[In]formal Diagram, In[formal] World

ACCORDING TO GUATTARI, the fourfold is not a model of one specific process or structure, but rather a ‘meta-model’ (SC: 17) that should function as ‘an instrument for deciphering modelling systems in diverse domains’ (17). The complexity of this ubermodel calls for an extended commentary. A reader's guide. Perhaps, in some aspects, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus might be read as such reader's guides. In my own commentary, in order to keep Guattari's overall argument in sight at all times, I will approach Schizoanalytic Cartographies at what might be called a medium level of entry. Below this level, many more levels define the fourfold in even more detail.

After a short introduction, all Schizoanalytic Cartographies does is to explicate, in often painstaking detail, the immensely complicated diagram that makes up the book's conceptual spine. As Guattari was a card-carrying Lacanian until his gradual and complicated fall-out with psychoanalysis, the book's many formalizations and the numerous diagrams of specific positions and conceptual vectors within the overall diagram must inevitably evoke the diagrams Lacan uses to formalize psychoanalytic axioms. For some, it might even evoke Lacan's growing obsession with ever more complicated mathemes, as well as his increasingly formalist interest in and use of knot theory.

One difficulty of explicating the fourfold is that a formal diagram, which is a diagram that conforms to the conventions of what we understand, by default, a diagram to be, does not in itself have a narrative along which one might structure one's analysis or commentary.