1

8. ‘Specifically, the diagram is subverted from Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory’.

Discuss this statement from Jakub Zdebik in relation to the Deleuzo-Guattarian

‘pragmatics’.

I. Introduction: Setting the Stage for the Diagram

The texts produced under the joint authorship of Deleuze and Guattari, while varying

widely in topic, converge in terms of their approach to the virtual grounds of any represented

content. Where previous images of thought have remained idealistic, whether by concealing a

transcendent despotic signifier or by staying trapped in the figural without achieving properly

conceptual realization, Deleuze and Guattari aim across their texts to chart a course to a

philosophy that can finally earn its materialist credentials by insisting on what they will

eventually call the ‘diagram.’ In order to understand the motivations for this diagrammatic

(non-)image of thought, it is important to clarify their reasons for seeking such a radical solution

to this problem, which flow ultimately from their theory of semiotics with its delineation

multiple regimes of signification.

They begin addressing this problem in Anti-Oedipus, when they distinguish between

territorial and imperial representation. As they explain this distinction, “territorial representation

is made up of two heterogeneous elements, voice and graphism: the former is like the

representation of words constituted in lateral alliance, while the latter is like the representation of

things- of bodies-established in extended fliation” (203). In this regime, the word is seen rather

than read, “insofar as it evaluates the sufering caused by the graphism” (204); in this world, words are

so many signs of pain emanating from the flesh. In imperial representation, on the other hand, “The

subordination of graphism to the voice induces a fictitious voice from on high which, inversely, no longer
 2

expresses itself except through the writing signs that it emits (revelation)” (205).1 The despotism at play

in imperial representation operates through a “system of terror” that replaces the territorial “system of

cruelty” (211).2 The word loses its organic link to the signified, sufering body, and meaning begins to

pass solely through the despotic (master) signifier (213), which “aims at the reconstitution of the full

body of the intense earth that the primitive machine had repressed, but on new foundations or under

new conditions present in the deterritorialized full body of the despot himself” (210). In this imperial

world centered on the body of the despot, “the question ‘What does it mean?’ begins to be heard, and

that problems of exegesis prevail over problems of use and efficacy” (206). Where territorial

representation was concerned with questions about the use of bodies, imperial representation institutes

a world preoccupied with interpretation, above all the interpretation of the decrees of the sovereign.

Here the stakes of Deleuze and Guattari’s resistance to the first prong of the idealistic double bind

referred to above become clear: the diagram is needed in order to avoid the (often concealed)

transcendence of modes of representation centred on the signifier. As will become clear, the diagram

returns to the problems of use and efficacy which are covered over by the advent of imperial

representation, on a basis other than the ultimately arbitrary link territorial representation sought in the

link between writing and sufering.

To understand the figural second prong that Deleuze and Guattari are attempting to move

beyond, the efects of the third regime they add to the couple, namely capitalist representation, must be

taken into account. In this new period

It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange
piety. (The two taken together constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence of the social
field, and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat; cynicism is capital as the means of extorting
surplus labor, but piety is this same capital as God-capital, whence all the forces of labor seem to
emanate)” (225).
1
Incidentally, it is notable that it is at this point of their exposition of imperial signification that the authors comment that this is
“perhaps the first assembling of formal operations that will lead to Oedipus (the paralogism of extrapolation)” (205).
2
 3

The combination of cynicism and piety, coming together in humanism, while it appears to emanate from

the divinized flows of Capital, for Deleuze and Guattari must instead be understood as last gasp of an

Oedipal desire on the point of final collapse. Deleuze and Guattari, in the wake of Marx’s paeans to the

revolutionary bourgeoisie in the Manifesto of the Communist Party,3 praise the positive dimensions of

ascendant capitalist representation as it overcomes the reference to a despotic signifier, decomposing it

into so many

deterritorialized flows of content and expression are in a state of conjunction or reciprocal precondition
that constitutes figures as the ultimate units of both content and expression. These figures do not derive
from a signifier nor are they even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are nonsigns, or rather
nonsignifying signs, points-signs having several dimensions, flows-breaks or schizzes that form images
through their coming together in a whole, but that do not maintain any identity when they pass from
one whole to another (241).
These nonsignifying points-signs aford “the comparison of language to a game” (242) where gestures,

shrieks and music count as ‘moves’ alongside words in the production of sense. By undoing the

overcoding efects of the despotic signifier, they “short-circuit the signifier's coded gaps” (243), exposing

the ruses of any thought grounded on identity. However, while they praise the “‘figure-matrix’ […] which

carries us to the gates of schizophrenia as a process” (244) they are careful to note that this new regime

is still held back by its reliance on a fatal connection between desire and absence. This theme will return

in their final co-authored text, What is Philosophy, where the figure (produced by aesthetics) is

contrasted with the concept. This distinction is especially clear when they diferentiate between religious

thought and philosophy:

