1
8. ‘Specifically, the diagram is subverted from Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory’.
Discuss this statement from Jakub Zdebik in relation to the Deleuzo-Guattarian
‘pragmatics’.
I. Introduction: Setting the Stage for the Diagram
The texts produced under the joint authorship of Deleuze and Guattari, while varying
widely in topic, converge in terms of their approach to the virtual grounds of any represented
content. On their account, previous images of thought have remained idealistic, whether by
concealing a transcendent despotic signifier or by staying trapped in the figural without
achieving properly conceptual realization, and Deleuze and Guattari aim across their texts to
chart a course to a philosophy that can finally earn its materialist credentials by insisting on what
they call the ‘diagram.’ In order to understand the motivations for this diagrammatic (non-)image
of thought, it is helpful to clarify their reasons for seeking such a radical solution to this problem,
which flow ultimately from their theory of semiotics that delineates multiple regimes of
signification.
In Anti-Oedipus, this problem is framed in terms of a universal history of contingency,
meant to examine the material production of different forms of intelligibility. In their sketch, this
history begins with a distinction between territorial and imperial representation: “territorial
representation is made up of two heterogeneous elements, voice and graphism: the former is like
the representation of words constituted in lateral alliance, while the latter is like the
representation of things- of bodies-established in extended fliation” (203). In the territorial
regime, the word is experienced as immediately seen rather than read, “insofar as it evaluates the
suffering caused by the graphism” (204). In this world, words are so many signs of pain
emanating from the flesh. In imperial representation, on the other hand, “The subordination of
2
graphism to the voice induces a fictitious voice from on high which, inversely, no longer
expresses itself except through the writing signs that it emits (revelation)” (205).1 The despotism
at play in imperial representation operates through a “system of terror” that replaces the
territorial “system of cruelty” (211).2 The word loses its organic link to the signified, suffering
body, and meaning begins to pass solely through the despotic (master) signifier (213), which
“aims at the reconstitution of the full body of the intense earth that the primitive machine had
repressed, but on new foundations or under new conditions present in the deterritorialized full
body of the despot himself” (210). In this imperial world centered on the body of the despot, “the
question ‘What does it mean?’ begins to be heard, and that problems of exegesis prevail over
problems of use and efficacy” (206). Where territorial representation was concerned with
questions about the use of bodies, imperial representation institutes a world preoccupied with
interpretation, above all the interpretation of the decrees of the sovereign. Against the
arbitrariness of the territorial correlation between writing and suffering and the (often concealed)
transcendence of modes of imperial representation centred on the signifier, the diagram aims to
ground signification in a pragmatics that avoids the twin dangers of territorial immediacy and
imperial hermeneutics. Before they arrive at the diagram, however, Deleuze and Guattari first
pass through a third regime that they see as offering a false resolution to these problems:
capitalist representation.
For Deleuze and Guattari, this new age is characterized by a specious immanence:
It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a
strange piety. (The two taken together constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence
of the social field, and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat; cynicism is capital as
1
Incidentally, it is notable that it is at this point of their exposition of imperial signification that the authors comment that this is
“perhaps the first assembling of formal operations that will lead to Oedipus (the paralogism of extrapolation)” (205).
2
3
the means of extorting surplus labor, but piety is this same capital as God-capital, whence all the
forces of labor seem to emanate)” (225).
While the combination of cynicism and piety, coming together in humanism, appears to emanate
from the divinized flows of Capital, Deleuze and Guattari insist it represents the last gasp of an
Oedipal desire on the point of final collapse. Deleuze and Guattari, in the wake of Marx’s paeans
to the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the Manifesto of the Communist Party,3 praise the positive
dimensions of ascendant capitalist representation as it overcomes the reference to a despotic
signifier, decomposing it into “deterritorialized flows of content and expression” that
are in a state of conjunction or reciprocal precondition that constitutes figures as the ultimate
units of both content and expression. These figures do not derive from a signifier nor are they
even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are nonsigns, or rather nonsignifying signs,
points-signs having several dimensions, flows-breaks or schizzes that form images through their
coming together in a whole, but that do not maintain any identity when they pass from one whole
to another (241).
