Stephen Metcalf: Third Terminal
Countdown to the Millennium. The end or the beginning? Just
as Capital’s dream of exercising magical, dematerialised
control reaches delirious levels – populations comatosed in its
immanent electronics, decorticated nervous systems wired to
its terminals, sequences of instructions, error correcting
codes, security systems, surveillance networks, flows of
contradictory information pulsing electromagnetic waves of
pleasure in consumption – a crisis point is reached: a terminal
point both catastrophic and irresponsibly positive. Somewhere
on the line the perverts have dropped out of the New World
Order, begun to construct their own Virtual Machines, to
program systems which may not yet exist, to jam systems
already choked with information, feeding viral subroutines
back into Capital’s master programmes, micro-errors in social
programming bombarding the system with noise, absurdity,
psychosis. Come flow in our Hysterical Materialism (the
pleasure short-circuits the pain waves after they hit, cushions
the blows to come) to three terminals in the technosphere;
fuse with their circuitries.
Terminal 1
Electronic eyes of the State Machine. A program taking an
identity law as premise. This one looks set to RUN and RUN.
Or at least it has done, as the Digital Logic Level of the
Human Security System. 1A = A, 0 + A = A; symmetrical
equations, neatly balanced, never overstepping the mark of
the identity law, present at the Digital Logic Level, faced with
the apparent impossibility of things being otherwise.
Deposited in front of a mirror, the first lesson in sociability
takes place. This scene of fascination, this tragic puppet
which tracks my movements exactly is my first reference
point, a place of safety and protection against the outside.
Teach me to dichotomise. Those others in my looking glass
who are not me. Teach me to fear them and, at the same
time, identify myself in terms of the manifest fact that others
who resemble me are not me. Teach me negation – I am not
x, I am y. Then wire a brain to my voice box and teach me
your language, the dichotomising communication vectors
which you legitmise if manifest under scrutiny by some optical
apparatus. As long as I see it in some sense, the rest follows
– cogito ergo sum, dialectics, fear of the others, desire for
borders and protection – and you think you’ve got me. You
make my escape routes illegitimate, coding them, as
symptoms to be cured.
Psychotic states. Schizophrenia. Fuck you.
Encrypted as Read Only Memory, these interiorized programs
of the State Machine (Capital’s coding of desire) begin their
Fetch – Decode – Execute cycles, all based on the premise of
One Central Processing Unit (identity) and its ability to
dichotomise: gender separation, heterosexuality, reproduction
in the interests of the continuation of the code (families),
neurosis (the desire to fit in rather than face the
consequences of transgression), the desire for knowledge (to
domesticate the perceived threat from others), nationalism,
paranoia, fascism. Error Correcting Codes sweep the
memory; search routines rubbing out points at which the
program has not ‘taken’, domesticating the under the rubric of
one or another of the paranoid categories of subjectivity,
social position, family background: political economy,
sociology, psychoanalysis.
Flickering grey of display screen coming on-line. High-pitched
whine and singing crackle of pixels organising a closed circuit
TV image. Search files for errors in desire coding.
Sex scene on monitor.
Two boys. Smooth, muscular bodies wrapped in
accouterments of domination and submission. Steadying with
hands on hip bones. Bound by wrist and ankle. Commands.
Greased penis extends across flat stomach. Pulses.
Advances to pretty boy for the thrill of being beaten as a man.
Raises his arms and strikes. Mesh of thin purple welts traced
across the back of thighs, calves, buttocks.
At Terminal 1, Error Correction Codes are cycling. Project
Domestication initiated. Problems with socialisation according
to Oedipal/heterosexual inscriptions of desire. Find in the
masochist’s desire for humiliation, the shadowy figure of the
father, the desire to be possessed by him, to belong to him, to
be penetrated by him; discover a latent father figure/substitute
in the dominator, by now a phallocentric tyrant; and, by some
kabbalistic magic, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ and mapped onto
the familial/state apparatus. Or, worse, we could be more
scientific: map statistical norms of behavior across the social
body and burn out the deviancy accordingly.
Encryptions in pure machine language, pixels reversed into
signals, surfaces reduced to latent content and diagnosed;
digitisation of results fed into scanning devices of the state’s
psycho-technicians. Frenzied algorithm carrying out social
surgery: a process of psychochemotherapy cleaning out the
system of unwanted networks of gratifications in deviant
sexuality. Pulsations of desire along sine waves, completely
unpredictable and transmitting no information, unfiltered
noise, assaults on the precious, neurotic ego. Fuse the
perverts into these networks, these licensed sex channels at
all costs. Call it therapy.
