Cruising in Circles: Promiscuous Temporalities in Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, ‘Display’ (2021)

‘2 meter zur tür, und du lachst, haha lachst du. bist du schauspieler? ich lache, haha lache ich. geschichtenerzähler, ich bin ein geschichtenerzähler. und von dir werde ich erzählen’¹‘2 meters to the door, and you do laugh, ha-ha, do you laugh. are you an actor? I do laugh, ha-ha do I laugh. storyteller, I am a storyteller. and I will tell a story about you’ Full reference in Zotero Library. If not otherwise stated, all following citations are taken from the above text.

‘Movement is non-directional—or multi-directional, and a step forward is, by definition, a step back’²Samuel Beckett on the specific temporality in James Joyce’s Ulysses; cf. Full reference in Zotero Library.

Literary texts circulate, have circulated, are being circulated in various forms and manners, in time and over time, with temporal restrictions of these circulative movements and conditions of their own. But can the movement of circulation and circularity truly enter a literary text, a genre and medium being inevitably confined to and traditionally defined by a linear reading? Things, protagonists, words can certainly circulate in narrative structures, or within the realm of the page, but are there certain ‘inner mechanics’ Full reference in Zotero Library that imbue texts (or poetic textures) with non-linear movement to such an extent that they become—poetically and metapoetically speaking—so filled and thick with circularity, that the reader—or certain readers – gets the feeling of being circulated, of being (pleasurably, confusingly, annoyingly) thrown into and onto the page with no way in and no way out, revolving around inner images and affects created by the material letters they visually perceive and mentally process, i.e., read?

After having read Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç’s short poetic text ‘Display’ in spring 2022, I found myself repeating parts of it to myself even days and days after, looping certain passages, echoing its sentences, integrating them into my day. ‘Display’ had created a weird feeling I might best describe with the word “suction”—I turned to it over and over again without really knowing what exactly it was that kept my mind so occupied. Eventually, it lost its persistency—it faded out. But the effect was repeatable: once I stumbled over it again, rereading the article that had initially sparked my attention,³I owe the acquaintance with Keskinkılıç’s text to a paper by my colleague, Nina Tolksdorf Full reference in Zotero Library. catching up words somewhere that resembled its rhythm, I was hooked yet again. I felt trapped by ‘Display’, its prosody, its vocabulary, its scenery, and metaphors. It circulated through my head by involuntarily recitation—or else, I orbited around its lines, as I apparently had memorised parts of it without my explicit will to do so. The following is an attempt to pierce through the ability of ‘Display’ to create those poetic affects and effects of circulation, as well as their embeddedness in a certain topical/political horizon and a resistant desire (or: a desire of resistance). As a literary text, I will argue, ‘Display’ engages formally with the nature of its subject and the desire of its subjects, which is doubled and redeemed by its poetic structure: ‘Display’ cruises. That is, with concepts of ‘queer’ or resistant temporality as a formal horizon, Keskinkılıç’s text brings forward a literary structure relying not on ‘straight time’ Full reference in Zotero Library, but on the promiscuous temporalities of rhythm: as a non-final, affect-driven movement of words and bodies in space that clashes with linear, normative concepts of time.

