… pulk pull revolving doors!

In conversation with Ali Akay: "For Gilles Deleuze"

The focus of this conversation with Ali Akay, an established theoretician and curator, was derived from questioning of some issues posed by and argued within his curatorial constrain on his recent exhibition For Gilles Deleuze (1) which took place in Istanbul at Akbank Sanat (Akbank Art Center).

In the midst of this intellectual quest, we criss-crossed Deleuze’s own project towards unfolding its differential structures referencing “processual” intensities in its rhetoric, there we have a world where the rule of the game almost remains secret in an understanding towards what one must hope that the ‘tabula rasa’ brings out tendencies present.

Bal: In mapping out issues in Deleuzian philosophy as being “inherently axiomatic,” I would like to begin with paraphrasing a quote from Žižek concerning Deleuze’s desire to render a totalizing view of the universe. This suggests a way of transcending any reaction towards an instantiation of an encounter as escape, “[Deleuze] once wrote that when a true philosopher sits in a café and hears somebody saying ‘let us debate this point a little bit!’ he jumps up and runs away as fast as possible.” (2) What this passage begin to suggest is that some deeper and more fundamental issues, over the role of philosophy, need to be questioned and so can you initially talk about why Deleuze?

AA: The question of the transcendent in Deleuze’s philosophy is a inherent one. It means that maybe the only interesting relation with Kant emerges from the point at which he argues that the plane of immanence is related to the transcendental, which is a Kantian concept, but in a different sense. Deleuze’s thought is not difficult but his thought that philosophy can function by the concept of the plane of immanence is more complex.

The concept of transcendental has some relation with the possibility of the “individuation” which is a concept of Gilbert Simondon for who Deleuze wrote an article.

This is like a singularity: The person has a relation with the other persons. The singularity of one person is coming from the point with which that person has a common history with the others. This is not the same history but the histories are connected. At the same time of the school, of the neighbour, at the same of the classroom, is this kind of relation. It explains to us that the persons are relating on the same time plane. But all of them have a different psychology, different class, different parents, different physic and different life.

This is what Deleuze calls transcendental which is different from the experience of the subject or of the individual. This relation is never universal, but singular. It is a relation like the relation of “plane of immanence” and the concepts. They are not reducible. Although the same element can appears in the same time on the plane and in the concept. It will not be in the same guise, even when they are expressed in the same verbs and words as say Deleuze and Guattari.

Bal: If everything is not really a discursive construction, is this then an engagement relevant to the quintessence of the social structures where the question of political and ethical meaning opens up?

AA: The constructivist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is always beyond deconstruction and the question of the “other” developed by Levinas and afterwards by Derrida and others political sciences discourse of ethnicity and gender problematic.

Becoming-women for example for Deleuze and Guattari are very different from the gender issues of the political feminist discourse. It is neither a identification to the man, nor to make like a women. This is just a “becoming” which is really different from the concept of “being” in the philosophical discourse. I think that with Deleuze and Guattari, we are going to enter, beyond the subject, into the new kind of horizon with this idea of the plane of immanence and the political discourse, which will be changed with a new orientation of the reflexivity and the complexity of the relations, and therefore the inter-relational of this relation will be a new horizon of the multiplicity.

This term which Deleuze introduced in the beginning of Bergsonism (1966) is against the dialectical relation of the “One” and “multiple” which is a Marxist and Hegelian discourse of the political approach. The ethic of Deleuze if we want to use that term is maybe about of ethic of Spinoza: and therefore the concept of adequacy is a relevant one. If we say that some idea or some attitude is adequate for us, it creates our ethic. The ethic is however not the dogmatic discourse of Alain Badiou. For Badiou the ethic is a fixed term during the life. If we are always in the same way we create an ethic; or according to Deleuze, contrary to Badiou, the ethic is a relation of our body and the others as a multitude, and consequently we are the multitude as like the others. Our ethic will be oriented with the variability and variations of the attitude of our body relating to ethical questions.

