CartPhilosophers’ Diagram Instructor: Thomas MicalProgram: Transdiciplinary Studies, Art & Curatorial, Critical Philosophy, Information Architecture and Intelligence DesignCredit(s): 1Date: June 20, 27, July 4, 11Time: 09:00-11:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: What happens when philosophy is visualized rather than merely verbalized? What if its most elusive problems like time, subjectivity, emergence, and metaphysics require not just concepts but diagrams?
This Workshop investigates the conceptual and affective power of diagrams across the history of continental philosophy. From Plato’s cosmological schemas and Husserl’s time-consciousness graphs to Deleuze’s rhizomes and Barad’s agential cuts, we explore how philosophical diagrams operate as devices (dispositifs), both exposing and producing structures of thought. Drawing from ancient metaphysics, media theory, and speculative technics, we engage diagrammatics not merely as interpretation but as method. Each session is organized around a specific thematic or philosophical problem (time, perception, subjectivity, interface, the event) and activated through a curated archive of historical and contemporary diagrams. As much a visual as a conceptual inquiry, the Workshop “delaminates” the diagrammatic unconscious of philosophy, revealing how thought itself can be shaped and unfolded through spatial-logical forms. The Workshop culminates in a hands-on practicum where participants develop original diagrams in real time. These may range from philosophical systems to affective cartographies, cinematic temporalities, or synthetic cosmograms. The goal is to equip participants with tools to construct their own situated, speculative diagrammatics: intuitive yet precise, aesthetic yet structural, metaphysical yet grounded.
Session 1: Cosmological Origins / Plato’s Timaeus and the diagram of the khora; Neoplatonist systems of emanation; Gnostic cosmograms and the mytho-diagrammatics of Bertrand Russell’s Icarus.
Readings/References: Plato, Cornford, Plotinus, Proclus, Derrida, Kristeva.
Session 2: Time, Perception, and Memory / Diagrams of temporality in Husserl and Bergson; Whitehead’s event-diagrams and their mutations in Stengers and Manning; constructing processual diagrams of attention and bracketing. Readings: Husserl, Bergson, Gell, Whitehead, Stengers.
Session 3: Dispositifs and Media Apparatuses / Foucault’s diagrams of epistemes and the dispositif; C.S. Peirce and diagrammatic logic; Mitchell and Stjernfelt on diagrammatology as an epistemic mode. Readings: Foucault, Bird & Tusa, Peirce, W.J.T. Mitchell.
Session 4: Platonism, Event, and the One / Deleuze and Badiou on metaphysical seriality; diagramming the One and the multiple; the tension between immanence and transcendence in diagrammatic form.
Readings: Badiou, Deleuze, Hallward, Rolfe, Masciandaro.
IMAGE: Alexander von Humboldt and A.G. Bonpland. It is titled, Geography of Plants in the Tropics, 1803.
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