These nonsignifying points-signs afford “the comparison of language to a game” (242) where
gestures, shrieks and music count as ‘moves’ alongside words in the production of sense. By
undoing the overcoding effects of the despotic signifier, they “short-circuit the signifier's coded
gaps” (243), exposing the ruses of any thought grounded on identity. However, while they praise
the “‘figure-matrix’ […] which carries us to the gates of schizophrenia as a process” (244) they
note that this new regime is hampered by a reliance on a fatal connection between desire and
absence.
3
As Marx notoriously puts it,
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. […] It has been the first to show what man’s activity can
bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. […] All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Chapter 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007).
4
This theme will return in their final co-authored text, What is Philosophy, where the
figure (produced by aesthetics) is contrasted with the concept. This distinction emerges when
they differentiate between religious thought and philosophy proper:
It is a wisdom or a religion-it does not much matter which […] Chinese hexagrams, Hindu
mandalas, Jewish sephiroth, Islamic "imaginals," and Christian icons can be considered together:
thinking through figures. […] the figure has a reference, one that is plurivocal and circular by
nature. Certainly, it is not defined by an external resemblance, which remains prohibited, but by
an internal tension that relates it to the transcendent on the plane of immanence of thought. In
short, the figure is essentially paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical, and referential (89).
When religions think through such figures, they are able to traffic in points-signs and exploit
their polyphonic nature, recoding inconsistency as enigmatic transcendence. In contrast, the
concept
is not paradigmatic but syntagmatic; not projective but connective; not hierarchical but linking;
not referential but consistent. That being so, it is inevitable that philosophy, science, and art are
no longer organized as levels of a single projection and are not even differentiated according to a
common matrix but are immediately posited or reconstituted in a respective independence, in a
division of labor that gives rise to relationships of connection between them (91).
While the figure-matrix liberates representation from its fixation on the signifier, it remains prephilosophical, replacing the full body of the despot with the common differentiating field of the
matrix. Deleuze and Guattari make a surprising connection between capitalist representation and
religious thought,4 showing that in both cases the matrix they construct fails to reach the
threshold of conceptual thinking, that they define in terms of absolute deterritorialization. The
diagram, unlike the figure-matrix, “retains the most deterritorialized content and the most
deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them” (A Thousand Plateaus, 141).5 These
Walter Benjamin in his fragment on “Capitalism as Religion” makes a similar point, when he argues that “capitalism serves
essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.” See
Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings Vol. 1, (Belknap Harvard Press, 1921, 1996) p.288-291. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
4
5
For an account of the role that stratification and planification play in deterritorialization that casts compelling doubts about the
plausibility of Deleuze and Guattari’s account absolute and relative deterritorialization, see Brassier, Ray. “Concrete Rules and
Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus.” A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy (2018): 260-279.
5
movements of deterritorialization are mapped in the diagram, responding to the non-signifying
game of capitalo-religious representation by orienting it according to conceptual consistency. In
order to understand the role that this new cartography plays in their conception of the diagram, I
now turn to their treatments of this theme in their individual works.
