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1. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 11 (1986-01-21) Similarity: 0.3525

   • So, forget all that, since you do not want to say anything, and finally we are continuing on. Last time, we delved into the question of power in the following form: given that power is a set of relations of forces corresponding to a formation, power is presented in a diagram, and I attached a great deal of importance to the word “diagram,” which Foucault uses one time. Why? Because it gave me a reason, or rather it gave me a convenient word for clearly marking that we were no longer in the domain of the archive. The archive is the archive of knowledge. The archive of knowledge is not opposed to, but distinguished from, the diagram of power. Now, we have seen, and this was our principal objective last time, that there were two characteristics of the diagram, insofar as it is an exposition of relations of forces. Its general definition would be: exposition of relations of forces.

   • But what are the characteristics of the diagram? The first characteristic of the diagram is that it brings together [met en présence] non-formed matters and non-formalized functions. In this way, it distinguishes itself from the archive of knowledge. And last time we had just made… In what way is power distinguished from knowledge? And there, the answer should thus be my two characteristics of the diagram, it should be the two differences between power and knowledge.

   • But as for power, it speaks to us of something else, speaks to us… but I cannot say otherwise…. Power presents to us something else, it regards non-formed matters and non-formalized functions. You will say: that is so abstract! But at any rate, I hope that it was less so the last time. It is precisely abstract, it is abstract. In fact, non-formed matters and non-formalized functions are pure abstraction; it is matter and then voila, matter qua matter or function qua function. How could I put in any variety? The answer is simple: there is a great amount of variety to the diagram, or to diagrams, for the simple reason that non-formed matters are not inevitably one and the same matter, and non-formalized functions are not necessarily one and the same function but are only distinguished by the space-time variable. Thus, in order to define a non-formed matter or a non-formalized function, I will only be able to take into account the space-time variable, following this first characteristic of the diagram.

   • Thus, I will say: some human multiplicity, without at all specifying… – in this way it is diagrammatic – without at all specifying what multiplicity it is. Some human multiplicity in a closed space, this multiplicity being small, small multiplicity in a closed space. There you have a diagrammatic trait: to impose a task, to impose some task, to impose some task on a small multiplicity in a closed space. I will say: there you have a category of power. It is a diagrammatic trait or a trait of the diagram. If I now say: to control the principal events – I am not specifying which ones – to control the principal events in a large multiplicity itself situated in an open space, I am defining another diagrammatic trait. Thus, the abstraction of the diagram does not prevent its potential varieties, since I have at my disposal a space-time variable that is largely sufficient. And there are all sorts of types of multiplicities. In effect, at this moment, I will define a multiplicity by the way in which it spreads out in a space. Multiplicities will vary according to the type of space and also according to the way it which they occupy the space; so I will have a great deal of variety in the diagram, or from one diagram to another.

   • Thus, you see, if I say, “to impose a task on a small multiplicity in a closed space,” or if I say “to control the principal events of a large multiplicity in an open space,” I provide categories of power. On the other hand, if I say, “to punish, to educate, to put to work, to teach”, etc., these are not categories of power, these are categories of power/knowledge. These are categories of knowledge, which of course imply power, but they are categories of knowledge. Why? Notice that all these terms in fact mobilize formalized functions and formed matters. The schoolchild, worker, prisoner are formed matters. To impose some task on a small multiplicity in a closed space was a category of power, but now I am in the concrete, there is no matter that is not formed. What is this generic multiplicity? It is a multiplicity of children, so the function will not be to impose a task, but simply to teach. To teach a multiplicity of children in a closed space that will be called the high school or elementary school. But, next door, to impose some task on a small multiplicity in a closed space will become… the formed matter has become the prisoner and no longer the schoolchild, and to impose some task is not to teach but to punish. Is it surprising that, after all, there are punishments at school and there are lessons in the prison? No, they respond to the same diagrammatic trait. You understand? But, thus, if I consider power in the abstract, it being said that power is an abstraction, if you tell me “in fact, it’s never separated!” Clearly, it’s never separated, Foucault is the first to say it. If I make an analysis, it is to mark the difference in that which is not separated in reality.

   • What must be called “power” is the diagram, which consists in swirling together [brasser] non-formed matters and non-formalized functions. And I would distinguish it in this way from archives of knowledge, which begin from the moment when the functions are formalized and finalized, that is, when it is no longer a question of imposing some generic task, but of teaching, or punishing, or putting to work in a factory, or the like. It is no longer a question of some generic closed space, but sometimes of a school, sometimes a prison, sometimes a workshop…, sometimes a factory. There you have it, that is the first characteristic of the diagram.

   • What, then, is a point or a state of power? A point of power? Well, here, I believe this must be taken very seriously because it will be important for us. You recall what I told you: the diagram is the exposition of relations of forces. Now, the relation of forces does not add to the force, there is not the force plus its relation with other forces. Force is fundamentally plural, there is force only in the plural. That is, force is, in its essence, a relation with another force. It is with force that the word ‘one’ loses all meaning. There is no force that is not a relation with other forces. It is on this basis that Nietzsche founded his pluralism of forces. Forces are not unifiable. It was a very simple idea, yet so well confirmed by physics, by the physics of forces, which is very important. Good.

   • So, we sense… okay, what is a point? Well, we have seen – I am returning to my whatsit [truc] – it is a diagrammatic trait expressing a relation of forces, that is, a force that acts on other forces. To impose some task on a limited multiplicity, to impose a force that imposes a task on a small multiplicity of other forces. And I told you that we can diversify according to the aspects retained of a space-time, and this will yield: to arrange [ranger] – a force which arranges others – to arrange, to be arranged; to arrange, on the side of the force that affects, that arranges other forces; to be arranged, on the side of the forces affected. And I told you that there is more than just arranging, there is classifying, a hierarchical series, first, second, third, fourth, fifth, which is also a diagrammatic trait, that is, a category of power, a force that classifies other forces. Here I will again have two affects: to classify – to be classified. To be arranged is a reactive affect, and to arrange is an active affect. To classify and to be classified, etc., I have given all kinds of examples…

   • So, I am here returning to a theme … that we have sketched a little bit, saying: among the diagrams… Foucault, at the end of his life, accorded a great deal of importance to pastoral power, to this ecclesiastical power. Why? Because he saw there the first power that proposed to individualize its subjects. But how to define pastoral power, this power of the church? Foucault defines it in his manner… But, for me, this evokes something because I tried to tell you: this whole conception of Foucault is very Nietzschean. It is very Nietzschean, and it is so Nietzschean that, strictly speaking, he had no reason to say so. Now, it is all the more important for our purposes that Nietzsche is surely the first to have posed the question, in cold and cynical terms… no, not cynical, in cold terms: what does the power of the priest consist in? And this is perhaps one of the most novel things in his philosophy: what is the power of the priest? What does it consist in? I am not at all saying “cynical,” I am saying: he demands a positive theory of the power of the priest. Where does this strange power come from? Hence Nietzsche also can exclaim at the end of his life: “I am the first to have done a psychology of the priest!” By psychology, he means something very elevated. “I am the first to have done a psychology of the priest.”

   • So, Foucault would be the second. What does this mean? But consider the great psychology of the priest that Nietzsche provides in the second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals, for he does not only provide a psychology of the priest, but a psychology of the mutation of the priest. And this second treatise of the Genealogy of Morals begins by providing the psychology of the Jewish priest, so as to pass on to the psychology of the Christian priest. Now, how – I do not want to go back over all of this, but it is just so you better understand what is at stake in this matter of the diagram and relations of forces – how does Nietzsche define the Christian priest, that is, the pastor? It is the pastor, and Nietzsche often uses the form “the pastor,” the expression “the pastor”. How does he define the pastor? He gives a very strange definition, but it is so beautiful: it is one who returns force against itself… [Interruption of the recording] [1:00:32]

   • … Hence the possibility of defining power without ever speaking of man. For all the histories, like the death of man, etc., we will see later on, we will see very soon that if these ideas of Foucault were so misunderstood, it is because, from the beginning, nothing was understood of what he was saying. A diagram of power makes no appeal to the “man” form, even if it presupposes it. It must be entirely articulated in terms of affects and relations between the affects and relations of forces.

   • This is why I can say: if the first determination of the diagram is the swirling together of non-formed matters and non-formalized functions, the second definition of the diagram, equal to the first, incidentally, is an emission of affects or singularities, an emission of affects or singularities corresponding to a social field, corresponding to a collective field.

   • Hence you may understand my question better. Foucault uses this word “diagram” one time, and he uses it concerning disciplinary societies, which is to say, what he considers to be our societies, and I told you last time: good, very well, but there remains a problem for us, we readers of Foucault. Does this mean that the diagram of power exists only for our societies? And that, before these societies, other previous societies were ruled [régies] by something other than a diagram of forces? For example: did the sovereign replace the power of the diagram? There was a power of the sovereign and not a power of the abstract diagram. I would say: definitely not. Quite evidently not. For the sovereign, in turn, is only a formalized and finalized function that presupposes a diagram. It is thus for every society, for every social field, no matter what it is, that we must say there is a diagram. Which brings us finally to an important problem, which we saw last time, and in this regard, I would like to add something that will prepare us going forward.

   • I was saying that just before our disciplinary societies, you have, according to Foucault, the societies of sovereignty, and this is another diagram, their diagram is not disciplinary. “Disciplinary” designates a certain set of relations of force with force, but it is not the only relation. Once again, in a diagram of sovereignty, it is no longer a question of composing forces, as in discipline…; it is a question of levying forces. The sovereign is a force that levies other forces. It is a power of levies. And levying is an active affect, just as “being levied” or, rather, “being the force on which one levies something” is a reactive affect. It will thus be another distribution of singularities in societies of sovereignty, other relations of forces, fine, but there will be a diagram. It must be said that the diagram is not reserved for disciplinary societies, but there is a disciplinary diagram just like there is a diagram of sovereignty.

   • And so, in this spirit, I was saying, in the limit case, regarding matters with which Foucault was never the least bit concerned, in so-called primitive societies, there is a diagram, the diagram of alliances, which is a very particular diagram, some aspects of which will remain in the diagram of feudalism, for example, with a network of alliances but conceived in a new way. So with diagrams, you can multiply them, you can make as many as you like, especially since there are inter-diagrams, I was saying.

   • And, finally, we must ask ourselves… we will see what kind of problem arises from this, we will be compelled to see… It will be necessary in the end to say that diagrams are always intermediary, much more than they belong to a social field. Diagrams are always intermediary between a social field in the process of disappearing and a social field in the process of emerging. Why? You will see where I want to take this. It is something that will concern a fundamental instability of the diagram. The relations between forces in a social field are fundamentally unstable. What is stable? You will see right away what is stable, namely, the strata, yes, the very formation, but the diagram that is like the motor of the formation is itself fundamentally unstable.

   • But, at any rate, we will see this… This is why there are, according to the text of Foucault, there will be…, we will be able to speak of a Napoleonic diagram, as I told you. The Napoleonic diagram is Napoleon precisely at the hinge point of the conversion from the society of sovereignty into disciplinary society; he presents himself as the resurrection of the ancient sovereign, of the great Emperor, but in the service of a completely new society that will be a society…, a diagram of the organization of detail, a kind of secular pastor, the surveillance of cattle. And the Napoleonic diagram will be the conversion of the society of sovereignty into the society of discipline.

   • But, to better emphasize the diagrams, which are everywhere and vary greatly from each other, I say to myself, okay then, for the first-year students…, I could give them an assignment. It would be: construct… There would be problems, like in geometry, you know. Construct the diagram of feudalism. So, if they speak to me of the knight, I will cross it out and mark zero: [Laughter] they have not understood what a diagram is, they must only speak of affects of singularities and relations of forces. They will therefore be forbidden the word “knight”, and each affect will be defined by a force relation, but there will surely be an “x” (small x) that will only be able to be performed by horse. Very interesting. Do you want me to give you an assignment…? Even for everyone, eh? Or a written quiz, that would be marvelous… And then I will give you the grades, and after, the comments, eh? I will begin with last place, obviously… Okay. Alright, then.

   • And then another topic would be: in your view, …are we still within the disciplinary diagram, or are we already within a society that refers to a new diagram? I was telling you last time, the partisans of the idea of a postmodern era, in which we would have entered, means above all that, according to them, the diagram has already… how do you say it? “Molted” or “mutated” [mué ou muté]? You say “mutated”? You are sure? Mutated. The diagram has mutated. The diagram has molted… Yes, you say “mutated,” good. They are not the same, but yes, good. Alright, then.

   • Or I could ask: and the Greek city-state, does it have a diagram? I mean, this interests me greatly because Foucault, at the end of his life, converts all his reflection into a reflection upon… in part, not all his reflection, but a reflection upon the Greek city-state assumes a particular importance. So that, if I jump into his last book, one of his last books about which nothing at all has been said, The Use of Pleasure, I say to myself: is there enough there to find a diagram? And here we would see the originality of Foucault’s method because we would have to see how Foucault defines the Greek city-state, how ancient historians defined the Greek city-state, how contemporary historians define the Greek city-state. This would then be a privileged terrain where we could directly evaluate Foucault’s originality in relation to historians. Now, if you read The Use of Pleasure, it seems to me that what he retains as an essential characteristic of the Greek city-state is very interesting, because, if I take as criteria the best current historians of ancient Greece, [Paul] Vernant or [Marcel] Detienne, for example, I would not say that it is in opposition, but that it does not coincide. It is not opposed to, but does not coincide with, the principle traits retained by Vernant or Detienne.

   • What, in fact, strikes Foucault about the Greek city-state? He does not think that the Greeks were some miracle, eh, he does not make the Greeks into an astounding idea. In this regard, he is full of implicit irony vis-à-vis Heidegger, for he does not see in the Greeks the world-historical gesture or gest. He says: oh no, these are interesting people, but in the end, it is nothing earth-shattering; no, they are not at all the shepherds of Being. They are not the shepherds of Being, but in a sense, as always, Foucault says, this is his form of humor: they did much less and much more, depending on your perspective. So, what is greater than “being the shepherds of Being”? If you look at the text, you can read The Use of Pleasure by searching for it: what diagram of the Greek city-state does this book imply? He has a very curious idea, which is that the Greeks invented something very strange in the relations between forces: they think that force is only exercised legitimately over other forces when the forces are free. You will tell me: great, but what are free forces? Well, no doubt it refers to preexisting diagrams. And this obviously refers to the Greek citizens… You will tell me: yes, but here I have lapsed into the error I was denouncing, and I cannot help myself to the Greek citizen, the free man. I cannot help myself to the free man since the free man is not diagrammatic. It’s not that this does not exist, but that it is not diagrammatic.

   • So, I must choose another word. It’s not just a semantic distinction: I will speak of free agents, free agents, that is, those who are presumed to not be already determined by a pre-existing power relation; this is an abstraction, which I can very well make. “Free agent,” by contrast to agents who are already determined by pre-existing power relations, for example, slaves. And the great idea of the Greeks is a rivalry between free men. I believe that is what Foucault is saying: I believe it, but is is up to you to say it and to see if… His idea of the Greeks appears to me to be very strong… We will pick all this back up, so it’s not pressing, it’s just to anticipate where we’ll be going. His idea of the Greeks is that what they invented politically is something that has not ceased inspiring democracy afterward. If they are democrats, it is in this sense: for them, free men are in a state of free rivalry. Why is this diagrammatic? Because I do not say in what domain. In all the domains. In any domain. So, we must not be surprised that the Greek city-states did not stop warring with each other, since they lived fundamentally as rivals. It is not the barbarians: the barbarians did not compete with the Greeks, from the Greeks’ perspective. However, the Greeks compete with Greeks. Greekness is the rivalry of free men.

