The Mirrorless Reflection

Imagine standing in a world without mirrors, cameras, polished surfaces, or any medium that could reflect your appearance back to you. You have a body, you move, you act — but you have never once seen yourself from the outside.

Now ask: how could self be construed under such conditions?

Without reflection, self-construal cannot rely on the external image — the visible body doubled back as object. What remains is the lived process: proprioception, inner alignment, the sense of moving through a world that offers resistance, support, and response.

This thought experiment highlights a distinction at the heart of relational ontology:

• The body as event — experienced from within, as process.

• The body as object — construed from without, through reflection.

In our world, self-construal entwines both. Mirrors, photos, and others’ gaze fold us back into ourselves, constructing an image of the self as an external object among others. But in the mirrorless world, “I” is never doubled in this way. Identity remains a lived alignment, a resonance of action and sensation, never split by reflection into an inner and outer.

The mirrorless reflection thus shows us that the self-as-object is not a given, but an achievement of construal. It requires symbolic mediation — a surface that turns perspective back upon itself.

And in this reversal lies the seed of reflexivity itself: the possibility of construing construal.