Body at Work/Play: or, The Coils of a Serpent

Gilles Deleuze ends his short ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ by noting ‘The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.’1 In this paper I will focus on the different bodily concepts, references and models discussed by Deleuze (and his collocutor Michel Foucault), exploring their tangible, contradictory manifestation in two recent ‘co-working spaces’; the Electric Works (Sheffield, 2009) and BrewDog Waterloo (London, 2022).2 Paradigmatic of neoliberal working practices and associated control over the distributed body of ‘dividuals’,3 both projects include a prominent helter-skelter or slide, and in their (self)publicity they foreground these features with laboured amazement.
The ’coils’ of these particular metal serpents are akin to ‘the most idiotic’ game shows, which Deleuze notes ‘are so successful ... because they express the corporate situation with great precision.’4 Limiting discussion to the slides and the ways in which they stage or imitate play/fun (in-situ and though various media), these architectural sitting-ducks can be easily grasped as a gesture politics of misdirection, more mole than snake. The slides recompose a prior (historical) state of the bounded (worker)body, gathering two poles of Foucault’s ‘disciplinary societies’: the individual and the mass;5 the sliding body of the punter and the assumed embodied audience. Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming note wryly: ‘Herein lies a curious aspect of biocracy, what we might call a formalized informality ... Yet work remains in its Deleuzian“gaseous”form,whichistheexactoppositeofplay,fun.’6 Whilepaying attention to the embodied, haptic body-architectures of the latter, I will also slide back towards the gaseous body and biocracy that these helter-skelters seek to obscure.