The graphic imagination is an overdetermination. The imagination IS graphic, primarily, and when the multiform products are restricted to a 2d framework with mixed texts and line-work, the diagram is the result. It is by far the humblest intellectual token, never asserting itself to be more than an appendage, and attempt at clarification. Because of its low birth, the diagram is easily misunderstood, and thus its relation to the zairja can be revealed. As Baudelaire once said [paraphrasing], “Thank God we don’t understand each other, otherwise we could never agree on anything.” This agreement itself has a special form, a corollary of diagram thinking: dessensus. This is agreement de jure rather than de facto. It involves three other Latin terms/ideas, littera, sensus and sententia. [From Jacques-Alain Miller’s essay on “Extimity”]: “Littera is the level of the construction of the text, the most grammatical level; sensus is the level of the signified, of the explicit and easy meaning; and sententia is the deep understanding of meaning. Only this level of sententia can justify the discipline of commentary.” Diagrams aim to please the sensus level with their crude parody of litteræ, but the effectiveness they make possible is sententia. And so the point of these excursions is not to clarify but clear the decks.
• Aristotle’s Four Causes, Parallax View (part 1)
• Aristotle’s Four Causes, Parallax View (part 2)
• Metalepsis • Chirality • Frames
• Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
• Boundary Language Cheat Sheet
• Cheat Sheet, Aristotle Edition
• Lacanian Discourses as Diagramatic Operators
• Enunciating/Énoncé: Architecture
• Enunciating Mulholland Drive
• Enunciating/Énoncé: E. A. Poe’s Cipher Technique
• Enunciating/Énoncé: “The Queer Feet”
• Enunciating the Automated Memory
• Enunciating/Énoncé: Categories of Travel
• Enunciating/Énoncé: The Vichian Key
• Figures: The Rhetoric of Space-Time
• Diagramming Lacan’s Four Discourses
• The Four (Lacanian) Forms of Discourse
• Double Frame: Global versus Local
• BoLaGRAM: Hysteria of North by Northwest
• Frame Theory: Visualizing Lacan
• Double Frame: Mulholland Drive
• Double Frame: “The Queer Feet”
• Double Frame: The Art of Memory (Simonides)
• BoLaGRAM: Strangers on a Train
• BoLaGRAM: Symbolic, Imaginary, Real
• Double Frame: Categories of Travel
• Enunciating the Visual: Protocol for Space-Time
• Enunciating the Visual: Stereognosis and Propriocept
• Frame Theory: A Polythetic Method
• Hand-List of Johnstone’s ‘Categories of Travel’
• Mapspace is Topological not Projective
• Lacanian Discourses and Metalepsis
• Negation, Fathers, and Sexuation
• Autoerotica of the Portable Point of View
• Point of View / Vanishing Point
• Sequencing the Four Discourses
• Diagrams of the Four Discourses
• Vico Box