From critical theory to critical fabulism: Aesthetics in a minor key

Abstract

In this essay to mark the centenary of the Frankfurt School, I situate the (his)story of domination between critical theory and critical fabulism. The version of this (his)story crafted by the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers is anchored in the idea of ‘the masses’, and in the first part of the article, I track this through the work of Theodore Adorno, drawing on Grant Kester's writings on ‘exculpatory critique’. The second part of the paper pivots to Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulism, which affords a way of refiguring the relationship between aesthetics and politics while also refusing the idea of the masses. In contrast to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which is an all-or-nothing wager with a future currently foreclosed and forever deferred, in the world(s) that Hartman fabulates, the revolution is always already happening.

Introduction: Critical theory and the thought of the outside

If we were to pose a question as to what animates critical theory, one plausible answer would be the possibility of social and political transformation. Experiencing the world as it is – in its unpredictable and at times unbearable entanglements of beauty, cruelty, love, and suffering – seems to push us to imagine the world as it might otherwise be. It is this push that conjures what Michel Foucault calls ‘the thought of the outside’ (1994). Originally published in 1966, Foucault's essay on the thought of the outside engages critically with what he refers to as ‘humanism’ which, in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1972: 12–13), serves as a kind of shorthand for ‘the doctrine that, behind history or beyond it, looms the singular nature or the singular essence of the human subject’ (Faubian, 1994: xv). It turns out that the thought of the outside can only be thought by an embodied subject, and is thus caged by the historical and cultural specificity of language and discourse. The outside is an imaginary projection that – depending on how it is figured, whether it poses as transcendental truth or operates as a subversive intervention in the order of things – has a bearing on what Foucault would later discuss under the heading of ‘critique’ (1997). If, as Foucault proposes, the task of critique is to ‘transform the subject’, meaning transform ourselves (1997: 153), then we have to somehow get beyond the thought of the outside figured as truth, and thereby enact a politics of refusal. The problem of course is ‘how’ – how do we imagine a beyond from within? For Foucault, it is aesthetic experience in the guise of avant-garde art that provides an answer to this question, and this is something Foucault shares with Theodore Adorno, which is not to suggest that their respective views on aesthetic experience are identical or interchangeable, but it is worth noting that in his lecture ‘What is critique?’, Foucault expresses ‘fellowship’ with the Frankfurt School of critical theory (1997: 55). More specifically, there is a family resemblance between Adorno's negative dialectics and the insights that Foucault derives from avant-garde literature. Maurice Blanchot's fictions are exemplary in this regard, in that he draws the reader into a paradoxical situation that Foucault claims is the imbrication of attraction and transgression – an existential threshold that is ‘neither fiction nor reflection, neither already said nor never yet said, but is instead “between”’ (1994: 154).

What I am going to explore in this short essay is how the thought of the outside shapes the relationship between politics and aesthetics, theory and praxis. To be clear, and to emphasise the central paradox, the thought of the outside, extending to the ‘beyond’ that radicalises it – that which is ‘neither already said nor never yet said’ – is generated from within the enclosure of language and discourse, and thus also within the enclosure of embodied (inter-) subjectivity. The thought of the outside is an initial and perhaps unavoidable step in imagining the possibility of social and political transformation, but as I will argue in the next section by focusing on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, it comes at a price if it assumes a purely negative form – a void in the fabric of being generated by an aesthetics of negation. My argument is that we need to retrieve what is remaindered by this way of constituting the thought of the outside, and to this end in section two I look to Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulism, which will be presented as ‘aesthetics in a minor key’.

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and ‘exculpatory critique’

In this section, I present a critical account of Adorno's aesthetic theory, and the emphasis will be on critique as opposed to exegesis. A fuller account would require more space, and it would also be worthwhile to explore the ‘fellowship’ with the Frankfurt School that Foucault refers to, ¹ but for reasons of brevity, I am going to focus on Adorno and what I referred to earlier as the cost of staking the future on an aesthetics of negation. As a line of approach, I begin with Kester's (2015) analysis of ‘exculpatory critique’, which encompasses two guiding assumptions:

First, that the artist (or artist qua theorist) possesses a uniquely privileged capacity to comprehend the totality of capitalist domination, standing in for a proletariat that has remained stubbornly indifferent to its historical destiny (Adorno uses the metaphor of the artist as a ‘deputy’). And second, that art can preserve this remarkable prescience only be refusing to debase itself through any direct involvement with social resistance or activism.

