Discourse is Death- A Webcomic About Words by Paul R. Buckle

Discourse is Death

Introduction (Extract from the Beast Machine s)

(Or go straight to the comic).

A comic panel featuring a dog with sunglasses and a hat that transforms a stick figure into various words, finishing with the wotd "void".

“Discourse is Death” is a comic series that examines the phenomenon of language in its guise as ideology. It explores how the commonality of ideas in a culture obscures their contingency, leading us to impose unnecessary limitations on our potential. The conceit of the comic is not only that we are in the grip of ideology, but also that this is our natural state because language is a necessary part of who we are, both socially and personally. That is, we are thrown into shared linguistic worlds which we must negotiate and inhabit, and though we may travel among these worlds, we cannot imagine our way out of the whole that they form. Language is our sole medium of conceptualization and meaningful cooperation; and knowledge of the linguistically mediated inter and intra-cultural ways of being needed to negotiate our interactions is the dominant determinant of our place among others.

The forms of these linguistic ways of being can be called discourses, and they forge the unifying basis, as suggested above, of our social and personal selves. Sociality, as expressed in discourse, is as necessary for individuality as individuality is for sociality. We need a network in which to find ourselves as self-comprehending individuals, and we need self-comprehending individuals to form a viable network. However, the network is finite, limited, and contingent. That is, though it may appear natural and self-justifying, it is a construction, and we are of value to it only insofar as we are stable nodes in its structure.

As such, language’s relationship to us is morally ambiguous. The overarching linguistic system we are subject to and subjects in both frees us and captures us, and a positive realization of this ambiguity is necessary for creative engagement with this system. That is to say, we are faced with social situations in which we know how to act and in which, in accordance with our conditioning, certain actions appear natural or even inevitable, but this should not delimit our ethical and moral horizons. We are not condemned to define ourselves exclusively in terms of socially accepted, acceptable, or even legible roles. We retain, at least in theory, the option to define ourselves in opposition to the cultural forces that shape us, and doing so may sometimes be the more moral choice, particularly as it relates to the exercise of our freedom.

In order to understand this, of course, we ought to understand what we mean by freedom. Freedom may be conceptualised as the opening up of multiple choices that satisfy our desires, or, contrarily, as our ability to resist our desires in the face of such a multiplicity of choice. It may be considered as the freedom to express and associate ourselves with others or the freedom to disassociate and differentiate ourselves from others. It may be thought of as the freedom to act or the freedom to understand the meaning and context of our actions. It differs in its quantitative and qualitative elements and the ideal balance of these is something that is not often possible to definitively discern.

In “Discourse and Death” though, a clear moral binary is established. It consists in the tension between the more quantitatively oriented form of freedom accorded to us by our status as functionaries of discourse (the freedom to effectively incorporate ourselves in groups and group activity and to reap the practical social benefits of doing so—nominal freedom) and the more qualitatively oriented freedom accorded to us in our potential for disrupting these roles (the freedom to creatively resist such incorporation and reap the individual spiritual benefits of doing so—ontological freedom). The tension between these respective forms of freedom is represented in the comic by the enmity between Discourse Dog (for whom human freedoms are conceived of as mere opportunities for discourse to process in order to reproduce itself) and his foil, the anonymous clown (for whom authentic freedom consists in opposing, perverting, and redirecting attempts at social processing).

What characterizes both of these figures is their active subjectivity. And it’s this active subjectivity that pushes them in different ways towards the socially illegible. Discourse Dog is like invisible ink, a social force that makes itself invisible in its ubiquity, and the clown is like encrypted code, a social force that is enigmatic in its uniqueness. The stick figures are the far more passive and legible social subjects in the overall dynamic, pulled here and there in their attempts to negotiate these strange opposing forces they can’t quite read.

Finally, though the series is highly influenced by Lacanian (and related) philosophical psychological concepts, a knowledge of anything more than is written above is not required to understand the basics of the action. And even where specific conceptual allusions are inferred, the gist should not be entirely lost.