Moving in circles: circulation, recursion, radiation, repetition

‘Display’ was first published as part of an ongoing online archive of short literary contributions thematically revolving around the topic of ‘the materials of contemporary literature’, brought to life by the German cultural institution, Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (LCB) in 2020.⁴‘Stoffe. Woraus besteht die Gegenwartsliteratur?’ Event series and Online text archive at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (2020–). Cf. https://lcb.de/programm/stoffe/ Its publication is furthermore linked to a particular festival that took place in Summer 2021, titled ‘Cruising as a Cultural Practice’.⁵‘komm in den totgesagten park und schau: Cruising als kulturelle Praxis’. Festival at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin (26–28 August 2021). Cf. https://lcb.de/cruising/ In accordance to this topic, ‘Display’, so it seems, tells the story of an erotically framed encounter between two strangers: the supposedly male first-person narrator and an unnamed, supposedly also male person in a flat.⁶The narrator uses a masculine genus in his* use of self-descriptive features: ‘ausländer’ (foreigner), ‘geschichtenerzähler’ (storyteller), a masculine connoted feature mentioned is the narrator’s breast hair (‘ein ikea-decke, in die ich meine brusthaare hineinfalte, damit etwas von mir bleibt.’). The description of the ‘you’ is equally by deployment of masculine connoted features: ‘zwei baumstämme, ein schwarzer slip um die rinde geschnürt’ (‘two tree trunks, a black slip tied around the bark’); ‘du im adamskostüm’ (‘you in your birthday’s suit’, lit. in Adam’s suit, as in Adam and Eve). The narrated timespan extends from shortly before the narrator enters the apartment of the unnamed, directly addressed ‘you’, to shortly after the encounter. At least, that is what the reader might guess from a deictic marker, which works as one of the structuring principles of the text: the repetition and variation of concrete distance/proximity of information, as it is for example displayed in smartphone map services or certain dating apps providing a “radar function”:

210 meter, schreib hier wenn du vor der tür stehst. Ich lache, haha lache ich. checkst du nochmal aus dem fenster wie süß ich bin? ich schreib dir gleich. 120 meter, ich werde der ausländer im grünen cappy sein.⁷‘210 meters, text here when you’re in front of the door. i do laugh, ha-ha, do i laugh. Will you glance through the window to re-check how cute i am? i’ll text you in a sec. 120 meters, i’ll be the foreigner with the green basecap’.

Through the recursive pattern of exposing “geo-deictical” details, the temporal dimension of the narrated is, in a certain sense, spatialised: as the readers have no concrete temporal markers at hand that indicate the time passed within the narration, they are dependent on the “proxy” time provided by the indication of the narrator’s traversing of space. This traversing, though, is decisively characterised by circularity: in a loop-like movement, at the end of the text, the narrator is back where he started off (at 231m distance). And according to the circularity of his movement, the words which describe his status quo in relation to the subject/object of desire are a recursion, as well: ‘die letzten 231 meter rase ich in 5g geschwindigkeit bis zu deinem bett’⁸‘the last 231 metres i race in 5g speed all the way to your bed’. is echoed and repeated in the final phrase ‘231 meter bis zu deinem bett und die haut fühlt sich an wie ein display, das uns voneinander trennt’.⁹‘231 metres to your bed and the skin feels like a display that separates us from each other’. It is not only the temporal frame of the text that is blurred by this shifting from temporal to (pseudo-)topological markers of passed/passing time; it is precisely the shift from a temporal to a spatial level of the moving body of the narrator (in time and space) that brings forward, or even produces, the circular structure of this very movement.

Similarly, the separating ‘display’, marking the finale of the text, loops back to its beginning: not only to its title, but to its opening, explicitly addressing technical (and, in in their abstract vocabulary, phantasmatic) features of the smartphone screen entangled with the narrator’s affect/desire, a desire that seems connected to its qualities just as much as the narrator’s enhanced performance skills are conditioned by it:

es steht mir im gesicht geschrieben, das verlangen. es sitzt gemütlich auf der pupille, es leuchtet den fußweg aus, wie das retina display die aluminiumkanten meiner finger[…] keine sorge, der chip a14 bionic gibt “genug power für so ziemlich alles, was noch kommt”, hat mir die werbung versprochen. ceramic shield um die brust gewickelt mit “viermal besserer sturzfestigkeit”, hat mir die werbung versprochen. zeit für einen testdurchlauf.¹⁰‘it’s written all over my face, the desire. it sits comfortably on my pupil; it illuminates the footpath like the retina display illuminates the aluminium edges of my fingers […] don’t worry, the a14 bionic chip gives “enough power for pretty much everything that is yet to come”, the ad promised me. ceramic shield wrapped around the chest with “four times better drop resistance”, the ad promised me. time for a test run’.