Meanwhile, the two boys remain oblivious to this act of
state-sponsored voyeurism. They have not been invited to
any interactive screening of their scene, now being played-out
in digital pantomime with the state’s mind cops in all the
expensive seats, and carry on regardless, grinning in mutual
consent - ‘Use me’ - Further – the dare – the contract.
Electric waves of intensity rush through nerve-endings, gated,
connected, and wired to S&M circuitries. Master’s cock
pushing gently but firmly into the slave’s rectum. Animal
whinnying. Symphony of giggles. Fusing per vas nefandum to
the detriment of patriarchy.
Now, this refusal to conform – to be ‘reasonable’ and embody
upon the State Machine’s control circuits = psychosis –
apparently justifies the arrest of transgressors and
(conveniently for them) keeps psychologists at work. We care
for you. Like the mummy-daddy apparatus. Condition a
nauseous rush of anti-gratification, as aversion circuits switch
in where pleasure previously erupted across the libidinal
band, the sexualised skin, in micro-machines composed of
body parts and fetish objects. Fit and legally working again.
Terminal 2
Terminal 1 is the desire to dominate: politically,
psychologically, economically (in both monetary and libidinal
senses), eternally. To operate a machine limiting interaction
(the state) while remaining exterior to its mechanisms. To be
Control without being controlled, as Burroughs might say. To
close a social, familial, sexual, subjectified circuit and remain
on its outside. Watching. Regulating. Avoiding being itself
processed by the machine (E.g. consider how therapists are
so immune to psychotic projections, deviant states of mind,
outlawed behavioral patterns).
Eternal recurrence of state logics coupled to a slave output.
Power, control, radical exterminisms of alterity, negations of
the other, oppressive necessities, security systems, prison
houses of linguistic and social co-operation, armies of labor
shackled to the control machines, blood lines, shared cultures
of panic, require recognition of their domination, binary
co-movements of control and feedback. The interpretation of
related messages in uninterrupted flows. Producing the
following problem:
As Capital’s desire for spectral possession of its subjects
reaches digital perfection, as control scales ecstatic peaks,
measured only against the homeostatic metric of its
self-regulating immune system, it decreases resistance;
flipping the process over into its reverse – cancerous
excrescence initiating a death-bound, entropic, retrograde
spiral of wasted energy and useless institutions. Control runs
out of things to control, it sets the mechanisms of its own
death into a potentially catastrophically motion. Therefore a
certain type of comprehensible resistance is tolerated as
feedback. Something left on the screen to control. This is the
radical negation of Terminal 2.
This S&M business looks awfully pitiful to the radical moralists
in our midst. Can this “...dreary parade of sucked dry,
1
catatonicised, vitrified, sewn-up bodies...”, as marginal and
potentially antipathetical to the State, be radicalised,
politicised, and domesticated in the social-factories of some
revolutionary super-state? Like Terminal 1’s policing
initiatives, it’s a matter of interpretation: a demand for
recognition (all applauded by the state: first hand knowledge
of what its defiers are up to in their bedrooms, clubs, and
torture chambers). This is radicalism’s secret: it serves the
State Machine, is caught up in the logical matrices of the
state, and can only offer negation of the state’s negations as
the (Final) solution. This is the logic of the
Konzentrationslager, camping it up in libertarian clothing.
Represent.
Express yourself.
1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, Athlone Press, 1988, p. 150.
Confess. Lose your little war machines in our orbit, our
demilitarised zones of settled identity, your new family; come
and meet your Volks. But, as your future police force, we
need to outline a few ground rules. Your co-operation is
required. We want information. Data to be fed into our central
control machines. We want to understand you. We want to
Occupy Terminal 1.
Demand that they recognize you. We’ll start with a nice, safe,
legal end to censorship as a prelude to your crossing the
threshold of your new home after you’ve married the Party,
and then we’ll make you normal as a valued and functional
component in our joyous machineries. Maybe secondly we’ll
demand that you should become V.I.P.s right now, articulate
your demand for the normality you obviously long for, pry over
your practices with interviews, video cameras, study groups,
day-schools, seminars, politically correct consciousness
raising events, why not a few concerts? The future is yours.
With our permission.
Transmission ends. Funded by State T.V. Crackling terminus
of the program. The opposition trots back home, claiming
victory over the social void, monitored at all points by banks of
cameras lining the ceilings of the decimated cities.
For sure, radical cybernegative S&M will finds its place on the
margins of the social, its black hole where desire stops,
terminating in suicidal exhibitionism. There at the dimly lit
entrance, a micro-fascist territory will be staked out, a zone of
ressentiment generated by a gasping reflex-jerk. “We”.