II. Pragmatics: From the ‘Trash Heap’ to the Politics of Language
Deleuze directly addresses this issue in his article “Not a writer: a new cartographer” which
takes Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an occasion for a reflection on method. Deleuze points
out that what is singular in Foucault’s approach is his decisive move away from “whatever is still
pyramidal in the Marxist picture,” replacing hierarchic analysis with a functional micro-analysis
that operates through “a strict immanence, whereby focuses of power and disciplinary techniques
form so many interlocking segments” (3). This functional approach has the virtue of presenting
“the immanence of its field without transcendent unification, the continuity of its line without
general centralisation, the contiguity of its segments without distinct totalisation” (4). Deleuze
clarifies this general reading with a reference to Foucault’s (in)famous discussion of the
Panopticon:
What is “panopticism”? It is not a theory, nor even strictly speaking a model. It is a machine, and
one which functions, but a very particular type of machine. It is defined by a pure function,
independent of sensible configurations and of categorical forms in which this function is
incarnated. The function is to see without being seen. […] We can call such a machine an
abstract machine […] It is not a model which would be applicable. It is a “diagram”, Foucault
says. “It is the diagram of a mechanism of power… (with a) functioning abstracted from every
obstacle, resistance or friction… and that one must detach from all specific usage”. It has nothing
to do with a transcendent Idea, nor with an ideological superstructure, as it is presupposed by
every statement. Neither does it have anything to do with an economic infrastructure which is
already qualified in its substance and defined in its form and its usage. And it is certainly not
about making the diagram play a role analogical to that which the Marxists make the economy
play: here there is an entirely new distribution, which refers us back to the conception of power
and to its relations with the whole of the social field. What is important first of all is the
immanence of the diagram. The diagram is the map, cartography. (Not a Writer, 9)
6
This passage contains the main elements Deleuze will borrow from Foucault in his later
development of diagrammatic thought. This reading emphasizes function, centering on a ‘pure
function’ independent from any given incarnation of that function, in this case seeing without
being seen. This functional analysis is, as Deleuze stresses, not analogous to the Marxist couple
of infrastructure and superstructure, insofar as these concepts presuppose a pre-existing
partitioning of the social field. In other words, “The diagram, the abstract machine coextensive
with the social field, always plays the role of immanent common non-unifying cause” (11). The
mapping of these non-unifying causes is not aiming to constitute a fully objective representation,
correcting the errors of previous forms of representation. Instead, as Deleuze writes, “it organises
a new type of reality. The diagram is not a science, it is always a political matter. It is not a
subject of history, nor one which is above history. It makes history in undoing the preceding
realities and meanings, constituting so many points of emergence” (14). The diagram exposes the
gaps in any sutured conceptualization, pointing out potential inconsistencies as part of a political
project of discovering lines of flight [ligne de fuite]. Through such mappings, Foucault shines
“an intense, abstract light, which renders the statement visible” (16) bringing to
light the dominant statements of an epoch, but in their relation to what is made in this epoch.
Thus Foucault’s statements effectively discover the diagram, provided that they make themselves
part of another regime of statements than those about which he speaks, and refer to a totally
different way of “making”. […] All of Foucault’s statements refer to a practice and to
environments which endeavour to provoke a mutation in the diagram, like new matters and new
functions (17).
The diagram, then, is not a neutral description of the grounds and conditions of thinking; it is
intrinsically bound to practices which attempt to transform the diagram. It is this pragmatic
focus, both at the level of method (to diagram is to analyse functions) and at the level of aim (the
point of the diagram is to release new functions) that will come to define the way this concept is
throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work, both in their individual and co-authored texts.
7
This pragmatism is present as early as Deleuze’s first published book, Empiricism and
Subjectivity. Here he presents a reading of Hume’s philosophy which emphasizes construction as
central to Hume’s overall approach. Against those simplistic readings of Hume which subsume
his strange brand of empiricism into contemporary (analytical) empiricism, Deleuze presents
Hume as a forerunner of his own constructivism. For Deleuze’s Hume, “Justice is not a principle
of nature; it is rather a rule, a law of construction, and its role is to organize, within the whole,
the elements, including the principles of nature” (40). Much like the dynamic Deleuze found in
Foucault’s functional analysis, in this case it is through the habitual application of these rules that
new practices are cemented and that the diagram is mapped. A similar emphasis on construction
is present in Guattari’s last book, Chaosmosis, where he explains that in his work he has “opted
for pragmatic interventions orientated towards the construction of subjectities, towards the
production of fields of virtualities which wouldn't simply be polarised by a symbolic
hermeneutic centered on childhood” (18). As we saw above, he tries to avoid the fixation on
meaning, an obsession that Guattari replaces with an “a-signifying semiotics” of “equations and
plans which enunciate the machine and make it act in a diagrammatic capacity on technical and
experimental apparatuses” (36). This new,
cartographic representation forms part of a process of existential production involving
territorialised components of finitude, irreversible embodiment, processual singularity and the
engendering of Universes of virtuality which are not directly locatable within extrinsic discursive
coordinates. They come to being through an ontological heterogenesis and affirm themselves
within the world of significations as a rupture of sense and existential reiteration (42).