   • You pose a question and he replies to you: it is I, it is I, it is I! Go say that where the emperor of China resides; there will be no rivalry among free agents. There will be free men where the emperor of China resides, certainly, but they will not enter into a rivalry, into a pure and direct rivalry. They will not compete. They will perhaps compete in secret, but in order for rivalry there to be precisely the relation by which forces pass… And then, it may not be the footrace… Rivalry in the Olympic games – that is why the Greeks invent the games, with their theme of competition among free people, among free agents – so they invent the Olympics, absolutely, but they also invent democracy… Democracy is not liberty, nor is it equality, but rather the power to compete [rivaliser]. The power to compete is an affect. You understand, I would say, that rivalry is the diagram of the Greek city-state, just as I was saying that alliance is the primitive diagram. And is it surprising that they invent eloquence? Rivalry, I would say, implies the form of the good adaptable to each domain. The form of the good, insofar as it is adaptable to each domain, is what defines rivalry.

   • What is the form of the good in the domain of speaking? The form of the good in the domain of speaking is eloquence. The Greeks will thus have institutions of eloquence. The form of the good in the domain of physical exercise is, as we put it, speed, at least in certain physical exercises it is speed; consequently, the Greeks will have the Olympics. And just like that. I could say that the diagram of the Greek city-state…– just as there is a disciplinary diagram, a diagram of sovereignty and a thousand other diagrams – I would say that the diagram of the Greek city-state is rivalry among free agents. And, once again, in a despotic society, in an imperial society, rivalry among free agents cannot take place. Good.

   • So then, you see our problem: we now find ourselves not, as we first believed, before a sole diagram, but before an open multiplicity of diagrams. This suits us, but remember that each diagram is itself a multiplicity, multiplicity of relations of forces, multiplicity of singularities, multiplicity of … affects. Well, yes. Each diagram is a multiplicity, and there is a multiplicity of diagrams. But then, where do the diagrams come from? This is an importance question. What traverses them? [Qu’est-ce qui les parcourt?] … What is this diagrammatic materiality? What is that kind of thing? Well, no doubt there is neither beginning nor end. There is neither beginning nor end, neither an origin of forces nor an end of forces. There are only reincarnations [avatars] of forces. There are only metamorphoses of forces. The question of origin and the question of destination are disqualified from the point of view of forces. What does this mean? It means that not only are there mutations from one diagram to another, but every diagram is a place of mutation, and that this is what defines the diagram: it is a place of mutation.

   • You will tell me: we are not in the domain of the visible and the statable. Of course, of course, we are in the domain of the visible and the statable, but there was a mutation. For there to have been a mutation, the diagram must have passed through it. What assures the mutation is the diagram. The diagram is the mutation itself. Relations of forces are in perpetual mutation. There is no longer, I can no longer even speak of current society. So-called current society is only the conjunction of what is still in the process of disappearing and what is still in the process of emerging. Parenthesis: [Antonio] Gramsci said extremely profound things about this, about this intermediary characteristic of every society. [Pause] So, good.

   • But finally, this brings us to a… a very delicate point, which is what? I would almost put it: where does the diagram come from? Where does the diagram come from? Since we saw that it did not presuppose any forms. I can invoke no form. It is primary in relation to forms. Forms follow from it. We do not yet know how, but it is primary in relation to forms. It is primary in relation to knowledge. It precedes all knowledge. No doubt nothing could be known if there were no diagram, but the diagram does not belong to the domain of knowledge.

   • So then, where does the diagram come from? We will see Foucault’s reply. For the moment, let us content ourselves with what we can. It must be said, there are two replies… The diagram … it will be necessary to consider one after the other…. The diagram always comes from outside. For me, I’d like this: the diagram comes from outside, but what does that mean? Either it means nothing or else it requires an analysis of this notion of outside. We can be sure that it requires an analysis of this notion of outside and that it will be necessary to take account of this notion of the outside in Foucault, which is all the more important given that, in an article written in homage to [Maurice] Blanchot, he titled his text “The Thought of the Outside”.[2]  So, I would say: the diagram comes from outside, but we do not know what Foucault might have in mind by “outside”.

   • Second reply: the diagram always comes from another diagram. Oh yeah: why? Because every diagram is mutation. Every diagram is a mutation of a preceding diagram, which was itself already mutation. The diagram is fundamentally mutant. It even expresses, in a society, the mutations that are possible. Good. How to join the two together? If you have followed everything I have said, I would say: if you want a definition of the diagram, it is very simple, namely, the casting of a dice throw [l’émission d’un coup de dés].[3] What is it to think? To think is to cast a dice throw. We are Mallarmeans. What are the points on the die? The points on the die are affects or singularities. These are singular points. To think is to cast a dice throw. To think is to cast a dice throw. As soon as you think something, you have cast a dice throw. Your molecular brain cast a dice throw, and you say: I think. What allows Descartes to say “I think” is that his brain cast a dice throw. Each time that you think, you cast a dice throw or, at least, your brain casts a dice throw for you. I cast a dice throw, good, which is to say: I produce a distribution of singularities. To cast a dice throw means: to produce a distribution of singularities. Okay? You have released some such combination. That is what a diagram is, a distribution of singularities, a roll of the dice.

   • Only, here, understand, we’re going to… …we are going to understand everything. For I would say: every diagram comes from a preceding diagram. Well, yes, there are drawings [tirages]. There are successive drawings. There are successive drawings. So, you give yourself – because we cannot go back infinitely – you give yourself a first roll of the dice, you call it “diagram 1”, and then you give yourself a second roll of the dice, which yields “diagram 2”. In what relation is diagram 2 to diagram 1? You could conceive several cases. Either the drawings are completely independent of each other, which is the independence of the cases claimed by pure statistics. Each roll of the dice is presumed to be radically independent of the other. That is the extreme case.

   • For me, I believe that the relation between a diagram and another diagram, between a diagram and the diagram following, is typically a Markov chain; that is, each diagram is a dice throw, but the second diagram re-links together with the preceding one because the preceding one fixed the conditions under which the second throw, the second casting took place. Typical Markov chain. We dwelled on this for longer. Now I don’t have the time, this year, and then it would be necessary to start over, but those whom this interests would do well to refer to statistics manuals, to probabilities, to a chapter on Markov chains that currently plays a very important role in mathematics and physics.

   • I would say: from one diagram to another, there is a re-drawing and redistribution following the second drawing. So let us say that from primitive societies to imperial societies, from imperial societies to ancient or archaic societies, from archaic societies to the Greek city-state, from the Greek city-state to the Roman world, from Rome to feudalism, from feudalism to the societies of sovereignty, from the societies of sovereignty to disciplinary societies, etc., what must be conceived is a multiplicity of re-drawings where the state of forces, the singular points, the affects, are redistributed at each level… at each diagrammatic state. You understand? This would be obviously a way of restoring universal history, which would horrify Foucault, thus it must be said at the same time: no, this is not universal history since you make constant appeal to mutations and re-drawings. Everything is re-drawn [retiré]. Constantly, everything is re-drawn. It is only in the dreary periods, in the periods when we are beaten down, that we no longer believe that everything is re-drawn. Yet there always come the dawns, when one perceives that a new roll of the dice is possible. Which is to say: a new roll of the dice is possible, that is, thought, thought again becomes possible.

   • So, I have arrived at the conclusions of this second part. You see: my first part on power was a very general discussion of postulates. My second part on power, where we have arrived at the end, was: what are the differences between power and knowledge? And these differences, at the heart of this second part, you see that we have gone over them using several terms. Power is strategy, by contrast to strata; it is the diagram, by contrast to the archive; it is microphysics, by contrast to macrophysics or molar physics. Good, next we could add…. I would nearly add the forms of knowledge… Forms are always the forms of knowledge, the forms of the archive. Everything that is formed is already archived, a matter of strata… Well, the forms are subject to history. Forces are instead subject to a mutation, subject to the diagram; I would say, for the sake of convenience, that forces are taken up in a becoming. And just as we must distinguish power and knowledge, we must distinguish the becoming of forces and the history of forms. History is morphological. Good.

   • This amounts to saying what? Well, once again, regarding this whole domain of power, if I multiply its characteristics, then I would say: it is informal, so that whereas knowledge is always formed, the diagram is informal, going from one point to another, a many-pointed system and not a formal one; it is non-stratified, the non-stratified matter invoked by [Herman] Melville[6] — “and we go from stratum to stratum in the hope of finding the non-stratified element” –, non-stratified and unstable; it is diffuse; it is in perpetual mutation; it is abstract and yet is not general — you see that this is the only way I can mark abstraction and, at the same time, variability– it is abstract without being general, it varies, in fact, and is not general because it varies with the coordinates of space-time, as we saw.

   • So, I can very well say of the diagram that it is, once again, informal, non-stratified, unstable, diffuse, many-pointed, abstract without being general, virtual without being fictional or irreal. Last characteristic: it is… it all revolves around the same thing, it never ceases to be made the object of re-linked drawings [tirages réenchaînés], Markov chains… [Interruption of the recording] [1:46:48]

2. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 10 (1986-01-14) Similarity: 0.3018

   • Consequently, you should be able to understand a very strange text, to which I attach great importance, in Discipline and Punish, page 205, [Pause] where Foucault tells us… [Pause]; Deleuze looks for the page] What does he tell us? Here, I’ll read it… “The Panopticon…,” which Comtesse has just been speaking about, “the Panopticon,” this very curious system of surveillance, “the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building” – a dream structure – “it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” — you will consent to remove the word “form,” eh, Foucault having no reason to apply the distinction that I have just marked; here, he is employing “form” in a totally different sense, as aspect — “It is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system :”  — take note: the Panopticon can be represented as an architectural and optical system, colon — “it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” If there is a passage that proves my case, it is this one. It is a figure… you see exactly what he means, what he says exactly. One can define the Panopticon as an architectural and optical system, but it is not a sufficient definition. It is in fact a figure of political technology that one can and must detach from any specific use. What does this mean?

   • It is for this that we reserve the name “diagram”. The diagram, following this text by Foucault, who, alas, uses the word only once…, I can at least draw from this text that what Foucault calls “diagram” is the relation between a non-formed matter and a non-formalized function. That is to say, it is the exposition of some action, the exposition of an abstract action. To impose some task on some multiplicity. Moreover, or rather, even better, I can give – if I attach importance to this word “diagram,” all while recognizing that it appears only once in Foucault – I can give three definitions of the diagram according to Foucault, up to this point. Three definitions from which I will be able to conclude: the diagram is power.

   • Ah, the diagram is power, but this will … enable reclassifications. These three definitions are the following. I will say: we call “diagram” the exposition of a relation of forces or a set of relations of forces. This is the first definition of the diagram, taking into account everything we have seen previously, which I will not go back over. Second definition of the diagram: we call “diagram” every distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected, that is, every emission of singularities. In this sense, the diagram goes from one point to another. It goes from some point to some other point, these points being determinable as singularities. There you have the second definition of the diagram. Third definition of the diagram: we call “diagram” the swirling, which is an oceanic word, quite perfect. We call “diagram,” yes, the figure that swirls together, the swirling of non-formed matter and non-formalized functions.

   • I can ask, from what is the diagram distinguished? Well, the diagram is distinguished from the archive. And how is the diagram distinguished from the archive? Every archive is an archive of knowledge. Every diagram is a diagram of power. Good, what are the fundamental differences between the diagram and the archive? Well, I can say in any case “diagram-archive,” but I could express this distinction, this fundamental difference in other terms. I could say: strategies-strata. Every diagram is strategic. Every archive is stratified. I could say: it is the micro-macro distinction, every diagram is microphysical or differential, which amounts to the same. This amounts to the same… from our point of view. Every archive is macrophysical. I always circle back to the following: every diagram is power, every archive is knowledge. Strategies-strata.

   • You understand: if literature has meaning and justifies life, it is based upon passages like this one. There are not enough of them. And well, what does this passage have to do with Foucault? We begin again. It concerns Foucault personally, I believe. It matters little if Foucault knew it, though he surely knew it; he certainly knew Melville, but… In what way do we, who read this text independently of Foucault, say to ourselves that this text concerns Foucault? It is as though this passage winks at Foucault. “The old mummy lies buried in cloth on cloth; it takes time to unwrap this Egyptian king”: that is the archive. It is the archive. “But, far as any geologist has yet gone down into the world, it is found to consist of nothing but surface stratified on surface”: one finds only historical formation on historical formation, stratum upon stratum, strip of cloth upon strip of cloth, and this situation of the archive or the archaeologist – Melville says “geologist,” but there is little difference – the geologist-archaeologist goes from stratum to stratum. To its axis, the world being nothing but superinduced superficies.

   • To exit the strata to come to the non-stratified substance. What is this? Here, we are surer of ourselves. Since, as far as the history of the central room, we do not yet know, we do not yet have the means to know what it was for Foucault; we can only do so by progressing, but now, now we have at least an idea about the outside of the strata. Yes, the outside of the strata is the oceanic diagram. The oceanic diagram that does not cease to swirl together the relations between forces. That is the outside of the strata, the non-stratified element: it is the global strategic element. Global strategy in the sense that it is not only human beings who have a strategy; things also have a strategy. It does not matter which things: particles, electrons, all that, all the fields of forces. What defines a strategy is a field of forces, whether it be human or not.

   • We asked for two axes: knowledge-power. Whereas, and this is not the first time in our analysis that we have had one too many, we have three. There is the history of the room, of the inside, that we are leaving to the side for the moment, but we fall back on our two knowledge-power axes. And the difference in kind between power and its diagram, on the one hand, and knowledge and its archives, on the other. There is no archive of the sea, there are only port archives. Power is of the sea. Um… well, I’m taking the plunge. What is it? It is molecular. Water is molecular. Good. And so… There you have it.

   • I said: to order, but why to order? To serialize, why to serialize? And where? Is it at the school or in the workshop? I didn’t say it, it was thus… it was part of the diagram. And then, when I tried to give an even more general definition, I said: to impose some task on any multiplicity whatever. You understand, the difficulty is this: my diagram must nevertheless be varied. Yet how can we reconcile variety and abstraction? Since it is a physics of abstract action, how can it be variegated? The answer is relatively simple: variation cannot stem from any form, therefore variation can only stem from space and time. [Pause]

   • It is the manner in which abstract action will be in an abstract space-time that explains how the figures of the diagram will be able to vary. So that I conceive that in a diagram, there are always several figures, that is, several relations of forces. Several relations of forces. That is why, regarding this problem of detail, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 marks a significant development from Discipline and Punish; for, in my view, Discipline and Punish only studies one type of abstract action: to impose some task on some human multiplicity, in which kind of space-time? In a limited space-time. In a well-defined space-time, a closed space-time. Which implied that the multiplicity be not too numerous. For all this I have remained in the abstract, thus I could conclude: to impose some task on some human multiplicity, on the condition that this be in a closed space-time and for a multiplicity that is not too numerous. This was my category of power.

   • You may remember, as we saw in the first trimester, that The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 introduces a second abstract action: to manage life in a large multiplicity and in an open space. This is effectively another type of abstract action. But Discipline and Punish does not take into consideration this other type of abstract action; The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 is the first to include it. And Foucault will tell us, in fact, that there is a political anatomy, which is the first aspect, but there is also a biopolitics: to manage life in large multiplicities and in open spaces. And disciplinary societies were defined… or at least, power in disciplinary societies – which is to say, according to Foucault, our societies since roughly the middle of the eighteenth century – power in disciplinary societies was defined by these two…, I will call them “diagrammatic traits,” by these two diagrammatic traits: to impose some task on some multiplicity that is not too numerous in a closed space-time; and to manage life in a large multiplicity and an open space, to control life, the biopolitics of populations. In one case, the multiplicity is the number of those who are gathered together in a closed space; in the other case, it is a population distributed in an open space or in a large space. Thus, I would say: this is how the diagram that we could call the “disciplinary diagram” is defined, the diagram of power proper to disciplinary societies.