Homeostasis. Security systems monitoring the entrance,
defense systems barring the exit.
Even Deleuze and Guattari, usually willing to allow deviant
states to flow back into the social and infect it, show a myopic
moralism in relegating S&M to this second terminal position. It
was they who alerted our attention to the fact that S&M is not
a fantasy requiring interpretation mapped onto a familial,
Oedipal grid but is, actually, a program. But this is not to
accept their contention that this algorithm careens into
Terminal 2 monomania (cutting off relations with the outside
of the system) and produces a micro-fascist fortification. A
pre-programmed security system.
PROGRAM
- the process of sewing
-how to produce a reactive-cybernetic, closed-up body:
Bow to the mistress. Beg her for forgiveness. Transgression
must have its punishment, after all. Lash the penitent to the
table, drawing the ropes, cords, thongs, cuffs and chains tight
enough to register their presence with nagging insistency.
Prepare tools required to carry out the program: weapons,
instruments of humiliation. RUN. 100 lashes. Then pause.
Begin to sew. Sew up the hole in the glans, then sew the skin
around the glans to the glans itself. Sew the scrotum to skin of
the inner thighs. Sew the breasts, attaching a pinching clamp
to both nipples. Connect them. Bind the penitent to a chair.
100 lashes. Sew the buttocks together. Initiate procedure for
intensifying torture as per contract. Stick pins in the buttocks,
as far as they go. Tie the penitent to a chair. 100 lashes.
Apply cigarette burns. Random humiliation.
Presto. A pre-program. A security system closing up the body;
a set of sad, repetitive, entirely predictable rituals in whose
regime nothing is unexpected, no contact outside of this
particular orbit is even desirable or even possible. The
program becomes a means by which the masochist
guarantees a fortified sense of identity. Martyrdom. The
ascetic’s sanctity reinforced by a sewn-up, bound, lacerated,
body only allowing waves of pain to traverse its surface.
Desire’s anarchic flow is blocked as the masochist closes the
circuit, refuses to patch into other networks. Welcome to the
cave. Populate in an act of fortification against the passage of
exterior 2flows, this “...Metropolis that has to be managed with
a whip.”
2 Ibid., p. 153
Two problems [1] Mechanical absurdity. Energy flows need to be gated at
the Digital Logic Level in order to pass through a machine. An
open circuit is a ridiculous concept: with no gates, no
channels to focus energy, nothing will happen; the amorphous
cloud of electrical nonsense bombarding the machine ending
in entropic degradation. The point of the S&M programs is to
channel energy through the gates sufficiently to blow the
whole assemblage apart, with a negentropic co-movement
into synergetic relations of desubjectification on a positive
feedback circuit.
[2] Repetition taken to mean ‘I want more of the same.
Reinforce me’. Rather, take it to be simply ‘I want more’. This
argument against enclosure, desire to open up the circuit,
condemnation of the refusal to climax and build elaborate
systems instead, what does it affirm? A simple genital
interface between cock and cunt, keying into no other zones
(except for a quick grope in the dark), so desperate to climax
and allow the outside to flood in that it prematurely ejaculates.
Not ‘I want more’, but ‘Fuck me now, quickly, let’s get this
over with, we’ve other things to do, come quickly, the
intensity, the intensity, inside and waiting for others to join us,
feels so good, coming, end.’ An algorithmic progression
resembling nothing more pleasurable than five minutes with a
Victorian patriarch.
Terminal 3
As the territory of the Virtual Machine, Terminal 3 is the zone
Terminal 1 turns its systemic antibodies against, tabulates
information on, and explains away in terms of its simple
categories, with the hope of viewing and controlling its
pixellated manifestation in Terminal 2. The Third Terminal has
other ideas. Refuses the play the game of panic, surveillance,
and control. Supposedly canceled in the rational signification
of Capital’s symbolic order, it continues pulsing
incomprehensible forces resisting domestication, puncturing
the fabric of the order itself, setting up its own expert systems
in questions of domination and submission, running its own
viral programmes, perverting the natural course of the state’s
desire code. Action, intensity, jouissance, desubjectification,
pragmatics of evasion and flight, sadomasochism,
homosexuality, drugs, strange rituals and algorithms,
schizophrenia, psychotic projection, hysterical refusal, wild
boys and girls switching their soft machines into annihilation
mode, writing programs for machines that do not even exist
yet, cyberpositive and obsessed with the disappearance of
self. Fracturing screens at the point of system crash.
