Charles Stivale & Dan Smith - Deleuze on Painting and the Question of Concepts 

Its a great day when you see something new with Dan Smith listed on RU-vid. Really enjoyed my first listen to this! Thank You

on the diagram: you might all want to look into bergson's concept of the diagram in matter and memory, ch 4 - in there, its what mediates the relation between the actual and the virtual, i.e. what makes practical activity possible. in the book on bacon, deleuze explains that the diagram mediates between the painter's intention and their production, i.e. its what makes the practical activity of painting possible - hence, pollock expands the diagram over the whole painting, allowing his motor memories (in bergson's terms), his habitual hand movements and methods of paint-dropping, to override the tactile-optical cliche of representation, while mondrian contracts the diagram to its minimum by measuring his lines, planning his paintings with pencil (which he often leaves visible on his paintings), and painting as evenly as possible - he paints as carefully as he can, reducing his habitual hand movements, the motor memories that undergird all practical activity insofar as it is necessarily movement-activity, to a minimum. both deleuze and bergson see the diagram as structuring practical activity, with bergson emphasizing its relation to memory, while deleuze emphasizes those memories that are most immediate to the activity of painting, the habitual movements of the hand and its coordination with the eye (in figurative tactile-optical painting), the eye of the mind (in abstract, purely optical painting), to itself (the self-sufficient hand, abstract expressionist manual painting), or to the sense of touch specific to the eye (bacon's (and cezanne, monet, etc.) haptic painting).

It's always a 50/50 chance one of you will drop something that will keep me awake all night thinking, very risky to listen before going to bed. Oh well ☺