It is a wisdom or a religion-it does not much matter which […] Chinese hexagrams, Hindu mandalas,
Jewish sephiroth, Islamic "imaginals," and Christian icons can be considered together: thinking through

3
As Marx notoriously puts it,

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. […] It has been the first to show what man’s activity can
bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has
conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. […] All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with
their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his
real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Chapter 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007).
 4

figures. […] the figure has a reference, one that is plurivocal and circular by nature. Certainly, it is not
defined by an external resemblance, which remains prohibited, but by an internal tension that relates it
to the transcendent on the plane of immanence of thought. In short, the figure is essentially
paradigmatic, projective, hierarchical, and referential (89).
When religions think through such figures, they are able to traffic in points-signs and put to work their

complex multiple dimensions, without reaching immanence. In contrast, the concept

is not paradigmatic but syntagmatic; not projective but connective; not hierarchical but linking; not
referential but consistent. That being so, it is inevitable that philosophy, science, and art are no longer
organized as levels of a single projection and are not even diferentiated according to a common matrix
but are immediately posited or reconstituted in a respective independence, in a division of labor that
gives rise to relationships of connection between them (91).
While the figure-matrix liberates representation from its fixation on the signifier, it remains pre-

philosophical, replacing the full body of the despot with the common diferentiating field of the matrix,

whether this is a nexus of Capital or one associated with . Deleuze and Guattari make a surprising

connection between capitalist representation and religious thought, 4 showing that in both cases the

matrix they construct fails to reach the threshold of conceptual thinking, which in their terms requires a

conjunction of relative and absolute deterritorialization. The diagram, unlike the figure-matrix, “retains

the most deterritorialized content and the most deterritorialized expression, in order to conjugate them”

(A Thousand Plateaus, 141).5 The diagram, then, avoids the twin idealisms of imperial and capitalo-

religious representation by constructing a mapping of the neighborhoods in which the concept dwells. In

order to understand the role that this new cartography plays in their conception of the diagram, I now

turn to their treatments of this theme in their individual works.

II. Pragmatics: From the ‘Trash Heap’ to the Politics of Language

4
This connection is confirmed, albeit with a different set of references by Walter Benjamin in his fragment on “Capitalism as
Religion” where he argues that “capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the
so-called religions offered answers.” See Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings Vol. 1, (Belknap Harvard Press, 1921, 1996) p.288-
291. Translated by Rodney Livingstone.
5
For an account of the role that stratification and planification play in deterritorialization that casts compelling doubts about the
plausibility of clearly distinguishing between absolute and relative deterritorialization, see Brassier, Ray. “Concrete Rules and
Abstract Machines: Form and Function in A Thousand Plateaus.” A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy (2018): 260-279.
 5

Deleuze directly addresses this issue in his article “Not a writer: a new cartographer” which takes

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an occasion for a reflection on method. Deleuze points out that what

is singular in Foucault’s approach is his decisive move away from “whatever is still pyramidal in the

Marxist picture,” replacing hierarchic analysis with a functional micro-analysis that operates through “a

strict immanence, whereby focuses of power and disciplinary techniques form so many interlocking

segments” (3). This functional approach has the virtue of presenting “the immanence of its field without

transcendent unification, the continuity of its line without general centralisation, the contiguity of its

segments without distinct totalisation” (4). Deleuze clarifies this general reading with a reference to

Foucault’s (in)famous discussion of the Panopticon:

