Seven Red

What do you get when you mix a bit of Foucault’s biopower with Debord’s spectacle, and imagine it as fiction in the style of more experimental Delillo (like, say, Cosmopolis) presented in the, well, austere prose style of a Paul Auster? That would be Benoit Duteurtre’s stark little novella The Little Girl and the Cigarette, the prolific young French writer’s only book appearing in English translation.

Yes, this really is the book’s cover, and I’ll leave it to Gunther Kress and the image semioticians to work out its implications. The thing to note here is that the little girl and the cigarette appear in different scales, indicating different planes, a choice between the two. Now, she is probably going to take this as my argument against quitting smoking (the babygirl and the cigarette), but it’s really not. For now it’s enough to say that the choice bumps up against the title, “the little girl and the cigarette,” the mysterious absence of which on the cover portends the tension played out in the novella.

The book develops three main plots which could be said to incorporate a single theme: LONG LIVE LIFE. As we know, Foucault saw modernity as the emergence of a new form of power, called biopower or the biopolitical. Rather than the monarchical power, which could make die (or let live), this new form of power was concerned with life, the ability to make live (or let die). Capital punishment is the form of monarchical power, the more brutal the better. Medical bureaucracy is the form of biopower, and gentle, now. Dutreutre’s novella seizes on this distinction to draw out the dystopia of biopower.

In the first plot, Desire Johnson, a dim-witted or brilliant convicted murderer faces the very gentle lethal injection. All he wants is a cigarette, his right according to the archaic Article 47 of the Law (and yes, the Law is a Kafkaesque presence in TLGATC). But in this near-future nameless country (though obviously France, despite the mention of President Bush Boulevard), smoking is prohibited in the prisons – and pretty much everywhere else, for that matter – for the health of both the prisoners and the guards, so the warden faces a conundrum: let Johnson smoke, and thereby violate the prohibition, or forbid him from smoking, and thereby violate his rights according to Article 47. Like all good bureaucrats, he defers to a higher power – the Supreme Court. Johnson’s case becomes a media spectacle, with the nation divided over whether he should be allowed his request, debates throughout the city about the paradox of preventing a condemned man from harming his health, machinations by a giant tobacco company to use the case for advantage, headlines and breathless reportage. Throughout it all, Johnson is almost impassive, although he seems to understand that granting his request will require sending him out of the prison, during which time he can make his very spectacular escape, with the paradoxical help of ubiquitous surveillance.

In the second plot, a first person narrator tells his own story of the current absurdity. The nation so much believes in life – in making live – that it has glorified children over everything, since they are at once life and future life. The narrator – a minor government researcher and avowed epicure – despises this development, and despises children of all ages. He wonders what will happen to the 40-60 year old men, the most oppressed group in the society, he thinks. He also smokes like a chimney, though his habit now requires him to engage in illegal bathroom smoking, since the administrative offices of the city have been turned into a daycare center in which children run wild (according to him). He complains bitterly about this, but the other people seem to prefer the children to his rantings. This isn’t even a nanny state; it’s a permissive parent state. During one of his bathroom smoke operations, he forgets to fully bar the door, and a little girl walks in on him. He kicks her out, hissing “Get out of here, you stupid idiot!” Of course, this infraction snowballs into a massive criminal charge, called crimes against children, with all the insinuation, and ultimately outright accusation, of sexual abuse. He is even forced to undergo a mock prosecution in a children’s court, the mayor’s attempt to relieve the daycare center/administration building’s children of their psychological trauma (though everyone admits they have a long road of therapy ahead – especially the little girl).

In the third plot, told in third person, a terrorist group called John Wayne’s Conscience have taken a multicultural and decidedly multi-aged band of hostages; the terrorists support (and this is pure Debordian snark) better conditions for terrorism. Rather than offering the hostages for ransom or just publicly offing them, however, they arrange a reality TV show – called A Martyr Idol – which will require the hostages to perform for an audience of voters, with the loser getting the head-cut-off treatment. Perhaps the funniest sentence in the book, then is the following:

For the first test of this morbid competition, the disciples of John Wayne had organized a karaoke contest.

At first, few people vote, but when the Kuwaiti wins the first round (the rules of the contest, which includes singing as well as Jeopardy-like game show fare, are extremely complex, and Duteurtre doesn’t really bother explaining them), and when Desire Johnson, now a celebrity, advocates for the hostages, the whole world begins watching and voting – the game has turned into a global media spectacle. At times, this part of the story seems the most forced, a bit like a thought experiment in which we are asked to consider the absurdity of the 9/11 attacks as spectacle, and what it would mean to truly grasp the synoptic logic of contemporary spectacle as a tool for terrorism (the 9/11 guys were amateurs in this regard, seems to be the argument). Whatever value there may be in showing up the strange imitative relationship between terrorism and contemporary media, Duteurtre still manages to convey that hooked-in sensibility, with the global public debating who is more deserving of life among the various hostages. And isn’t this really what we’re secretly and sometimes not so secretly debating when we watch American Idol or Survivor?

Needless to say, the three plots intersect and build together towards the terrifying – because mild – conclusion.

To read TLGATC, you’d think its author was an American reactionary, peddling the worst kind of libertarian tripe and white male anger. The whole smokers’ rights uprising is classic libertarian fare, and almost as noxious (and obnoxious) as thick tobacco exhaust hovering in a crowded bar (and I smoke!). Moreover, even minor characters have their nationality and ethnicity mentioned with an audible sneer, as if the narrative itself is mocking some multiculti quota system, real or imagined, for the arts. The first person narrator’s pathetic belly-aching about the fate of 40-60 year old men is similarly Limbaugh-esque in outlook and effect. When you learn that the author is actually a French anarchist, however, you might get a little reflective. The full administration of life is just as obnoxious in the story, as is the drooling adulation of the Child, the backfiring and anti-scientific anti-pollution programs, and the deep hypocrisy of particular versions of multiculturalism.

Perhaps the big move in America was not the co-opting of 60′s counter-culture by the right wing, but the co-opting of turn of the century anarchism by that vicious version of American capitalist libertarianism, a theme also taken up to brilliant effect in Pynchon’s stunning Against the Day (about which more later). We know the libertarians inveigh against the so-called “nanny state,” and so good liberals are meant to harrumph and call them children, and thereby argue for the effectiveness of good government. As Foucault and others argued in France, this response is not particularly useful. Yet to do the opposite would seem to support the free market system against regulation (the master articulation of the contemporary and not-so-contemporary right wing). This was always the quandary of the May 68 thinkers. And it’s the quandary contemplated in its French context by The Little Girl and the Cigarette. In the American context, we might ask What has become of American anarchism?

The contemporary left almost cannot contemplate the conflict between support for the state apparatus as a regulatory arm aimed at social amelioration and condemnation of the state apparatus as some kind of “Big Brother” type repression engine. Look at the relative value of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is one week the noble Bush resistor, and the next week a depraved pack of torturers, one week a terrifying surveillance mafia, the next week the supporter of the very upright Ms. Plame-Wilson. The left’s relationship to the state apparatus turns out to be just as incoherent and childlike as the awful me-me-me-ism of the libertarians. The first group substitutes the good state for the bad state, a laughable contrivance; the second substitutes the market for the state, an absurdity because the market requires a state (see uber-moron Lou Dobbs and the densely stupid support that has glommed on to Ron Paul). And lurking in there somewhere is the tradition of American anarchism, filleted and vivisected into the libertarian zombie. But is there and can there be an American anarchism that isn’t immediately capitalist and reactionary libertarianism in practice? Or are we constantly pushed into the choice between the little girl and the cigarette?

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