The 2014 book Anti-Social Behaviour in Britain, edited by Sarah Pickard, contains a chapter by Andrew Millie called “The Aesthetics of Anti-Social Behaviour”. Millie examines the relationship between aesthetic values and behaviours society considers antisocial, which we can also think of as behaviours of failure. Millie’s argument is that “aesthetics have an important role in determining what is acceptable or anti-social, and that such assessments have a disproportionate impact on the powerless” (110). He points to the young and the poor as groups “stereotypically regarded as ‘problem’ populations” (106) who often provoke “the mixing of aesthetic judgement and censure” (106) when they are banished from public space/life because their “visible presence does not meet [society’s] aesthetic expectations” (107). The chapter pays particular attention to drunks, as Millie contrasts the cultural perception of drunk homeless people with that of drunk city workers, both of whom are frequently seen drinking in public places:

"Key here is the idea of banishing the ‘unsightly’. [...] As already mentioned, street-drinking city workers are more acceptable than a street-drinking homeless person, with the homeless person regarded as ‘unsightly’ and moved on. Furthermore, the homeless person’s contribution to the local economy is not on the scale of the city workers’ -- and if you are not making a significant contribution to the economy your presence is more likely to be criminalized [...]." (107)

Indeed, the homeless alcoholic -- the wino, the vagrant -- is one of our most persistent and totalizing images of failure; if any figure of the fall seems theoretically irredeemable, this would be the one. And yet, as Millie suggests, our antipathetic view of these characters is grounded in cultural and aesthetic biases.

I use the word “characters” to pivot into a conversation about literary and dramatic art. I mean to consider these figures as they appear in art as a lens through which to reconsider failure, and the acceptance of failure as a form of self-possession. Failure here will be framed as an entry point into what I am terming the "fallen sublime, a political and aesthetic resistance strategy that, like Melville’s famous scrivener Bartleby, envisions hegemonic success and responds “I would prefer not to” (Melville 21).