beyond the norm/transgression

For [Lewis] Call, following Baudrillard, power is less stable than indicated by Foucault’s rendering. Power exists through signs and symbols and is thus open to reinterpretation and quick reversals. All the prisons, gulags, and monitoring of citizens could not prevent the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Call notes that the collapse of the Soviet Union, which seemed as if it only took a few minutes, demonstrates what Baudrillard says about the unstable nature of power. “Baudrillard is attempting to unmask the state’s deepest, most closely guarded secret: that its power is unreal, that the state exists only as simulation.” Call quotes Baudrillard here: “The spectacle of those regimes imploding with such ease ought to make Western governments—or what is left of them—tremble, for they have barely any more existence than the Eastern ones.” If anarchists could cultivate practices that move beyond the norm/transgression dichotomy, so that they circulated as common currency throughout society, there is the potential that one day Western governments will disappear as quickly as their counterparts did in the East despite “Total Information Awareness.” - Michael Glavin