quotes from Foucault | by G. Deleuze
The diagram is defined by Deleuze as follows in a text on Foucault:
'... it is the presentation of the relations between forces unique to a particular formation; it is the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected; it is the mixing of non-formalized pure functions and unformed pure matter... it is a transmission or distribution of particular features.'
'...it is a diagram, that is to say a 'functioning, abstracted from any obstacle... or friction [and which] must be detached from any specific use'. The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine. It is described by its informal functions and matter and in terms of form makes no distinction between content and expression, a discursive formation and a no-discursive formation. It is a machine that is almost blind and mute, even though it makes others see and speak.'
p 34
'...concrete machines are the two-form assemblages or mechanisms, whereas the abstract machine is the informal diagram. In other words, the machines are social before being technical. Or rather, there is a human technology which exists before a material technology... tools or material machines have to be chosen first of all by a diagram and taken up by assemblages.'
p 39
'And if the techniques... are caught within the assemblages, this is because the assemblages themselves, with their techniques, are selected by the diagrams: for example, prison can have a marginal existence in sovereign societies and exists as a mechanism only when a new diagram, the disciplinary diagram, makes it cross the technical threshold.'
p 40
'We can therefore define the diagram in several different , interlocking ways: it is the presentation of the relations b between forces unique to a particular formation; it is the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected; it is the mixing of non-formalized pure functions and unformed pure matter'.
p72-3
'Power...is diagrammatic: it mobilizes non-stratified matter and functions, and unfolds with a very flexible segmentarity. In fact, it passes not so much through forms as through particular points which on each occasion mark the application of a force, the action or reaction of a force in relation to others, that is to say an affect like 'a state of power that is always local and unstable'. This leads to a fourth definition of the diagram: it is a transmission or distribution of particular features.' p 73
Ed Keller, notes on STUDIO: note dream relevance to our condition as individuals in reality. the dream serves as more valid model of reality because of it's indeterminate condition; cf stan allen's quote of norman bryson r/e the condition of doubt as an operative field. also nietszche's comment on dream from the birth of tragedy
dream sequence disruption of time and shifting of personality; this invokes a deleuzean multiplicity which, as nietszche notes, is completeley UNconfounding; by that we mean (nietszche means) that there is a continuous suspension of disbelief in the multiplicity of the dream world. this suspension of disbeleif parallels the child mind state that zen strives towards in its simultaneous wondering embrace of the linguistic, yet retaining a close connexion to the inchoate- the inchoate being what don juan (carlos castaneda) calls INTENT.
7.4.93