In continuity with Deleuze’s analysis of Foucault and the constructivism he derives from Hume,
Guattari here affirms that the diagram is always aiming at rupture with an existing state of affairs
through the reiteration of pragmatic rules. It is notable that it is at this point that the figure of
Peirce appears:
8
Charles Sanders Peirce, who described the diagram as an "icon of relation" and assimilated it to
the function of algorithms, proposed a broader vision that is worth developing further in the
present perspective. Here, the diagram is conceived as an autopoietic machine which not only
gives it a functional and material consistency, but requires it to deploy its diverse registers of
alterity, freeing it from an identity locked into simple structural relations. The machine's protosubjectivity installs itself in Universes of virtuality which extend far beyond its existential
territoriality. Thus we refuse to postulate a formal subjectivity intrinsic to diagrammatic
semiotisation, […] there is no univocal subjectivity based on cut, lack or suture, but there are
ontologically heterogeneous modes of subjectivity, constellations of incorporeal Universes of
reference which take the position of partial enunciators in multiple domains of alterity, or more
precisely, domains of alterification. (44-5)
In parsing this somewhat dense passage, the connection to alterity appears decisive. The
diagram, on this account, cannot be limited to a single model of subjectivity, instead giving
consistency to enunciations that traverse multiple Other-structures. From the earliest to the latest
texts, it is possible to discern a continuity of gesture, moving away from any overarching
structural model and towards the local contingencies of pragmatics. To better understand their
singular brand of pragmatism, I now turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s most sustained discussion of
this theme in A Thousand Plateaus.
In “November 20, 1923-Postulates of Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattar argue forcefully for
the importance of pragmatics in the study of language. Against any position that would “define
semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scientific zones of language independent of
pragmatics,” (77) for Deleuze and Guattari pragmatics have a starring role as a “politics of
language” (82). Moving from the margins to the center,
Pragmatics ceases to be a "trash heap," pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the
alternative: fall outside language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize and
semanticize pragmatic determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes the presupposition behind
all of the other dimensions and insinuates itself into everything (77-8)
Avoiding the tendency of linguistic to cloister language away from the world, pragmatics “does
not simply appeal to external circumstances: it brings to light variables of expression or of
enunciation that are so many internal reasons for language not to close itself off” (82). These
9
pragmatics form the horizons for the evaluation of any statement, revealing “the implicit
presuppositions, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce
new configurations of bodies” (83). It is these functional conditions of possibility that delineate
any abstract machine, defining the diagram of that assemblage (91). Addressing the
Chomsky/Labov dispute, Deleuze and Guattari pick up Labov’s point of view where
It is the variation itself that is systematic, in the sense in which musicians say that "the theme is
the variation." Labov sees variation as a de jure component affecting each system from within,
sending it cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it off, to make it
homogeneous in principle (93).
By seeing language as a system of variations, Labov makes possible a linguistics of the virtual,
where every statement is present in the enunciation of any other. This approach necessarily treats
supposedly non-linguistic elements (gesture, instrument) “as if the two aspects of pragmatics
joined on the same line of variation, in the same continuum” (98). Continuing their theme of
pragmatics approximating music, Deleuze and Guattari use the example of a synthesizer,
“gradually making ‘fundamentally heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in
some way.’ The moment this conjunction occurs there is a common matter. It is only at this point
that one reaches the abstract machine, or the diagram of the assemblage” (109). Unlike the
common matrix discussed above, in this case what is held in common does not pass through a
central instance but rather shares a continuum of transformation. To better frame the distinction
between Deleuze and Guattari’s and Peirce’s understanding of the diagram and the continuum
made in the next section, one more crucial piece of the puzzle remains: Deleuze’s contestation of
representation in Difference and Repetition.