I would like to reiterate that for oriental Chinese thought, it seems that a term for ethic does not exist (François Julien) nor has the same meaning of the occidental understanding of ethic. The morale of the Taoist approach is not the ethical one. It is like a Spinozist term of ethical accessibility, which is not morale: this is not a religious concept like the morale. It is not the metaphysical of customs. It takes care of the ethical approach of our relations with the others and also with ourselves.

The knowledge is the possibility of the person having an independence and liberty like a Spinozist knowledge of the third kind: the liberation of the individuation. It is a political one thanks to the ethical approach.

This is a “planomene” nomadic, plenestai to err on the plane of immanence or is a Rhizosphere, rhizomatic axiom. In Dialogues(1979) with Claire Parnet, journalist and student of Gilles Deleuze, he uses the term of “planomene” in the same sense of the plane of immanence in which he connects the life to the thought and vice versa. The life becomes an active force of the thought. This is a political and also artistic approach of Deleuze’s thought.

Bal: In its nature, the curatorial strategy that you are employing by opening a discursive space which features the creative practices from Thierry Kuntzel and Jean- Jacques Lebel, while along side presenting some documentation published in various news papers, photos belong to him, sample copies of his book as well as his study notes and voice recordings; it seems you are creating a complex mode of production site delineating a “situational representation.” At the same time this also presents critical modalities towards the creative practice. Could you briefly evaluate this with its practical ramifications?

AA: To make an exhibition about a philosopher is not very simple. We have some examples of the exhibition of Barthes in Beaubourg and Sartre in the National Bibliotheque of François Mitterand in Paris. I did not take these exhibitions as best examples, because I think that they were too closed (focused) around the thinkers. Deleuzian thought is not closed. He himself has wanted to open his philosophy to the “non-philosophical one”. He wrote that he wanted to make a Pop philosophy, which means pertinent to the “open one” that is for example to articulate the artistic work of Thierry Kuntzel with the Deleuze’s concepts but without relation with Deleuze’s thought or Deleuze’s plane.

The work of Thierry Kuntzel has a relation with Wirginia Wolf’s “waves”, which is also some kind of relationship with Deleuze’s concept of the fold. In What is the Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari wrote that: concepts are like multiple waves rising and falling, yet the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them. The plane envelops infinite movements that pass back and forth through it, but concepts are infinite speeds of infinite movements that, in each case, pass only through their own components and this is a problem of infinite speeds which is perhaps the relation of Thierry Kuntzel’s work relative to Deleuze’s thought.

Also according to Deleuze and Guattari the plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought which gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought. In this sense my exhibition is very different of the others like Barthes or Sartre’s exhibitions. I try to create a docu-fiction exhibition as said the others docu-drama. The documentary part of the exhibition is articulated according to the artistic gaze of the fiction. We thereby have an open strategy. It is the same for the conferences (Raymond Bellour, David Lapoujade, Eric Alliez, François Zourabichvili, Dork Zabunyan, Ulus Baker, Ahmet Soysal, Melih Başaran and lastly mine), which are not the format of the symposium. I prefer that the speakers have time to explain, to develop and discuss their speech.

For that reason I prefer to put in place the format of conference of two hours in every day during the first week. Discussion then continues on every Tuesday for the duration of the exhibition and the public then has time to listen the conferences at the same time options to listen to and watch the video of particular concepts (desire, tennis, zigzag, style, drinking, and history of philosophy) of Gilles Deleuze with Claire Parnet duration one hour, or to see the video of Jean Jacques Lebel, The Monument for Felix Guattari, duration one and half hour.

They have also time to listen for four lessons from him, (Deleuze) at the Vincennes and St. Denis, Paris VIII University where I studied for on and off for 15 years [about The Fold, about Georges Dumezil and war machine and about two lessons of painting (Bacon’s courses)]. Over the duration of the exhibition there are also readings from some of the books of Deleuze and Guattari translated into Turkish (I was the first translator of the first of their books in Turkish, at the beginning of 1990).

For this reason, I don’t think that this exhibition is a representation of the thought of Giles Deleuze. The exhibition is in between the documentary and the artistic fiction. They don’t represent all his ideas. They are just there to be articulated by the spectators. Yes you are right when you say that it is a practical creation and transcendental experimentation.

