Diagram: The Instrument Of Thought

Maps, charts, graphs – all diagrams – are used by us to organize our experience of the world outside. Our senses coordinate information from our surroundings and organize it – often in linear form – so that we can know ‘where we are’ and go from A to B in any situation.The authors of this book suggest an exciting method for applying the diagram to our internal world of thoughts, ideas, feelings and emotions. Diagramming an inner situation will, they argue, not only help us to understand an attitude or feeling, but will also put us into touch with our innermost organizing mechanism, whether we call it soul, spirit, psyche, mind or cerebral cortex.The way we experience the world, our perception of it and our perception mechanisms, contributes to the construction of our diagram; models, games, the ambivalence of coincidence, the relation between personality and cosmology – all these are topics round which important sections of the book are constructed and which are the basis of the excitement the authors convey so invitingly. A diagram, they say, is not an idea but a model of it, intended to clarify, in the way a map does, characteristic features of the terrain, inner or outer.Humans have been navigators and geometers for thousands of years, and the method suggested here is put forth as a way to bring our inner world into greater harmony with our outer world.The many drawings in the book – a large number of them in color – provide a graphic demonstration of diagramming, and offer the reader several opportunities to indulge in perceptual ‘games.’Keith Albarn is Course Tutor in Fine Arts, North London Polytechnic, and Jenny Miall Smith is Senior Tutor in Design at Chelsea College of Art. Together they collaborated in The Language of Pattern (1974).