The Language Without Listeners

This post investigates another facet of solitary construal: the ways language exists in potential, shaped by the horizon of possible listeners, even when no one is present to receive it.

Imagine a language spoken by only one person. Every word you utter falls into silence. There is no one to respond, no one to acknowledge, no echo of recognition. And yet, you keep speaking.

What happens to language in this world? Does it wither without listeners? Or does it take on new shapes — muttering, reciting, performing, reminding? You invent dialogues with yourself, stage arguments, tell stories that begin and end in your own mouth.

Language here is not destroyed by solitude. Instead, it turns inward, proliferating as an echo chamber of reflexive alignment. Words point not to external hearers but to positions within the self — the speaker to whom you must explain, the critic who interrupts, the confidant who reassures.

The language without listeners shows us that meaning does not depend on exchange with an external other. Rather, it lives in the architecture of roles that language makes possible. A sentence always presupposes an addressee, even if that addressee is only a shadow-self conjured into being by the act of speaking.

What this reveals:

Language is never solitary. Even in absolute isolation, it calls into being a dialogic space. The listener is not a separate body but a position constituted by construal. To speak at all is to divide the self into many, and to enact the collective within.

The Society of One

Picture a society with a single member: yourself. There are no others, no neighbours, no companions. And yet, in this solitary society, the structures of social life persist — roles, norms, expectations.

You rise in the morning and greet yourself. You cook a meal and feel the need to thank the cook. You make a mistake and feel compelled to apologise — to whom, exactly? To yourself, and yet also not yourself.

The society of one is not empty. It is dense with reflexive alignments. The self fractures into positions: speaker and listener, judge and judged, friend and adversary. Social meaning emerges, not from numbers, but from the capacity to take perspective, to construe relation where none is physically present.

The experiment shows that society is not reducible to a collection of individuals. It is an architecture of construal, a scaffolding of roles and relations that can persist even when only one body is present to enact them.

What this reveals:

Society is not built out of individuals, but out of relational positions. The “one” already contains the many. To imagine sociality without others is to find, within oneself, the architecture of the collective.