   • It is the space – I am returning to Foucault – it is the space of biopolitics. I would say that open space is a type of smooth space. It is a space consisting of degrees of density and rarity: density of population, density and rarity of marriage, etc. It is a space defined by indices of density and rarity, quite different from the other, which is a measurable space defined by indices of speed. You see, I would say: in the one case, you have the striated space of small multiplicities with well-defined space-time, striated space-time; in the other case, you have smooth space-time for large multiplicities that are distributed in themselves [se répartissent en lui]. In the one case, you distribute the space according to given elements. In the other case, you distribute elements in an open space. There will be a whole game of nature [jeu de nature] between the two types of space. Good, but… this would be to say: these are two different diagrammatic traits. But then: new small difficulty, but we will stop because… But here it is only a matter of small difficulties, really nothing at all.

   • One is quite often left with the impression that Foucault… On the one hand, he uses the word “diagram” only once, …but well, it’s like that, and then there you are. … On the other hand, there is the thing everywhere, it seems to me, but one has the impression that this status of power relations or relations of forces, such as the diagram expresses them, is reserved for our modern societies, namely, disciplinary societies.

   • Thus, the question becomes: is this reference to a diagram of power unique to our modern societies, or does it apply to every society? Our societies of discipline were formed both based on and against the societies — Comtesse pointed this out quite well — the societies that Foucault terms “of sovereignty.” And well, one of two things must be true. Either it must be said that in societies of sovereignty, there is no diagram because the sovereign filled in for it, or it must be said that in societies of sovereignty, there is perfectly well a diagram, that there is a diagram of sovereignty different from the disciplinary diagram. Here one must choose, it being said that Foucault provides us with no answer and does not pose this problem.

   • We ourselves do not have much … hesitation, we can say: clearly every social formation refers to a diagram of power. Only, it is not the same, and there is nothing surprising about this since one of the fundamental characteristics of the diagram is its fluid, fluctuating character. The diagram is always unstable. By definition, relations of forces are unstable, there is never an equilibrium of relations of forces. What is in equilibrium are the strata. The strata, yes, are in equilibrium. Relations of forces, strategy is never in equilibrium. The diagram is fundamentally unstable, so it is clear that the diagram is not reserved for our societies. Only, the diagram never stops going through [traverser] mutations. The diagram is fundamentally mutant, and Foucault will several times spell this out, speaking of a site of mutation; we will see this, we will see it later on.

   • I am just pointing out that, in fact, the diagram will be completely different. What will the diagram of societies of sovereignty be? Let’s try to find out, going quickly instead of proceeding point by point. We saw that the first diagrammatic trait of discipline was what? To construct a productive force greater than its composite forces, that is, to combine forces, to compose forces. That is what a diagram of discipline is: to divide the labor in order to increase the output, for example. And well, the diagram of sovereignty will no longer be that.

   • Action upon an action: what is the action upon an action within a formation of sovereignty? It is levying [prélever]. A force that levies on another force is an action upon action, no less than in the case of discipline, but it is an action of sovereignty, an economy of levying, a diagram of levying and no longer a composition of forces. A force that levies on other forces: that is the diagram of sovereignty. It will levy, for example, on the product when it comes to taxes, or on production when it comes to work assignments [corvées]. Levying everywhere. Instead of composition. This will be the first so-called diagrammatic trait of societies of sovereignty, of the diagram of sovereignty.

   • Another trait: it is not a matter of managing life, which was the other trait of discipline, but of deciding death. A force that decides death instead of supervising life – here, too, is implied a completely different space-time –, this is also a diagrammatic trait of societies of sovereignty.

   • Second remark, therefore, I am moving forward in my answer: yes, societies of sovereignty also refer to a diagram. The diagram is not at all unique to societies of discipline. Second remark: the diagram is so unstable that, in the end, it is in perpetual mutation, in a state of perpetual transformation. This is why it can never be restricted to any one formation. It should almost be said: it is always intermediate between two formations. The diagram is always intermediary, it is always unstable, thus intermediate between two social formations. This is why it is non-stratified. It is always inter-stratigraphical. Between two strata. Foucault explicitly gives an example of this in Discipline and Punish, page 141, Napoleon. There is a Napoleonic diagram. The Napoleonic diagram is characteristically intermediate between the old sovereignty and the emergent discipline. It is a diagram of both sovereignty and discipline. Moreover, it is Napoleon who invents the disciplinary diagram. You will see this passage, very interesting.[13]

   • Third little remark, right? — These are exercises, fanciful exercises — Are we, today, still in a disciplinary diagram? Can we say, for example, following the tenants of postmodernism, that… it would amount to saying that information technology and the related disciplines have changed, …representing a mutation of the diagram and propelling us into another type of society that is already no longer disciplinary, though it is no less cruel and no less harsh, but that the relations of forces no longer pass through the disciplinary diagram. Think it over… it does not seem very interesting to me, but, well, just because. Okay, it would have to be seen whether current methods of control still borrow from the old model of the disciplines or borrow instead from completely new models, and which new models?

   • And next, final remark, equally insignificant. We ventured in the other direction the last time, if you recall, and I will summarize that here. Namely: there is indeed a diagram corresponding to so-called primitive societies. Here, too, a problem that is absolutely not broached by Foucault, but I tried to say, last time, that if you consider what we call primitive societies, there is a diagram that is irreducible to a molar structure. There is a molecular diagram, which is what? Which is constituted by the relations of forces in these societies, and the relations of forces constitute the network of alliances … insofar as this network of alliances forms a microphysics of primitive societies, insofar as it cannot be deduced from lines of filiation. The alliances between two lines of filiation cannot be deduced from these same lines, but mobilize a different dimension, a transversal dimension opposed to… distinct from the verticals of filiation. And I can say that a network of alliances in primitive societies really constitutes the microstructure, if you like, or rather the strategy of these societies. Whereas their lines of filiation constitute their kinship structure. But you will never deduce the network of alliances from the kinship structure. Now, is it a coincidence if the relations of forces pass through the network of alliances?

   • There you are, then, we have an aggregate… I would add… ah yes, final point… At the limit, it would have to be said — I do believe, if it’s not a misinterpretation of Foucault’s thought — that there are as many diagrams as you like. It all depends on where you situate the strata. In any case, there are diagrams as soon as there is a new strategy. And, to take an example, in interviews, especially at the end of his life, Foucault insists on what he calls the importance of pastoral power, saying: this is a very curious power because it is a power that was invented. Thus, here too there is… it is a relation of forces, but an invented one, a new relation of forces that appears with the Catholic church. Pastoral power. “We the shepherds!”

   • The model will be Platonic. It will not be the first time that Christianity will have borrowed from Plato; Plato’s great text on power and the pastoral is The Statesman. When the statesman is confronted by the person who shepherds the sheep, the flock. To shepherd a flock: …well, there you are, a diagrammatic trait. To shepherd some flock or herd, whether these be cows, sheep, or men: that is a beautiful diagram. And, well, so it is that we are told: men, you are a flock, you are the flock of the good God, therefore a natural power is exercised over you by the shepherd of the flock, that is, by the man of God or the priest. With regard to Nietzsche’s question “what new power does the priest invent?”, Foucault replies: he invents pastoral power. A reply that Nietzsche had not foreseen. As for Nietzsche, he gives another answer. The priest will invent this extraordinary thing: pastoral power. What is so extraordinary about pastoral power? But think it over. Flock, flock… okay.

   • In other words, pastoral power is a power that is exercised over a multiplicity assimilated into a flock or herd… You see, it is a very original diagrammatic trait, which can be reduced neither to the small multiplicities from earlier, nor to the large multiplicities from earlier, but is something else. …assimilated to a flock, a flock within which power produces individualizations, which is to say, it is a power of detail. To know that Blanchette is well-groomed, … a power of detail, of care, of daily care. But take into account that in the same period, the sovereign completely could not care less about daily care. The daily care of his subjects: that’s crazy talk! What does he care about that? What he is asking for comes from levying. He asks only that his subjects be in good enough health for there to be something to levy. But that they be well-groomed, that they have trimmed fingernails, the sovereign couldn’t care less about any of that. But the shepherd, quite the contrary. It is necessary that in his individual… individualizing appreciation of each member of the flock or herd, the horn of the cow not imperil the eye, so it must be filed down in time. For that is an abominable image, right?

   • And the marvel is when Foucault will show how one of the great diagrammatic originalities of pastoral power is thus the individualization of subjects, a power that individualizes, and then it will be necessary to await the disciplinary power of societies, of secular societies, in order for them to borrow from the pastoral Church this diabolical project: to individualize the citizens. And at this moment one of the aspects of pastoral power will become the object of State power, and State power will propose individualizing its citizens. In what form? In the form of the disciplines. The disciplines must bear on detail, which schoolchildren know something about.

   • Alright then, all of this to say – here I am just concluding, at the juncture where we are – that as for me, I believe the question must be answered thusly: yes, every social formation refers to a diagram for a simple reason… or to several diagrams for the simple reason that all diagrams are unstable and fluid, whereas the social formations are in relative equilibrium, and there is no society that does not refer to a microphysics of power. Thus, there are diagrams everywhere between the strata. [End of the recording] [2:49:41]

   • [13] On the shift from the diagram of sovereignty to that of discipline, see Foucault, pp. 40-42.

3. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 01 (1985-10-22) Similarity: 0.2790

   • And there is one of these axes, and in my view, it is the first, it is the first that Foucault develops, in his corpus, and this first axis, he will call archaeology. And archaeology is the discipline of the archives. But what does Foucault call an archive? He will try to say this in one particular book, Archaeology of Knowledge. But as for us, we don’t want to take for granted right away what is . . . we won’t . . . we’ll almost say: so, look, it revolves around what? Foucault’s whole first period, I’d say, roughly, from The History of Sexuality to Discipline and Punish, it revolves around what? What it revolves around will let us define the archive. And there is no doubt that the archive has something to do with history. The object of the archive is the historical formation. The archives refer to historical formations. At first sight, this does not move us forward, we are spinning . . . you see, this is what I wanted to do today, we are spinning in the words. Good. The archive refers to historical formations. The archive is always the archive of a formation. This does not tell us at all what an historical formation is, nor what an archive is.

   • And then here is Foucault telling us, in The Use of Pleasure, so, in a very late book, here is Foucault telling us: my books have been historical studies, but not an historian’s work. Historical studies and not an historian’s work. Everyone knows that Foucault has a very close relation with the adherents of what was called the New History, roughly, the students of [Fernand] Braudel, the Annales School. But a relation may be very complex. He tells us absolutely: I am not an historian. He tells us absolutely: I am and I remain a philosopher. And nevertheless, a whole part of this corpus treats historical formations. He repeats: granted, they are historical studies, [but] they are not an historian’s works. What does he mean? He specifies a bit. He specifies a bit when he says, still in The Use of Pleasure: don’t expect a history of behaviors or of mindsets from me. Here, the allusion is clear. It is true that the Annales School, at least in part, offers us a history of behaviors and of mindsets. For example: what is a history of behaviors? Here, too, we’re touching on very broad, very cursory, signs. I think, I’m thinking of a very, very interesting book of history: Comment on meurt en Anjou au XVII siècle, au XVIII siècle. [How One Dies in 17th and 18th Century Anjou] Comment on meurt en Anjou. [How One Dies in Anjou][3] You can’t put it any better: that’s a history of behavior. I can do the history of a behavior, the behavior of death. I could also do: how one is born. How one is born in Picardy at a given point in time. You can easily see that this marshals archives. But Foucault tells us: I do not do a history of behaviors. One can imagine a history of the maternal instinct; that has been done.

   • What does this amount to saying? This already gives us an entire agenda. We’ll have to make do with these four theses. All that I can conclude for the moment is what? What is an archive? And, listen, I’ll answer, I’ll give a final answer which will be, in a sense, the most disappointing, and will stop being disappointing if you take into account everything it took for us to get to it. I’ll say: well, here it is: the archive is fundamentally audiovisual. And so: see you later, my work here is done! The archive is audiovisual—only this commonplace has been transformed by Foucault. Because, let’s go on: right away, what is archaeology?  Archaeology is the study of historical formations. In what way is it something different than history? Because it concerns ascending right to the conditions, the visible and the statable, and because history will never be able to identify pure statements or visibilities. These are pure elements: they require a philosophical analysis.

   • And, lastly—you’ve had enough, huh. . .  And, lastly, I’ll close on the following point: the two, the two—seeing and speaking, that is, visibles and statables—make up what he will call a savoir, a form of knowledge. To know [savoir] is always to produce the non-relation between the visible and the statable, it is to combine the visible and the statable, to produce mutual captures of the visible and the statable. At stake is the problem of truth. You will perhaps notice that I have defined in the same way the archive, audiovisual, the historical formation, a combination of the visible and the statable, and knowledge [savoir]. Well, yes. The reason is that for Foucault there is nothing, there is nothing beneath knowledge. Everything is a knowledge. Everything is knowledge. There is no experience prior to knowledge. This is his break with phenomenology. There is not, as Merleau-Ponty said, a ‘wild experience,’ there is not lived experience or, rather, lived experience is already a knowledge.

4. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 02 (1985-10-29) Similarity: 0.2537

   • Our last session was on the topic of: what is an archive according to Foucault? What is archaeology? What we brought to light is a very general idea, namely: seeing and speaking, or more precisely, but this “more precisely” should already seem almost startling to us, and we are not yet in a position to understand it, we just know that the terms that follow are more precise than “seeing and speaking.” Seeing and speaking, or more precisely, the visible and the statable, or, if you prefer, visibilities and statements, make up the two stable forms in each period. In the end, a substantial portion of Foucault’s corpus consists in dividing up and positioning these two forms—I would say that from History of Madness to Discipline and Punish (I’m not saying that Foucault’s books can be reduced to this, I’m saying that they include this)—distributing two forms according to the given historical period: the form of visibility, the form of statability. And I stressed once and for all that certain interpretations of Foucault that sacrifice the conception of the visible to a conception of the statement, of the statable or the sayable, are necessarily led to mutilate Foucault’s thought.

   • Hence, the visible and the statable comprise two stable forms in each historical period. This should perhaps even be reversed: what defines an historical period is a complex field of visibility and a complex regime of statements. In other words, an historical period is defined by what it sees and what it says. [Pause] Hence: what does “archaeology” mean? It means a discipline that analyzes archives. And what is an archive? It is the audiovisual record of an historical period, the visible and the statable. [Pause]

   • And we had barely begun the second question, which was no longer “What is an archive? What is archaeology?”, that is, the search for the two pure conditions. You see why he uses, why he must appeal to, a word like ‘archaeology’ to distinguish himself from history, to distinguish himself from the historian—the archive is not history, it’s the determination of the two elements, that is, the conditions of visibility and statability. And we had opened up a second topic, that is, ‘what is knowledge [savoir]?”, “what is knowledge?”. And we said the same thing: to know is to see and to state. That made a nice sequence, it’s a bit as if, at first glance, the historical formation expressed objectively what knowledge tells us subjectively. Knowledge and historical formation . . . it still seems bizarre to us: knowledge and historical formation are but one. Knowing, in fact, is seeing and stating. That is, to know is to combine something of the visible with something of the statable. Consequently, all knowledge is historical. And that’s just about where we were. So, I repeat my invitation: Are there any comments on this first point about the archive? No? There’s no problem, no unclarity? It’s very clear? Okay, well then let’s continue. [Pause]

   • How can we understand this kind of identity between knowledge and historical formation? The identity of knowledge and historical formation is the archive itself. But how should we understand it concretely? Actually, knowledge has neither object nor subject. Knowledge [savoir] as Foucault conceives of it is not the knowledge [connaissance] of an object by a subject. Knowledge [savoir] has neither object nor subject. What does it have, then? Well, there’s nothing to do now but let oneself go. We’ll see that we’ll find new difficulties concerning the question “what is knowledge?”, but for now “it’s all downhill.” We know how to define knowledge: knowledge has neither object nor subject, it has elements. It has two elements: the visible and the statable. You’ll tell me: “the visible is its object and the statable is its subject.” No, not true, not true. There are two pure elements that are absolutely irreducible. In other words, there is nothing beneath knowledge or prior to knowledge.