While Kester mentions Adorno specifically on this occasion, the model of exculpatory critique is by no means unique to Adorno (see Kester, 2023), though – as I aim to show – Adorno exemplifies its twin assumptions, which are distilled by Kester as ‘the incapacity of the masses’, and ‘the prematurity of practice’ (2023: 79, 133).

In the chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment devoted to the ‘culture industry’, the assumed incapacity of the masses comes through loud and clear as Horkheimer and Adorno explain that:

The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped … Through the mediation of the total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses, human beings are being turned back into precisely what the developmental law of society had opposed: mere examples of the species, identical to one another … The rowers, unable to speak to one another, are all harnessed to the same rhythms … (2002: 28–29)

I am not suggesting that this way of diagnosing ‘the total society’ is simply wrong. Indeed, it could be argued that the world we inhabit now, with the culture industry powered by algorithms, big data, and artificial intelligence, makes Horkheimer and Adorno's argument seem prescient. That said, and this applies as much to the present as the past, the argument holds only as long as we trade in the currency of generalisations aligned to a very specific way of seeing, whereby theory operates as a lens. I will come back to this below by looking to Hartman's micro-level analysis, but here I want to pivot from the assumed incapacity of the masses to the corresponding assumed prematurity of practice. This goes some way to explaining Adorno's response to leftist student activists who occupied the Institute for Social Research in 1969 – he called the police to have them removed (Richter and Adorno, 2002). This might seem like a cheap shot at Adorno in that it bypasses the complexity of his writings while exemplifying his well-known intellectual elitism. ² It is thus important not to lose sight of the fact that in the actions of the students, Adorno glimpsed the spectre of incipient fascism (or ‘left fascism’ as Jürgen Habermas put it). In his correspondence with Herbert Marcuse in the wake of this episode, and it should be noted that Marcuse was of the view that there was an international student movement brewing that might become ‘the strongest, perhaps the only catalyst for the internal collapse of the system of domination today’ (Adorno and Marcuse, 1999: 133), Adorno explained that he did not share Marcuse's view that praxis ‘in its emphatic sense is not blocked today’. Adorno was convinced that the student protest movement in Germany was indifferent to the way it threatened to ‘inflame’ an ‘undiminished fascist potential’ in the country at that time, while also ‘breeding tendencies’ that ‘directly converge with fascism’. Adorno qualifies his assessment as follows:

I name as symptomatic … the technique of calling for a discussion, only to then make one impossible; the barbaric inhumanity of a mode of behaviour that is regressive and even confuses regression with revolution; the blind primacy of action; the formalism which is indifferent to the content and shape of that against which one revolts, namely our theory. (Adorno and Marcuse, 1999: 131)

This was written during the summer of 1969, more than twenty years after the earlier quote on the culture industry from Dialectic of Enlightenment, and little has changed in Adorno's thinking, which was one of the things that Marcuse took issue with (Adorno and Marcuse, 1999: 129). The masses apparently confuse regression with revolution, and thus the ‘primacy of action’ stands accused of attacking not only Adorno personally, but also the theoretical edifice produced by the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt University. The historical record would support Adorno's stance, up to a point, with the actions of the Red Army Faction – the bombings, arson attacks, kidnappings, and assassinations that commenced from the late 1960s in Germany – being one historically proximate example.

To expand the context slightly, it is interesting to note that in a short essay originally delivered as a radio address in 1968, Adorno seems to anticipate criticisms of his later response to the student activists, and does so by refuting the accusation that ‘we older representatives of what the name “Frankfurt School” has come to designate have recently and eagerly been accused of resignation’ (1978: 165). In refuting this critique, Adorno explains that the ‘repressive intolerance’ to ‘thought’ that doesn’t seek to actualise itself through the immediacy of action is ‘founded on anxiety’ (166). As to the cause of this anxiety, Adorno's belief in his own ‘thought’ is unwavering. Those who accuse him and his colleagues of resignation know deep down that he is ‘right’, they just can’t admit it (166), and so they commit to a self-defeating folly. Anxiety begets ‘rage’ that turns inwards against the self (he attributes this to an ‘age-old bourgeois mechanism with which the eighteenth century Enlightenment thinkers were familiar’), manifesting as ‘pseudo-activity … that overdoes and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity’ (167), and on it goes. Pseudo-activity is but a futile attempt to ‘rescue enclaves of immediacy’ from the totally administered society, and according to Adorno, this pointless gesture is rationalised by claiming that ‘is it one step on the long path to the transformation of the whole’, which merely serves as justification for a ‘disastrous model of … do-it-yourself activities’ that lack the capacity to transform the ‘totality’ into something other than what it already is (167). Against this theatre of the absurd stands a resolute Adorno, self-fashioned as ‘the uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness not lets himself be terrorised into action’. Against the charge of resignation, Adorno ‘is in truth the one who does not give in’ (168). So, Adorno holds his ground, refusing to capitulate to ‘repressive intolerance’, but what exactly is it that the time of praxis waits for and anticipates? The answer to that question can be discerned from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, which circles back to the thought of the outside and the part that aesthetic experience is to play in freeing us from the ‘system of domination’ that Marcuse refers to.