What is “panopticism”? It is not a theory, nor even strictly speaking a model. It is a machine, and one
which functions, but a very particular type of machine. It is defined by a pure function, independent of
sensible configurations and of categorical forms in which this function is incarnated. The function is to
see without being seen. […] We can call such a machine an abstract machine […] It is not a model which
would be applicable. It is a “diagram”, Foucault says. “It is the diagram of a mechanism of power… (with
a) functioning abstracted from every obstacle, resistance or friction… and that one must detach from all
specific usage”. It has nothing to do with a transcendent Idea, nor with an ideological superstructure, as
it is presupposed by every statement. Neither does it have anything to do with an economic
infrastructure which is already qualified in its substance and defined in its form and its usage. And it is
certainly not about making the diagram play a role analogical to that which the Marxists make the
economy play: here there is an entirely new distribution, which refers us back to the conception of
power and to its relations with the whole of the social field. What is important first of all is the
immanence of the diagram. The diagram is the map, cartography. (Not a Writer, 9)
Deleuze makes a cluster of claims here that need to be unpacked. First, his reading of Foucault is

determined by the definition of a ‘pure function’ independent from any given incarnation of that

function, in this case seeing without being seen. Second, crucially, this functional analysis is not

analogous to the Marxist couple of infrastructure and superstructure, insofar as these concepts

presuppose a pre-existing partitioning of the social field. In other words, “The diagram, the

abstract machine coextensive with the social field, always plays the role of immanent common non-

unifying cause” (11). The mapping of these non-unifying causes is not aiming to constitute a fully

objective representation, correcting the errors of previous forms of representation. Instead, as

 6

Deleuze writes, “it organises a new type of reality. The diagram is not a science, it is always a political

matter. It is not a subject of history, nor one which is above history. It makes history in undoing the

preceding realities and meanings, constituting so many points of emergence” (14). The diagram exposes

the gaps in any totalized conceptualization, pointing out potential inconsistencies as part of a political

project of discovering lines of flight [ligne de fuite]. Through such mappings, Foucault shines “an intense,

abstract light, which renders the statement visible” (16) bringing to

light the dominant statements of an epoch, but in their relation to what is made in this epoch. Thus
Foucault’s statements efectively discover the diagram, provided that they make themselves part of
another regime of statements than those about which he speaks, and refer to a totally diferent way of
“making”. […] All of Foucault’s statements refer to a practice and to environments which endeavour to
provoke a mutation in the diagram, like new matters and new functions (17).

The diagram, then, is not a neutral description of the grounds and conditions of thinking; it is

intrinsically bound to practices which attempt to transform the diagram. It is this pragmatic

focus, both at the level of method (to diagram is to analyse functions) and at the level of aim (the

point of the diagram is to release new functions) that will come to define the way this concept is

throughout Deleuze and Guattari’s work, both in their individual and co-authored texts.

This pragmatism is present as early as Deleuze’s first published book, Empiricism and

Subjectivity. Here he presents a reading of Hume’s philosophy which emphasizes construction as

central to Hume’s overall approach. Against those simplistic readings of Hume which subsume

his strange brand empiricism into contemporary (analytical) empiricism, Deleuze presents Hume

as a forerunner of his own constructivism. For Deleuze’s Hume, “Justice is not a principle of

nature; it is rather a rule, a law of construction, and its role is to organize, within the whole, the

elements, including the principles of nature” (40). Much like the dynamic Deleuze found in

Foucault’s functional analysis, in this case it is through the habitual application of these rules that

new practices are cemented and that the diagram is mapped. A similar emphasis on construction
 7

is present in Guattari’s last book, Chaosmosis, where he explains that in his work he has “opted

for pragmatic interventions orientated towards the construction of subjectities, towards the production

of fields of virtualities which wouldn't simply be polarised by a symbolic hermeneutic centered on

childhood (18). As we saw above, the trap to be avoided is a fixation on meaning, an obsession

that Guattari replaces with an “a-signifying semiotics” of “equations and plans which enunciate the

machine and make it act in a diagrammatic capacity on technical and experimental apparatuses” (36).

