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Chaosophy - autonomous learning

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governor of California, Ronald Reagan, tried to establish a colossal<br />

research center meant to study the means of curbing violence. It<br />

ended up going in the same direction as the film A Clockwork<br />

Orange, and hardly in a less caricatural way.)<br />

It is a fact that given the phenomena of decomposition experienced<br />

by very large cities in the United States, urbanization and<br />

"urbanity," if they ever did, cease to go hand in hand. The function<br />

of the city as a "melting pot" gives rise, when the urban texture is<br />

cancerous, to an acceleration of racial segregation, and a reinforcement<br />

of particularisms service to such extent that circulating from<br />

one district to another becomes impossible. (The police only enter<br />

exceptionally into certain districts in New York.)<br />

Rather than considering such phenomena as collective<br />

responses improvised because of a lack (a lack of shelter, for example),<br />

we should study them as a blind social experiment on a huge<br />

scale. In a more or less significant manner, social minorities<br />

explore the problems raised by the economy of desire in the urban<br />

field. This exploration does not offer forms or models, and it does<br />

not provide a remedy to something that would be pathological; it<br />

indicates the direction of new modalities of the organization of<br />

collective subjectivity.<br />

Let us consider a typical example: that of South Bronx in New<br />

York. Bands of youths sometimes involving several thousand<br />

individuals control an entire part of this city. They had given<br />

themselves a very rigid, very hierarchized, and even traditionalist<br />

organization. Women are organized in parallel gangs but remain<br />

completely subjected to the male gangs. These gangs participate,<br />

on the one hand, in a fascist desiring-economy, and, on the other,<br />

in what some of their leaders themselves call a primitive socialism<br />

(grassroots) . Let us note the signs of an interesting evolution. In<br />

certain Puerto Rican gangs in New York, whre young women<br />

were traditionally subjugated to male leaders, more <strong>autonomous</strong><br />

292 /

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