Aesthetic Theory anticipates ‘a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’ (2002: 243), and according to Adorno, it is the ‘enigmatic truth content’ of art that harbours this radically transformative potential (see p. 128). In the background to this notion of an enigmatic truth is what Adorno refers to as ‘serious art’, meaning art that stands apart from ‘degraded, dishonoured and administered art’ (2002: 39, 311). The distinction Adorno makes between serious art and ‘entertainment’ articulates the ever-present danger of art being recuperated by the culture industry, in which case it becomes ‘vulgar’ and ‘degrades people by cancelling out its distance from an already degraded humanity’ (314). The stakes are thus high, and for Adorno, only serious art has the capacity to transfigure the subject constituted by the socio-historical totality of capitalism and the culture industry. However, this radical encounter with the enigmatic truth content of art cannot take the form of a reciprocal relationship between subject and (art) object (see Kester, 2023: 119–120, 124). This is not about projecting one's subjective desires through the work of art, and nor is it about extracting (established or imaginable) concepts or ideas from encounters with art that might then inform situated/embodied political struggle. There is no agency at work here, unless we allow for the agency of art itself, which acts through and upon the subject as though art alone possesses an emancipatory power.

The thought of the outside is immanent to art yet exists as a horizon that recedes into a future that never arrives. In other words, the envisioned ‘transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’ can be grasped within the realm of critical theory as a fugitive idea, but the aesthetics of negation serves only to defer the time of praxis. In short, the time is not yet, because the masses are not ready. Adorno knows this because he says it is so. This stance of certainty is evident in Adorno's essay on the ‘Culture industry reconsidered’, where he delivers his diagnostics of the masses by adopting a psychoanalytical register with a twist of pathos:

The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all (1991: 103).

Here we learn that the assumed incapacity of the masses requires a type of exertion; the effort that goes into self-deception is what makes an otherwise intolerable life tolerable, and so, to come back to the transformative potential of art – noting that this spans consciousness and social reality – we might pose a question: how exactly does this apply to the masses? Otherwise put, who is Adorno writing to, for, and about?

In the introduction to the English translation of Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullot-Kentor suggests that a reader can open any page and, without reading a single word, ‘see that the book is visibly antagonistic’ (2002: xi). It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that Aesthetic Theory is Adorno walking his own talk. As a discursive procedure – by which I mean technique, operation, method – the book stages a cognitive encounter between the authority of the text and an envisioned reader who is interpellated by Adorno's ‘visibly antagonistic’ structure and style of textual composition. In this way, Aesthetic Theory bestows a form of sovereign power upon critical theory itself, which again begs the question (now refined) as to who is the subject of this sovereign power, and who is subject to it?

Figured as a mass of bodies moving to the rhythm of the culture industry, the lives that Adorno homogenises as the masses are written into his story of domination in a way comparable to a cast of extras on a movie set. The script dictates that the masses act the part of being complicit in their own domination – and not reluctantly either, for ‘mass deception’ is a game ‘in which they [the masses] have desperately collaborated’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 36, 208). If and when the lives corralled by the idea of the masses refuse to play what Jacques Rancière (2011: 33) calls ‘the part of no part’, then the part performed by the supplement threatens to supplant the privileged place reserved for critical theory, and this is the precise moment when critical theory reveals itself to be analogous to sovereign power, unwilling to countenance a praxis that does not conform to ‘our theory’ (as Adorno puts it in his reply to Marcuse).

What if we were to play this game of power by different rules, acknowledging that the numerous lives that populate the category of the masses are in fact doing precisely what Adorno assumes they are doing, i.e., part-taking in the commercial entertainments provided by the culture industry, but doing so on their terms. Moreover, what if we move Adorno out of the way so that we can actually hear and see what's happening down there in the bowels of the culture industry – would that shift the balance of power in the Frankfurt School's story of domination?

