Andrew Benjamin examines the ways in which differing treatments of machines, geometry and drawing within philosophy mirror developments in architecture. Starting with the treatment of the clock and the machine in French materialist philosophy of the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries, Benjamin demonstrates how certain formulations of materialism are inevitably tied to a conception of drawing - and, by extension, geometry - based on the structure of representation. The consequence of this is that drawing - and, by extension, the diagram - is limited to the domain of representation, from which many of its experimental possibilities are excluded. Benjamin discusses how, whilst containing the potential for representation, the drawing and diagram cannot be thought in representational terms.