Bal: The ontological opposition between “being” and “becoming” that gives substance to the key to this paradox is as what Deleuze characterised it the difference between the “actual” and the “virtual.” This involves a multiple positions in its rhetoric. However in an oscillating odyssey of a multiplicity and multiple belongings, the “divergent of actualisation” remains and “convergence” becomes illusive. How is reflexivity understood? How would you describe the constituency of this epistemological portrayal?

AA: The difference between “being” and “becoming” is very clear: “becoming” is not a substantial one like can be the “being.” “Becoming” is open to the different movement of the person during his or her “individuation,” this is very different from, to be an individual in sociological terms, whereas the “being” is substantial and ontological. It is a state of things in which the individuation takes components of the other’s individuation.

The identity of the individual, who belongs to a nation or an ethnic group or a religion or a gender, is the central problematic issue at the end of the 20th century. We inherited this situation from the creation of nation-state; but also before it, this is the heritage of the creation of the kingdoms in Europe.

The European Enlightenment is one of the factor with which the individual has become the person who belongs to the collective. This is a moment in the history of Europe, if we use the Hegelian term, whereby we forgot to speak with the notion of geography, latitudes and longitudes, and we began to speak the policy. By the new terms of the Enlightenment within which the subject, the people became a central element we were using the term citizenship for the creation of state-notion especially since the French revolution with which came also a wonderful notion of freedom.

If we would like to speak in archaeological terms we can say that the theory of Hobbes is very interesting in as much as for the first time to have a notion of people was to have the notion of citizenship elimination of the concept of multitude. This idea is going to come back again, nowadays, into to the sociological use. These terms, especially after the book of Negri and Hardt, The Empire, which is translated in every languages, even in Turkish, this book has become a best sellers, are already remerging in the social sciences.

This process in development of the individual who belongs to a collective community possesses some bifurcation. The French sociological theorist Gabriel Tarde is one of the great thinkers on the subject of individual in terms of Leibnizien monadology. His sociology is the monadology of Leibniz but he used the notions of open gates and windows, contrary to Leibniz for who the monad does not possess either windows or doors. This is a fact of the history of philosophy, which developed the notion of individual as an integrated person, as an indivisible subject of consciousness. This development of the indivisibility of the person whom the name came from the inidividis, individu or individual is the whole subject, indivisible subject of the body.

This indivisibility makes from the notion of individual one person belongs to himself and the sociology has developed the difference between society and the individual as a long process of, the separation of the individual from the societal (social). In these terms, the individual was separated from the collective and he can exist as a part of society, which is completely different from the use of Tarde. Tarde’s as term for individual is very different from the use of the sociology of Durkheim on the beginning of the 20th century. In this sense, the infinitesimal mathematic is different from the finitude by the degree to which the individual is a multiplicity who has a multitude of affects by the way in which the individual is divisible until infinitesimally infinite.

This physic of the human understanding in this context is comprehensible in the sense whereby the body is a certain “segmentarity” as Deleuze and Guattari said in Thousand of Plateaus edited by Minuit edition in 1980.

The Body without Organ taken by Deleuze and Guattari from Antonin Artaud has an element of explanation of Tard’s theory with which we can say that the body is a physic component and the mood and the affects are coming from the outside excited body for the transformation of it and this is quantification, according to Tarde (Monadologie et Sociologie, Les Empecheurs de Pensee en Rond, Paris, 39).

For understanding the nature of the human body, said Tarde, in the same book, we can see the two elements of the soul, the desire and the belief, from which we can: arrive to voluntarism and affirmation which is the characters of eminence and distinction the body of the individual from the other.

Every individual is different from the other and even from himself and for that reason we can try to employ a concept of Freud, “Unheimlich (Uncanny)” which is, I think, the key to our nature of our individualism.

Every one is a multiplicity in touch with others. This kind of inter-individuality has contact by the affectivity of the affects traversing our body. Inter-individuality is not a relationship of the individual with the others but with this inter-individual situation possible when we are alone, not in the moment at which we are in touch with the others physically, but when we have left contact with the others and we find ourselves alone. We can find this possibility of the inter-individuality in our body inside of this body. This is an affects coming from the outside but this outside become the inside of our individuality.

