Camp abstract Hélène Frichot

Diagramming Expression: Working with diagrammatic forces

A Workshop led by Hélène Frichot

A diagram can be retrospective, offering an analysis of an existing state of affairs and a diagram can be prospective, imagining a future scenario, sketching out its potential, imagining it into being along lines of becoming. A diagram is composed of a set of lines, but less than stable, these lines suggest trajectories, vectors, tensors, exploding this way and that: “lines of visibility and enunciation, lines of force, lines of subjectification, lines of splitting, breakage, fracture, all of which criss-cross and mingle together.” (Deleuze 1992: 31) A diagram traces an organisational logic, rendering connections and disconnections visible by way of abstraction, including some information, while excluding other information. Through exclusions and inclusions, every diagram is a diagram of power. A diagram is a sieve, an umbrella with holes in it, letting in a little chaos, as well as splashes of the outside. A diagram does not always need a notational score, but the activity of drawing out the diagram can be a helpful way of capturing a thought erupting in the midst of an encounter, much like taking a line for a walk.

The diagram as a concept, or rather, processes of diagramming, are to be discovered everywhere in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and in his collaborations with Félix Guattari: In Deleuze’s writings on Francis Bacon the artist who mobilises diagrammatic forces to remove habit, opinion and cliché, unsettling the tendencies of mere illustration and narration (2003); in Deleuze’s work on Foucault, where the diagram is animated in its relationship to an outside, attended by dynamic processes of subjectivation and stratification, all expressive of relations of power (1998); in Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993) where he offers his account of the Baroque House; in Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature describing blocks, passages and doorways, the spatial power dynamics of institutional arrangements and the relation between forms of content and forms of expression (1986); in A Thousand Plateaus, diagrams explore faciality, abstract machines, processes of subjectification and what Donna Haraway would call a material-semiotics (1987); and in What is Philosophy? (1994) where the diagram complements a critical analysis of the Cartesian cogito and a history of modern philosophy said to follow in Descartes footsteps, in contradistinction to which Deleuze and Guattari map out another image of thought, one that traverses a plane of immanence, creating concepts on the go, while greeting conceptual personae and aesthetic figures who perform something like the role of guides across a diagrammatic cartography of slownesses and speeds.

Together we will work on some of the diagrams to be found in Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, and we will go about inventing new ones. Bring A4 paper and mark making tools.

READING INSTRUCTIONS

We will focus on the excerpts from Deleuze (1988; 1994; 2003; 2004) and Deleuze and Guattari (1986). Other excerpts include diagrams used in the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, and we will deploy these as resources in our diagram workshop.

REFERENCES

Gilles Deleuze (1988) Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilles Deleuze (1992) What is a dispositif? Timothy J. Armstrong ed. Michel Foucault Philosopher. London: Routledge.

Gilles Deleuze (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilles Deleuze (1994) Sept Dessins [Seven Designs]. Chimères, Hiver [winter], 21, 13-20.

Gilles Deleuze (2003) Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilles Deleuze (2004) Faces and Surfaces. In Desert Islands (pp. 281-281). New York: Semiotext(e).

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994). What is Philosophy?. London: Verso.

Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot (PhD) is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her recent publications include Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018) and Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019). She has collaborated on editing many anthologies including: Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems (Birkhauser 2022); Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021); Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020).