Chaosophy - autonomous learning

22
GANGS IN N
YOR K
Marginality is the vantage point which illuminates the points of
rupture within social structures and the beginnings of a new problematic
in the field of the collective desiring-economy. It is a matter
of analyzing marginality, not as a psychopathological manifestation,
but as the most vibrant and mobile part of human
collectivities in their attempts to find responses to the changes in
social and material structures.
But the notion of marginality itself remains extremely ambiguous.
In fact, it always implies the idea of a hidden dependence on a
society which claims to be normal. Marginality calls for recentering
and recuperation. We would like to oppose it to the idea of minority.
A minority may choose to be definitively minoritarian. For example,
militant homosexuals in the United States are minoritarians
who refuse to be marginalized. In the same way, we may consider
that black and Puerto Rican gangs in the United States are no more
marginal than the blacks and Puerto Ricans in the districts of the
large cities which they sometimes almost entirely control. What we
are dealing with here is a new phenomenon which indicates new
directions. A current simplification consists in saying that these
types of gangs simply deploy self-defense mechanisms and that
their existence only results from the fact that political power, the
parties, and the unions still have not found a response to this
problem. (It is in the hope of finding such a response that the
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