   • You see: each formation . . . This now allows me to enrich the earlier notion of the archive. I was saying a while ago, I was saying—and that was the first determination—the archive is a stratification, it’s a stratum as an historical formation, that is, it was the first determination of the stratum—it’s a combination of the visible and the statable. That already makes for a certain thickness of the stratum. Now, I can add that the stratum is a stacking of varyingly oriented thresholds. A stacking of thresholds—and here this really takes into account the word ‘stratum,’ and you see how it enriches the notion of archaeology—a stacking of varyingly-oriented thresholds according to which statements can be deemed “political statements from a particular formation,” “aesthetic statements,” “scientific statements,” etc.

   • The theme, all I wanted to say, about this, the theme that Foucault constantly reprises, it’s a rule of his method: what’s hard is to find statements where they are, but they are somewhere. It’s up to you to find them. They are not hidden. And the archive means this: put together the corpus, as Foucault says, but he uses a term very frequently used by linguists, or at least by certain linguists, put together the corpus of statements that are characteristic of an historical formation. That in itself requires a lot of ingenuity. You have to find them where they are. “Find them where they are” means both: they are not hidden, and yet it takes an effort to find them. You must construct the corpus of statements from which you start off. When you conduct research on a particular historical formation, you’ve got to build your corpus. That’s it, so, we’ll move on to the other problem: but then, if they are not hidden, they are nonetheless not given either. So: what to do? And why are they not given? That’s it! [End of the recording] [1:56:10]

5. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 13 (1986-02-25) Similarity: 0.2505

   • For this purpose, if I were to try to give a very general approximation, I would say: yes, knowledge is a matter of archives, the archive being audiovisual, that is, an archive of sight and an archive of the statement, an archive of the visible for each period and an archive of the statable for each period. Knowledge is an archival matter; power is not an archival matter. Power is a matter of cartography, of a moving cartography, a strategic map, always reworkable, always fluid. So that up to this point, Foucault’s two words could be: until Discipline and Punish, I am an archivist; with Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, I am a cartographer. The strategic map is millimetric. The millimetric map of power is of a different nature than the archives of knowledge. And over the archives, over the archives of strata, over the archives of stratified formations, it is necessary to superimpose strategic maps, the millimetric maps that state the relations of forces or power relations of a given period, the relations of forces or of power that correspond to such and such stratified formation. There are relations of forces that correspond to each stratified formation, but the two differ in kind as power and knowledge differ in kind. This difference in kind does not prevent concrete experience from only ever giving me mixtures of one and the other.

   • It becomes mysterious. The outside was already mysterious in Blanchot. If we do not start from there, then in any case we will not be able to understand. But I would say indeed that saying this does not suffice for understanding. I am just saying that the exigency of the outside is to be more distant than any external world, than all exteriority. Good, but then… The relation of forces, where the forces come always from the outside and affect each other from the outside – we have seen what this was, that it is expressed in a diagram. You remember: the diagram is the exposition of a relation of forces corresponding to a stratified formation. I would already say that if the forms, if the stratified forms are forms of exteriority, then for its part, the diagram plunges into the outside, the relation of forces. I would say that the relation of forces is, how to put it, the outside of a stratified formation. It is the outside of a historical formation.

   • What I mean is that a historical formation has nothing outside it, nor is there anything beneath it – here we must take a great deal of precaution, it has nothing beneath it, nothing outside it. Why? It is itself a form of exteriority; how would a form of exteriority have something external to it? It has nothing outside it, but it has an outside. The outside of the formation is the set of relations of forces that govern [régissent] it, that determine [régissent] this formation, which is to say, that are incarnated in it. The set of relations of forces that are incarnated, that are actualized in a historical formation – for example, the disciplinary diagram that is actualized in modern societies, in the modern formations – is such that this diagram is the outside of the formation. It is not outside the formation – you see that I save my immanence, for it is first and foremost not outside the formation –, but it itself constitutes the outside of the formation. [Pause]

   • Thus, the diagram plunges into the outside. Let’s take a closer look. This will perhaps lead us further into the layers of the outside. A diagram, that is, an exposition of relations of forces – for example, the diagram of our modern formations, the disciplinary diagram, as we have seen. I warned that there are as many diagrams as one would like, that we must not let ourselves be taken in by the text of Foucault, which speaks of the diagram as reserved for disciplinary societies. There are as many diagrams as you want. I remind you that in our analyses that I would have liked to be concrete, we saw numerous diagrams; we even invented, at our own risk and peril, a diagram of primitive societies, the relations of forces such as they are presented in networks of alliance. Good, the alliances of primitive societies, the networks of alliance of primitive societies, this would be a diagram.

   • Next, I announced that Foucault, in his last books, discovered a Greek diagram. The Greek diagram, the relations of forces upon which the forms of the Greek city-state will depend, and from which they will result, are strangely, according to Foucault, agonistic relations, which is to say, relations of competition between free agents; that is a diagram of power, and in a certain manner the forms of the Greek city-state depend upon it. There is a feudal diagram, there is a diagram of sovereignty, the one which we have analyzed. There is a diagram of discipline; as we have seen, it is the one that is defined as imposing whatever task on small multiplicities and managing life in extensive multiplicities. It is a diagram of forces. From this, there results our modern societies, so-called disciplinary societies, by contrast to societies of sovereignty. I would say: the disciplinary societies in Europe, in Europe, the disciplinary societies followed societies of sovereignty, the hinge point being established around Napoleon. And the passage from societies of sovereignty to societies of discipline, that is, the diagrammatic mutation, the changing of diagrams taking place around Napoleon. Good.

   • If you understand that, I will say that the diagram, which is to say, the exposition of relations of forces, can only be grasped in a double relation with something else. On the one hand, a diagram of forces is in relation with the stratified formation that results from it, or if you prefer, of which it is the immanent cause; this is not such a problem. The disciplinary relations of forces are incarnated in formal institutions, in formalized institutions that we have previously seen (prison, factory, school, etc.). Thus, a diagram of forces is always in relation with the stratified formation that results from it; or if you prefer, the map, the strategic map is always in relation with the archives that result from it. Good. But at the same time, a diagram is related to the preceding diagram, in relation to which it marks a mutation. Which is to say, there is nothing beneath [en-dessous] the strata; but on the underside of [par-dessous] the strata, a diagram communicates with the preceding diagram. Why? Because, as we have seen, every diagram is a distribution of singularities. A distribution of singularities that is incarnated in the formation.

   • So, there is no first diagram, no more than there is a last diagram. Every diagram is always the mutation of a preceding diagram. Which is to say, a second roll of the dice. Every diagram is by definition a second roll of the dice, or a third, or a fourth. There is no first roll of the dice. There is no first diagram. So that every diagram is in relation with what follows from it, but also in relation with the preceding diagram of which it is the mutation… or in relation to which it performs a new distribution of singular points. The relations of forces corresponding to societies of sovereignty are not the same as the relations of forces corresponding to disciplinary societies; diagrams must be equated to two dice rolls that give solutions, that give different combinations.

   • So perhaps you understand better: every diagram comes from the outside. Every diagram comes from the outside: which is to say, one diagram does not follow from the preceding one, but is in relation with the preceding one… I would say to you: it’s not a chain of diagrams, they are separated from each other by the formations that each one determines. There is no chain of diagrams, but there is perpetually the second… the third diagram links back up with the second from the very fact that it performs a new distribution of singularities. The fourth links back up with the third. It is a series of re-linkages where the givens are as though reset, a new roll of the dice. They are partial re-linkages. The outside is the element of the castings of dice throws, dice throws coming from the outside.

   • Thus, it is no longer enough to say, as I said at the beginning…. Here are the three fundamental propositions regarding the outside, in order to understand this quite strange notion. Firstly, the outside is something other than the external world and every form of exteriority. The outside is more distant; the outside is distance in its pure state, that is, a distance that can never be approached. It is not a relative distance, but an absolute distance. Thus, the outside is more distant than any external world. Second proposition: the outside is the element of forces and their relations. Force comes from the outside, forces are affected from the outside, and thereby it is the element of the diagram; the diagram is the outside of historical formations. It is not outside the historical formation, it is the outside of the historical formation that corresponds to it or that follows from it.

   • Third proposition: the diagram itself comes from the outside. For the diagram is multiple, and each diagram corresponds to a drawing [tirage]; thus, each diagram is a reshuffling [retirage] since there is no first diagram, and the diagrams are ceaselessly shuffled [brassé] from the outside. Oh really?! For the moment this story is very abstract, but remember, I would add, let us always return to this example: casting of singularities, integral curve that passes through the neighborhood of the singularities, of the singular points. You recall that this was our famous thing about azert, as an example of a statement. The statement azert. Which is to say, the statement of the series of letters, singularities, in the order they take on a French typewriter. A Z E R T, Foucault told us: A Z E R T do not form a statement, but azert is a statement when I state the order of the letters on a French typewriter.

   • And we have seen that this amounted precisely to saying: the casting of singularities, a casting of singularities is not a statement, but on the other hand the curve that passes through their neighborhood is a statement; and Foucault told us therefore that the statement is always in relation with something else or with an outside. The outside of the statement: that is the singularities by which the statement passes. Thus, all the diagrams are shuffled by the outside. The outside is the mixing of diagrams, which makes it so that, a diagram being given, there will always be another diagram emerging in a kind of mutationism that is evident in Foucault. The diagram is agitated by mutations; the mutations come from the outside. So that, you see, I can no longer maintain – and this is the object of my third remark – I can no longer maintain the identity of levels between the outside and the relation of forces.

   • My three remarks are: first, there is an identity of levels between exteriority and form; second, there is an identity of levels between the outside and the relation of forces or the diagram; third…, it must be added that no, in certain regards, there is not an identity of levels, for the diagrams are drawn from the outside. The outside is, how to put it, even more distant than the diagram. The diagrams issue from the outside. What is that, then? It’s not a form, you recall, forms are exterior; the outside is not a form, but that from which the singularities emanate. Oh really? But then, if the singularities… it must be said, therefore, that the singularities exceed even the relations of forces, which will lead us very far, it’s complicated… Until now, we have identified singularities and points, relations of forces: we can no longer say that. We will say: the singularities are taken up in relations of forces – and this will be much more beautiful, even more beautiful – the singularities are taken up in relations of forces at the level of the diagrams. But as pure emissions, where do they come from? They come from the outside… You will tell me: this does not get us any further. It is by repeating this word that we will perhaps get something from it.

   • Let us accept this: we must go so slowly. They come from the outside. Here, there is a kind of romanticism of the outside in Foucault that is very important, very essential. We will not be surprised that if seeing and speaking find their status at the level of forms of exteriority, thinking does not find its status at the level of forms of exteriority; thinking finds its status at the level of, and in relation to, the outside. Thinking is the relation with the outside. Alright, but what does that mean? Before knowing… I always proceed with the same method. Before knowing what it means, we have every interest in drawing a consequence. If all of this means something, then we have a rude consequence, which is that the singularities exceed the relations of forces; the singularities enter into relations of forces, yes, but only to the extent that they are taken up in a diagram. Insofar as they come from the outside, they are not yet taken up in a relation of forces.

   • You see: there would thus be three stages. Emissions of pure singularities. Second stage: these singularities are taken up in relations of forces. Third stage: they are incarnated, actualized in forms, in forms of exteriority. Ah yes, that’s very clear! Oh, how clear it is! Eh? Very, very clear, it’s rare that I am so clear as this! Ah yes! Good. Do you want me to repeat it? You will regret it, [Laughter] you will regret this brief moment of clarity. And well… what is the essential consequence? That, in the diagram, there will be strange singularities. There will be singularities taken up in relations of forces, yes, that will happen: power to be affected – power to affect. The power to be affected and the power to affect are taken up in relations of forces.

   • But there will be some singularities, how to put it, that are a little floating, singularities that attest to a potential exceeding the diagram. Insofar as the diagram comes from the outside, it captures singularities that it does not manage to take up in its relations of forces. So that, in fact, the forces have not two aspects, but three. We could not say this before. First aspect: power to affect. Second aspect: power to be affected. Third aspect: power to resist. To resist is the potential of force, if you will, insofar as it does not allow itself to be exhausted by the diagram; or, in what amounts to the same thing, it is the potential of the singularity insofar as it does not allow itself to be exhausted by a relation of forces given in the diagram. There are resistances.

   • There are resistances, and it’s Foucault’s great passage in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, pp. 95-96. I will read it to you: “Power relationships” – so, much more — “The existence of power relationships depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance” — Points of resistance: there are thus singularities of power, whether it be the power to be affected or the power to affect, but there are also singularities of resistance, which explain that in effect there is something that exceeds the diagram — “Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. Hence there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt,” etc. “Instead there is a plurality of resistances [that is, of singularities], each of them a special case,” and he will give us the list. Resistances “are the odd [autre] term in relations of power,” that is, are the outside of relations of power. The relations of power are the outside of the stratified formations, yet there is still an outside of relations of power. Resistances are the odd term in relations of power. Above all, there would be a misunderstanding that you will be wary of and avoid, which would be to say: ah well yes, the odd term, that is the power to be affected, it’s the other term in relation to the power to affect. That is not it at all. The power to be affected is not a resistance. The power to be affected and the power to affect are the two aspects of every power relation, but there is something other than power relations, which is the resistance to power.

   • Where does the resistance to power come from? It would be unintelligible if there were no singularities of resistance, and the singularities of resistance can be understood only if the diagram does not enclose the outside, but is itself stirred [brassé] by the outside, so that there can be points of resistance that are irreducible to the diagram. Do you understand a little? And it will be on this point that Foucault, in a text that is not part of a book, will suggest something that we will have to explore in more depth, namely, that resistance is even in a sense primary in relation to what it resists.

   • The primacy of resistance in relation to what it resists: a theme that seems very important to me, and that we will have to…. As a result, the power relation is what combats a prior resistance, what strives to overcome a prior resistance. Resistance is not second, it is first. This idea, which can appear very strange, is explained at least abstractly for us if you understand that the diagrams or relations of power are not the final word. The diagrams were, once again, distributions of singularities insofar as these singularities entered into relations of forces, but in this sense, every diagram emanates from an outside. The outside attests to its irreducibility, which is to say, to its irreducibility to the diagram itself, by inspiring irreducible points of resistance in each diagram. You understand?

   • And perpetually the diagrams are changing. Why? What is the force that compels the diagrams to transform [muer]? To undergo mutation. It goes without saying that if the diagram were not strewn with points of resistance, there would be no mutations. It is the points of resistance that force and bring about a mutation of the diagram, which is to say, a second drawing that comes from the outside, no less than the preceding one, which will also have its points of resistance, and a third drawing, etc., which will thus determine… not determine, which will trigger… [Interruption of the recording, with text overlap] [3:01:54]

   • …to undergo mutation. It goes without saying that if the diagram were not strewn with points of resistance, there would be no mutations. It is the points of resistance that force and bring about a mutation of the diagram, which is to say, a second drawing that comes from the outside, no less than the preceding one, which will also have its points of resistance, and a third drawing, etc., which will thus determine… not determine, which will trigger the mutations. It is the moment when the points of resistance are globalized that there will be a toppling of the diagram in favor of a new diagram.