Doubling on a leitmotif level—the spatially organised circularity of a (temporally) linear movement brought forward by the work’s formal structure—the ‘display’ operates as a movens of both the narration¹¹Etymologically, ‘display’ stems from Medieval Latin displicare: to unfold. and the desire it hosts. What is more, it points the reader to yet another type of textual “back-and-forth” that structures the narrated time and its discours—again, but not only—spatially. This motion is—as the central figure of the screen hints—inextricably bound to an optical-technical regime; that is, to the variation of focal length in the context of analog or digital camera lenses: the zoom. By the inverse repetition of the distance/proximity information weaved into the text, a striking effect of “zooming in” and “zooming out” of the narrated situation is achieved: starting from ‘231 metres’ distance at the beginning of the text, then moving to ‘210 metres’, to ‘51 metres’, to ‘31 metres’, to ‘7 metres’, to ‘2 metres to the door’—and then backwards again from ‘2 metres’ to ‘7 metres’, and so forth—the reader, together with the narrator, arrives at the same distance of ‘231 metres’ by the end of the text, which equates to his* starting point. While he*/we might be ending up at a different place, hypothetically, the radius (!) of the narrator remains the same.

Besides being situated in a sort of spatially organised time-loop, the narrated events are, in that sense, also structured via another, more embodied parameter: that is, by levels of varied and varying intensification (from relatively far to relatively close, to relatively far again). With regard to the formal composition, this varying intensity, this back-and-forth of (first) approximation and (then) moving away, which is staged and/or dramatised by topological markers, puts a spotlight on what then becomes the supposed nucleus of the entire text: the part of the histoire where the narrator is the most “zoomed in”, where he* is the closest to the sighted/focussed/desired object. Such an idea of a “nucleus” of narration as an integrative part of its formal organisation is amplified by yet another formal doubling of the loop/zoom movement within the textual arrangement. This doubling can be read, accordingly, as a circling movement—the surrounding (german ‘umkreisen’) of a narrative and its symbolic core through syntagmatic and vocabulary positioning. Not dissimilar to the lyrical structure of an embracing rhyme (abba), the phrases ‘ich lache, haha, lache ich’ and its variation ‘du lachst, haha, lachst du’,¹²‘i do laugh, haha, do I laugh’; ‘you do laugh, haha, do you laugh’. for example, perform a quasi palindromatic structure not on a letter, but a word level (abcba), revolving around the injection/utterance ‘haha’ as its affective centre. This circular arrangement is repeated on a macro level of the text: each of the two phrases (‘ich lache […]’, ‘du lachst […]’) appear twice in the text, in the equivalent order of the zooming in/zooming out, therefore embracing, or bracketing, the at-first-glance rhetorically unmarked, but in regard to the formal structure clearly traceable centre: the supposed “actual” encounter between the two subjects of the text.

Not surprisingly, this formally signalled nucleus of the text—that is, the erotic encounter of the two subjects who apparently have not met before, and have so far only communicated via smart phone, namely a dating app—can (presumably) be pinned down with the help of its very own receptiveness to the “radar function” of its first-person narrator. Indeed, following the shortest distance mentioned in the text for the first time (‘2 metres to the door’), the adjoining sentence marks an entrance to the apartment: ‘drinnen stehst du in weißen socken auf altem holzparkett, wie auf den bildern’.¹³‘inside, you’re standing in white socks on old wooden parquet flooring, just like in the pictures’. Accordingly, the sentence just before the second mentioning of the 2m distance (the beginning of the zooming out) evokes the parting of the narrator: ‘lass uns sein letztes screenshot nehmen, zum abschied’. But what seems so neatly locatable as a central event and narrative core of ‘Display’—that is, the description of the ‘actual’ coming together of two people (and two bodies)—is formally compromised. Firstly, it is subject to a disturbing complication of tenses: in the middle of the centre paragraph, the present tense of the narration suddenly (and only briefly) changes into past tense, suggesting that the encounter may just be a memory, recapitulated by the narrator, challenging the (imagined) temporal order of the events suggested by the structure of the text. Secondly, the idea of a narrative climax is sabotaged by yet another deployment of repetition: a quasi-circular rhetorical strategy (repetition as a coming back to) that disturbs the supposed linearity of the histoire and blurs the lines between anticipation, imagined encounter, actual encounter, and recapitulation, to such an extent that it is indeterminate for the reader if and when its central event has actually taken place. In concrete terms, the supposed “actual” meeting of the narrator and his* date—after the former has overcome the digitally traceable distance—consists partly of fragmentary dialogue/text messages or supposedly fantasised sexual acts that were imagined by the narrator in the advent of this meeting.¹⁴For example, as part of the ‘virtual’ encounter, the verbal exchange and (fantasised?) action displayed in the following sequence: ‘wie findest du meine unterhose?, fragst du. Gott weiß wie, sage ich und greife das wort an der nahtstelle und tausche den stoff ein durch meine lippen’ (‘what do you think of my undies? you ask. God knows how, i say, grabbing the word at the seam and exchanging the fabric for my lips’), is mirrored/repeated/varied in the supposedly ‘actual’ encounter with this sequence: ‘wie findest du meine unterhose?, hast du gefragt. ich habe es verstanden, ich habe den navi ausgeschaltet, und den flugmodus ein’. (‘what do you think of my undies?, you asked. i got it, i turned off the nav, and the flight mode on.’) Metapoetic reflection inscribes itself into this temporal layering when narrative sequences, like the following, are repeated, including stances that refer directly to narrative repetition (‘the story repeats itself’):

