The Culture of Diagram

The Culture of Diagram is about visual thinking. Exploring a terrain where words meet pictures and formulas meet figures, the book foregrounds diagrams as tools for blurring those boundaries to focus on the production of knowledge as process. It outlines a history of convergence among diverse streams of data in real-time: from eighteenth-century print media and the diagrammatic procedures in the pages of Diderot's Encyclopedia to the paintings of Jacques-Louis David and mathematical devices that reveal the unseen worlds of quantum physics. Central to the story is the process of correlation, which invites observers to participate by eliciting leaps of imagination to fill gaps in data, equations, or sensations. This book traces practices that ran against the grain of both Locke's clear and distinct ideas and Newton's causality—practices greatly expanded by the calculus, probabilities, and protocols of data sampling.

Today's digital technologies are rooted in the ability of high-speed computers to correct errors when returning binary data to the human sensorium. High-tech diagrams echo the visual structures of the Encyclopedia, arraying packets of dissimilar data across digital spaces instead of white paper. The culture of diagram broke with the certainties of eighteenth-century science to expand the range of human experience. Speaking across disciplines and discourses, Bender and Marrinan situate our modernity in a new and revealing light.

John Bender is Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University and a former Director of the Stanford Humanities Center (2001-2008). He is the author of Spenser and Literary Pictorialism and the prizewinning Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England. Michael Marrinan is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His writings include Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape 1800–1850 (Stanford 2009) and Painting Politics for Louis-Philippe: Art and Ideology in Orleanist France, 1830–1848.