Aesthetics in a minor key

Hullot-Kentor notes that Adorno's Aesthetic Theory ‘was written in refusal of a country [the US] that it depicts as a completely commercial order’ (in Adorno, 2002: xi). Saidiya Hartman takes us into the beating heart of this same country, which is also the cultural context that informed Adorno's views on jazz and other popular art forms. More specifically, the social setting for Hartman's Wayward Lives is Progressive Era America, extending through the Harlem Renaissance, loosely defined in temporal terms as spanning the end of the First World War through to the onset of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance was less a political movement on the part of African Americans than a shared experience animated by writers and poets such as Claude McKay and Langston Hughes, intellectuals (W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey), performers and musicians (Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington), visual artists (Aaron Douglas), film-makers (Oscar Micheaux), and photographers (James van der Zee) (Howes, 2001).

A top-down version of this history would focus on the accomplishments of the individuals listed above. Hartman does in fact have some interesting things to say about Du Bois and, in a less direct manner, Micheaux (who I will come back to below), but the lives that Hartman fabulates are framed by the notion of ‘minor figures’. This is not history of ‘the great man or the tragic hero’ variety (2019: 348), but another kind of story, told not through the actions and achievements of the artists who authored the textual, visual and musical compositions that are anthologised in the literature on the Harlem Renaissance, but through the power relations – both oppressive and mutually empowering – that made up the texture of everyday social life. In other words, this too is a story of domination (of sorts), but it is not without hope, courage, or inventiveness.

In contrast to Adorno's dismissal of popular and commercial art-forms, Hartman shows us how jazz, blues, cabaret, and dance could become a way of practising what I will refer to here as aesthetics in a minor key, which is about the art of living, or as Hartman puts it, ‘beautiful experiments … undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild, and wayward’ (p. xvi). The lives that Hartman retrieves from the archive are re-presented as ‘riotous black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals’, and what I am proposing is that this reconfigures the thought of the outside, so that instead of dismissing the ‘primacy of action’ as evidence of regression posing as revolution, we can glean insights into how the thought of the outside is immanent to embodied subjectivity and situated practices of refusal. Otherwise put, the ‘transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality’ which is aligned to the enigmatic truth content of art in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, is staged within the fabric of everyday life, and enacted by ‘minor figures’.

The chapter of Wayward Lives titled ‘Mistah beauty, the autobiography of an ex-coloured woman’ (pp. 193–202) fabulates the life of Gladys Bentley – blues singer, pianist, and drag king – who is re-imagined as the subject of an Oscar Micheaux film. The fictional opening scene depicts a mother who rejects – by refusing to embrace – her new-born child; a child who grows into a star with a voracious appetite for the love of women, as though it might be possible to fill the lack of maternal love experienced at birth. As the imagined film approaches the closing credits, fictional narration becomes entangled in biographical facts, leaving us – the reader, now positioned as witness to a tragedy – with a textual epitaph enfolded within a eulogy that Hartman presents as ‘lines from the deathbed’. Here Gladys explains that:

I inhabited that half-shadow of no man's land which exists between the boundaries of the two sexes. Throughout the world there are thousands of us furtive humans who have created for ourselves a fantasy as old as civilisation itself; a fantasy which enables us, if only temporarily, to turn our back on the hard realm of life. Our number is legion and our heartbreak inconceivable. (p. 202)

In this quasi-fictional scene, Hartman is in fact quoting from an article Bentley wrote for Ebony magazine in 1952, published under the title ‘I am a woman again’. Featuring photographs of Bentley with their new husband, and dressed as a housewife while making the marital bed and washing the dishes, it would seem that Bentley's beautiful experiment culminates in capitulation to patriarchy and the medicalisation of queer lives, with Bentley explaining to the reader that:

Today I am a woman again through the miracle which took place not only in my mind and heart – when I found a man I could love and who could love me – but also in my body – when the magic of modern medicine made it possible for me to have treatment which helped change my life completely. (1952: 94)

There is, however, more to this scene than meets the eye, as Hartman explains (2019: 200):

In the 1930s, state law would require female performers to apply for a licence to wear men's clothing in their acts. Queers were placed in the sightlines of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bentley's much discussed marriage to a white woman in a civil ceremony made the entertainer vulnerable.

