Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience

Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience

This article relates to Gliff

In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been judged to be socially unacceptable, marking them off from the rest of society.

On a symbolic level, these red painted circles are a brilliantly evocative image, calling to mind the red circles a teacher inks around mistakes or a proofreader's marks flagging text for deletion or correction. Inevitably, there are also echoes of the term "redlining"—discrimination through systematic exclusion—while the imagery of circles and red lines evokes both the notion of a boundary not to be crossed and the notion of being cast out of bounds. Crossing the line results in social exclusion, expressed in the most visible way—being branded in glaring red, the color of prohibition (think stop signs) or shame (think The Scarlet Letter).

As a literal plot device, the painted red circles in Gliff add an element of the absurd to the story. In the dystopian world of the book, these red circles function as a powerful form of social control. Faced with red paint, most of the characters freeze as if encountering an insurmountable barrier or scatter in panic as if confronting a lethal threat. Yet for all their ominous symbolism, the lines are comically easy to circumvent. The red paint around the children's house is laid over loose bits of rubble that can easily be scraped away. Rose, the younger sibling, simply walks over the line and strides into their house. In an added twist, the machine that paints these lines is absurdly low-tech for such a high-tech society—a crude, hand-pushed contraption similar to a lawnmower that looks like "an invention made by an amateur for a joke," as Smith describes it. "Why are those machines they're using so rubbish?" Briar, the elder sibling, comments, "Don't we rate being bullied by something more technologically impressive?"

Absurd, surreal, and illogical elements are common in dystopian fiction, used to convey a sense of disorientation and alienation, the unsettling experience of living under the senseless and arbitrary dictates of an oppressive system. In Gliff, the absurd incongruity of Smith's line-painting machine—"such a stupid looking apparatus," as Briar puts it—also works as a reminder of another feature of oppressive and authoritarian regimes: they exert power over us by extracting our complicity and compliance. A clunky machine you can easily knock over and a circle of paint you can simply sidestep are threatening only if you've accepted the dictates of the regime imposing these threats. Otherwise, they're just comical.

Reflecting on the relationship between power and resistance, Vaclav Havel, a one-time political dissident and later president of the Czech Republic, argued that in a totalitarian society, people's everyday acts of acquiescence and compliance reinforce a culture of obedience that enables and perpetuates the repressive power of the state. "Individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system," he wrote in his essay "The Power of the Powerless."

In Gliff, it is perhaps not a stretch to see this dynamic at work in the behavior of Briar and Rose's young neighbor, who accidentally ends up in a red circle of paint and remains frozen inside, terror-stricken, even as the horse next to him walks on, stepping over the red paint like it isn't even there. It is certainly evident in the response given by one man who is confronted while applying the red circles: just doing my job, he says.

Havel's concept of compliance is similar to what American historian Timothy Snyder has referred to as anticipatory obedience in explaining how governments with authoritarian tendencies can devolve into full-blown tyranny. "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given," Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny. "A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do."

In the early stages, the demands may seem small and relatively inconsequential—perhaps, like the red painted circles in Gliff, nothing that looks like a serious threat. Yet by falling into line with its demands, people and institutions show the regime what it can get away with, enabling it to seize increasingly more extreme powers and to exercise ever-growing coercion. By then, of course, it is too late. The "first heedless acts of conformity" can no longer be reversed, as Snyder writes.

In Gliff, some but not all of the houses and buildings marked with red circles are later bulldozed by the state. Briar wonders what the point of it all is. "If they're not going to knock down all the places that they paint red round, why are they painting red round buildings at all?" Oona, an elderly activist Briar meets, gestures to the people passing by. Swerving in unison to avoid a section of red pavement, they flow away from the paint in a single mass, as if magnetized by an irresistible electric force. "I'd have said the point makes itself pretty clear," she answers. "See what a simple line, a visible mark of the utmost simplicity and cheapness, can do to a populace?"

Historians and policy experts warn that authoritarianism is on the rise in the United States and around the world. If so, Smith's grim vision of the future has clear lessons for today. So does Timothy Snyder: "Do not obey in advance."

Filed under Society and Politics

This article relates to Gliff. It first ran in the February 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.