du im adamskostüm gekniet auf altem holzparkett und das handy in meiner hand wie eine reife frucht vor dem fall. die geschichte wiederholt sich mit aprikosen, ein paradies auf 50 quadratmeter und ich weiß nicht für wie lange.¹⁵‘you kneeling in your birthday suit on old wooden parquet and the mobile phone in my hand like a ripe fruit before its fall. the story repeats itself with apricots, a paradise on 50 square metres and i don’t know for how long’.

The promiscuous temporalities of rhythm: ‘cruising’ as a formal horizon

It is this double, desire-induced loss of orientation—the feeling of being thrown into a loop, a circular movement (‘die geschichte wiederholt sich mit aprikosen’), and the losing of one’s sense of linear time (‘und ich weiß nicht für wie lange’)—that Keskinkılıç’s text not only thematises, but also performs. And it is the entanglement of these two types of disorientation— with one another, but also with the topical horizon of the text—that positions ‘Display’ within the context of what has been theorised lately as the concept of ‘queer temporality’. ‘Queerness’s time is a time of ecstasy’ Full reference in Zotero Library, José Esteban Muñoz states in his already seminal monography Cruising Utopia from 2009, in which he develops the concept of queer temporality as a temporality beyond linearity, beyond effectiveness, beyond finality. An invitation to such a time of ecstasy, a disruption of ‘straight time’ means for Muñoz a ‘request to stand out of time together, to resist the stultifying temporality and time that is not ours, that is saturated with violence both visceral and emotional, a time that is not queerness’. Following Muñoz’s lines of thought, ecstatic temporality is fundamentally determined by a ‘then-and-there, a not-yet-there’, but not confined to it in a negative sense; it functions as a ‘call’, an invitation to this ecstatic temporal state of non-fixation and a ‘convergence of past, present, and future’ Full reference in Zotero Library, abandoning linearity for the movement of layering and multiplying temporal relations—temporality relying on affect, not effect.¹⁶Situating her approach within the theory of Bergson and Deleuze, Kara Keeling frames (poetic) affect ‘as the embodied mental activity required to make sense of the world’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Theorising queer temporality, then, is tantamount to acknowledging that we ‘know time through the field of the affective, and affect is tightly bound to temporality’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Keskinkılıç’s text, its subjects to/and of desire connects to this alternate, affect-driven concept of temporality. In doing so, it admittedly relates itself also to a long history of the literary shaping of desire, to a well-established topos that has poetically framed all sorts of romantic or erotic encounters by seemingly similar or comparable ideas of temporal disorientation, misjudgment of the desiring subjects, of discordance, disruption, asynchrony between lovers’ affective temporal states and the temporality of the non-involved ‘outside’ world. But it is far from negligible that it is precisely as a poetic staging of homosexual longing and promiscuous bodily movement in the context of cruising that the structure of ‘Display’ is imbued in formal strategies of circulation, repetition, recursion and layering, which produces a clash with hegemonic models of (“monogamic”) narrative efficacy and finality: as a withstanding temporal involvement that runs counter to (hetero-)normative concepts of linear temporality and narrative rationales conditioned by a desire for closure and redemption. ‘Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant’, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously puts it Full reference in Zotero Library.

