the coils of the serpent. journal for the study of contemporary power

“The coils of a serpent”, Gilles Deleuze writes at the end of his influential essay Postscript on the Societies of Control, “are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.” But exactly how complex are they? The short text by Deleuze demonstrates the necessity to rethink power in the 21st century. When, to take up Marx’s imagery to which Deleuze refers, the distinct boundary lines between the surfaces of (capitalist) domination and the tunnels of (proletarian) resistance as they characterized the disciplinary societies of modernity dissolve in an increasingly complicated postmodern world of surfaces, then this requires precise and differentiated analyses of how forms of power change and of the ways in which emancipatory practice has to or already does change accordingly. https://coilsoftheserpent.org