This new,

cartographic representation forms part of a process of existential production involving territorialised

components of finitude, irreversible embodiment, processual singularity and the engendering of
Universes of virtuality which are not directly locatable within extrinsic discursive coordinates. They come
to being through an ontological heterogenesis and affirm themselves within the world of significations as
a rupture of sense and existential reiteration (42).
In continuity with Deleuze’s analysis of Foucault and the constructivism he derives from Hume, Guattari

here affirms that the diagram is always aiming at rupture with an existing state of afairs through the

reiteration of pragmatic rules. It is notable that it is at this point that the figure of Peirce appears:

Charles Sanders Peirce, who described the diagram as an "icon of relation" and assimilated it to the
function of algorithms, proposed a broader vision that is worth developing further in the present
perspective. Here, the diagram is conceived as an autopoietic machine which not only gives it a
functional and material consistency, but requires it to deploy its diverse registers of alterity, freeing it
from an identity locked into simple structural relations. The machine's proto-subjectivity installs itself in
Universes of virtuality which extend far beyond its existential territoriality. Thus we refuse to postulate a
formal subjectivity intrinsic to diagrammatic semiotisation, […] there is no univocal subjectivity based on
cut, lack or suture, but there are ontologically heterogeneous modes of subjectivity, constellations of
incorporeal Universes of reference which take the position of partial enunciators in multiple domains of
alterity, or more precisely, domains of alterification. (44-5)
In parsing this somewhat dense passage, the connection to alterity appears decisive. The diagram, on

this vision, cannot be limited to a single model of subjectivity, instead giving consistency to enunciations

that traverse multiple Other-structures. From the earliest to the latest texts, it is possible to discern a

continuity of gesture, moving away from any overarching structural model and towards the local
 8

contingencies of pragmatics. To better understand their singular brand of pragmatism, I now turn to

Deleuze and Guattari’s most sustained discussion of this theme in A Thousand Plateaus.

In “November 20, 1923-Postulates of Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattar argue forcefully for the

importance of pragmatics in the study of language. Against any position that would “define semantics,

syntactics, or even phonematics as scientific zones of language independent of pragmatics,” (77) for

Deleuze and Guattari pragmatics have a starring role as a “politics of language” (82). Moving from the

margins to the center,

Pragmatics ceases to be a "trash heap," pragmatic determinations cease to be subject to the alternative:
fall outside language, or answer to explicit conditions that syntacticize and semanticize pragmatic
determinations. Instead, pragmatics becomes the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and
insinuates itself into everything (77-8)
Avoiding the tendency of linguistic to cloister language away from the world, pragmatics “does not

simply appeal to external circumstances: it brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that

are so many internal reasons for language not to close itself of” (82). These pragmatics form the

horizons for the evaluation of any statement, revealing “the implicit presuppositions, immanent acts,

or incorporeal transformations it expresses and which introduce new configurations of bodies” (83). It

is these functional conditions of possibility that delineate any true abstract machine, defining the

diagram of that assemblage (91). Addressing the Chomsky/Labov diferend Deleuze and Guattari pick up

Labov’s point of view where

It is the variation itself that is systematic, in the sense in which musicians say that "the theme is the
variation." Labov sees variation as a de jure component afecting each system from within, sending it
cascading or leaping on its own power and forbidding one to close it of, to make it homogeneous in
principle (93).
By seeing language as a system of variations, Labov makes possible a linguistics of the virtual, where

every statement is present in the enunciation of any other. This approach necessarily treats supposedly

non-linguistic elements (gesture, instrument) “as if the two aspects of pragmatics joined on the same
 9

line of variation, in the same continuum” (98). Continuing their theme of pragmatics approximating

music, Deleuze and Guattari use the example of a synthesizer, “gradually making ‘fundamentally

heterogeneous elements end up turning into each other in some way.’ The moment this conjunction

occurs there is a common matter. It is only at this point that one reaches the abstract machine, or the

diagram of the assemblage” (109). Unlike the common matrix discussed above, in this case what is held

in common does not pass through a central instance but rather shares a continuum of transformation. To

better frame the distinction between Deleuze and Guattari’s and Peirce’s understanding of the diagram

and the continuum made in the next section, one more crucial piece of the puzzle remains: Deleuze’s

contestation of representation in Difference and Repetition.

In his chapter on “The Image of Thought,” Deleuze targets the concealed presuppositions of the

dogmatic image of thought which stands behind ordinary notions of representation. In short, Deleuze

sums this up when he writes “Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation” (130).