Queer temporality, as it is theorised by Sedgwick, Muñoz, Carolyn Dinshaw, Jack Halberstam, Carla Freccero, and many others, is not timeless, nor is Keskinkılıç’s ‘Display’. But in its ability to present itself, to appear (and appeal) as a poetic narration of an event in time, it relates to hegemonic narrative concepts of chronology, causality, sequenciality, and finality in a disconcerting way. Freeing itself from the restrictions of narrative linearity—or, more precisely, creating a strong tension against it from within (i.e., as a medium relying on, and being stuck with the linear sequencing of letters, words, and sentences), dissolving in circular eventuality—it is especially responsive to a structuring principle that, as a formal relation,¹⁷‘Rhythm’, James Joyce notes in his ‘Paris Notebook’ in march 1903, ‘seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole or of a whole to its part or parts, or of any part to the whole of which it is a part’ Full reference in Zotero Library. promotes an alternative take on temporal relationality and, in return, seems to speak exceptionally well to the “motion pattern” of cruising ‘as a cultural practice’: rhythm. While rhythm seems to escape quite well the incessant attempts to pin it down by definition all throughout the history of ideas, it may nevertheless at a very basic level be described as that which marks/is/performs recurring patterns within a motion that situates itself in time, a scape of patterns that relate. Not only can these patterns (or, varying number of patterns) change their nature and pace (lose themselves) while staying nonetheless in relation, staying the ones which relate. What is more, it is precisely because of these changing but recurring patterns that we are able to characterise a rhythm as a rhythm at all. As a cluster of formal recursions, rhythm as a structural principle is intrinsically non-final: as a structuring relation, rhythm in itself can never come to an end, and any attempt to define its (undoubtedly) temporal unfolding in texts with the help of linearity and/or temporal finality must fail.¹⁸As German philosopher Richard Hönigswald pointedly puts it as early (or late?) as 1926: ‘Als Gestalt ist der Rhythmus ein ›Ganzes‹, als Ganzes aber entbehrt er, trotz seiner zeitlichen Erstreckung, extensiver Maßbestimmungen. Er hat als Rhythmus streng genommen weder Anfang noch Ende: Wie wesentlich für ihn auch der Bezug auf die Zeit, die ›über‹ ihn verstreicht, sein mag, – die Uhr liefert der Durchdringung seines inneren Gefüges kein Kriterium’. (‘As a form, rhythm is a ‘whole’, but as a whole, despite its temporal extension, it lacks extensive determinations of measure. Strictly speaking, rhythm has neither a beginning nor an end: no matter how essential the reference may be to the time that passes ‘over’ it, the clock provides no criterion for the understanding of its inner structure.’), cf. Full reference in Zotero Library. Keskinkılıç’s heavy reliance on rhythm as a text structuring principle in ‘Display’, as a potentially never-ending doubling, a constant looping back to recurring patterns, an unfolding of promiscuous¹⁹In relation to his discussion of literary gay male desire and a re-reading of ‘promiscuity’, a term bearing with almost no exception solely negative connotations within a heteronormative societal setting throughout history, Ben Santa Maria has pointed out the seventeenth semantic dimension of the adjective ‘promiscuous’ as ‘consisting of members or elements of different kinds grouped or massed together without order […]; rarely of a single thing’; a ‘disorderly mixture’, ‘confusedly mingled«, »without respect for kind, order, number’ Full reference in Zotero Library. temporalities pushing formally and rhetorically towards circularity and recursion, shifts the temporal framework of the histoire as well as the readers’ perspective away from what Muñoz calls ‘straight time’, as it opens a window for the text as well as the narration not to ›progress‹ (ger: fortschreiten), but to cruise: as a directed, but not determined, affect-driven movement of a textual longing with no claims, but also no obligation to temporal closure.