[Framework Post] Week 7: Deleuze and Creative Philosophy.

In The Diagram (2003), Gilles Deleuze’s dissection of the works of great modern painter Francis Bacon, Deleuze focuses on Bacon’s process of painting that involved “a catastrophe” (82) between the “figurative givens on the canvas (and in the painter’s head)” (81), and the operative act of painting (“wiped, brushed, or rubbed, or else covered over” (81)). The diagram is not an image that “covers the entire painting” (89), instead it is an “operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches” (83). Effectively, the diagram is an incomplete ensemble of these devices that suggest—what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein terms—the “possibilities of fact” (Wittgenstein, qtd in Deleuze 83) or in fact potentialities.

The diagram is a powerful tool that at once adds dimensions and defamiliaries to maximally bring out the potential of what it is applied to. In our production of architecture, the diagram (parti, comes to mind) works as first-level images that within its whole has an operative function of suggesting an idea, a concept, but this idea is incomplete—it is not architecture per se, but a mark that neither starts nor concludes the process of design. Instead, it is part of dynamic whole, bound to be connected with fellow dots—other diagrams even—to make a greater whole in which it would always operate in itself as an entity and as a key of part to the greater system.

Deleuze’s diagram, however, must not be mistaken for the post-rational sublimation we might create to represent something real. Instead, the Deleuzean diagram is almost continually processional, almost always deferring to something outside of the real. It is an illusive becoming, a heralding of something yet to come.



References:

1. Deleuze, Gilles. “The Diagram.” Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. trans. Smith, Daniel W. London: Continuum, 2003. 81-90.