If Bentley's renunciation of their former life signals a victory for patriarchy and heteronormativity, it is arguably at the shallow end of an apparatus that attempted to force wayward lives to conform to the extant normative order. One of the elements that enabled this apparatus to function was the ‘status offence’ which, as Hartman explains (p. 221), ‘was a form of behaviour deemed illegal only for a particular group of persons’, and here again we encounter the factual dimension of Hartman's method, which is layered into the title and idiom of her book. ‘Wayward’ was codified by statutes that empowered magistrates to sentence young women to reformatories in the name of ‘protective measures’ (p. 222; also Garlock, 1979). At the risk of being apprehended and sentenced were ‘those who dared refuse the gender norms and social conventions of sexual propriety’ (p. 221).

Nestled within the status offence of waywardness was the ‘crime’ of living on one's own terms, exemplified by the story of Esther Brown, who likened domestic service to slavery. Esther was a teenage mother who did not marry the father of her child, and Hartman notes that by the age of seventeen, Esther ‘had nearly perfected the art of surviving without having to scrape and bow’ (p. 233). Longing for ‘another world’, for Esther ‘the aesthetic wasn’t a realm separate and distinct from the daily challenges of survival; rather the aim was to make an art of subsistence. She did not try to create a poem or song or painting. What she created was Esther Brown’ (p. 235). Living her life in ‘open rebellion’ (p. 237), Esther's beautiful experiment was conducted by strolling the avenues of Harlem or ‘losing herself in cabarets and movie houses’ (p. 234), but she finally fell afoul of the law on the night of 17 July 1917. An undercover detective named Brady had talked his way into the company Esther was keeping, and he made his move when the boyfriend of Esther's friend Rebecca asked Brady for fifty cents to buy liquor. Brady charged the boyfriend with white slavery (trafficking girls and women for the purpose of prostitution), while Esther was charged with vagrancy under the Tenement House Law (LSNY, 1901). As a young unwed mother, Esther's fate was all but sealed, and the social worker who reviewed her case decided she should be ‘rescued’. The Women's Court went further and sentenced Esther to three years at the reformatory for ‘being unemployed and leading the life of a prostitute’ (240–241). As Hartman notes sardonically, ‘One could lead the life of a prostitute without actually being one’ (p. 241).

As for the fate of Esther, the model of reformatory punishment, and in particular the Bedford Hills reformatory in New York State, looms large in Wayward Lives, and with good reason. Coercive control was the price paid by many of the girls and women who refused to conform to the racialised and gendered order of things. To refuse to be bound by the ‘servitude’ of a life in ‘the kitchen or the factory or the brothel’ (p. 298) was to risk being ‘rescued’ by the agents of ‘uplift’ and ‘betterment’, and the reformatory at Bedford was one of the instruments through which ‘uplift’ was orchestrated. In excavating the experience of life inside the reformatory, Hartman looks to the findings of a State Prison Commission, which reported on the violence the inmates at Bedford Hills were subject to, such as being beaten with rubber hoses, having their faces submerged in cold water until they couldn’t hold their breath, and confined in isolation cells for weeks (p. 263). When questioned on these practices, the prison superintendent explained that she considered such practices to be ‘treatment, not punishment’ (p. 265).

During December 1919, the women in Lowell Cottage at Bedford reformatory (one of six cottages reserved for Black girls) staged a riot, tossing their mattresses, breaking windows, pounding the walls with their fists, and raising hell with their voices. A journalist for the New York Times described the rebellion as a ‘noise strike’, and as the ‘din of an infernal chorus’ (p. 279). Hartman deflects the journalistic sensationalism by fabulating ‘the chorus’ as a ‘sonic revolt’ and a ‘soundscape of rebellion and refusal’ (p. 279). In response to the headlines printed in the New York Times – ‘Devil's chorus sung by girl rioters’, ‘Bedford hears mingled shrieks and squeals, suggesting inferno set to jazz’ – Hartman suggests that for the journalists, jazz serves as synonym for ‘primal sound, unrestrained impulse, savage modernism’. Leaning into that interpretation, Hartman adds that the riot was an act of ‘improvisation’, activating ‘the aesthetic possibilities that resided in the unforeseen’; it was ‘collaboration in the space of enclosure’ and it ‘exceeded the interpretative grid of the state authorities and the journalists’ (p. 284). In short, the ‘Devil's chorus’ was, in the words of Hartman, ‘the soundtrack to a history that hurt’ (p. 285), but also an ‘incubator of possibility’ (p. 348). Reaching back in time to the barracoon, the hold, and the plantation, the riot was (still is?) part ‘aesthetic inheritance’ and part ‘philosophy of freedom’ (p. 285). Otherwise put, the ‘chorus’ of voices and bodies acting together, thereby supporting and sustaining each other, is ‘the dangerous music of black life’ that inhabits the time-space of the ‘interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet’ (2008: 14). This indeterminate interval is where Hartman places her readers, thus leaving it to us to figure out what happens next. In contrast to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, which is an all-or-nothing wager with a future currently foreclosed and forever deferred, in the world(s) that Hartman fabulates, the revolution is always already happening.

