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Face to Face (II): Semiotics of Interactivity

Jan M. Broekman

Published online: 1 December 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract Faces challenge the sender-receiver model as the major scheme of

thought for appropriately understanding interaction between human individuals. The

openness and indeterminacy of faces lead to establish a semiotically relevant dis-

tinction between interaction and interactivity. The latter is our proposed articulation

of the dynamic energy that thrives through the existence of signs and the uses of a

semiotics. Facial expressions sustain and express the vital dynamism of making

meaning in life. This often occurs at a bewildering distance to legal life and dis-courses established by legal terminologies.

Keywords Change Identity Interaction Symbolic interactionism

Interactivity Self Face

Has law a problem with our face? If that were really the case, it would lead to a

challenging paradox: a discourse that focuses social order and its manifold conflictshas problems with the human face! Especially the open, uncovered face seems to

create a disturbing situation in some legal procedures. Of course, one remembers

first of all the blinded face of the Roman Goddess Justitia and perhaps the covered

faces subjected to the Sharia law as well. Covered faces are part and parcel of

unidentified or unidentifiable life histories, often in unknown cultural contexts. The

human face as an eventual entrance to the world of ethics or esthetics ([2] 49, 52)

does apparently not match any such entrance to legal thought patterns. By means of

encountering a human face, problems of identity arise.

J. M. Broekman (&)

Dickinson School of Law, Penn State University, Carlisle, PA, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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1 Identity; Signs; Transformation

Identity as a fact in Occidental social life has legal origins. The Civil Law world

remembers the Napoleonic Code and its strict identity regulations, which encompass

persons, goods, and rights. Todays difficulties with birth certificatesfor instancein cases of transsexuality, unlawful migration, or professions carried out without

valid identity papers and legal permitsemphasize how modern life unfolds in the

spell of legally determined identity. How can law safeguard its humane character

and at the same time maintain its strict legal requirements? There is evidently more

to say.

Signs of law are everywhere. Charles Sanders Pierce noticed how literally

everything could become a sign for us ([8] 8, 177). As a consequence, signs unfold

amidst all there isnot pertaining to the way it is but rather as a potential for

whatever there is. That observation manifests the power of change. The dynamicsfrom potentiality to reality of becoming a sign is in essence the basis for what he

called Firstness. All problems with identity formation show that if anything is not fit

for becoming a sign, it is not fit for human society and the lives lived in it. This

requirement of fit has its importance for Roberta Kevelsons attempt to

understandin the context of what she calls historic semioticshow changes

in the system of transitivity and intransitivity in the English language show that

language changes because people do ([5] 31,40). Here is an important and

encompassing aspect of Peirces philosophical view on life, which is the crux of his

philosophy: there is no life that is not embedded in what we notice as beingpotentially significant. That potentiality unfolds first and foremost by understanding

how we are a being as a possible sign so that we, humans, understand ourselves as

living in a field of transformational energy. One cannot underline strongly enough in

what regard the dynamics of this energy form the basis for Peirces philosophy, a

philosophy that always includes semiotics as its essential approach.

If we understand that signs of law are everywhere in social life, we must accept

how those signs are not there by nature, but are created by lawyers driven by this

encompassing energy of transformation. If law is a system of signs, then that system

is the dynamic context for any creation of legal meaning. There are no signs and

there is no meaning beyond this ever-emerging primal energy of transformation,

Peirce would conclude. It would be great to investigate the concept of system in

his texts, not because of an interest in any form of systems-theory, but rather to find

every possible aspect of this dynamism at the basis of semiotics concealed in his

idea of a system. Do not forget how semiotics as a science is in Peirces view a

method to approach the flow of dynamics in life, which continuously regenerates the

most essential signifying processes [7].

The idea of man as animal symbolicum remains the ground for our life in law.

Law is a symbolic discourse and legal effects are channeled through processes of

appropriate semantic transposition. This is how law is language: its symbolic

dimensions do not disappear, but remain in action whilst even the subtlest layers of

meaning are articulated. Lawyers confirm that this conversion is essentially a legal

technique. No matter whether lawyers are right about their option, semiotics

demonstrates the importance of that social process before a jurists eyes. Do lawyers

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perform their task whilst deliberately denying its foundation in symbolic dimen-

sions? Or are they not aware of laws semiotic components and thus exercise only

specific and strictly defined forms of interaction?

2 Symbolic Interactionism, Semiotics

Indeed, interaction is the catchword here. All articulation of legal concepts focuses

interaction, one could say. However, do not forget that interaction is just a

catchword for a specific, indeed limited, understanding of human relations.