   • Deleuze: Ah, listen, I do not think it’s the same thing, I don’t know, you will have to tell me what you mean. Must it be said that…? For the moment, we are at this point: that beyond diagrams, there is still something else, which is this line of the outside from which the diagrams emerge, from which the diagrams are derived; it is the line that throws the dice. If I dare say that it’s the line that throws the dice, then in this sense, it will be the line of Nietzsche; we could mark as nodes on this line: Melville, Michaux, Nietzsche, you can add what you like, Proust if you like, all that… and good, okay, perhaps we have gone too fast, because we have indeed seen…

   • Let us stick with the capacity to transform the diagram. This capacity to transform can only be explained by the line of the outside. We agree on this, but in order to not go too fast and to try to unravel such a mystery as the line of the outside, we must go back and ask: what exactly is a diagrammatic mutation, a change in the relation of forces? And we are going to run up against a theme that is so well-known in Foucault – and we will have to look at it clearly because so many stupid things are said about it –, which is the famous theme from The Order of Things, the death of man. What does it mean, “man is dead”? It may be said that this theme aroused sometimes indignation, sometimes approbation, but regardless, what is it? What does it mean? And on this point, what relation is there between Foucault and Nietzsche? In a certain manner, you sense that it signifies that we are in the midst of a mutation of the diagram… [Interruption of the recording] [3:07:06]

6. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 07 (1985-12-10) Similarity: 0.2403

   • What’s going on? Do you understand what it means to say: “power puts a spotlight on me” and “power makes me speak”? So, Foucault personally studied a case like this in the archives, the famous trial of Pierre Rivière, I, Pierre Rivière, having slaughtered my mother, my sister, and my brother… [1975], that’s perfect, because there’s an act that becomes visible, the crime, there is the evidentiary notebook, the statement and the visible fact. It’s tremend- … the variable relations between the two since Pierre Rivière himself recounts the relationship between his crime and his notebook in a very diverse way. Well, it’s very interesting: Pierre Rivière is pulled into the spotlight and forced to speak. The vile man is the ordinary man who always has something to blame himself for, but who is drawn into the spotlight and forced to talk about what? Complaints from neighbors, a police investigation… and then it will be set in motion… and then it will extend to supporting documents. Even Pierre Rivière keeps a notebook.

7. Gilles Deleuze, Painting and the Question of Concepts / 03 (1981-04-28) Similarity: 0.2331

   • But along the way and at the same time, I’m equally interested in building—it’s a technicality, but anyway—building a sort of concept which would be proper to philosophy. And you know what concept I’m looking for, because it’s the very one I’ve discussed with regard to painting, namely, a concept of the diagram. Which in the end might be uniquely tied to painting—but anyway, it would be coherent as a concept.

   • As a result, our inquiry into painting is just as much an investigation of the diagram and the possibility of fleshing out a philosophical understanding of the diagram, or a logical understanding of the diagram—and what logic might this view of diagrams belong to? It’s why I start by summarizing and tracking the diagram’s primary characteristics in the context of painting, since everything I’ve said thus far boils down to something extremely simple: in a painting—well, one question: what do I mean by “a painting”? Do I mean any painting in general, or a certain type of painting? A particular period, or are there examples in every period? We can’t answer all of these questions up front. But let’s assume that, in a painting, there is—I have to put reservations aside—whether actually [actuellement] or virtually—virtually things are really vague, whether it’s an over-simplified context… Virtually—we can always say that it’s virtual, okay, but that doesn’t help, we aren’t certain… we aren’t at all certain—whether actually or virtually, there’s a diagram on the canvas. Okay, but we don’t know what a diagram is; that doesn’t get us anywhere.

   • Nevertheless, before arriving at a philosophical understanding, what I’ll try to define are the pictorial characteristics of what I’m calling a diagram. Are there diagrams in music? I don’t know—that would be a different question… What sort of connection is there between a diagram and a language? These are the sorts of things that open up as objects of inquiry. For the moment, all I’d like to do is just number some of the pictorial diagram’s characteristics. I can see five, based on what we looked at before the holiday…

   • First characteristic: When it comes to the pictorial diagram, there appear to be two fundamentally related ideas, necessarily interrelated. The diagram would be the necessary relationship between these two ideas… These ideas being that of chaos and seed.

   • As a result, the diagram would be a chaos-seed. Right. You might ask, why call this a diagram? I’ll ask for your patience—bear with me. We’ll see if, uh… Unless maybe one of you thinks there’s another word that would work better; I’m sure there is one. Obviously, I’d be much more offended if someone thinks no, painting isn’t like that, there’s no chaos on the canvas. Right. That would be a fundamental objection. On the other hand, I’d be much more interested in a formal objection, where somebody says, “Sure, there’s something like a chaos-seed on the canvas, but ‘diagram’ isn’t the best word for it.” That’s possible too. Our inquiry is still—it isn’t predetermined. So, for the moment I’ll call it a diagram. The first characteristic is [that it is] a chaos-seed, or the relationship—the establishment of a necessary relationship between the two. What exactly do we mean by chaos-seed? The only evidence I have, remember, is what I’ve gathered from both writings and examples—no examples yet; we’ll look at the examples later—by Cézanne and by Klee, where these two painters seem to have really elaborated on this notion of a chaos-seed. But that’s a rather narrow time period, from Cézanne to Klee, so I won’t make any broad claims—it should be able to stand on its own.

   • The second characteristic—I think that when it comes to painting, if that’s what the diagram is, how do we describe this chaos-seed? I claim that the second characteristic is that in essence the diagram—now this, this is crucial—is fundamentally manual. And once again, I don’t know where this will take us, but I feel it will definitely lead somewhere. It’s about the hand, and only an unfettered hand can trace it.

   • What do I mean by an unfettered hand? Let’s break it down. What constraints does the hand have? When it comes to painting, the hand is tied down to the eye, of course. You might say that the hand is in shackles inasmuch as it follows the eye. The unfettered hand is one that is freed from subordination to visual coordinates. And the chaos-seed, the diagram there on the canvas, is fundamentally manual. Ultimately, see, we have to push on and see how this approach, resonates with classical problems, bearing in mind the little we’re relatively certain about. Wouldn’t this be another way of getting us back to the classical problem: how are the eye and hand related in painting? I mean, is painting a visual art or a manual art? And if we say it’s both—well, that’s no help: what relationship is there between the eye and the hand in painting? And again, the same reservations I bring up every time: is this something that concerns painting in general, or does it vary painting to painting, or is there at least a broad tendency that we can distinguish? Is a painter “abstract” based on these hand and eye relationships in painting? Instead of basing these categories—abstract, expressionist, figurative, etc.—on juvenile details like whether or not it represents something, isn’t there a case to be made for retooling these major categories if they’re well-founded, by referring them to totally different criteria? For example: are the hand-eye relationships the same with a so-called abstract painter and a painter we would characterize as figurative? Are they doing the same thing?

   • How widely can the eye-hand relationship vary? But our sort of biased way of approaching the classical issue of how the eye and hand are related in painting—not that it’s right…it’s a small bias for engaging with this problem, even if this bias perhaps changes the nature of the problem—it always comes down to the diagram per the second characteristic I’m trying to flesh out, namely, that this chaos—if it exists—this chaos laid out onto the canvas, which is like the foundational act of painting, is fundamentally manual. And even if it isn’t true of every aspect of the painting, when it comes to the diagram itself, the diagram is manual; it reflects a hand freed from its submission to the eye. A bit like if I sort of scribbled stuff down; I can do it with my eyes closed. As if the hand were no longer guided by visual input—that’s what makes it chaotic?

   • In what sense is it chaotic? It’s because it involves this diagram—I’m not saying the whole painting, since, again, the diagram is there so that something can emerge — so, for now, I’m not talking about what will come out of the diagram; for now, I’m talking about the diagram itself. I’m saying that it’s a manual act, and one carried out by a hand liberated from the eye. That’s the power [puissance]­­­ of the painter’s hand. So, a hand liberated from the eye is a blind hand, but does that mean that it’s random or that it just scribbles around? Of course not! Maybe there are rules the painter’s hand must follow; maybe it has a manual sense of direction, manual vectors—at any rate, what makes the diagram chaotic? It’s because it implies the breakdown of all visual coordinates. You know, Cézanne’s bloodshot eyes, “I can’t see anything.” I can’t see anything, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything. Doing without seeing. The hand’s liberation. All right.

   • The diagram is manual. We’ll see why that is. Actually, at this point, when it comes to the diagram—as diagram—a painting is not visual; it’s strictly manual.

   • It’s the revolt of the hand—the hand’s had it; it’s sick of taking orders from the eye. It gets its shot at independence, I guess. Only, it’s odd, because it’s not just that it’s independent; it turns the tables. Instead of the hand following the eye, the hand slaps the eye in the face. It commits violence against the eye; the eye will have a hard time following the diagram. To me, not being able to find the diagram would only prove my point, because the eye cannot find it. It’s difficult—instead of the hand following the eye, here we have the liberated hand imposing itself onto the eye. Is the eye capable of seeing what’s done by a hand freed from the eye? It’s complicated; it really twists the relationship around! The relationship between two organs.

   • Take one problem I have—this is still me working through the diagram’s second characteristic. There’s a major problem: if I want to describe painting as really an agencement,[4] what would that amount to? What does this “agencement” involve?

   • We would have to figure out why, throughout history—with Rembrandt, it’s obvious that he didn’t paint with a brush, or I mean, not only with a brush. Historically speaking, what have painters painted with? They paint with scrub-brushes—actual brushes—they paint with sponges, brushes, rags. What else? Pollock famously painted with basting syringes. Now that’s something—basting syringes. Right—scrub-brushes, sponges, basting syringes; you can use sticks… sticks have always been important in painting. Rembrandt used sticks—so what, why am I bringing this up? I’m still working out the diagram’s second characteristic, which comes down to the fact that there’s a problem, there’s a sort of tension, a pictorial tension, between the eye and the hand. Don’t mistake it for a question of harmony, where the hand both obeys the eye and renders something ultimately visual—that’s not it. Whatever it is, if you aren’t getting or sensing a certain tension, a certain antagonism in painting between the eye and the hand, it’s because we haven’t looked at it concretely enough.

   • It might be among the more interesting moments in painting. So, as for the second characteristic—the first characteristic of the diagram was simply, well, that it’s a chaos-seed. The second characteristic I’d attribute to the diagram is that it is made up of strokes and blots [un ensemble trait-tache] and not lines and colors [ligne-couleur]. It’s a set of strokes and blots, and it’s manual.

   • Note that this second characteristic is an extension of the first because—I’ll explain why: there is chaos. If the diagram is fundamentally manual and reflects a hand freed from its subordination to the eye, if only provisionally, again, this doesn’t apply to what “comes out” of the diagram, what “comes out” of the chaos. But if that is what’s going on with the diagram, it’s easy to see why it’s chaotic since, again, it entails the breakdown of visual coordinates, courtesy of the hand’s liberation. In other words, it’s a set of traits/strokes [traits], ones that do not constitute a visual form—thus, we ought to call these traits/strokes literally “non signifying” or meaningless. And what about blots [la tache]? The blot or stain might be a color, but it’s like an undifferentiated color. A set of meaningless strokes and undifferentiated colors. That’s chaos, the collapse. Right. Onto the third characteristic.

   • The third characteristic—we’ve covered it, so I can be brief—is that, if the diagram is the manual stroke/blot that emerges onto the canvas and defies optical coordinates, visual coordinates, that causes them to break down, how do we define this stroke/blot? Well, now we can consider it from the other end and define it based on what’s supposed to come from it… because something comes out of the diagram. What results from the diagram are pictorial colors and pictorial lines. We don’t yet know what a pictorial line or a pictorial color is. That is, the color’s pictorial state, the line’s pictorial state. Klee gave us the answer: it’s gray. The blot is gray, and that’s what the diagram is: it’s gray.

   • How is that the diagram? Because there are two grays, because it’s a double gray. Because gray is simultaneously the gray of black-white—and this gray is where all the visual coordinates fall apart—and also the gray of green-red, from which the whole spectrum of colors emerges; you could also say that the whole light spectrum comes out of the black-white gray. What comes out of the diagram is the two-fold pictorial spectrum: Light – Color.

   • The same goes for the other aspect of the diagram. The blot [la tache] is thus gray in this—now you can tell that the tension is no longer between the eye and the hand; the tension is within the blot itself. In the blot’s gray, in the grayness of the blot, there are two aspects, insofar as this gray is black-white and insofar as it is green-red, the color matrix.

   • Notice that I’m distinguishing the diagram from two things irrevocably bound up with it: its before and its after. It’s related to a before because it leads the before into catastrophe: the visual world. It’s related to an after since something will come out of the diagram, the painting itself. As a manual, pictorial unit, the stroke-blot causes a visual catastrophe—what emerges as a result? Something new? What do we call it? For convenience’s sake, what about “the third eye”? The eyes had to be annihilated to bring out the third eye, but where does the third eye come from? It comes from the hand, from the diagram. It comes from the manual diagram. All right.

   • Fourthly, the fourth characteristic—let’s make it a little more concrete. I’ll just sum up what we saw at the beginning. What is the function or purpose of the diagram? Looking back, looking at what was there before it, it’s simply to get rid of any resemblance. Clearly everyone knows there’s never been such a thing as figurative painting—if by figuration we mean the act of “making a likeness”—it’s obvious there’s never been any figurative painting. Getting rid of resemblance has always been something that happened not only in the painter’s head but in the painting as such. Even if some resemblance remains, it’s so secondary that even the painters who feel they need it, need it as something that regulates rather than defines the painting; in this sense, there’s never been such a thing as figurative painting, right.

   • So, unmaking resemblance has always been inherent to the act of painting, but it’s the diagram that unmakes resemblance. Why? It came up last time: for the sake of—as some painters put it, like Cézanne, for example—for the sake of a deeper resemblance.[10] What does that mean? It’s to make the image emerge. Let’s take that seriously and look at it one piece at a time: getting rid of resemblance so that the image can emerge. What? If only to change up our vocabulary for, uh… let’s take a look at this idea, which might help us along. I could also put it this way: getting rid of representation so that presence can emerge. Representation – Presence. Representation is what comes before—before painting anything. Presence is what comes from the diagram. Which is another way of saying: getting rid of resemblance to bring out the image. What emerges, what comes out of the diagram, is the image. The image without resemblance.

   • Anyway. See, I’m saying that the diagram is the instance whereby I get rid of resemblance in order to produce the presence-image. That’s why I’m bringing up diagrams: breaking down resemblance and producing the image. There’s the aspect before and the aspect afterward, with the diagram in between—I’ll try to distinguish them terminologically: given features [les données], the possibility of fact, and the fact.

   • But why is it that the given, the visual given [données], falls apart in the diagram? It’s so that the pictorial fact can emerge. The pictorial fact, specifically. And what is the diagram? According to the painter, Francis Bacon, it’s the possibility of fact. The possibility of fact. The image with no resemblance. Well, as I see it, personally at least: Who is the painter—always trying to squeeze in an example wherever I can—who is the painter who really pushed, established the raw presence of the pictorial fact? One of the first—no one was first because really, it’s always been the case—but to us, from our modern or pseudo-modern perspective, is synonymous with the affirmation, the imposition of the pictorial fact, is Michelangelo. Look at a painting by Michelangelo, and there’s no denying that he’s a sculptor. A sculptor-painter, you might say. You’re confronted with a pictorial fact where there’s nothing left to justify, where painting has achieved its own justification. But what form does that take? I really do think that our artistic categories, the main artistic categories, are well-founded. A lot of people say, “Romanticism, Classicism, Baroque: they’re just words!” Abstract, expressionism—I don’t think they’re just words. I think they’re well-founded terms; I just think we need to find better definitions than, say, “abstract is the opposite of figurative,” because that won’t cut it. They’re perfectly fine categories, and besides—categories are philosophy’s bread and butter, so all the better.

   • However, I claim that the coexistence, the contemporaneity, of Michelangelo and mannerism is crucial. I think the category of mannerism neatly sets us up to understand what the “pictorial fact” is. In the most general sense of the term: something is “mannered” in the painting’s figure, in the figure as such. Where does it come from? It comes out onto the painting; it comes out of the diagram. It comes from the diagram with a sort of mannerism that we can still interpret anecdotally.