In his chapter on “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze targets the concealed presuppositions of
the dogmatic image of thought propping up ordinary notions of representation. In short, Deleuze
sums this up when he writes “Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation”
10
(130). Representation is “thus found in the element of a common sense understood as an upright
nature and a good will” (131). Deleuze defines representation as “identity with regard to
concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to
judgement, resemblance with regard to objects” (137). The reliance on these unthematized
certainties disfigures thought’s approach to singularity and multiplicity:
the world of representation is characterised by its inability to conceive of difference in itself; and
by the same token, its inability to conceive of repetition for itself, since the latter is grasped only
by means of recognition, distribution, reproduction and resemblance in so far as these alienate
the prefix RE in simple generalities of representation. (138)
The diagram eliminates this dogmatic image of thought, substituting difference for conceptual
identity, conjunction for determination through contradiction, univocity for analogy and
equivalence for resemblance. Moving away from a conceptuality grounded in universally shared
givens, the diagram exposes these virtual conditions of thought, pointing out gaps in consistency
in order to effect pragmatic transformation. We now have all the pieces necessary for a
comparison of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the diagram to Peirce’s, which I pursue in the next
section.
III. The Cultured Bacillus
Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly credit Peirce with the concept of the diagram, borrowing it
along with other elements from his semiotics.6 In this section I first give an overview of Peirce’s
theories, before relating his theories to an unexplored reference that he shares with Deleuze and
Guattari, namely Schelling. In my account of Peirce’s work I am indebted to Fernando
Zalamea’s groundbreaking interpretation in Peirce’s Continuum: A Methodological and
For the best overview of Deleuze and Guattari’s relation to Peirce in the secondary literature see Bowden, Sean, Bignall,
Simone and Patton, Paul. “Deleuzian Encounters with Pragmatism.” Deleuze and Pragmatism (2015): 1-17. I will not reproduce
the details of their account here, focusing instead on aspects of their relation to Peirce which have not yet been conjugated.
6
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Mathematical Approach. Zalamea cuts through the Gordian knot of traditional approaches,
integrating the attention to logic present in accounts offered by analytic philosophy with the
attention to semiotics present in those accounts rooted in aesthetics. The interpretive key to
Zalamea’s approach is Peirce’s development of the logic of relatives, which expanded the scope
of logic beyond the scope of unary predicates to include relational predicates;7 on this view,
Peirce’s development of diagrammatic existential graphs flow from this initial breakthrough.
Zalamea’s Peirce is not an ordinary pragmatist, signaling “that knowledge, seen as a semioticlogical process, is pre-eminently contextual (versus absolute), relational (versus substantial),
modal (versus determined), synthetic (versus analytic)” (47). Peirce’s system relies on the
deliberately vague concepts of ‘Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness,’ that Zalamea glosses as
(1) Firstness: immediacy, first impression, freshness, sensation, unary predicate, monad, chance,
possibility. (2) Secondness: action-reaction, effect, resistance, alterity, binary relation, dyad, fact,
actuality. (3) Thirdness: mediation, order, law, continuity, knowledge, ternary relation, triad,
generality, necessity (50).
Peirce’s pragmatic maxim that our conception of effects is the whole of our conception of the
object (47) governs the transit between these different strata, offering the basis for a recursive
continuity. Each of these strata in turn corresponds to an aspect of the sign (icon/firstness,
index/secondness, symbol/thirdness). As Zalamea explains, for Peirce logic becomes “a sort of
geographical science, which studies characters common to classes of ‘cognitive places’,
emphasizing semantic, topographic aspects” (53). This mapping presents a range of variation,
which Peirce calls tints upon conceptions (61), producing a continuum which is “what the logic
Peirce’s examples in his original paper are extremely telling: “A general relative may be conceived as a logical aggregate of a
number of such individual relatives. Let l denote “lover”; then we may write
7
l = ΣiΣj(l)ij(I : J)
where (l)ij is a numerical coefficient, whose value is 1 in case I is a lover of J, and 0 in the opposite case, and where sums are to
be taken for all individuals in the universe” (1883 CP:3.329). For the original paper see “The logic of relatives” in Studies in
logic by members of the Johns Hopkins University, C.S. Peirce (ed.), Note B, pp. 187–203; reprinted in CP: 3.328–3.358.
