Diagrams are concrete structured sets of objects and relations experimented with as such so as to form a kind of laboratory, factory or poem of creative consequence. In working with diagrams, one is at times caught up in a kind of witches’ ride, an at least partially ecstatic transport. This is because when one makes a diagram—and here making is essentially using and testing—one finds oneself transformed into a vehicle or vessel of implicate sense, a sign of all the diagram itself can and perhaps will unfold. Contemporary philosophy has inherited some of its profoundest insights and techniques from diagrammatic thinking. Frege, Husserl, Peirce, Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Hintikka, Brandom and many others have used diagrams not only to express their thoughts, but more importantly to produce new kinds of thinking—above all to find new ways to experiment with thinking. One cannot modify or add to a diagram without building and participating in new and unintended relations. Diagrams thus use relations to create and multiply relations.

The logically precise and rigorous aspects of diagrammatic experimentation and expression are not without their spiritual dimensions. A diagram is always a concrete assemblage—a set of scratches, marks, lines and scribbles on a napkin, for instance. Thus the diagram resides in space and time. It is material. But the work of the diagram is to draw immaterial, universal, abstract and atemporal consequences from the relations embodied in the materiality of the diagram itself. The subject who tests, tries, scratches out and revives the diagram is a mediator, a two-way radio, a categorial functor from the micro- to the macro-cosmic. In antiquity, such use of the material world for signaling and explicating the spiritual was called theurgy. In modernity, the diagram stakes out a new consolidation of powers on this old terrain. And it raises the stakes.

Here by way of illustration we reproduce and adapt a diagram taken from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus:

As a first step, prior to any interpretation, trace the diagram with your eye or, better, with the tip of your finger. Follow its topology, its flows and cuts, its continua and gaps. Familiarize yourself with its unique territory and note the intrinsic bifurcation and differentiation of that territory into two incommensurable sides—an ACTUAL territory on the one hand, composed of pixels on a screen in front of you, localized in time and space, and a VIRTUAL or abstract territory on the other, delocalized and determined only by internal, structural relations of the diagram’s parts.

Now let us turn to the specific interpretation of the diagram as offered by Deleuze and Guattari. They use this diagram to model the dynamics of signification and of what escapes signification. (Or is it rather that these dynamics themselves in fact model the given diagram? In any case, a diagram is not a formal syntax coordinated to various semantic models; it is a spiritual assemblage, what Deleuze and Guattari call an abstract machine.) Signifying and escaping signification is what a diagram does. Thus the sense of their interpretation and the diagrammatic form of its expression remain strictly inseparable.

We begin by calling attention to certain diagrammatic components: a dot or stain (A) stands at the center of a proximate, centripetal ring (B) while anchoring a centrifugal spiral criss-crossed by leaps and linear relations forming their own micro-systems (C). The spiral terminates finally in a blockage (D) mirrored by or contraposed to an indeterminate jettisoning (E). Having designated these abstract components, we may now examine Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual mapping. They call the stain (A) the “Center or the Signifier; the faciality of the god or despot.” The ring (B) they name the “Temple or Palace, with priests and bureaucrats.” The relations and micro-systems on the spiral (C) are understood to figure the complex dynamics of signification, with signs “referring to other signs on the same circle or on different circles” which transform “signifier into signified, which then reimparts signifier.” Finally, the blockage (D) represents the “expiatory animal; the blocking of the line of flight,” while the escaping impulse (E) marks the “scapegoat, or the negative sign of the line of flight” (all citations from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, trans. Brian Massumi, A Thousand Plateaus).

In short, the diagram pictures the transcendental, all-seeing (or all-interpreting) eye that dominates every semiology, every structuralism, every representational venture, and it navigates an escape from the signifier’s tyranny, an emission and no longer a mere interpretation of signs. Such is the very essence of diagrammatic thinking: “The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”

In this way, diagrammatic thinking constitutes an imperative, a set of imperatives for lived experience as figured in the spiral and, above all, the arrow of flight in the diagram above: “Destratify, open up to a new function, a diagrammatic function. Let consciousness cease to be its own double, and passion the double of one person for another. Make consciousness an experimentation in life, and passion a field of continuous intensities, an emission of particles-signs. Make the body without organs of consciousness and love. Use love and consciousness to abolish subjectification.”

