The Mole, The Snake, and the Acritarch
James Andrew Billingsley
Writing in 1990 on the transition from societies of "discipline" to those of "control," Gilles Deleuze invokes an animal aphorism: the industrial labourer is like a mole, a creature of enclosure, whereas the neoliberal subject is a snake, "undulatory. . . . in a continuous network." These animals reappear twenty-five years later in Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, where the snake illustrates neoliberalism's systems of emotional, financial, and technological manipulation. A short fable introduces them to a third creature to speculate on spatial counterstrategies against neoliberalism.