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

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.