Representation is “thus found in the element of a common sense understood as an upright nature and

a good will” (131). Deleuze defines representation as “identity with regard to concepts, opposition

with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, resemblance with

regard to objects” (137). The reliance on these unthematized certainties disfigures thought’s

approach to singularity and multiplicity:

the world of representation is characterised by its inability to conceive of diference in itself; and by the
same token, its inability to conceive of repetition for itself, since the latter is grasped only by means of
recognition, distribution, reproduction and resemblance in so far as these alienate the prefix RE in simple
generalities of representation. (138)

The diagram is what comes to replace this dogmatic image of thought, substituting difference for

conceptual identity, conjunction for determination through contradiction, univocity for analogy

and equivalence for resemblance. Moving away from a conceptuality grounded in universally

shared givens, the diagram exposes these virtual conditions of thought, pointing out gaps in
 10

consistency in order to effect pragmatic transformation. We now have all the pieces necessary for

a comparison of Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the diagram to Peirce’s, which I pursue in the next

section.

III. The Cultured Bacillus

Deleuze and Guattari repeatedly credit Peirce with the concept of the diagram, borrowing it

along with other elements from his semiotics.6 In this section I first give an overview of Peirce’s

theories, before relating his theories to an unexplored reference that he shares with Deleuze and

Guattari, namely Schelling. In my account of Peirce’s work I am indebted to Fernando Zalamea’s

groundbreaking interpretation in Peirce’s Continuum: A Methodological and Mathematical

Approach. Zalamea cuts through the knot of traditional approaches, integrating the attention to

logic present in accounts offered by analytic philosophy with the attention to semiotics present in

those accounts rooted in aesthetics. The interpretive key to Zalamea’s approach is Peirce’s

development of the logic of relatives, which expanded the scope of logic beyond the scope unary

predicates to include relational predicates;7 on this view, Peirce’s development of diagrammatic

existential graphs flow from this initial breakthrough. Zalamea’s Peirce is not an ordinary

pragmatist, signaling “that knowledge, seen as a semiotic-logical process, is pre-eminently

contextual (versus absolute), relational (versus substantial), modal (versus determined), synthetic

6
For the best overview of Deleuze and Guattari’s relation to Peirce in the secondary literature see Bowden, Sean, Bignall,
Simone and Patton, Paul. “Deleuzian Encounters with Pragmatism.” Deleuze and Pragmatism (2015): 1-17. I will not reproduce
the details of their account here, focusing instead on aspects of their relation to Peirce which have not yet been conjugated.
7
Peirce’s examples in his original paper are extremely telling: “A general relative may be conceived as a logical aggregate of a
number of such individual relatives. Let l denote “lover”; then we may write

l = ΣiΣj(l)ij(I : J)

where (l)ij is a numerical coefficient, whose value is 1 in case I is a lover of J, and 0 in the opposite case, and where sums are to
be taken for all individuals in the universe” (1883 CP:3.329). For the original paper see “The logic of relatives” in Studies in
logic by members of the Johns Hopkins University, C.S. Peirce (ed.), Note B, pp. 187–203; reprinted in CP: 3.328–3.358.
 11

(versus analytic)” (47). Peirce’s system relies on the deliberately vague concepts of ‘Firstness,

Secondness and Thirdness,’ which Zalamea glosses as

(1) Firstness: immediacy, first impression, freshness, sensation, unary predicate, monad, chance,
possibility. (2) Secondness: action-reaction, effect, resistance, alterity, binary relation, dyad, fact,
actuality. (3) Thirdness: mediation, order, law, continuity, knowledge, ternary relation, triad,
generality, necessity (50).
Peirce’s pragmatic maxim that our conception of efects is the whole of our conception of the object (47)

governs the transit between these diferent strata, ofering the basis for a recursive continuity. Each of

these strata in turn corresponds to an aspect of the sign (icon/firstness, index/secondness,

symbol/thirdness). As Zalamea explains, for Peirce logic becomes “a sort of geographical science, which

studies characters common to classes of ‘cognitive places’, emphasizing semantic, topographic aspects”

(53). This mapping presents a range of variation, which Peirce calls tints upon conceptions (61),

producing a continuum which is “what the logic of relatives shows the true universal to be” (62). 8

Peirce’s philosophy bottoms out with habit, where “the most perfect account of a concept that words

can convey will consist in a description of the habit which that concept is calculated to produce” (86).