There are eight of us tonight at the Tarot School. We’re sitting around a long, brown conference table in a small, grayish white room. The class meets weekly on Monday nights, on the sixteenth floor of a nondescript office building, on Seventh Avenue in New York City. “How will the court case come out?” a woman in her late forties wants to know. “Will it resolve well for me, or I am going to have to pay?” Those sitting around the table stare at her intently, thinking about her question, despite not knowing much more about her situation than what little she has told us. She and an unidentified man are locked in an ambiguous case where she stands to make a considerable amount of money. The case has been dragging; she is tired and would like the entire issue to be resolved so that she can move on with her life. “Okay,” Wald, the co-owner of the school, says, moving us toward the “reading practice” portion of the three-hour class, “who would like to read for Jill? You’re all accomplished readers, some with more knowledge than others, but all of you can answer this question given what you know about Tarot. Who wants to try it? Sara? Sara… why don’t you read the cards for Jill?”

Silence as Sara looks to Wald and then to Ruth Ann, the other co-owner of the school and Wald’s wife, and she smiles a bit shyly, to convince herself that she is up to the task. “Okay, let’s see what they say.” Sara “clears” her cards of negative energies by waving her hand over the pile and then picks them up to shuffle her deck (being the “Universal Waite,” which is an updating of the popular Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is often abbreviated as the Rider-Waite, thus erasing the authorship of the woman who illustrated the cards, Pamela Coleman Smith). Shuffling the cards deliberately, Sara then lays the deck face down in front of Jill. “Please cut the deck into two piles using your left hand,” she asks. Jill does this, and as she does Sara explains that she will do a spread with two columns—the left column will be the “yes” column, representing the expansive forces that are working toward a positive resolution for Jill, and the right column will be the “no” column, representing restriction or the challenges that may be in the way of such a resolution.

I note to myself that this seems like a pragmatic way to hedge the divinatory challenge of “yes or no” that Jill is posing. Although many people at the school describe themselves as “intuitive” or report receiving unexpected “psychic hits” during the card readings, no one likes to be tested by a strict yes-or-no question.

I feel the pressure of the question and wonder how Sara is feeling about the reading.

A successful reading hinges on the ability to be, as Wald likes to say, “a master of your own ship,” which means someone who is in charge of the reading, who can integrate themselves into the reading, and who can tune in to the message the cards are sending. The mastery here comes in learning to choose your words properly but also putting the person receiving the reading at ease.

“Okay, let’s see what the cards say,” says Sara. “Let’s do the ‘yes’ column first,” she says as she flips over the card. “The Three of Pentacles, oh, a good sign. Now, for the ‘no.’” “The Nine of Wands. Okay.” “Well, the pentacles here seem like a very good sign that you will receive some money or that the case will go in your favor,” Sara says, as she points to the image on the card of three individuals consulting one another within the walls of a cathedral. “This card suggests there may still be some negotiation necessary, and perhaps you won’t receive as much money as you might hope for.” Jill smiles and nods her head. “The three is also known as the Lord of Material Works,” Sara says referring to the card’s esoteric title, which are additional attributes that the Golden Dawn associated with the cards in the late 1880s. “This seems to suggest that the business of the case will be handled smoothly and, ultimately, everything will come together.” In the “no” column, however, stands a card depicting a man with a bandage around his head, bruised and leaning against a single wand, in front of a wall of eight other wands. Sara says, “well, in the other column, there is some work to be done or something that you still might have to fight for. I don’t think you can rest just yet, or perhaps you feel like you have been fighting forever, and this might mean making one last push.”

Jill looks around the room as the rest of us are staring at her two cards, putting our own versions of the story together. Sara says, “Ultimately, the case resolves, but you may need to draw on the Lord of Great Strength of the nine. There may be more proceedings, paperwork, a hassle, but since this is a nine, it’s pretty far down on the Tree of Life, so you’re almost there. The final stop would be the ten, but you’re not there yet,” Sara says and gestures around the room. “What do the rest of you think?” One by one, the rest of us offer our interpretations. Jill nods, listening and thanking us. Wald asks, “did this answer your question or help you to feel better about the situation?” “Yes,” Jill says, “because I’m going to try to remember the three and not focus too much on the nine. But sometimes it’s just funny how the cards reflect back to you what you already feel is going on. I had a feeling this is what they would say.”