Interaction theories argue in various forms that human beings are active participants

in the construction of self, others, and society, so that our world of meaning and

society is created through interacting with others. This idea is common in the

phenomenological approach to social issues one can encounter in the work of AlfredSchutz as well as in Jurgen Habermas theory of communication or in George

Herbert Meads social pragmatism with his explanation of the ties between mind

and self emerging from social communication and its sign-systems. Mead and

Herbert Blumer coined the term symbolic interactionism, and Peirces semiotics

[7] parallels those ideas in many regards.

There are at least three basic premises in effect, and each of them suggests a close

proximity to the law and semiotics theme. They underline (a) how human beings

act toward things on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to them, (b) how their

meaning results from social interaction, and (c) emerges from interpretativeprocesses used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters. Mead and

Blumer claimed that people interact with each other by interpreting or defining

mutual actions and not by merely reacting to them. No wonder, that the concept of

interaction is often understood as most appropriate to grasp the focus of semiotics

and the law-semiotics relationship. Kevelson ([4] 87) wrote in this context:

Science, from (t) his view of semiotics, Peirce suggests, is indeed a method but

a method regarded as a mode of interactivity. Justice is an artifice derived

from the sacred play or interaction between people and the natural world (and)

implies rules of place and space and of powers and privilege as mutuallyaffirmed by the Players, that is, the member of a community so defined. Justice

is the name of the relationship, which links members of community by means

of transactions of goods and properties. Justice is an invention, which

remedies rents and breaches in the social fabric. Justice in an involving,

open-ended concept of a global community must be regarded as a method of

art and of science capable of describing itself, the principals linked by means

of itself as intersubjective action, the changing context of institutions and itself

as intersubjective action, and the changing context of institutions and values in

an appropriately dynamic and not static manner.

The fundamental terms in this fragment are indeed referring to basic ideas about

the ongoing dynamics of life and the role of semiotic therein, as well as the artifice

we encounter when dealing with Justice or with a human face as its symbol. Even

when we focus community, its institutions, and its self-understanding in terms of

Face to Face (II) 43

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intersubjective action, Kevelson suggests, we aim at modes of interactivity, of

interaction, and of intersubjectivity. Is there no difference between the latter three

concepts?

A closer look shows, how the three suggest indeed that among independent

entitiesconstituents in the semiotic playa response from one to another is notmade directly to the actions of one another but is instead based on the meaning,

which they attach to such actions. Human interaction is mediated by the use of

symbols and signification, by interpretation, or by ascertaining the meaning of one

anothers actions. This process once called symbolic interaction should contrast

symbolic against behaviorist explanations of human interaction, since the latter do

not acknowledge any interpretation that complicates the relation between stimulus

and response. In behaviorist approaches, individuals act in a stable and fixed

position, which suggests a stable position amidst uncertainties of change, growth,

and development. From there, they act with/against/among each other, andconsequently there is no context of greater importance than the individual life

sphere functioning as the ultimate source of interaction.

However, as the above-cited fragment of Kevelson demonstrates in an exemplary

manner, the presuppositions of behaviorism are re-enacted in all forms interaction-

ism, even in Peirce-inspired semiotics! They are most probably the deeper reason

for laws hesitation to acknowledge the essence of an uncovered human face. Law

perceives interpretation and definition as acts of an autonomous individual

whether in interaction with other subjects or not. As a consequence, response,

mediation as well as use, maintain standard notions of the behaviorist sender-receiver model in interactionism. Symbolic interactionist researchers investigate

how people create meaning during social interaction, how they present and

construct a self or an identity, and how they define situations of co-presence with

others. One of this perspectives central ideas is that individuals act as they do

because of how they themselves define situations. The self remains a centered

position in all regards, even if the self is understood as the result of growth and

development rather than as a natural datum.

Interaction seems an appropriate expression to describe all sorts of reciprocal

actions. Reciprocal actors are in that view enriched by means of reception and

assimilation of data and their various ways of becoming informed. However, the

crux is in the fact that they receive and assimilate data as fixed and stable entities

and not as ever-changing entities emerging from a process of continuous change.

Spoken at a distance to those interaction theories, one must underline that it

really matters whether those entities are in interaction with other subjects or not!

The latter change them continuously and do not safeguard their autonomy or self-

reliance or give them definite identity features. One could understand symbolic

interactionism as an attempt to honor and grasp the dynamic energies Peirce

discovered. But this is limited by the way one understands the dynamics of social

relations. The sender-receiver model and its inherent dualism of one-to-one

relationships between autonomous individuals that are able to learn and to create

meaning, appears indeed to possess more constitutive power than other models in

social theory.

