Kurt Vonnegut once gave a lecture on how diagrams can help you think about the shape of stories. Diagrams are very powerful visuals and they are often left out when thinking about drawing as an art form.
Jason Hoelscher, Dynamic Biennial Dialogic/Chronotopic Network Diagram, 2012
The diagram above was produced for a conference on art in Croatia
Helena Wahlman has been making diagrams of Shakespeare plays.
However there is a sinister side to the diagram. Think of how the butcher is thinking. The diagram helps in his mental dismembering of the ram. This mental control will become at some point a physical act.
Foucault has written more extensively than anyone else about how power works. This is what Deleuze says he has to say about the diagram.
If Power is not an attribute but rather a relation, one can understand the necessity to map this system of relation between its various actors. This abstract map is not a geographical one but rather, what I would call, a dynamographic one (dynamo is the greek root for power or force). It does not insist so much on the actuality but rather on the potentiality of actualization of power.
What can we call such a new informal dimension? On one occasion Foucault gives it its most precise name: it is a ‘diagram’, that is to say a ‘functioning, abstracted from any obstacle [. . .] or friction [and which] must be detached from any specific use’.18 The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine. It is defined by its informal functions and matter and in terms of form makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation. It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak.
What is a diagram? It is a display of the relations between forces which constitute power in the above conditions: “The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange between a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations functions in a function, and of making a function through these power relations.” We have seen that the relations between forces, or power relations, were microphysical, strategic, multipunctual and diffuse, that they determined particular features and constituted pure functions. The diagram or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relations and at every moment passes through every point, ‘or rather in every relation from one point to another’.
Deleuze Gilles, Foucault trans Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
After reading Foucault you begin to see the grid of power penetrating all areas of our lives. As every statistic is gathered we see its potential to be turned into some form of control mechanism, as every diagram is drawn, we recognise that it is also a plan for a future operation, a plan that like all plans can lead to change; to the re-shaping of what was there before. Plans and diagrams can be dangerous, and they can also be art.
See also:
Data visualisation
Diagram as artform
Louise Despont
Click here for an interesting article on how to draw a novel.
Click here for an interesting article on how to draw a novel.
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