The Mole, The Snake, and the Acritarch

The Mole, The Snake, and the Acritarch

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.