With the Culture of Diagram, John Bender and Michael Marrinan have written a complex and ambitious study examining the transformation of perception and cognition over the past two hundred and fifty years. How do we describe our world, they ask, and how has that process of description changed since the mid-eighteenth century? While Diderot and d’Alembert’s celebrated Encyclopédie, published between 1751 and 1772, provides the starting point for their investigation, Bender and Marrinan examine subjects including the development of French history painting, theater design, linguistics, descriptive geometry, Cubist drawings, and quantum mechanics. This partial list of their dizzying array of subjects and disciplines illustrates the scope of their endeavor, but the resultant book also reveals the tremendous challenges of producing truly interdisciplinary work.

For the authors, who are both professors at Stanford and worked on this project for nearly a decade, the Encyclopédie provides a natural point of departure. Bender is a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature, and Marrinan is an art historian specializing in nineteenth-century French visual culture. What interests them most is the nature of visual and textual description, and using Diderot’s remarkable series of volumes, they investigate in great detail this subject and the interaction between these two modes of representation. Indeed it is the specific relationship between image and text in the Encyclopédie that provides Bender and Marrinan with a key element in their argument. With its careful cross-referencing between articles and illustrations, they argue, the Encyclopédie reveals a new kind of scientific thinking. They see this process, which they term “correlation,” as an indicator of a larger conceptual shift in the nature of visualization; they then make the case that it continues to have consequences today.

Bender and Marrinan’s analyses of specific articles and plates from the Encyclopédie are among the strongest sections in the book, and several of its extraordinary illustrations clearly bear out their argument that visual thinking was in the process of a radical transformation during the later eighteenth century. This is perhaps most noticeable in what they call the “hybrid” plates, dedicated to subjects such as the hunt. In one image from this section, the artist uses at least five different modes of description. Readers see a tableau of the hunt itself, detailed drawings of stags’ antlers, charts of their hoof prints, the musical score of a hunting song, and explanatory text all thoughtfully united in one picture. For Bender and Marrinan, these novel techniques, which include the use of multiple views and the isolation of objects on a white background, create a new mode of representation. In their view, what can be seen in these plates is a series of stripped-down ideal types. Breaking with the long tradition of the Albertian picture as a window, they argue, this concatenation of descriptive techniques creates a new type of image: a diagram.

While the “culture of diagram” may be rooted in the eighteenth century, for Bender and Marrinan the contemporary world of high-speed computing and virtual reality are simply unthinkable without it. In fact, the book opens with the description of a modern surgeon performing an eye operation without actually laying a hand on the patient. Using microtools, he “sees” a real-time, stereoscopic image of the movement and position of the patient’s eye and operates completely virtually. One of Bender and Marrinan’s key questions is how this kind of “mediated experience” has come to be accepted. Such thinking, they argue, can be traced back to the diagrams of the Encyclopédie.

From the outset, Bender and Marrinan frame their study as a scientific one. While they make reference to the visual studies of James Elkins and Barbara Stafford (James Elkins, The Domain of Images, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001; Barbara Marie Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), their greatest debt is to historians of science. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s examination of how scientists created the concept of “objectivity” proved particularly valuable as Bender and Marrinan developed their own methodology (Lorraine J. Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007). The language they adopt throughout their book makes this “scientific” intention clear, and it also reveals the far-reaching scope of their claims. But the writing can be extremely difficult to follow: “A diagram is a proliferation of manifestly selective packets of dissimilar data correlated in an explicitly process-oriented array that has some of the attributes of a representation but is situated in the world like an object” (7). In this definition of their key concept, the terminology has been borrowed from computer science, and was originally used to characterize communication over a digital network. Bender and Marrinan also reference the concept of a “working object,” Daston and Galison’s term for a standardized representation used by scientists. But while the tone might sound “objective,” this definition of “diagram” is both abstruse and all-encompassing.

In their study of the concept of objectivity, Daston and Galison carefully focused on one subject, scientific atlases. The authors of the Culture of Diagram have a far more ambitious goal. Like Diderot and d’Alembert before them, they want to investigate the full breadth of human knowledge. Presumably they will then be in a position to identify a shift that cuts across all these disciplines. Much of their text consists of drawing parallels, or “correlations,” among contemporaneous developments in different fields. Thus a diagram becomes anything from Jacques-Louis David’s 1784 oil painting Oath of the Horatii, to a statistical table, to the use of free indirect discourse (a style of third-person narration) in eighteenth-century novels. Some of these perceived connections are more persuasive than others.