   • As a result, when people point to anecdotal accounts of the painters’ homosexuality, that’s not what it is, right? That’s not it. It’s insofar as they are painters that they work in mannerism. Yeah, obviously. Well, that’s all pretty trivial. Anyway. Using the diagram to get rid of visual givens, which establishes a possibility of fact, but the fact itself is not given. The fact is something to be produced, and what is produced is the pictorial fact, i.e., basically, the arrangement of lines and colors, the new eye. The diagram’s manual catastrophe was required in order to produce the pictorial fact, that is, to produce the third eye.

   • Anyway, the last characteristic of the diagram, the fifth characteristic, if you’re following me so far, you see that the diagram should be there; I no longer think that it can only be virtual… Or it can be covered back up, but it’s there; a painting has to have it there, it can’t just be in the painter’s head before they start painting. The painting must reflect this brush with chaos, the so-called orderly abyss, as someone said [Jean Grenier]. It’s not about an abyss, and it’s not about making a well-ordered painting. What the painter is concerned with is the order proper to chaos, establishing an order proper to the abyss…

   • But see, then there are huge risks, even in terms of technique. And I’m backing up because it’s… that’s how I’ll eventually rearrange, reclassify everything we did before, because it’s really—I’d like to convey it to you as concretely as possible, because it’s a bit funny how this whole business with… — Again, what I’m trying to do is chart the painting’s journey through time. I don’t think of a painting as a spatial reality; I really look at it temporally via the synthesis of time proper to painting: the before, the diagram, and the after. All right, what are the risks?

   • We’ve already seen them, so I’ll recap. The first danger is that the diagram takes over, that the diagram scrambles everything, that it scrambles the whole thing, that… Maybe now that makes more sense because this would be… [Deleuze does not complete the phrase] Maybe there are paintings like this, or paintings that come close! Because the paths get narrow at this point. And maybe that will allow us to renovate our main categories. What does it mean to be abstract? What does it mean to be expressionist? Because at what point can I say about a painting, wow![11]  Well, you can tell that, even though it’s a matter of taste, after a while there’s nothing to say, all you can do is wait for reactions, for everyone to have their own reactions, which isn’t easy.

   • To understand what looking at a painting makes me feel when there’s so much has already been done, that itself is difficult… but at what point can I say oh! The paintings that seem to have missed the mark. They fail because…. It was close; they could have been great, were it not for a bit of grayness or a stray brushstroke, stray and ultimately arbitrary brushstrokes—I ask myself why not…you can do that, but…? He could have just as well done something else, there’s nothing stopping him. You know, the enemy of any form of expression is gratuitousness: when they say there’s no wrong answer, that you can’t make a mistake—but why are you expressing what you’re expressing? Is it worth the trouble of expressing it? Likewise, is a painting worth the trouble of making it? Even for those who made it, plenty of painters make paintings and there’s no need for them to do so, but who decides that? I don’t know, it’s complicated, but anyway, it feels like something could come out of it; once the diagram takes over, however, nothing can come out of it.

   • So, when the diagram takes over, I might call it pure chaos; the seed is dead. Klee’s turn of phrase is great: if the gray point takes over, overwhelms everything visible, the egg dies.[12] So it’s up to you. What does it mean when a painter judges other painters? He’s not actually judging them because, again, out of all artists painters might be the proudest but also seem to be the most modest. They don’t pass judgment; they express preferences. It’s always interesting to hear why a painter says they aren’t drawn to this or that form of painting. When Bacon is looking at a Pollock and says, “This is sloppy—just sloppy,” no offense to Pollock, right? It takes nothing away from him.

   • Why does it matter? Not because it tells us anything about Pollock; we learn more from what Bacon says about a painter he likes and admires. When he just says—what exactly does it mean for Pollock to be sloppy?—he goes so far as to say that he “hates” expressionism, in an almost racist way. “I hate that kind of sloppy sort of Central European painting,”[13] that sloppy Central European—you can tell what he means; he’s Irish, he’s Anglo-Irish, a sloppy sort of Central European painting, right. How is that relevant? It’s relevant because when Bacon sees a Pollock, he ought to flip it around, he ought to say, “This is chaotic,” and indeed, when you see one of Pollock’s paintings it can genuinely come across as a chaos-painting. All right. Well, Pollock aside, some paintings have this effect: the diagram leans so far into its first aspect of chaos, where it’s descended into chaos, so that nothing can come out of the diagram; everything is blurred, greyed out, or else there’s too much color so everything’s gray, a ruined canvas. So, that’s the first danger.

   • What’s the second risk we run? It’s that the diagram… as the diagram brings about the breakdown of visual givens… the risk has been very clearly articulated—without using the word, diagram—very clearly articulated by Cézanne. There are letters where, with some apprehension, Cézanne writes: instead of assuring their junction, the blank spaces—note that it isn’t a question of perspective because painting has nothing to do with perspective, it’s a meaningless concept…there is a concept of it, but perspective is only one possible response to the pictorial problem, which you can only pose pictorially in the form: do paintings allow us to—in paintings where there is a reason for distinguishing different levels [plans], for in some paintings there is no need to differentiate levels [plans]—well, how does it work, how does the painter bring different levels [plans] together?[14] But perspective is nothing if not a case of conjoined levels [jonction des plans]—the real pictorial problem is that, if there are different levels [plans], by what method will they be connected?

   • Cézanne says, well… when it comes to the abyss of chaos, instead of coming together, the different levels [plans] fall on top of each other, they fall on top of each other. Instead of falling into a sequence, the colors mix together. And this mixture is nothing but gray. The object—the painted object—has lost its resemblance, has lost it in the chaos, is fundamentally off-kilter. Right. Levels [plans] collapsed onto each other, colors mixed into gray, the object all wrong and off balance—this extreme case has the painting so bound up with the diagram that there’s nothing but chaos. But the failures aren’t what’s interesting; I’d say that what matters are the ones that take this risk. Which ones come dangerously close but actually manage to avoid falling into this danger, and do so masterfully? Then it gets interesting: what is it that’s able to run the first of the diagram’s risks—but is it because the painter is especially talented, or do all great painters manage to avoid it?

   • That might let us establish our first artistic category: I think it’s specifically what was known as abstract expressionism. Abstract expressionists—that is, the whole American movement that dominated American painting—the generation that’s now some sixty years old. I think the way they flirt with chaos, where the diagram takes over; they get really close to chaos, but the diagram still manages to produce something fantastic. I think that’s what Pollock is about. It’s Morris Louis. It’s [Kenneth] Noland. All the ones many of you are familiar with. In particular, I’d refer to Pollock in terms of lines and to Morris Louis when it comes to color-stains [tache-couleur]. But later we’ll see that this is the trend with abstract expressionism, reaching a maximum level of chaos with the diagram. But of course, contrary to what Bacon says, I think it’s obvious that they don’t descend into chaos, that their paintings are neither muddy nor sloppy.

   • Well, look at the diagram’s other tension. So, the first tension is for the diagram to take over and it all just looks like chaos. Which, if you like, we could call abstract expressionism. What about the other tendency? See, now I’m defining artistic categories by privileging what’s happening with the diagram, and without any regard for what’s going on with figuration, which is not relevant.

   • Coming at it from the other side, what would the diagram’s second tendency be? It’s to be minimized, to be minimized. Okay, how do you minimize a shallow stream? By making a very shallow stream. By retaining nothing but the bare minimum. This time, just like I was saying earlier that when you maximize the diagram’s power it tends to turn into chaos, its first aspect. When you minimize it, it tends to fully lapse into a pictorial order. That is, you tend to effectively reduce the diagram, even replacing it. With what? Let’s tentatively say—and this is the first time we’ve run into this idea, a term which might do a lot of heavy lifting for us—you tend to replace [the diagram] with something rather remarkable: a sort of code.

   • And if this term opens things up for me, it’s insofar as, well: doesn’t this offer us a new diagram/code dynamic, such that the difference between diagram and code will help us make a lot of progress on what a diagram is? In terms of the philosophical concept that we’re after. What does it mean? What gives me that impression? Obviously, a code can mean something grotesque—I’m thinking of botched paintings, but you get what I’m trying to… the attempt to reduce the diagram to a maximum—No, minimum! And to replace it with a code…which is what, exactly? It’s an obvious way to define so-called abstract painting. With the great abstract painters, we’ll see it’s correct, we’ll see if it’s true. But when it goes wrong—and God, abstract painting has some awful painters. Just as many as other kinds of painting, but with abstract painting it’s catastrophic. The guys who make squares or whatever—it’s horrible. Well, I mean, it’s so pretentious; a square can be pretentious, a square can be crap. You shouldn’t think that just making squares is enough to make…. A square can be hideous. There are some hideous squares in bad abstract art. Well, anyway, all these types of abstract painting, at the most basic level, tend toward a sort of geometrism. You get the feeling that yes, that what they tend to do is replace the diagram with code.

   • … Bringing up non-Euclidean geometry and the possibility of painting using non-Euclidean codes doesn’t change anything. It’s obvious that when a great abstract painter—when a great abstract painter actually moves toward replacing the diagram with a code, it’s not about that, because at that point, abstract painting would just be another sort of catastrophe for painting. If the abstract painters are great, what makes them great? If they are great painters, it’s because they have an understanding—doesn’t matter whether it’s ascetic or spiritualistic—of the spiritual life! At bottom, they have a religious soul, don’t they?

   • Again, there’s a fine line—just like I was saying earlier. It’s true, Pollock’s painting verged on becoming too sloppy and letting chaos reign, but then he gets out of it. Abstract painters verge on a sort of painting-code where painting would be obliterated, but then the great abstracts knew how to pull it off and forged the elements of a code that’d be uniquely pictorial; they turn code into pictorial reality instead of applying a code onto painting; they’re Kantians. With Kandinsky, it’s obvious that he’s a disciple of Kant to some extent—they create an Analytic of elements. Kandinsky offers us a stupendous Analytic of elements. Here too, it would take very little for this to fail. I would at least try to define abstract painting by saying, see, this is the other side of the diagram: they reduce the diagram to a minimum; they ultimately replace the diagram with a code, but it’s a properly pictorial code, inherent to painting. One painter who best makes my case here isn’t Kandinsky, nor even Mondrian, although they all basically share an understanding of code—both Kandinsky and Mondrian converge on one point, which I find fascinating, namely, that ideally, genuine code is binary.

   • In fact, by dividing up its own surface, the canvas ought to resonate with divisions on the surface of the walls, whereby painting becomes mural. Hence, the need for a code… well, anyway! What’s the answer? Why paint today? Well, see, it’s… it can… ultimately, it can only emerge from what we called the diagram. If the diagram is the chaos-seed… I think every painter, whether they say it or not, thinks painting is still worth the trouble precisely because it has a certain relationship to chaos that they claim—sometimes philosophically, sometimes poetically—that everyone recognizes in modern humanity. Our world has descended into chaos. Our world is tumult and chaos. Kandinsky is always talking about it. The modern world has descended into tumult and chaos. Okay… so why painting? You can read anything stereotypical examples of modernity into this: the atomic bomb, city life, pollution, and so on… tumult and chaos.

   • It’s the bizarre act of measuring chaos. Using the diagram but preventing it from contracting or expanding too much. Putting limits on chaos or maintaining chaos to a limited extent. That’s hard to do. So, we might call it temperate or moderate, but at the same time, it tries to localize chaos, tries to hold it off. It’s a terrible undertaking. Your eyes get tired, your hand starts shaking. Your hand shakes because it no longer follows the diagram’s visual cues; your eyes get tired because visual cues come undone in the diagram.

   • Well, then, it’s difficult to say what I would call that. We cannot call it figurative. The approach I described does come down to establishing chaos, but something comes out of the chaos: the figure. It’s not a reproduction; it’s an image without resemblance. With whatever trend you like—starting with Cézanne, this line would have Van Gogh, there’s Gauguin… the so-called “figural,” rather than figurative, painters. Anyway. And you can see in all these cases that this third position is a very awkward one: the diagram for itself—neither extending so far that it descends into chaos, nor limiting it in order to replace it with a code. The diagram and nothing but the diagram. But it lends the diagram some dramatic weight, so it would be wrong to call it a temperate approach, and yet it fits because it’s what drives Van Gogh mad: preventing the diagram from giving into chaos, but chaos still remains.

   • And my concern is specifically with regard to what we’ve defined and how we’ve defined them strictly according to three scenarios regarding the diagram. By no means did we define them in terms of figuration, which we did away with outright. These three scenarios—ultimately the three positions the diagram can find itself in: The first scenario: the diagram verges on chaos. The second scenario: the diagram leans toward code and is even replaced by a code. The third diagrammatic scenario: the diagram acts like a diagram, but that brings us back—I’ll try to elaborate. Let’s bring back the eye-hand dynamic and apply our three categories. When you look at a painting—for example, take a Pollock for example. What’s going on? It’s a strange problem.

   • … So, yeah, see, we’re making some progress, because now the idea of a diagram isn’t enough on its own; we’ve introduced the concept of positions, different diagrammatic positions. The diagram can take different positions—now, we’ve identified three such positions, and I’d like to follow up on these in concrete terms. How do they work—it’s not only about their effect on us—it’s how do they happen? How can such effects come about? And it’s really a matter of a slow and—for the painters—a very dangerous, a very dangerous confrontation with chaos itself, not an abstract chaos but the chaos on the canvas, based on these diagrammatic positions anyone can experience for themselves.

   • So, let’s try to pin down what we mean by—what could we mean by “expressionist”? Since if I understand—first of all, if I interpret the major pictorial categories based on the diagram’s position, on diagrammatic positions, we’ll have to see what follows as a result, that is, what new definitions result from these categories. Thus, what expressionism is qua the diagram’s relative position, its diagrammatic situation. What is the most striking about a so-called expressionist painting? Ultimately, I think even if we describe them as tendencies, even if it doesn’t always work this way, what are they tending towards? I think the answer has already been spelled out, particularly by certain American critics. In the end, if you take a painting from a period of Pollock’s career—it depends, not any period, but truthfully many periods of Pollock’s work—you can immediately tell that it’s a total rejection of the canvas’s organic existence on the easel.

   • So, if that’s how it’s defined, the word expressionism is interesting because—not to overdo it—it’s all well and good to define expressionism as a diagrammatic position and not by what it depicts, but how does it work? I mean, what exactly is expressionism? It’s noteworthy when critics manage to propose a category—at their own risk and peril, again—if we accept well-founded categories, if we believe in the philosophy of art. I think people are fully justified for rejecting the philosophy of art and opting to talk about painting as little as possible—the less we talk about it, the better. And actually, I wonder if it wouldn’t be better, but even so, in the absence of such a lofty stance on the matter—if we’re going to use categories, they need to be well-founded.

   • Anyway, Gothic… And naturally, American critics then used abstract expressionism to describe Pollock and his influence. The lineage that leads us to define expressionism as the use of shapeless colors or lines which are endowed with a non-organic life, and so we’ve caught up with the same movement that’s sometimes called informalism. There has been a lot of discussion about informal art around [Jean] Paulhan.[22] You can see what makes it informal art—here, at least, I think our diagrammatic approach has the advantage of accounting for why [Pollock’s work] might also be seen as informal art. It’s because there isn’t any form insofar as the line doesn’t outline anything but being informal is a consequence rather than a pre-condition; it’s informal because the line doesn’t outline anything. So, there isn’t any form, it’s true that there is no form, the line does not delineate a form, it delineates no form. Okay, and yet it is pictorial materialism at its purest; it comes together as if it were molecular. I think these are the first painters to really pull it off, managing to bring pictorial matter to a sort of molecular state.

