"Language comes first. It's not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven't got language, you can't be conscious"
About this Quote
Alan Moore flips the usual self-help bromide on its head: you are not a pure, pre-linguistic self who later learns to label feelings. You are, to a disturbing degree, a creature assembled by words. It’s a provocation that fits a writer who treats language like occult technology - a spell system for building reality - and it carries the same unsettling implication his comics do: what you call “your mind” is partly a social artifact.
The intent is less academic than insurgent. Moore is arguing for language as the operating system of consciousness, not its decorative interface. Without symbols, grammar, narrative, you don’t just struggle to communicate; you struggle to have an interior world coherent enough to qualify as “consciousness” in the first place. That’s why the line is so bluntly conditional: “if you haven’t got language.” It’s not romantic; it’s infrastructural.
The subtext is power. If language scaffolds awareness, then whoever controls language controls the boundaries of what can be thought, confessed, imagined, or resisted. Moore’s career-long obsession with propaganda, media manufacture, and political mystification sits behind this: from governments shaping public reality to superheroes shaping moral vocabulary, he keeps returning to the same fear - that our most private perceptions are vulnerable to public scripts.
Context matters, too. Moore emerges from a Britain where class is audible, authority speaks in polished codes, and dissent gets dismissed as inarticulate noise. His line is a warning and a dare: expand your language, and you expand your mind’s permissions. Let others shrink it, and they shrink you.
The intent is less academic than insurgent. Moore is arguing for language as the operating system of consciousness, not its decorative interface. Without symbols, grammar, narrative, you don’t just struggle to communicate; you struggle to have an interior world coherent enough to qualify as “consciousness” in the first place. That’s why the line is so bluntly conditional: “if you haven’t got language.” It’s not romantic; it’s infrastructural.
The subtext is power. If language scaffolds awareness, then whoever controls language controls the boundaries of what can be thought, confessed, imagined, or resisted. Moore’s career-long obsession with propaganda, media manufacture, and political mystification sits behind this: from governments shaping public reality to superheroes shaping moral vocabulary, he keeps returning to the same fear - that our most private perceptions are vulnerable to public scripts.
Context matters, too. Moore emerges from a Britain where class is audible, authority speaks in polished codes, and dissent gets dismissed as inarticulate noise. His line is a warning and a dare: expand your language, and you expand your mind’s permissions. Let others shrink it, and they shrink you.
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| Topic | Deep |
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