After defining their terms, Bender and Marrinan devote the majority of their text to a survey of these very different “working objects.” In chapters entitled “Descriptions” and “Visualizations,” they concentrate on the later eighteenth century, beginning with an investigation of further sections from the Encyclopédie. An analysis of the Encyclopédie’s article entitled “Description” is used to demonstrate that work’s “diagrammatic” nature. Written by four different authors, this multidisciplinary article integrates different types of knowledge into one multivalent whole. A discussion of Diderot’s plays is skillfully linked to shifts in contemporary theater design, but an extensive treatment of David’s drawings and history paintings is less successful. It is difficult to argue, for example, that in his Oath of the Horatii David is moving away from one-point perspective. And would not Charles Le Brun’s Treatise on Expression, published nearly a century earlier, with its simplified physiognomic notations of specific emotional states, provide a better example of “diagram”? In the lengthy chapter “Numbers” that follows, Bender and Marrinan adopt a different approach, presenting a chronology of what they view as key shifts in scientific thinking from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Here they trace advances in descriptive geometry, probability calculus and statistics, and finally quantum theory. In a fascinating coda, they consider Étienne-Jules Marey’s nineteenth-century panoramic photographs and one of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist drawings as examples of the phenomenon of “diagram.”

All of these examples are carefully chosen to chart the rise and continuing significance of the culture of diagram throughout the modern period. Bender and Marrinan aim to reveal a sea change in the nature of how we humans describe our world. This new way of thinking, they contend, not only destroyed the world of one-point perspective, it moved knowledge out of the realm of direct experience. Scientific “seeing” became something removed from the first-person, sensual experience of the surrounding world. It changed into something impersonal, mathematical. And this process, they conclude, culminated in the present, in which vision is increasingly dependent on digital technology.

This fascinating study presents a strong and intricate argument, and is clearly the result of tremendous research in many different fields of study. It is easy to understand how it took Bender and Marrinan nearly ten years to complete it. Their careful analyses of both images and texts contain many new insights. Reading, for example, Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s description of Cubism in the book’s conclusion, it now takes on a whole new meaning. “Here is a new visual language,” Kahnweiler writes, which can represent an object from many different viewpoints, and capture its “primary characteristics” (205). Kahnweiler becomes an exemplar of diagrammatic thinking. Like the Encyclopédie itself, the Culture of Diagram can help the reader recognize the conceptual linkages among a wide range of disciplines.

In their introduction, Bender and Marrinan explain their intent to “write a book that can be called truly collaborative and thoroughly interdisciplinary” (xv). They achieve this goal. But their study reveals not only the strengths inherent in this ambitious approach but also its weaknesses. The purported aim of interdisciplinary work is to connect and integrate academic schools of thought and technologies. But it is not clear how this actually functions in practice. Does the scholar search for similar conceptual underpinnings in a variety of fields and then graft them together? And if so, which theories should one select? Are Daston and Galison’s ideas concerning scientific objectivity, Michael Fried’s concept of “absorption” in the visual arts, and Ann Banfield’s linguistic theory—all mobilized by the Culture of Diagram—actually compatible?

The multidisciplinary approach brings up another, equally pressing question: who is the audience for this book? Whether we like it or not, to make sense of our world we break it down into a wide range of domains or disciplines; and even with tremendous diligence, the vast majority of us can only master one or perhaps two of these areas. How many readers are well-versed in descriptive geometry, linguistic theory, and quantum mechanics? Who will fully understand the meanings of all three of Bender and Marrinan’s terms “enthymeme,” “cognitive yield,” and “human sensorium”? While the question of comprehension is important, in an academic sphere the matter of judgment is equally crucial, and the book presents a tremendous challenge for readers to evaluate the authors’ claims in so many disciplines.

The Culture of Diagram is a demanding book. Far-reaching, and erudite, it provides an extraordinary guide to the transformation of scientific “seeing” over the last two-and-a-half centuries. But for its authors, crucial Enlightenment works, most notably the Encyclopédie, serve not simply as subjects of study, but as methodological models. Like the thinkers they consider, Bender and Marrinan produce a grand, expansive synthesis of image and text, attempting to integrate the widest range of disparate elements and conceptual models into one coherent whole. Perhaps unwittingly, like Hegel before them, they are both seeking and creating a unified system of knowledge, one intended to reveal enlightened ways of seeing.