The desire of the Third Terminal is the incapacity for
embodiment as subject in/to Capital’s machine language, the
jamming of systems saturated with flows of information, a
tactic of total indifference to Capital’s demand for feedback in
order to produce more information facilitating the
management of the crisis engendered by the existence of the
Third Terminal; hatred of all police machines, including those
of Capital’s cynical future negotiators.
The Third Terminal is the space of the Assassins, drifting
silently through the crowds and uniform architectures of user
friendly consumption; the time of the Assassins, deferring
execution until the optimal moment; the invisibility of the
Assassins, spilling off the control screens in all directions; the
humour of the Assassins, leaving a jeweled dagger in the
Sultan’s pillow; the threat of the Assassins, the trusted servant
who suddenly turns against his master.
As Burroughs pointed out in a fragment of The Book of
3
Breething, the power of the Third Terminal lies in its
3 See William S. Burroughs: Ah Pook is Here and Other Texts, John Calender, London, 1979, p. 188
invisibility, in the confounding fact that it does not present a
coherent scanning pattern to the optical apparatus of control.
Control does not know anything about it. It knows a lot about
control. The Third Terminal is the pathological case control
inscribes into its symptomatologies, to which it then attributes
all of its unpredictable maladies, its dangerous malcontents
and social indigestion problems. The Third Terminal is the
enemy of paranoia.
A Virtual Machine is a constant process of production, it
evades control to the extent that by the time the state
machine has translated its software into terms inside its orbit,
it is always elsewhere, always other, patching new
components into its assemblage. Once the fetish object has
been neatly compartmentalized as a maternal penis/phallus
substitute-pubic fur, shoes, underwear, instruments of
punishment – fetishism begins to confound this categorization
in the delirious contemplation of other objects exterior and
absurd to this Oedipal matrix: Rubber (next to silicon, the
perfect inhuman fabric?) suspension in space (the desire to
float, to get out of it?) masks (desubjectification of the face),
machines (opening the sexual circuit to the flow of the final
outside, the technological inhuman).
The construction of these Virtual Machines has always been
an element in the cycling of S&M programs, scanned on their
own (virtual) terms and free from the prejudices of
symptomatology, (namely that S&M is a problem, a
disturbance. Actually, all it disturbs is the state’s encryption of
‘normality’. A precious thing). A reading of Sade and
Sacher-Masoch reveals the frenzies of two early
cyberneticians at work: it is not the subjectified practices of
sexuality that matter, it is the bodies and objects that open the
gates to ecstatic desire flux, these assemblages of harnesses,
straps, thongs, cuffs, pulleys, seats positioning the body for
optimum penetration by others, mirrors assaulting the senses
with confused images of the co-flux of self, others, and
mechanical parts; primitive tactile feedback sensors (as the
orgiastics move in escalating pleasure, the entire machine
rocks, intensifying the mania, the regal dominatrix in her furs,
the resonating surface of the body of the submissive.
Fragmentation of identity on positive feedback circuits. This is
the use of the machine that processed itself, removing the
certainty of exactly who or what is using who or what. Human
use of mechanical means of dominating nature or the viral
contamination of a metabolic vehicle by a machine? Or a
process of becoming machine, carrying the debris of of the
subject of certainty in its undertow in a movement of
becoming inhuman. Non-existence of the Human Security
System. The birth of a monster.
But that’s not all. Blown apart by escalating positive feedback,
the Virtual Machine begins to bombard the security systems
with noise. The only feedback Terminal 1 will result in
micro-destruction of sections of its desire code as unfiltered
noise becomes ungovernable. Third Terminal perversion
feeds a viral sub-routine back into the system, fucking up its
terminals, corrupting its operations.
Meanwhile, the culprits are never caught. As non-beings with
no identity of their own, they are already out of the combat
area, regrouping for the next strike, disguised in indicators of
outward respectability and normality, laughing.
Techno-Assassins whisperings calls to chaos. Viral whispers.
Strange infections.
Perhaps one day Capital will begin marketing domestic sex
machines. Glance at all the middle class, cultish drool
saturating this potentiality of paying by credit card, jacking into
telephone networks, staging pixellated fantasies of machine
fellatio, necrophile liaisons with historical figures, rape without
scars, promiscuity without viral infection, and realise that
Capital’s boomer R&D department is ecstatic about taking its
chimerical sexual revolution to the next stage.
When these systems come online, be positive that noise from
the Third Terminal will infect the code at its vegetable roots.
Terrorising the aging sixties’ club. Leaving anonymous death
threats on the bulletin boards of the state. Perverting the
licensed trajectories of desire.