How Diagrammatic are Diagrammatic Instruments?

Abstract

Diagrammatic Instruments are objects and their associated prompts for use. They make up the core of Performative Diagrammatics, an artistic facilitating practice that tends to co-articulating own ways of doing and thinking among individuals in small groups, by means of conversation, movement and play. I think of Diagrammatic Instruments as akin to musical instruments, which may have multiple parts and can be tuned, modified and activated with additional, intermediate objects, as part of an intimate, corporeal relationship. Seeking new entries into being present to one another at a time when communication struggles to cut across orthodoxies, platforms and other siloes, Performative Diagrammatics resonates with practice-driven theory that details laboratory-based intra-acting (Barad 2007), self-managing through metamodelization (Guattari 2000 [1989]), and institutionally bringing conceptual imagination into play (Braidotti 2011). The specific diagrammaticity of Diagrammatic Instruments resides in their spatial and material configuration and the sequential and affective facilitation of their use. By mapping Diagrammatic Instruments onto Charles Sanders Peirce's iconic diagram structure (Peirce 1906, Stjernfelt 2007), tracing and where necessary stretching Peirce’s diagram stages, correspondences emerge. For example, the ease with which the transformand diagram stage is modifiable shows how a diagrammatic process need not be confined to paper, and the excitement Peirce associates with the dynamic middle interpretant foreshadows embodied performance. The prominence of abductively infused symbolic interpretants within the diagram engenders facilitation as a means to support category examination (Butler 2002). In turn, facilitating may be framed as technique of existence (Massumi 2011). Noting the role of abduction in making and operating diagrams and initially relating it to familiar artistic techniques of attending to premises and articulating techniques, a proposal emerges for an Abduction - Deduction - Induction (AB-DE-IN) model of artistic research. AB–DE–IN offers a diagrammatic, performative and realist model of artistic research that deserves further exploration.