This explains the centrality of abduction to Peirce’s system, 9 since “the deep task of the logic of

abduction may be seen as locally glueing breaks in the continuum, by means of an arsenal of methods

which select efectively the “closer” explanatory hypotheses for a given break” (90). From the sketch

ofered above, Peirce’s proximity to Deleuze and Guattari appears a foregone conclusion; to complicate

matters, it is instructive to evaluate their respective relations to a thinker they both follow, namely

Schelling.

Peirce’s relation to Schelling, and to German Idealism 10 more generally, is complex but broadly

positive. When discussing the genealogy of his “tychism” (from the Greek τύχη), Peirce sees himself as a
8
Zalamea’s extraordinary construction of the diagram as an “apology for pragmaticism” (74) can only be pointed to in passing
here. This fascinating demonstration is “the only known presentation of classical logical calculi which uses the same global and
generic axiomatic rules to control the ‘traffic’ of connectives and quantifiers”(75).
9
It is strange that the concept of abduction does not seem to have made an impression on Deleuze’s text on “The Philosophy of
Crime Fiction” (from Desert Islands). In future research I hope to investigate this symptomatic omission.
 12

descendant of a “Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and

partially deadened mind,” saying that although he was

not conscious of having contracted any of that virus. Nevertheless, it is probable that some
cultured bacilli, some benignant form of the disease was implanted in my soul, unawares, and
that now, after long incubation, it comes to the surface, modified by mathematical conceptions
and by training in physical investigations (Scientific Metaphysics, CP 6.102).
As Peirce puts it even more pointedly, he opposes “all philosophies which deny the reality of the

Absolute, and asserted that ‘the one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective

idealism, that matter is effete mind.’ This is as much as to say that I am a Schellingian” (Reply to

the Necessitarians, CP 6.605). Peirce ultimately retains from Schelling an idealism concerning

the nature of mind and matter. It is here that the contrast with Deleuze and Guattari appears

clearly, as their filiation to Schelling results instead in a materialism of the concept centred on

construction.

Deleuze and Guattari claim their allegiance to Schelling in What is Philosophy, hailing him

as one of “the philosophers who paid most attention to the concept a philosophical reality in this

sense” (11). To better understand this remark, I turn to Alberto Toscano’s “Philosophy and the

Experience of Construction” which reads Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on construction in

light of this Schellingian filiation. For Toscano this question takes place in a “stratigraphic time”

occurring “within the bounds of philosophy, as the (re-)emergence of a new configuration for thought,”

signaling “a new articulation of philosophy and its outside, in other words, a new figure of materialism”

(110). This materialism is grounded in “the primacy of practice, which in philosophy takes the guise

of an 'experience of construction'” (110), the articulation of a primacy of philosophical practice.

10
Peirce’s evaluation of Hegel is deeply ambivalent: “never was there seen such an example of a long chain of reasoning -- shall
I say with a flaw in every link? -- no, with every link a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard
model of a philosophy that in reality does not exist. If we use the one precious thing it contains, the idea of it, introducing the
tychism which the arbitrariness of its every step suggests, and make that the support of a vital freedom which is the breath of the
spirit of love, we may be able to produce that genuine agapasticism at which Hegel was aiming” (1893 CP: 6.306). For a detailed
overview of Peirce’s relationship to the post-Kantian tradition, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/self-
contextualization.html
 13

Toscano frames Schelling’s materialism against the backdrop of Kant critical revolution in the

Critique of Pure Reason, which relies on a strict distinction between philosophical and

mathematical conceptuality:

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts; mathematical knowledge is
the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts. To construct a concept means to
exhibit a priori the intuition that corresponds to the concept. For the construction of a concept we
therefore need a non-empirical intuition (A713/ B741).
As Toscano glosses this distinction,

Dogmatism is founded on […] a forgetting of intuition as the intimate, sensible passivity that checks the
spontaneous eforts of the understanding […] Only the mathemata, whose being is founded on a
construction woven from pure intuition into axioms, definitions and demonstrations, possess apodeictic
legitimacy. Only they can, outside experience, decide upon the certain existence of their objects (113).
Dogmatism, for Kant, depends on a confusion between the exceptional experience of thinking of

mathematics with thinking in general. Schelling’s breakthrough, for Toscano, inverts Kant’s demarcation

between philosophy and mathematics:

