In a “Klein bottle,” container and content become indiscernible from one another, and so their difference becomes iridescent (i.e. when look from different perspectives, each one seems to change into the other):
Diagrams are perfect examples of “Klein bottles,” for they consist in turning conceptual content into visual form, which is also the reason why they should not be seen as mere illustrations of ideas. Here are two examples:
Diagram #1 – Curved time
Rather than displaying at an exclusively present (i.e. neither-past-nor-future) point in the linear time arrow distinctive of flat (chronological) temporality events ascend from their respective event-points in a double loop that communicates them with the past (what was) and the future (what can be). For any true event of our lives resonates synchronically in several layers of time connecting past, present, and future. But this means that time is curved instead of rectilinear and that the transtemporal effects of any event are multiple. It also implies extending Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus (as on a rhizomatic web any given point can connect to any other point) to time itself.
Diagram # 2 – Chaosmosis
The production of reality has chaos as its underlying basis, from which a number of photo-vectorised degrees of consistency manage to leap out; they make it through the cosmic threshold, crystallising above it as singularities. The cosmos begins to take form there, due to the transversal connections that such vectors make among them. In turn, these connections set forth the lines of compossibility needed for the making of possible things, states of things, and worlds. It is probably an image like this (whose messy central motif we have taken from Paul Klee’s notebooks) Guattari had in mind when he wrote on chaosmosis in his Schizoanalytic Cartographies.
(Diagrams by Polymorph.)