Queuing in Language

— What happened?

— Something is going to happen.

— They said something would happen.

— Who said that?

— I don’t know. But something will.

This exchange, in its apparent simplicity, recurs in innumerable variations across the textures of everyday life. It condenses into a mode of being, one that does not so much transmit the event as it reproduces it in the form of a perpetually deferred anticipation, sustained by its own repetition, carried forward by language without requiring the stabilizing force of realization.

Sentences no longer arrive to report what has taken place; they work instead to suspend possibility, to keep it in circulation, as though their function were no longer to refer to the real, but to shape our relation to it—drawing us toward it even as they disperse it.

It is precisely this language, its insistence, its circularity, that lies at the heart of The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin (Arabic version, Dar Al-Rafidain, 2023). The novel relinquishes narrative authority altogether, abandoning the structuring presence of a narrator in favor of a proliferation of voices that drift alongside one another, without hierarchy, without convergence.

What unfolds is not a story but a surface of utterances: fragmented, overlapping, momentary. A queue extends, though toward what remains unknown; those who stand within it speak, yet what they say does not accumulate into knowledge. Meaning is neither revealed nor resolved. It lingers, dispersed across adjacent phrases that never quite meet.

Composed in a Soviet context in which queues marked the rhythms of daily life, where scarcity and power were inscribed in the act of waiting, Sorokin’s text exceeds its historical frame. It radicalizes the experience to the point where its referent begins to dissolve, leaving in its place a linguistic condition.

To read it is not to follow a plot, but to endure a temporality. The reader, drawn into the queue, becomes subject to the same repetitions, the same slow accrual of voices, the same fatigue that arises from a movement that does not lead forward. The text offers no promise of arrival, no threshold beyond which it might resolve. Reading becomes an act of inhabitation, an exposure to a time that does not open.

In the Lebanese context, the queue does not appear as a borrowed metaphor so much as a lived form, sedimented in memory, almost inscribed in the body itself. It reaches back to the years of the Lebanese Civil War, when standing in line outside bakeries in search of bread constituted a familiar scene—an ordinary submission to a time stretched by uncertainty.

There, waiting unfolded without measure. Duration lost its contours, extending unpredictably, suspending those within it between the possibility of obtaining and the risk of absence.

This temporality has not receded; it has re-emerged, reconfigured, during the economic collapse, in the long lines at petrol stations, where bodies, now enclosed within cars, remain aligned and immobilized, subject to the same indeterminacy.

Hours pass without guarantee. Under heat or darkness, time thickens once more, and with it, language proliferates: voices exchanged between drivers, messages relayed across screens, rumors reformulated and set back into circulation. Waiting becomes saturated with speech, a dense verbal field that fills the void left by the absence of certainty.

From this accumulation, historical and affective, it becomes possible to read the present in Lebanon as a collective immersion in a suspended temporality. The present ceases to function as a point of passage between past and future, and instead extends into a field continually reproduced through language and through the circulation of expectations.

Discourse moves forward, occupying the foreground, becoming almost the sole means through which the real may be approached. The event, in turn, recedes, not absent, but mediated, encountered only through successive layers of speech that reshape it even as they defer it.

Within this space, the sentence that gestures toward imminence multiplies, yet never resolves. News promises turning points, but these fail to consolidate into outcomes. The future is consumed in its hypothetical form, endlessly anticipated, never actualized.

A temporality emerges that no longer leads toward the event, but folds back upon itself, sustained by the repetition of its own signs.

In this movement, the individual is not external to the structure but implicated within it, participating in the production and circulation of meaning through acts of commentary, interpretation, and reformulation.

What unfolds across social media, this incessant proliferation of voices, belongs to this same economy, in which speaking becomes a form of presence. One remains within the structure even while experiencing participation in an event that does not arrive.

Will the war continue? Who has the authority to negotiate and on whose behalf? What remains of the state? What does it mean to persist?

These questions do not seek resolution so much as they sustain their own reiteration, binding subjects to a movement in which language holds the real in place even as it renders it inaccessible.

Meanwhile, what is imagined as “the front”, or what some persist in imagining as such, remains elusive. It disperses into a multiplicity of mediations: political discourse, media narration, continuous commentary.

Statements accumulate, oscillating between information and chatter, producing competing accounts without ever stabilizing a single point from which the real might be grasped.

In this proliferation, a distance takes shape between those who experience events in their material immediacy and those who encounter them through their circulation, generating parallel modes of experience that intersect in language without converging in reality.

Waiting, in this sense, no longer appears as an interval between two moments, but as a structuring condition of the present itself. It absorbs uncertainty, redistributing it across successive anticipations, rendering time inhabitable through deferral.

It becomes the basis of a fragile equilibrium, sustained through the capacity to remain within postponement.

The question, then, is no longer one of duration, nor of proximity to an end, but of form: what is this time that persists without advancing, that neither stops nor progresses, but folds inward, renewing anticipation while exhausting every possibility?

Within this expanse of voices, where chatter is not excess but constitutive, the question remains suspended, passing from sentence to sentence without settling into an answer.

It concerns the possibility of imagining a time in which something might, finally, take place.

In a horizon where such a possibility can no longer be assumed, the act of thinking it becomes, in itself, a displacement, an attempt, however tenuous, to step out of the queue, if only through language.