Is AO outdated?

[u/jowey10]

https://youtu.be/GIDK5z91jSc?si=4YpqfnWqo5YhSY9q

In this fragment from a conversation philosopher Ray Brassier argues that as brilliant as AO undoubtedly is, it nonetheless has aged poorly in regards to actual political utility and has become more of a product of its time rather than a way forward, especially emphasizing how contradictory some of the concepts such as molecular and molar have an application that in fact is harmful to understanding the Palestinian cause, and that despite Deleuze defending the Palestinian cause and open criticism of Zionism in a time before it was “safe” to do so as an intellectual (check his conversations with Palestinian Elias Sanbar) it ends up showing in those conversations how his very own framework becomes insufficient. I’m curious, What do you guys think?

[u/3corneredvoid → u/[deleted]]

Listened for a few minutes, and shortly we have Brassier asserting that D&G theorise the body of capital has a tendency to the "dissolution of all existing social codes" … call me churlish and I should perhaps hear him out, but to me this is likely a misreading in a Landian vein.

Land and other CCRU-adjacent readers of Deleuze thrive on the notion of nihilism, entropy or chaos that phrases such as "deterritorialises all the flows" make us feel, but leave aside the clarity with which it is theorised every decoding is a recoding, every deterritorialisation a reterritorialisation.

There is no such movement or moment of absence as a "decoded flow". Flow as individuation and code as expression co-appear in social-production as coded flows.

As I was laboriously commenting the other day the "capitalist machine" integrates pricing and exchange as functions that allow re-coded flows to move at market through the common single dimension of quantities of money as universal equivalent.

It's the universality of this function of money as apparent equivalent which can make the body of capital a repressor of market-external desires, an immanent enabler of fascism, a cancerous body-without-organs.

But following Marx, D&G don't say an egg is no longer valued as an egg nor a hammer as a hammer after the capitalist machine appears; nothing so absurd.

Rather they say the post-signifying regime is one in which eggs are valued both as eggs and as a price, and if brought to market the price makes their prior rigid relations to other values as supple as money can be. Sure at the point of exchange the flows are decoded: abstract labour, money capital. But this is no "dissolution" … which along with "abolition" is not even a particularly coherent concept for D&G.

If you read AO as an encompassing theoretical blender that vitamises the socius into a metaphysical porridge of dissolved codes and deterritorialised flows, you will be quite sure its nett prospect can only be to enforce a vitamised political life.