The Time of Diagrams

Abstract

Diagrams are visual structures that, while immediately spatial in appearance, invite us to confront time in its simultaneous multiplicity, outside the bounds of linear progression and development. Diagrams collapse the past into the present and afford the opportunity to imagine divergent futures. While the diagram has been adopted as a theoretical model by historians of art, music and performance in terms of its administration of materials and gestures in space, we still lack a thorough articulation and elaboration of the diagram’s peculiar relationship to time. This speculative essay expands on arguments initiated in Harren’s book, Fluxus Forms: Scores, multiples, and the eternal network (University of Chicago, 2020), regarding the fundamentally diagrammatic nature of Fluxus event scores in order to consider all experimental scores as a genre of diagram that bears a philosophically complex relationship to temporality. Moving beyond the case of Fluxus, Harren gestures to a broader range of artistic diagrams and experimental performance scores (e.g. from Dada, Yvonne Rainer, Lawrence and Anna Halprin, among others), as she considers the diagram on more theoretical grounds, moving between the diagrammatologies of Frederik Stjernfelt and Gilles Deleuze (who receives special emphasis) in order to account for diagrams’ multifaceted temporal address. Ultimately, Harren argues, the ‘real’ time of the diagram faces the past in relation to the form it describes, whereas the ‘virtual’ time of the diagram is the infinite future space to which it may connect through (actualizations of) formal correspondences. For the present, the score-as-diagram is thus both a wedge between and a bridge connecting the past and the future. Notation emerges as an applied model of becoming.