Recasting Dialectics: Hannah Black’s Deep Cuts

This essay offers a lyric reading of Hannah Black’s novella, Tuesday or September or the End, to argue that strategies of lyric figuration serve to mark the difference between the real movement of history and its representations. Noting the speculative dimensions of Marx’s own analysis, the author compares Fredric Jameson’s and Carolyn Lesjak’s spatial accounts of incommensurable temporalities to Fred Moten’s lyric concept of the “notin-between” to highlight a surprising coherence between Marxist and lyric methods for figuring the dialectical interference of distinct striations of time. Reading lyric dialectically, the essay argues, allows us to apprehend moments of recognition in their simultaneously negative character and to locate ourselves within large and unknown systems. Lyric strategies thus bring both the “real” of value relations and the production of difference into figuration as dialectical moments within a moving system—one in which the capitalist time of value production is spatially imposed through colonial encounters.