12
of relatives shows the true universal to be” (62).8 Peirce’s philosophy bottoms out with habit,
where “the most perfect account of a concept that words can convey will consist in a description
of the habit which that concept is calculated to produce” (86). This explains the centrality of
abduction to Peirce’s system,9 since the “task of the logic of abduction may be seen as locally
glueing breaks in the continuum, by means of an arsenal of methods which select effectively the
“closer” explanatory hypotheses for a given break” (90). From the sketch offered above,
Peirce’s proximity to Deleuze and Guattari appears a foregone conclusion; however, their
difference emerges when judged in terms of their respective relations to a thinker they are both
inspired by, namely Schelling.
Peirce’s relation to Schelling, and to German Idealism10 more generally, is complex but
broadly positive. When discussing the genealogy of his “tychism” (from the Greek τύχη), Peirce
sees himself as a descendant of a “Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere
specialized and partially deadened mind,” saying that although he was
not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some
cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and
that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions
and by training in physical investigations (Scientific Metaphysics, CP 6.102).
Zalamea’s extraordinary construction of the diagram as an “apology for pragmaticism” (74) can only be pointed to in passing
here. This fascinating demonstration is “the only known presentation of classical logical calculi which uses the same global and
generic axiomatic rules to control the ‘traffic’ of connectives and quantifiers”(75).
8
It is strange that the concept of abduction does not seem to have made a lasting impression on Deleuze’s text on “The
Philosophy of Crime Fiction” (from Desert Islands). In future research I hope to investigate this symptomatic omission.
9
Peirce equivocates in his evaluation of Hegel: “never was there seen such an example of a long chain of reasoning -- shall I
say with a flaw in every link? -- no, with every link a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard
model of a philosophy that in reality does not exist. If we use the one precious thing it contains, the idea of it, introducing the
tychism which the arbitrariness of its every step suggests, and make that the support of a vital freedom which is the breath of the
spirit of love, we may be able to produce that genuine agapasticism at which Hegel was aiming” (1893 CP: 6.306). For a detailed
overview of Peirce’s relationship to the post-Kantian tradition, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/selfcontextualization.html
10
13
As Peirce puts it even more pointedly, he opposes “all philosophies which deny the reality of the
Absolute, and asserted that ‘the one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective
idealism, that matter is effete mind.’ This is as much as to say that I am a Schellingian” (Reply to
the Necessitarians, CP 6.605). Peirce ultimately retains from Schelling an idealism concerning
the nature of mind and matter. It is here that the contrast with Deleuze and Guattari appears
clearly, as their filiation to Schelling leads them instead to a radical constructivism.
Deleuze and Guattari claim their allegiance to Schelling in What is Philosophy, hailing him
as a thinker interested in the positing of the concept:
What depends on a free creative activity is also that which, independently and necessarily, posits
itself in itself: the most subjective will be the most objective. The post-Kantians, and notably
Schelling and Hegel, are the philosophers who paid most attention to the concept as
philosophical reality in this sense.(11).
To better understand this remark, I turn to Alberto Toscano’s “Philosophy and the Experience of
Construction”, where he reads Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on construction in light of this
Schellingian filiation. For Toscano this question takes place in a “stratigraphic time” occurring
“within the bounds of philosophy, as the (re-)emergence of a new configuration for thought,”
signaling “a new articulation of philosophy and its outside, in other words, a new figure of
materialism” (110). This materialism is grounded in “the primacy of practice, which in
philosophy takes the guise of an 'experience of construction'” (110), the articulation of a primacy
of philosophical practice. Toscano frames Schelling’s materialism against the backdrop of Kant
critical revolution in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant proposed a strict distinction
between philosophical and mathematical conceptuality:
Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical
knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts. To construct a
14
concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition that corresponds to the concept. For the
construction of a concept we therefore need a non-empirical intuition (A713/ B741).
As Toscano glosses this distinction,
Dogmatism is founded on […] a forgetting of intuition as the intimate, sensible passivity that
checks the spontaneous efforts of the understanding […] Only the mathemata, whose being is
founded on a construction woven from pure intuition into axioms, definitions and
demonstrations, possess apodeictic legitimacy. Only they can, outside experience, decide upon
the certain existence of their objects (113).
