The Baddie

They call themselves bad, and in the naming believe they have escaped. But the word was never theirs to confiscate. Authority coined it, and authority, which fears nothing so little as its own vocabulary returned to it as ornament, hands the term back gladly. The transgression that can be worn has already been priced. What once drew the lash now draws the eye, and the difference between the two is smaller than the emancipated suppose; both are forms of being looked at under a regime that permits no other mode of existence.

The face tells the story the subject will not. Under liberalism the bourgeois cultivated a singularity, a homeliness convertible into virtue, the nose in which a lineage could be read. The bad one’s features converge instead toward a mean: the same brow, the same lengthened eye, the same lip drawn taut across appetite. This is praised as self-creation. It is the victory of the template over the living thing. Each labours, at cost in coin and pain, to arrive at the countenance already arrived at by every other who performed the labour — and the promise of distinction discharges itself as the standardised particular, since the market can reproduce only the interchangeable and sell only the unique. The lie is resolved upon the cheekbone, where it sits very still.

What disarms criticism is that the capitulation presents as command. They are unbothered. They do not solicit; they are solicited. The whole syntax is the merchant’s affected indifference to the sale, and indifference, once performed, becomes the most exhausting of all employments. One reads in the image the colossal exertion demanded to appear without exertion — the light measured, the negligence rehearsed before the glass until it may be issued as temperament. The spontaneity advertised is exactly the organ that has been excised; what circulates is its photograph, sold as evidence of the thing it has replaced. Freedom here is the freedom of the buyer among detergents, and the stridency of the claim rises with the narrowing of the fact.

Yet the aesthetic did not descend from any boardroom. It rose from those held under a longer and crueller subjection, who made of adornment a refusal, a way of occupying the space the world insisted they vacate. The lacquer, the contour, the deliberate excess — these were nearer to defiance worn as armour than to surrender. The melancholy of the hour is that the apparatus has digested the refusal entire: lifted it from the mouths that meant it, voided the danger, retailed the residue to the planet as a disposition. To expropriate a defiance and resell it as a mood is the subtler atrocity, and whoever sees in the result mere conformity flatters his own remove.

For there is no clean ground from which to despise them. The one who finds the bad one vulgar imagines a finer interior, a taste they lack — and his taste is likewise a purchase, his interior likewise a label, his shelf arranged toward its own photograph. The administered totality tolerates the critique of spectacle as a further commodity within spectacle; the dissident subscribes, the contrarian likes. To stand above is to take a costlier seat in the identical theatre and mistake the fare for elevation.

What is left is not contempt but the grief proper to any gift conscripted into its own reduction. Inside the unbothered one is the bothered one, who wanted and was instructed that visible wanting is the single unpardonable lapse, and who therefore became a sealed surface so that nothing further might be taken — not seeing that the seal is the taking. They are not damned for being bad. They are damned because the order that named them so has convinced them the name was a kindness, and they have received it smiling, behind a face they purchased and a calm they cannot meet the cost of.