   • So, I’m bringing up Velasquez through this incredible text by Elie Faure but consider a painter like Turner—insofar as there are any lines at all; if there are no lines, there are blots of color—in Turner’s work you’d be hard-pressed to find any, there is a sort of coordinated dissolution of things in order to move the lines and blots between things. All against the backdrop of the diagram’s chaos, the use of the diagram: stretching chaos until there are no more things, etc., and it’s from the chaos itself, by stretching the chaos over the whole canvas, that you extract the secret for a new order, the new order being the course of the shapeless line or the shapeless color-stain.

   • [2] In Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, Daniel Smith opts for “trait” or “stroke” depending on the context for the French “trait”. The discussion in the rest of the session largely corresponds to the development in chapter 12, “The Diagram”.

   • [17] This reference to Fried is presented in Francis Bacon. The Logic of Sensation, pp. 185-186 note 14. The discussion of Pollock and this section is situated in chapter 12, “The Diagram”.

8. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 19 (1986-04-15) Similarity: 0.2221

   • We have tried to develop, in Foucault, the necessity of the confrontation power – knowledge. Power is always a set of relations of well-determined forces. It is always a set of relations of forces. Remember a set of relations of forces is presented in what Foucault at one point calls a diagram. It is the diagram that is the presentation of relations of forces at a given moment. Well, I would say, first direction: we seek the relation [rapport] between … or rather the relationship [relation] between the relations of forces and the forms that follow from them. And we have found that the forms that will be the forms of knowledge follow from relations of forces. For example, we saw recently how the “God-form”, the “man-form”, and the “overman-form” can be considered as proceeding from changing relations of forces. This is a whole first aspect that we have [encountered].

   • Second direction: one considers the focal points [foyers] of power, the focal points of power presented in the diagram. This is the equivalent of relations of forces, but the accent is put on another aspect, it is no longer placed on the relations but on the points of power, once we remember that relations of forces in Foucault always go from one point to another in a social field. One considers the focal points of power and what follows from the focal points of power. What follows from them are regimes of statements or what Foucault calls the corpus. What follows is what we saw a while ago: to the question ‘How to select the dominant statements of an epoch? How to constitute the body of statements?’, Foucault answers: it is necessary first to determine the focal points of power and to see which words, which phrases, are exchanged at the level of these focuses.

   • That is the pure diagram: to impose any task on any multiplicity. What ensues from it? That is, how is the diagram effectuated? Well, through the formalized functions and formed matters which, from that moment on, make up the entirety of the holders [détentrices] of knowledge. Example: the multiplicity is no longer any multiplicity whatsoever; it is a multiplicity of children. A formed matter. The child is a formed matter. And the corresponding function is no longer to impose any task whatever, it is to educate. This will be the school. If the any-multiplicity-whatever is no longer the child, but the sick, the corresponding formalized function will be: to care. And the form will no longer be the form ‘school’, but the form ‘hospital’. If the any-multiplicity-whatever is ‘young people with a sound constitution’ – what age did one do one’s service in the 19th century? 21 years old – in that case, ‘young people with a sound constitution of 21 years of age’. Well, then the formed matter will be: soldier. And the any-task-whatever will no longer be any one whatever, it will be: to train soldiers. You see, each time I can say: what defines power, or the diagram is the ensemble of non-formalised functions and non-formed matters flowing from concrete formalizable functions and concrete formable matters.

   • So, it’s as if there are three aspects, all of which come down to the same thing. With this I’ve summarized the object of our research on the relations power-knowledge, knowledge-power. How power is always incarnated or actualized in historical formations, historical formations that themselves constitute types of knowledge. Hence the idea: all power implies knowledge, all knowledge implies power. But you see how the three different ways, Foucault’s method, involves a kind of variation. But the whole is extremely rigorous and coherent. Only, at the moment when we thought we were finished – it is always like that, it’s great – when we thought we had finished, we come up against what? Okay, assuming all that, then what? What is that makes diagrams change? What is it that makes one pass from one relation of forces to another relation of forces? What is it that produces change? It’s already been said, it’s already been indicated: there are mutations, there are mutations of diagrams, and these mutations of diagrams have been verified up to this day. Change in the regimes of images is a mutation. Change in juridical formations, we saw that last time, that is a mutation. These are mutations. Change in the relations of forces leading to the forms God, man and overman: it is, if one may put it like this, the diagrammatic mutations that always bring new forms with them, new social formations. Good, that’s all fine, ‘mutation’, but it seems a bit easy. What are these mutations? The word ‘mutation’, okay, Foucault employs it …. Foucault invokes mutation, and at the level of relations of forces.

   • Fine, but does he just leave us with that? He abandons us, he says nothing more. How to take account of these mutations? How to explain the passage from one diagram to another diagram? And what relation is there between diagram B and diagram A? We have attempted to demonstrate all that, we have attempted to, but I believe that, to conclude, the moment has come to try to be a bit more … Well, what we know is that every diagram is strategic, and that, in appearance at least, to the question ‘what happens in a social field?’ Foucault’s own response, which has a great importance, will be: well, what happens in a social field is that “it strategizes” [ça stratégise]. A social field is the place of a strategy. What defines a strategy? Well, the relation of forces presented in the diagram. The relations of forces define the strategy corresponding to the social formation under consideration. This means, in effect, that every diagram is the place of a combat. A combat of forces. And it is from the combat of forces that the forms ensue. But I go back to the question: what does combat consist in? Between what or whom does combat take place? This is what I would like to … there is a need to be totally meticulous since this is the question we’ve been left with. We realize now that we were talking of mutation, about the substitution of one diagram for another, but, once again, the motor of substitution, of the replacement of one diagram by another, has been left for us to think through.

   • So, what happens to explain the change of diagram, that is, the passage from one historical formation to another? One could think up a first answer as follows: who is the combat happening between, in the strategy? We have already given an answer to that during the second semester a while back. Every force has a double power, a power of affecting and power of being affected. The power of being affected should be considered to be a power no less than the power of affecting. To affect and to be affected. As what? Well, the power of being affected by another force, the power of affecting another or other forces (force is always in the plural). Okay. So, I will say: there are forces; combat comes about between affecting and affected forces.

   • For example, one can easily envisage a point of application: think back to your childhood. The headmaster says: ‘Get in line!’ You will find proof that there are points of application here. As Foucault said, this is an anatomy of the body, a political anatomy of the body. It can be that one finds oneself waiting with an almost sickly febrility for the end of the hour, for the moment when the master says, ‘Get in line!’, it’s the end of the class. It is not at all the same affect that is involved in the ‘getting in line!’ of “Come back in!’; so, there are already two affects of rank and file. But in fact, there are four affects: for there is the affecting affect of the master, also double – it is not the same at the beginning and the end — the master can be glad that it is over, or sad that it is over if he is a good master, he can be sad that the course is over. Anyway, I can thus furnish my diagram with all kinds of points. So, I ask you to keep this in mind, as we will need it. It is necessary to provide points, singularities. Now, is there in any of that anything that explains how a diagram passes away to the benefit of another diagram? I have looked hard, and there isn’t. No! The relations of power put all these points, or all the singularities, into relation with each other in such a way as to compose a stable whole.

   • What is capable of changing a diagram? You sense that there is a problem here. I hope you can sense that what needs to be retrieved here is Foucault’s path, his very path of research. He maintained the idea that diagrams change by mutation, but he could not content himself with a simple invocation of ‘mutation’. He had to ask himself: but who guarantees the transformation of a diagram? What had he maintained? He had maintained that there were affects or points between which relations of power are woven, but between these points, one does not actually come across the reason why a diagram changes.

   • And note, this is what matters to me today, I would like to insist in particular on this story of Foucault’s evolution. What is the evolution of a great philosopher like Foucault? When I say to you ‘one has no choice’, well, he had no choice; it was necessary that he find … something. And what will that be? At this point, we can make an attempt … but what does that mean, to ‘make an attempt to reconstitute a history of Foucault’s thought’? Well, we have the mapping points. Reading Discipline and Punish, one can see that it is already a question of the diagram, since it is there that the word appears. It is also already a question of the mutation of a diagram into another, since he studies two periods, two historical formations. But there is something about which he does not say a word, and which only emerges a year later — since there is one year, I believe, between the two books; yes, Discipline and Punish is 1975, The Will to Knowledge 1976 — What emerges in the course of one year is the idea that a diagram also involves points of resistance.

   • Well, you can see that this whole text … it fascinates me, this text, because if one turns back to a year before, it would have been completely unintelligible. The power of affecting in Discipline and Punish can only have a single vis-à-vis, and that is the power of being affected. That there is a power of resisting that is not to be reduced to the power of affecting, nor to the power of being affected, why does Foucault discover this? Because he absolutely has need of it. My question is: what are the consequences going to be? First: why does he absolutely need it? Let us respond to this question first. Why does he have need of it? Because it seems obvious to me that it is only by focusing on points of resistance that one can understand the mutation of a diagram; namely, why a diagram changes to the advantage of a new distribution of the relations of power. Everything happens as if – do you have a little piece of chalk? Thank you — you will understand. [Deleuze writes on the board]: There, that’s nice, eh? That is a set of relations of forces, going from one point to another, point of action and point of reaction. Each time there is a line, I can write: PA, PR. I would say: that’s a diagram, that’s what that is. It is enough to specify the PA and the PR, the points of action and points of reaction. One specifies it by determining the focal points of power in an epoch. The focal points of power are the points where specifically confront each other … where the lines that connect points of action and points of reaction. Now, that is what I would say if I remained within the confines of Discipline and Punish. The points of action and points of reaction are fundamentally bound to each other. Hence you can recognize them by the way they are joined to each other.

   • You will ask me: [Gesturing to the board] why don’t I join up that and that instead? Because there is dissemination: not every focus of power is bound to every focus of power. Sometimes it is bound, sometimes it is not bound. In any case, you have this: the set of the diagram will join the assigned points in a certain order. But now I need to join the points of resistance to the diagram, as in some way the non-bound points, or rather – actually, it’s not right to say non-bound; they are indeed bound, since in fact they’re not abstract. They resist existing centers of power. But, in order to indicate that they are not bound in the same manner as the preceding ones, I’ll write them with dots. You follow? The points of resistance. If these points of resistance, then, which are virtually tied to points of action and reaction, join among themselves … Imagine I’ve got a blue or red chalk, and I make a blue line from there to there. Suppose therefore that these points of resistance enter into relation and thus take on consistency and resonate with each other, then your diagram will collapse to the benefit of another diagram. All the relations of forces will be redistributed. How’s that sound? Is it clear? Question?

   • A student: Does this diagram encompass societies other than western, or…

   • Deleuze: Oh, no! Listen… there’s no answer to that since Foucault does not deal with other societies. But to the extent that we have seen that it can seem to us that every society has a strategy and a diagram, the East [l’Orient] would confirm it if there were societies which are thought, and perpetually thought, under the species of a strategy. There are indeed extreme oriental varieties, societies that are strategic by nature; the Chinese never stopped thinking strategically in their social formation. So, it seems to me to hold for all … But understand the importance of these points of resistance that, precisely, will guarantee the way in which a diagram is overturned, giving place to another diagram which will be the expression of a new relation of forces, to which points of resistance will also be attached. In other words, it is at the level of the points of resistance that the diagram is fundamentally malleable, reversible, and the object of possible mutations.

   • Hence that text seems to me to be extremely curious, extremely important, because it explains the point of resistance, the points of resistance, literally as counter-powers. Except that this will bring with it enormous consequences for Foucault’s philosophy, and even more for his political conceptions. I’ll dwell on this a little before moving to the consequences: what does that mean, that these are counter-powers? Well, it means: every time power determines an object that is proper to it or determines the object upon which it bears – and we have seen: every time there is a diagram, there is a determination of the object upon which the power bears – this object can always equally be related to a capacity for resistance which turns it back against power. Example: we have seen that in the formations of control, power and even right [droit] take life as their object. But power and even right under which form? Under the form ‘to administer life, administration of populations’; or under the form of right, social right, namely how to ‘insure life in man.’ I’m using ‘insure’ in the proper sense of the word, in the literal sense of the word, since we saw last time that in this formation of social right, insurance played the fundamental role. But, when power and right take life for an object, it is this same life that is turned back against power and against right and becomes the resistance of life against power and against right.

   • Fine, but what does that mean: power takes life for object, life turns back against power? I would say that this is a part of the contribution made by The Will to Knowledge that is completely different to Discipline and Punish. Only, if you have followed me so far, I would say: the consequences are enormous. It is very strange: these points of resistance disseminated in the diagrams, which have the power of making the diagram mutate under certain conditions: where do they come from? From where do they get their status? Do you sense that Foucault has found himself in a peculiar situation? Can he maintain that the points of resistances … will he be able to maintain any longer that the points of resistances are the vis-à-vis of relations of power, as he said on p. 126-27 [95-96 Eng]? Will he be able to sustain that? I’ve already insisted, from the outset, upon the very ambiguous character of an expression like ‘vis-à-vis’, because rigorously speaking the only vis-à-vis of a force of affecting is the force of being affected. Resistance, the power of resistance, does not have power as a property under any conditions, but under certain conditions to be determined, of being capable of overturning diagrams. Diagrams are presentations of relations of existing forces. But ‘power of resistance’ far exceeds a simple vis-à-vis. And can Foucault maintain his definition of the social field, “it strategizes”; that it is constituted as strategy? I mean: is it not that, one way or another, he will end up being forced into saying (which is bizarre): the points of resistance are primary in relation to power; they are not vis-à-vis, they have to be primary. From this moment a social field must be defined by this: it resists everywhere. It resists everywhere. Meaning: it resists power, and not: it strategizes everywhere. It is necessary, in a certain manner, that the points of resistance should be primary in relation to power.

   • Second possible intervention: Yes, there are points of resistance, the discovery of The Will to Knowledge, which brings with it the mutation of diagrams, etc., which can give a meaning to political struggle. Well, okay. There is that. It is already better. Can one link up the points of resistances? Yes, one can. Can one struggle? Yes, one can struggle, from this point: one can cross the line. Yes. Answer: on condition that one does not quickly go back to the other side of the line. For, if the points of resistance enter into relation with each other, that is, deliver themselves back over to operations of centralization, of reinforcement, if they transcend their dissemination – and they are indeed forced to transcend their dissemination, if not how would they prevail? – if they remold a centralism, the famous democratic centralism …. if they reforge a democratic centralism, in other words, if they restratify, they engender a new formation. But, well, the new formation, we learn from experience that it risks being worse than what went before; or it engenders focal points of power that render resistance ever more aleatory. Fine. These are the great setbacks of revolutions. So, there you are: the points of resistance.

   • [18] ‘The Lives of Infamous Men’, translated in Foucault, Power: The Essential Works, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: Allen Lane, 1994, p. 161; initially published in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, eds. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, trans. Paul Foss & Meaghan Morris (Sydney: Feral Publications, 1979), pp. 76-91; The text, “The Life of Infamous Men” is an introduction to an anthology of prison archives but appeared in an issue of Les Cahiers du chemin 29 (15 January 1977), pp. 12-29, and also in Foucault’s collected occasional pieces, Dits et écrits III (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 237-252.

9. Gilles Deleuze, Painting and the Question of Concepts / 04 (1981-05-05) Similarity: 0.2105

   • … We tried to categorize paintings base on the position of what we were calling a “diagram.” And so, we said this diagram—the diagram—we were looking to flesh out our understanding of diagrams. We said that a diagram could assume several positions. And that perhaps some pictorial categories could be defined as positions of the diagram—to put it in a more complicated way, as diagrammatic positions. And that it was necessary to lay down these pictorial categories wasn’t motivated by a concern over figuration, but was actually— maybe, rather, it might have been—based on the position of the diagram. So, we delineated three diagrammatic positions.

   • The diagram—these were tendencies for the different positions. They were position-tendencies. The diagram can tend to take up the entire painting, spreading over the whole painting. Broadly speaking, this seemed to be the tendency with so-called “expressionism.”