Concluding reflection

In tracing an arc from past to present – from the profound inequalities that form the backdrop to Hartman's Wayward Lives (as well as Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment) – and returning to my opening remark concerning the possibility of social and political transformation, we might ask how change has happened in the past or might happen in the present. We might also reasonably ask how transformative change ought to come about, but to frame the question in that way is already to privilege reason as the measure of what counts when it comes to grasping the relation between the actual and the possible. How the question is framed matters, not least because it has a bearing on the role that fiction plays in imagining other worlds. At stake is the difference between critical fiction and normative fiction. ³

If we look beyond Horkheimer and Adorno to the next generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, then we find Habermas’ approach to this question framed by the notion of an ‘ideal communication community’ (1987) and the ‘forceless force of plausible reasons’ (1996: 24). Fashioned from a sophisticated theory of communicative action, and this alongside his history of the liberal public sphere (1991), Habermas’ social theory is grounded in a ‘methodological fiction’ that generates a mode of public deliberation and decision-making which is emptied of the capriciousness of affective relationships and desire (1996: 323). As for the subject of Habermas’ ideal communication community, this too is a fiction – a normative figuring of the subject that echoes the old figure of ‘Man’. As Judith Butler points out, Habermas’ answer to the question, ‘What are we to do?” presupposes that the “we” has been formed and that it is known, that its action is possible, and the field in which it might act is delimited’ (2002: 213). This is precisely how the currency of normative fiction operates in the field of liberal and democratic political theory. ⁴ It is a game of exclusion whereby the ‘inside’ becomes an enclosure constituted by what is cast ‘outside’ (see Derrida, 1997).

This way of thinking the thought of the outside has a long pedigree, and can be traced back to the Enlightenment faith in human reason, which is what inaugurates the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Adorno's way of evading this type of epistemic enclosure is to think dialectically. ‘Open thinking points beyond itself’ he says (1978: 168), but if this is the case, then what is Adorno pointing to? The opening that Adorno's theory points toward is born from an aesthetics of negation, and it takes the form of a ‘void’ (see Foucault, 1994: 152).

Hartman's interval on the other hand mirrors Foucault's reading of Blanchot's fictions, figuring a ‘between’ that remains within the enclosure of language and discourse while gesturing towards a politics of refusal. At the same time, and here is a point of overlap with Adorno, there is something of a lacuna in Hartman's work when it comes to the matter of social and political transformation. If Wayward Lives is read within the arc of history, then it becomes necessary to synoptically contextualise the beautiful experiments that Hartman so carefully fabulates, and thereby acknowledge the ways in which the thought of the outside has been and can be grounded in durational practices and movements that engage in organised forms of political struggle. Hartman's ‘chorus’ is not just the rebellious girls and women she retrieves from the archive, it is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, Black Lives Matter, the Stonewall rebellion and the Gay Liberation Front. It is also – and I write this with a nod to Adorno in 1969 – forms of ideological extremism such as the contemporary Identitarian movement. This is the moment we are living at the time of writing this essay, and there are no guarantees that the chorus will not acquire a form that Adorno would call ‘regressive’.

The time when the thought of the outside could pose as an emancipatory horizon to be disclosed by the correct theoretical procedure has passed. The cat is well and truly out of the bag, and the fictive nature of the thought of the outside is in plain sight – evidenced not only in the way that movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter harness the power of language and imagination, but also by the rise of demagoguery and the tactical objective of ‘controlling the narrative’. So, if we are look to ourselves and each other in figuring out the perplexing problem of praxis, do we also look to critical theory for guidance on when to act and what to do, and if so, are we willing to live with the realisation that theory is a more or less useful, more or less compelling way of crafting and conjuring the thought of the outside?