ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relation between biopolitics and the demonically vitalist ontology. Brandscaping is a way to investigate how control rhizomatically ramifies in such a spatial thickness, both as a certain 'form of urban experience' as well as in its concrete realisation into urban assemblages of consumption and immunity. Control is an unauthorised and impersonal emergence, immanent configuration of power tied to the historically-specific convergence of different theoretical, scientific, technological, socio-cultural evolutions. If the basic mechanism of sovereignty is the 'secret', then the basic mechanism of the critique of sovereignty is the 'revelation'. The urban is a foamy tensegrity, and like any foam is in perpetual oscillation between a stability which, if too rigid, would make it so inflexible to burst at the minimal pertur bation and a flexibility which, if too loose, would make it so inconsistent to dissolve. The urban is a 'concrete abstraction' in which the contradictory sociospatial relations of capitalism are at once territorialized and generalized.