   • Or, in the second diagrammatic position, the diagram is there, but it’s kept to a minimum, and it tends to be replaced or “crowded over,” dominated by a genuine code. Notice that this gets complicated, but we’re playing it loose with our wording—because we haven’t said anything yet on what a diagram is, or what a code is. We’re just trying to lay out our terms, our categories. And in this second tendency, keeping the diagram to a minimum—the diagram is and continues to be the real seed of the painting—but keeping the diagram to a minimum and the substitution or application of a code: we figured that might be the tendency of “abstraction” in painting.

   • And then the third diagrammatic position: the diagram neither takes up the entire painting nor is it minimized. It’s like a rather exterior path; you might call it “a subdued path.” It’s there. It acts like a diagram, but it doesn’t take up the whole painting simply because the diagram fully realizes its effect, namely, it summons something out of the diagram. And this “something” that emerges from the diagram isn’t a resemblance or figuration, isn’t anything figurative—no more so than with the other diagrams. We can call it a “figure,” a non-figurative “figure,” that is, one that doesn’t resemble anything. A figure emerges from the diagram.

   • But what I examined last time—and we were nearly there, I almost finished—was the first tendency or the first position, the expressionist position. And I said, see—right away, we’re introducing an idea we’ll also have to try and develop—it’s as if the diagram were developed amidst overwhelming interference. Interference. Why this sudden interest in the concept of interference? Because our three diagrammatic positions are: the diagram that stretches out until it becomes genuine interference; second, the diagram that’s crowded over or determined by a code; third, the diagram that works as a diagram.

   • Well, but if we’re going to get to a logic of diagrams, we still have a lot left to do. So, in order to wrap up the first position: do you remember what it consisted in? What is this diagram that eats up the whole painting? Take your pick: either lines, line strokes [le trait ligne], or blotches of color—the two main pictorial elements that don’t trace contours. Either lines with no contour or blotches with no contour. Expressionism necessarily achieves a level of abstraction far beyond that of so-called “abstract” painting.

   • Well, as I was saying, see, I think it’s obvious that, when it comes to the problem that’s plaguing us, uh… which we’re still discussing: trying to figure out—since there are all kinds of things at stake in the concept of the diagram—trying to figure out the relationships between the eye and the hand in painting. I said, right, we have to assess the relationships between the eye and the hand in painting in keeping with our diagrammatic positions. At the very least, it’s worthwhile because, as I said, writings on the eye and the hand don’t seem to… what critics have written doesn’t appear to have fully accounted for the problem, for the tension there is in painting, at any rate, between the eye and the hand—the fact that painting is a certain resolution of this tension and requires the tension between the eye and the hand. All right. And you’ll recall that I really leaned into the fact that diagrams in painting are fundamentally manual. They’re arrangements of manual strokes [traits][2] and blotches. So maybe… obviously it produces something visual, but that’s not the point. When the diagram starts to take over, when it seizes and charges the entirety of the painting, the prevailing order is clearly a manual one.

   • Georges Comtesse: Perhaps that’s why American critics talk about a pure optical space when it comes to Pollock. Perhaps if you can’t see that there’s no contradiction between the manual line and pure space, it might be because of your concept of the pictorial diagram. Since you define the pictorial diagram as a hand detached from the eye, one the eye can’t keep up with, a rebellious hand. Okay, but in painting, in painting’s process of experimentation, the hand’s diagrammatic detachment from the eye, freer than the hand of the painter… there might be something else… you aren’t saying: the hand’s detachment from the eye… it’s specifically an optical machine of detachment that has nothing to do with the eye, the optical machine of the gaze, the painter’s gaze, which is neither the eye of perception, the sensitive eye, nor is it any possible eye whatsoever. There’s a gaze machine that… in the detachment, the painter… the painter’s hand is certainly still framed by this machine that’s irreducible to the eye, and which would certainly shift your concept of the pictorial diagram. The painter, meanwhile, … I don’t mean that the painter turns into this gaze machine while painting. But there’s like a sort of constant shifting when it comes to this gaze machine, which itself is primarily geared toward the task at hand.

   • Comtesse: Perhaps we shouldn’t forget that, in the major periods—Pollock’s first major periods—when compared, for example, comparing Jackson Pollock with Robert Motherwell, that all their problems, it’s not just the paintings or the new painting techniques. What was important was the pictorial line, pictorial creation, and this is exactly how they pose the question: as they related to the unconscious. It’s a crucial problem for Pollock and in, for instance, in Motherwell’s writings on Pollock. And the whole issue with Pollock over his botched interpretation of [Carl] Jung, and so on… painting was a way of revealing the unconscious. So that poses the problem of the relationship between the pictorial diagram and the unconscious, since they themselves keep posing it in their own artistic processes, the problem of this relationship, using just their lines.

   • Deleuze: Yes, Comtesse… that’s not entirely uniquely… certainly, that’s an apt description of diagrams, but it isn’t unique to expressionism because some will say, “the diagram, or its equivalent, is an instance of randomness.” Others will say, “it’s an instance of the involuntary.” Others will say, “it’s an instance of the unconscious.” Ultimately, all can agree that the diagram, the kind we first loosely defined as a chaos-seed, is sort of the unconscious of painting—yes, of the painter. See, that has so many ramifications, it’s perfect.

   • Moving onto the second diagrammatic position. This time it isn’t the extended diagram, what [Paul] Klee calls “the grey point that takes up the whole painting.” That’s not it. Instead, the diagram is only… it’s totally constricted, as if—it’s so complicated—the painter wanted to somehow suppress everything obscure about the diagram. Anything that’s, say, unconscious, involuntary, etc., etc. What about this tendency to reduce the diagram? My hypothesis—this will certainly get us tangled up and get us off track. These painters, for us, the viewers… you get a strange feeling, the feeling that once again we’ve reached painting’s boundary limit—but all painting is at the limit of painting—we’ve reached the boundary limit of painting because now we feel like we’re dealing with a sort of code we don’t know how to decipher. And what makes this form of painting verge on code? Once again, this is off the cuff. My initial thought: these painters are painters. They wouldn’t be painters if they applied a code or painted based on a code. That’s not what I mean. But it might be a fine line.

   • The third binary choice: you select six. You’ll select the half that includes six. You’ll get a sub-set with two terms. The third binary choice: you select six. So, it’s always possible to reduce a code-based decision to a sequence of binary choices. I don’t need any more, I won’t go any farther. Code = articulation. Articulation = units determined by a series of binary choices. A unit determinable by a series of binary choices. So, what do I think is crucial about that? I’ll bring it back to painting—more specifically, to my hypothesis that abstract painting is the elaboration of a code to which the diagram itself is subjected. In the case of abstract painting, that actually works like this: you have a certain number of discrete units. That doesn’t mean that it’s easy to paint or anything. But it’s painting by code. It’s the invention of a properly pictorial code that only exists in painting, and that only exists insofar as it is invented.

   • Anyway, as I was saying, there’s a third option. How does it go? See, my two diagrammatic positions are opposed to each other, point-for-point… [Interruption of the recording] [1:07:13]

   • Just who are these painters? To borrow a term… terms, for example, I’m borrowing terminology from [Jean-François] Lyotard that I think are very fitting and very… when Lyotard contrasts the “figurative” with what he calls the “figural,” it’s not figurative painting because in fact there is no figurative painting—again, it’s a “figural” painting.[13] That is, I’m taking diagram in the full sense, with the exception that…that is, in particular, I don’t intend for it to be a code, and at the same time, I’m preventing it from overwhelming the painting, from muddling the painting. In other words, I’m using the diagram in order to produce the pure “figural” or figure.

   • Anyway, see, I’m going to get completely new hand/eye relationships. It will no longer be the hand opposed to the eye or imposing itself on the eye as with expressionism, broadly speaking. It will no longer be the eye reducing the hand to the point that only a finger remains. What will it be? A hand/eye tension such that the manual diagram makes… what emerges? There’s only one answer since it’s not a figurative figure.

   • It’s that it gives the eye a new function, that the hand forces the eye to take on a new function, i.e., a real third eye. The hand causes a third eye to emerge, right—which tells you that this isn’t a moderate path. It’s only moderate compared to the other two, meaning that it doesn’t stretch the diagram over the entire painting, nor does it submit the diagram to a specifically pictorial code. Otherwise, it comes with many risks, including the double risk of verging into the abstract or into expressionism instead of forging its own path.  But that would be a third path, the pure diagram’s position, the purely diagrammatic position.

   • So, at the point we’ve reached, well, today we have to… even though it would take up a lot of our time today, a long detour, I’d like to get to the point where we can propose—everyone is entitled to one—a definition of painting. There are so many possible definitions, so everyone can give their own… we could play that game, sure, at this point, we have to kind of forget painting. I told you that my goal was twofold: my goal was to talk about painting, but I also wanted to sketch out a theory of the diagram. Well then, at the point we’ve encountered, it’s fine, now we have to try to manage with: well, what is a diagram? And what is the difference between a diagram and a code? What’s that about? The matter of diagram and code? And for me, that’s what I’d like to manage to derive from this a sort of definition of painting.

   • If it’s true that painting is diagram, what is the relationship between a diagram and a code? By no means am I trying to say… it’s certainly a complicated relationship, since painting absolutely includes the endeavor to invent optical codes that seemed characteristic of abstract painting, right, as a diagram… so we’re back to square one, very well, let’s start over. As a diagram, we’re back in a purely logical element now, it’s this element of pure logic that will get us back into painting.[14]

   • I’m saying that the couple as a diagram, there is another couple after all, we have to use everything. We looked at the digital—digital, a code is digital in the sense I worked out before: what we call “digital” is the binary choice behind the unit. A code is digital; you’ll grant me that much. And typically, in every theory of information and even linguistics, what is the opposite of digital? Analog. Analog and digital—synthesizers today, for example, are either analog synthesizers or digital synthesizers. The processes of retransmitting signals are either analog processes or digital processes. Well, it’s still technological, but it isn’t anything complicated. It’s a distinction today regarding code/diagram—I’ve got my two pairs: code/diagram, digital/analog. What does this have to do with painting? Why do I sound like I’m talking about something else if I’m not talking about something else?

   • Well, there’s no avoiding it, let’s see our hypothesis through to the end. It’s the diagram that would be analogical: the analog diagram and the digital code. But would this be a simple opposition, or would there be some code grafted onto analogical language, onto analog diagrams? Here we have a whole series of confusing problems surrounding the diagram’s logic. So, I’ll try to be brief because I want to get back to painting, but I’m starting with a initial approximation. Digital code would imply “convention”; analog diagrams or analogical language would be a language of “similarity.” So, my two concepts would be distinguished in the following way: similarity for analogy, or for the diagram; convention for digital code.

   • See, that doesn’t take us very far—why I say that is because the notion of the diagram and its extension and its eruption into logic, into philosophy, resulted from the general approximation laid out by an incredible author (whom I’ve already discussed with you in past years): [Charles Sanders] Peirce, P-E-I-R-C-E. An English-speaking logician who invented a discipline that went on to enjoy great success, semiology, which was based—I’ll stick to what’s relevant for our concerns here and now—which was based on a very simple distinction between what he called icons and symbols. He was saying that icons have to do with similarity, generally speaking. An icon – an icon? [Deleuze asks about “un” or “une” for the noun gender; students respond with both] – an icon is determined by its similarity to something. A symbol, on the other hand, he said, is inseparable from a conventional rule.[15]

   • Now what he calls diagrams are icons of relations; thus, you can see why it interests us but, but, but he maintains a definition of the diagram that depends on similarity. That’s why, for our purposes, we cannot follow him, and all of the Americans afterward who developed theories of the diagram have hung onto Peirce’s “iconic” principle, that is, the diagram as primarily defined by a similarity in relation. Which is what leads Peirce to think that the exemplary diagram or diagrammatic process is algebra. Algebra—he says that algebra isn’t actually a language because it is an icon, so it’s a matter of similarity in relation. The algebraic diagram extracts similarities in relation. Okay, and at the same time he adds that, on the other hand, algebra as such is not separable from certain conventional symbols that belong to the other pole. Which implies a code, that is, at which point Peirce is aware of mixtures of code/analogy or code/similarity. All right, I said why, then, we weren’t going to follow Peirce too closely.

   • Coming back to my question, the first one: there’s one main reason that the diagram cannot be defined by similarity, to wit, I cannot imagine a code that doesn’t involve or produce instances of similarity inseparable from it.

   • But you see, I’m already getting ahead of myself. Why? Because, in a qualified way, I’ve characterized code through articulation, or through the “common sphere”—I said there was a “common sphere” between digital code and articulation. Articulate, and you get a code. Which led us, to a lesser extent—as a result, I’m committed to define analogy and as a result, the diagram as the analogical principle. I have to… I can’t avoid it, see, it’s great when your hands are tied when it comes to concepts. My hands are tied; I have to either give up — it would be perfect, everything is perfect — whether we give up or whether we manage to define analogy and the diagram in analogy depends… on something as straightforward as articulation, and this “something” would be to the diagram what articulation is to code. I already know that it won’t involve any resemblance, won’t convey any similarity, and it won’t involve any code.

   • So, what does the diagram do that’s opposite of articulation, distinct from articulation, which can be defined neither by its conveying similarity, nor by code, nor by encoding? At least the conditions of our problem are well-defined. Then we have to press on, we have to press on, and so we saw—for now I’ll just say that, as code doesn’t rule out similarity but rather implies similarity, on the flipside, analogy cannot be defined by similarity. Only vulgar, common analogy is defined by similarity. Aesthetic analogy isn’t defined by similarity since it only produces resemblance through wholly different means.

   • So, he says, what is it that defines analogical language? He says that it’s a language of relations. What does he mean by “relations”? He doesn’t mean just any relations, because if he said just any relation—there are some writings where he seems to mean just any old relation—then we wind up with similarity again, i.e., analogical language would be one whose function is to convey relations. For example, in a diagram, you have to represent one quantity that’s big and one quantity that’s relatively small, and you make two levels, one level smaller than the other… that’s similarity, that is a language of relations, in fact. But that’s not what it means, because we’ve ruled out the similarity hypothesis.

   • I’m saying, analogical language would be defined by modulation; where there’s modulation, there’s analogical language—and thus, there’s a diagram. In other words, the diagram is a modulator. See, that does a good job of meeting my requirements: the diagram and analogical language are defined independently of any reference to similarity. Obviously, you have to check; there’s no need to bring any similarity into modulation.

   • And I could say that the diagram is the matrix of modulation. The diagram is the modulator, just as code is the matrix of articulation. And strange as it is, it’s not at all impossible that we’ll end up—if it gets us closer to the diagram, if it gets us closer to analogical language, if it gets us closer to modulation—involving a period of code. It may very well be that modulation has a lot to gain from a code phase. In other words, it may very well be that abstract painting constitutes a step forward for painting—for all painting—fundamentally, a step forward. From the twofold perspective of the modulation of color, i.e., from the paradoxical perspective—not with regard to the invention of code but with regard to the development of an analogical language. Regarding the modulation of color and regarding the modulation of light. What would it mean to modulate color, to modulate light? … What time is it?

   • [6] Translation modified to conform to Kandinsky’s definition of synthesis, cited above. On the diagram and the code, see Francis Bacon. Logic of Sensation, chapter 12, notably pp. 104-108.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault / 04 (1985-11-12) Similarity: 0.2098

    • But all this is metaphors, right? “Break open, open up,” okay, so, if I’m at my dotted line, like so, I’ve got the diagram for the statement, but I have to fill in the interval. [Deleuze indicates the blackboard drawing] Between the gathering of language and the corpus on which it gathers, that’s where the statement emerges. This still does not tell us what a statement is, but it will compel us to spell it out. There you have it. Time for break: I need to make a detour . . . [Interruption of the recording] [20:55]

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Rationale

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