The phenomenon I research is language, my question is how language works in human life. This ‘working’ occurs interpersonally, intrapersonally, and transpersonally, transcending the local interactions between co-present people. This approach does not privilege the psychological, i.e. individual mind, reaching out for language in a second step; nor does it privilege the linguistic apart from its psychological volume. With the working of language, the theory I suggest is pragmatic and dialogic: performed symbols we move through together, dia-logos. And we are moved through, are subjected to: Living language is doing it actively and it is being lived by it in interaction and thinking, with others and without them; it passes through us across time and situations, building up that ever changing and still recognizable ‘dialogical texture’ woven in polyphony and heterology. Thus my ‘reading direction’ for language is the common social, cultural, historical reality. Language activity cannot be but a plural dynamic of call-and-response, it is formed and accessible to the senses: it is simultaneously a sensorial and a symbolic phenomenon. Aiming at a holistic picture of language activity, I look at the rhetorical field with interlocutors, an audience, a speech community, an enacted-created semiotic field, bodies moving, postures and positionings, voices and gazes – and this field is saturated with imaginary instances that can be called in. Observable is how a series of political-epistemological decisions made this field shrink: language is evacuated from the mind, from moving bodies; others with their listening and questions and the field we stand in located and positioned are non-existent. It is from there that I will argue for living language as a political activity.