Intuition thus becomes the torsion of subjective production (the inner sense) upon itself, in the play of
activity and limitation that makes the transcendental into the element of the genesis, and no longer
simply of the possibility, of actual determinations. This genetic transformation of the transcendental
entails the reversal of roles between the philosopher and the mathematician: The mathematician is
never concerned directly with intuition (the art of construction) itself, but only with the construct which
can certainly be presented externally, whereas the philosopher looks solely to the act of construction
itself, which is an absolutely internal thing. (113-4)

By reversing the roles of philosophy and mathematics, Schelling relativizes Kant’s overly strict

demarcation (116). Schelling’s new conception

calls for the philosopher to abdicate his subjective status, and, in a manner prefgured by Schelling's
experiments in Naturphilosophie, to immerse himself in the element of the absolute, to produce the
coincidence of universal and particular; in other words, to articulate the diferentiated expression of the
absolute through the construction of ideas. This construction or idea is nothing other than the
immediate, non-empirical intuition of a concept (117).
Schelling’s prefigures Deleuze and Guattari on the question of construction, but it is “in their

phenomenology of the concept, in their account of its a-subjective intuition and composition, that a
 14

diferent vision of construction begins to emerge” (120). This difference is concentrated in the plane

of immanence where the “intuitions of immanence are not contemplations compressing the gap

between the universal and the particular into the unity of the idea, they are themselves determined by

the singular construction of a plane” (121). In Schelling’s vision, construction “is of the order of

totalization […] [establishing] the place of an idea (be it aesthetic, scientific, historical, and so forth) in

the seamless unity of the Absolute. In construction, philosophy experiences its immanence to the

Absolute by demonstrating the necessity of the Absolute” (123). Deleuze and Guattari’s materialism

of construction thus translates into two major points: the plane of immanence is indifferent to the

theatrics of intuition and the elements that compose it are themselves determined by the diagrams

they construct. In contrast to the interiorized totality that haunts Schelling (and Peirce, in the

transformed form of the gapless continuum), Deleuze and Guattari display a form of the

Schelling-virus that rigorously escapes the capture of easy transcendence. Where Pierce’s

continuum and diagram preserve traces of what Deleuze and Guattari would call striation,

Deleuze and Guattari’s diagram “does not ground itself in an all-encompassing totality but is on the

contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert, or sea” (A Thousand

Plateaus, 379).

IV. The Joy of Maps

As we saw in the first section, the motivations for the concept of the diagram derive from

Deleuze and Guattari’s overall semiotic project. Avoiding the cruelty of territorial representation,

the terror of imperial representation and the cynicism of capitalo-religious representation,

diagrammatic pragmatics display a “gaiety in horror, peculiar to revolutionaries,” unleashing a joy

that yearns to “destroy what mutilates life” (“Not a Writer,” 1). Deleuze and Guattari’s rewriting of Peirce

moves beyond his all-too-signifying horizon, translating his terms into their paradoxical asignifying
 15

semiotics. In doing this, they radicalize his project of describing the tones of the conceptual continuum,

making room for heterogenous elements in their speculative synthesizer. Where Peirce still wanted to

glue the gaps in continuity, Deleuze and Guattari position the diagram as an inherently political practice,

revealing the inconsistencies with an eye toward transforming them. In a word, the principle of

construction in Peirce’s diagram remains Schellingian, grounding the absolute on a point of indiference

between interior experience and the external world; for Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, the

points that constitute the diagram cannot be separated from the function they play within it. In line with

Labov’s fundamental intuition, variation becomes the basis for a philosophy that is constitutively

determined by its relation to a non-philosophical infinity. Unlike regimes of representations which would

force chaos to cohere with a transcendent ready-made armature of concepts, philosophy, in alliance with

science and art, constructs its immanent diagram through a mapping of pragmatic externalities which

through a properly conceptual alchemy are transformed into an exposition those order-words ( A

Thousand Plateaus, 76) which insinuate themselves everywhere.

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Bowden, Sean, et al., editors. Deleuze and Pragmatism. Routledge, 2018.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Mark Seem

et al., University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix. What Is Philosophy? Columbia University Press, 1994.

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