Dogmatism, for Kant, depends on a confusion between the exceptional experience of thinking on
display in mathematics with thinking in general. Schelling’s breakthrough, for Toscano, inverts
Kant’s demarcation between philosophy and mathematics:
Intuition thus becomes the torsion of subjective production (the inner sense) upon itself, in the
play of activity and limitation that makes the transcendental into the element of the genesis, and
no longer simply of the possibility, of actual determinations. This genetic transformation of the
transcendental entails the reversal of roles between the philosopher and the mathematician: The
mathematician is never concerned directly with intuition (the art of construction) itself, but only
with the construct which can certainly be presented externally, whereas the philosopher looks
solely to the act of construction itself, which is an absolutely internal thing. (113-4)
By reversing the roles of philosophy and mathematics, Schelling relativizes Kant’s overly strict
demarcation (116). Schelling’s new conception
calls for the philosopher to abdicate his subjective status, and, in a manner prefgured by
Schelling's experiments in Naturphilosophie, to immerse himself in the element of the absolute,
to produce the coincidence of universal and particular; in other words, to articulate the
differentiated expression of the absolute through the construction of ideas. This construction or
idea is nothing other than the immediate, non-empirical intuition of a concept (117).
Schelling
prefigures Deleuze and Guattari on the question of construction, but it is “in their
phenomenology of the concept, in their account of its a-subjective intuition and composition, that
a different vision of construction begins to emerge” (120). This difference is concentrated in the
plane of immanence where the “intuitions of immanence are not contemplations compressing the
gap between the universal and the particular into the unity of the idea, they are themselves
determined by the singular construction of a plane” (121). In Schelling’s vision, construction “is
15
of the order of totalization […] [establishing] the place of an idea (be it aesthetic, scientific,
historical, and so forth) in the seamless unity of the Absolute. In construction, philosophy
experiences its immanence to the Absolute by demonstrating the necessity of the Absolute”
(123). Deleuze and Guattari’s constructivism thus translates into two major points: the plane of
immanence is indifferent to the theatrics of intuition, and the elements that compose it are
themselves determined by the diagrams they construct. In contrast to the interiorized totality that
haunts Schelling (and Peirce, in the transformed form of the gapless continuum), Deleuze and
Guattari display a form of the Schelling-virus that escapes the capture of easy transcendence.
Where Pierce’s continuum and diagram preserve traces of what Deleuze and Guattari would call
striation, Deleuze and Guattari’s diagram “does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality
but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or
sea” (A Thousand Plateaus, 379).
IV. The Joy of Maps
As we saw in the first section, the motivations for the concept of the diagram derive from
Deleuze and Guattari’s overall semiotic project. Avoiding the cruelty of territorial representation,
the terror of imperial representation and the cynicism of capitalo-religious representation,
diagrammatic pragmatics display a “gaiety in horror, peculiar to revolutionaries,” unleashing a
joy that yearns to “destroy what mutilates life” (“Not a Writer,” 1). Deleuze and Guattari’s
rewriting of Peirce moves beyond his all-too-signifying horizon, translating his terms into their
paradoxical asignifying semiotics. In doing this, they radicalize his project of describing the
tones of the conceptual continuum, making room for heterogenous elements in their speculative
synthesizer. Where Peirce still wanted to glue the gaps in continuity, Deleuze and Guattari
position the diagram as an inherently political practice, revealing the inconsistencies with an eye
16
toward transforming them. In a word, the principle of construction in Peirce’s diagram remains
Schellingian, grounding the absolute on a point of indifference between interior experience and
the external world; for Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, the points that constitute the
diagram cannot be separated from the function they play within it. In line with Labov’s
fundamental intuition, variation becomes the basis for a philosophy that is constitutively
determined by its relation to a non-philosophical infinity. Unlike regimes of representations
which would force chaos to cohere with a transcendent ready-made armature of concepts,
philosophy, in alliance with science and art, constructs its immanent diagram through a mapping
of pragmatic externalities which through a properly conceptual alchemy are transformed into an
exposition those order-words (A Thousand Plateaus, 76) which insinuate themselves
everywhere.
17
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