphical one, analogy is rehabilitated. It is no longer rejected for working in the economy of the same or representation, but accepted as productive, modular, embodied and sensual. - * See Deleuze 1994, pp.33–35; Deleuze 2003, pp.111–121. - seeing and touching by analogy (ostension, drawing) is *less*prone to the errors of representation than thinking by analogy, for it embodies its ‘object’ in a physical continuity rather than depicting it ‘outside’. (187) ### Related ```dataview LIST FROM [[@maoilearca_thinking_2006]] and -"Plans" and -"resources" ```