The first drawings this reviewer ever saw as a boy were diagrams. My electrical engineer father would be imagining circuitry for exercises for his university students and drawing them on a tablet of typing paper with a #2 pencil at the kitchen table. An illustration contract in the mid-1980s found me drawing electronic circuits for instructional videos. That soon led me to an epiphany to link figuration with electronic schematics, a strategic compositional motif in my drawings and paintings ever since.

I generally think of a diagram as abstract representation fundamentally distinct from a figurative illustration. Early semiotician-philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce understood a diagram as an analogy of relations, and the four authors here approach diagramming as both a technical and poetic activity, emphasizing creative, embodied and exploratory modes of diagramming practices capable of new forms, thoughts and experiences. The March 2025 ARTFORUM featured the artist Kite’s “Potential Transformation of Power”, silver thread on black leather creating a “tactile music score” in the Lakota tradition, like diagrams in various media created to direct participants in her performances.

In Philippe Descola’s discussion of Analogism vs. Totemism in 2013, the naturalism of the Enlightenment claimed a separation of nature from culture, whereas the animistic European medieval mind saw a “great chain of being” that included angels and devils, animals, persons, astronomy, all beneath the creator God. Relations were metaphysical, metonymic links, sometimes just spacial proximity. A rising Technicity resulted in diagrams in the sciences, in psychoanalysis, philosophy and anthropology. And Art! The ancient Egyptians, Leonardo and Durer, 18th century Europeans were all makers of aestheticized (intentionally or inadvertently) diagrams. I’ve given my own Painting classes the assignment to construct a work containing observational (“realist”) rendering, a patterned ground painted or collaged, and a diagram: three different renderings of realities in space. This book argues that diagramming is both a technical and poetic activity.

John Cussans begins his essay with a simple graphic on figure/ground relations in paintings from a Rosalind Krauss text, comparable to a very similar diagram by Jacques Lacan on communication. Deleuze and Guattari’s perception of capitalist schizophrenia slides into Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical theory of surreal artmaking. Dali formulated it the same time Jacques Lacan analyzed the Symbolic. Both Walter Benjamin and Frederic Jameson looked to avant-garde artists to create new forms relevant to our society’s totalizing postmodern political economy and conditions.

Later in the book Cussans uses Alred Korzybski’s General Semantics and the theorist’s curious three-dimensional diagrams using kitchenware and strings to represent fundamental philosophical principles.

Mary Yacoob recognizes diagrammatic drawings by Hilma af Klint as embodying ideas of abstract representations of ideas put forth by Charles Sanders Pierce. Pierce doubted the existence of ghosts and spirits but recognized artworks are received with a similar “intellectual sympathy” and a cognition different from life’s social contexts. Cryptic and enigmatic, influenced by Theosophy, occultism, Mondrian, Kandinsky, she moved from landscape painting to employ her graphic design skills upon the structures of significant information in “The Tree of Knowledge” (1913-1915). She assigned her own meaning to words and letters. Pierce thought the gestural quality of diagrams was irrelevant; Hilma af Klint’s diagrammatic metaphysics were meditative and mediumistic, a realist depiction of her visions. Some of Hilma af Klint’s works resemble to this reviewer the mammoth religious diagrams that were collected by contemporary artist Jim Shaw then donated to Michigan State University.

Yacoob later notes how another cosmic diagram, Harold D. Craft’s successive pulses from a pulsar in an astronomy textbook was repurposed by Peter Saville for the moody, mysterious cover of a Joy Division record in 1979. She contrasted it with Ami Clarke’s 2019 “Lag, Lag, Lag”, a dynamic diagram in motion in real time.

During solitary walks during the Covid lockdown, David Burrows contemplated Betelgeuse and phenomena of the cosmos. This provokes him to consider Carlo Rovelli’s metaphor of time as a string, and Albert Einstein’s influence on the 1936 Dimensionist Manifesto calling for “completely new art form…Cosmic Art” based on non-Euclidean concepts of Space and Time, and enthusiastically signed by Hans Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, Francis Picabia, Macel Duchamp, Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Alexander Calder’s mobiles, Richard Feynman’s Quantum Electronics diagram, and Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored polka-dotted room and the collaborative Black Quantum Futurism generate further cosmic concepts for the author.

Burrows also provides an essay on audio diagrams, perhaps the most nuts-and-bolts application of diagrams to invisible forces.

Deleuze and Guattari called diagrams “graphs”, as painter Francis Bacon had done, in the construction of diagrams of the aspects of difference, distinct from Pierce’s “icons”.  Aristotle defined identity and its oppositions, but concepts of univocity and abstract machinery are naturized by Deleuze into the idea of the rhizome, further complicated by gene-splicing in our time. Dean Kenning explores various analogies found along this road in two chapters.

The book concludes with a discussion by all four authors, asking each other for elucidation. Their interdisciplinary chapters propose “diagramming as a method of enquiry” to spur artistic practice and creative research. Just might. Drawing Analogies in hardcover is priced at over $100 US, but is available through Bloomsbury Open Access, alleviating my initial fears that it won’t readily fall into the hands of advanced drawing students who’d benefit from this philosophical collection.