The other philosopher who has been working with the concept of individual was Gilbert Simondon who wrote many books about the individuation, which is different from Tarde. The originality of Simondon comes from the point of view from which the individual is a process, and the individuation is perhaps the last possibility for understanding the individual. His mobile taught is a relationship with the concept of “becoming” that also Deleuze used in his philosophy whereby “becoming” is the possibility for the individual to shift the “categories of principles.”

He is against this idea of principle, which is to establish laws, and for the impossibility to fix concepts. According to Simondon, the individual is never stabile but always meta-stabile. There is always a plus in the process of individuation, which is not seen as an evolution of predetermined program but one of “becoming” as a philosophical object, and call upon modesty.

It is easy to talk about principle because it is a habitus of Social Sciences and the arts, because it is stabile; however the process denies the concept of unstable identity. The medieval thinkers understood this process very well, for example Augustinus said: “every body knows what the individual is but nobody can formulate it.”

For the classical philosophy, the individual is indivisibility atomistic. But while he eats some food what are the affects of foods on the body if they create new components? The body is indivisible but the life of cellules affirms the divisibility.

This is a paradox for the thinkers. Simondon subverted this debate with a new approach. He rather explains the process instead of the principles as not matter of metaphysic. He refused to think that the matter is animated by an animation principle. In this transition, from the inert to the animated life, he formulated the new process.

The difference of the crystallization from the macro-molecule of the organic chemical is explained by its transitory information. All of this can be actualised by the past and futures virtual which can gives us the crystal thought of Gilles Deleuze.

Bal: In pursing the debates in a small step towards another ‘intriguing’ proposition; it appears subject/object relations are disrupted by proposing that multiplicity is not a ‘subject’, nor unity of ‘object.’ In this case what is the relation?

AA: The thought of Deleuze have neither a relation with subject nor an object. He told us about the “subjectum” is not a subject. This is like “individuation” and very different from individuals. This is important as I try to explain the implications implicit in your last question.

The subjectivities are, according to Deleuze and especially to Guattari, the variability of the individuals. There is a concept of hecceite, which is a different aspect of the relation of subject and object. Deleuze calls transcendental emprisme or superieur emprisme, which means the subject and the object, does not have pre-existing relations.

There is no object before the subject and the subject is not an experienced one but rather the subject and object are co-producing and individuating together with some chaotic harmony in the relation of the actualisation of the virtual.

Deleuze says: there are no pre-existing forms before, but some kind of relations without form between components. There are no subject but dynamics individuations without subject, which constitute collectives statement. According to him, in Difference and Repetition (P.U.F.1968) he explains that the “univocity of being” is immanent and is individuation as a last form of the actualisation. This is why Deleuze’s thought is without subject or object. The hecceite takes the place for, the realisation of the individuation, which is different from the individual. As Simondon says the individuation must be taken as a “becoming” of the “being.”

Bal: Your analysis urges the passage into a differentiating process of a liminal existence... How can a critical space be established?

AA- The critical space is not articulated in Deleuze and Guattari. But there are two notions of space: smooth and stride space: Nomadic and space of the state as they have developed in Thousand of Plateaus (Minuit, 1980).

Bal: Well… In conclusion, could you tell us something about your upcoming projects?

AA: I have others projects for exhibitions in the future: two exhibitions are in preparation and are: About Abbas Kiorastami and about IRWIN group at Akbank Sanat in Istanbul. One exhibition will be in Italy with an Italian gallery. And other one with Levent Çalıkoğlu, the curator with whom I worked before in different spaces in Berlin, Budapest and Paris.

(1) An exhibition: For Gilles Deleuze curated by Ali Akay at Akbank Sanat (Akbank Art Center) - Istanbul, 30 March - 06 May 2006

(2) Žižek, S. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York & London: Routledge, 2004. p, ix

First published at:Sanat DUNYAMIZ (a quarterly contemporary art magazine, based in Istanbul)Issue 99, Summer 2006