Nathan Moore

Drawing on the work of Paul Virilio, this paper addresses changes in the architectural and legal topography of the urban landscape through an examination of regulatory patterns, which increasingly intensify governance through, and as, ‘control’. Such regulation is ambivalent in that it cuts across many traditionally discrete regimes of power melding them into new forms with new effects; as a consequence it is no longer sufficient to think in terms of such distinctions as private/public, civil/criminal, and so on. This paper argues that a concern with patterns of enclosure and privatisation in our urban centres must now be placed within the context of changes in architectural practice and technology, which the authors term ‘open architecture’, and the embedding of governance through partnership, which give particular emphasis to the use of dematerialised and diffused modes of control. The paper utilises Virilio’s history and image of the fortress, which he tracks from a material form to a dematerialised form, to envisage these developments and to provide the foundation for an understanding of the importance of the development of practices of surveillance into, what the authors term, ‘total registration’ as a feature and function of governance through ‘control’.

This paper is broadly concerned with Deleuze’s distinction between ‚la loi et les lois’ on the one hand, and jurisprudence on the other. Jurisprudence is the␣creative action of legal practice, the process by which it is forced to think constructively and anew. In such circumstances legal thought is akin to Deleuze’s concept of the event. I explore the distinction between law and jurisprudence by way of Deleuze’s comments on control societies, arguing that, under control, law ceases to be a juridical hierarchy conforming to disciplinary modes to become a regulatory practice of interminable modulation. In order to begin to explore the relations and connections between law/jurisprudence and control, the paper will look to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce (who influenced Deleuze’s work on cinema). In particular it will argue that control operates predominantly through icons. As a consequence I argue that the proper ground of the sign, the event, is co-opted and, following from this, that control functions through the confusing of sense and meaning