The Culture of Diagram

By John Bender

Stanford University Press 2010



Book Review by Donald Brackett:

-Highly Recommended



This is a critical genealogy of diagrammatic knowledge presented in an interdisciplinary format which covers the last 250 years of western culture and brings into clear focus the parallel paths of visual art, cultural studies and scientific representation. James Elkins has often commented on the forgotten third in the triad of writing/image/diagram, especially in his own “The Visual Domain”, and he has observed astutely that a diagram is an amalgam rife with internal discontinuities, detecting how its frontiers offer a realm where images model thought outside of all linguistic containment. In Bender’s new comprehensive survey of the diagram’s often secret history, new conceptual ground is broken in a manner both entertaining and informative.

This book is an archaeology of the diagram, in all its scope and mystery: it offers a means of fully appreciating the wide range of symbolic forms available to us as expressively creative creatures. No other means of unifying art, myth, religion, language and the sciences into a coherent whole which recognizes the organic nature of signification is quite as effective as that of the dinergic model managed by governing dynamics. The culture being explored here is that of visual thinking itself, a fascinating terrain where Bender demonstrates how words meet pictures and formulas meet figures. He has foregrounded diagrams as mutable tools for further blurring the boundaries between images and ideas. He has also managed to draw provocative lines linking the diagram itself to our own inner sense of modernity.

The master of symbolic forms, Ernst Cassirer, has remarked on their subtle operation in our lives in a way which sheds light on the importance of understanding how diagram can evolve into emblem, and how emblem can enforce embodied meanings. “Human culture taken as a whole,” he has remarked, “may be described as the process of people’s progressive self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science, are various phases in the process. They also tend in different directions and they obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness do not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement each other. The dissonant is in harmony with itself., the contraries are not mutually exclusive but interdependent, harmony in contrariety, as in the case of the violin and the bow.” The Culture of Diagram invites us to consider a realm where formal differences cease to be contradictions, one where word and image are wed.