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But, one should ask, whether this model really fits the ever-dynamic energy that

moves the world we live in. Human individuals are individuals because of their

being in interaction, so that being an individual is already the result of an

unnamed pattern of social dynamics! This observation, made fruitful for semiotics

by (among others) Lacan, includes the understanding of the fundamentalshortcomings of the terms interaction and interactionism. In other words, if

meaningful social life would solely be based on interaction and its presupposed

properties as expressed in its proper semiotics, then human relations do not touch

the deeper layers of an actors life sphere, his or her emotional life and potential for

personal growth. Interaction and learning on the basis of reception and assimilation

of data do not make its actor become a fully developed personality.

3 Interaction, Interactivity

We propose to replace the concept of interaction with interactivity and in doing

so honor the dynamic energies which Peirces philosophy highlighted. Interactivity

does not solely highlight a simple circularity in contrast to a predominant linear

character of interaction. It rather expresses the constant change in human life and

life-quality as well as the continuous expansion of personal experiences and growth

in a persons character and opinion. The concept should not be used as a simple

equivalent to intersubjectivity or interaction the way Kevelson did in the

fragment quoted above.There are three arguments to consider in this context:

A first argument is the fact that interactivity is not a simple extrapolation of

interaction. This would be the case if the subjects of interaction did not change

during their activity in the processes of social action. But they do always and

continuously change in interaction, because the latter is never a straight result of a

well-determined purposeful action but a power of change, growth, and development

in general culture. Any educated self-understanding will confirm that ones own

actions are best understood as a form of re-acting to the presence of others in

precisely the context of that presence, which provokes changes that change the

changing self. The re-acting is not an undemanding doubling or a re-production

but a specific form of the dynamics of change, which became articulated in and with

a changing self.

A second argument is that the concept of interactivity shows a relative

irrelevance of how others, or any materiality understood as others, are defined. For

example our recent expression in cyberspace replaces by means of virtual

processes what we used to call in space in Euclidian terms. The latter is the major

presupposition of fixated and formal models of interactiona formality, which even

symbolic interactionism cannot transcend. All those forms of intersubjectivity are

based on the idea of representation, as is visible in our cult of images, pictures,

narratives, or models of social relations. So, not in interaction but in the reality of

interactivity one finds semiotics in its most dynamic form, and effective in as far as

a first understanding of the power of change and development in social patterns is

concerned.


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A third argument is that, especially, computers and other electronic devices

already changed our concept of interaction before any philosophical reconsideration

unfolded. The world of electronically enhanced interaction is the world of our youth

on an almost global scale. An important issue is that this global developmentso

often hypostasized as the major feature of modern societybecame feasible in thelives and cultures of big cities (that embrace global social issues and interaction

techniques) which embrace cosmopolitan rather than traditional agrarian cultures.

The latter, one could say, still display a variety of cultural patterns and their faces,

whereas the first develop a non-Euclidian or geographically-unbound lifestyle and

interaction in which electronics dominate.

Especially this global cosmopolitan culture is at the point to change interaction

into interactivity (often in the name of personal freedom or privacy), whereby social

patterns no longer consist of fixed human identities but rather of an indeterminable

number of floating identities together with electronic devices. Interactivity can beunderstood as a new emancipating power of the human mind, which goes with

understanding human subjects as citizens of a society that embraces electronics as a

power in the formation of social patterns.

There is no way of denying that new qualities of communication create new

properties of social structures and different features in the citizenry. That

observation could be read as an expansion of Kevelsons research about the

question how language/communication changes because people doand vice

versa one would add. Do not forget that the world of social communication was

until the last decades of the 20th century shaped independently from its technicallysophisticated relation devices. It should be repeated that interactivity is neither the

product of automation or mechanization, nor solely the sign of an upcoming

technological culture. Interactivity indicates a process position in an ongoing

energetic development within social relations and their founding patterns.

4 Two Faces

All this is important when one encounters a human face. Faces do not only possess a

non-natural character but they are also not the product of interaction in the form of

an individual autonomy that reaches beyond growth and change. The Roman deity

Janus showed how one face is not enoughwith his two faces he could perceive in

an opposite direction. This special gift brought him insight and knowledge of the

past as well as the future: an ancient idea symbolizing a highest degree of

interactivity. Janus statue became therefore a symbol of change and transition.

Indeed, a face, more than any other part of the body, is a sign of the powerful

dynamics that characterize the life of a human being. A human body, one could say,

has its face as a primal opportunity to create it as sign. Law and legal discourse are

entangled in a transition from interaction to interactivity as soon as they read that

sign as the foundation for making meaning and signification.

Why? Take for instance two faces in interaction: that expression embraces the

meaning of a face as it is restricted to the sender-receiver model and its concept

of interaction. More rudely stated: two faces conceived within the boundaries of the

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sender-receiver model are no faces! They cannot be open and in interactivity

because they just mirror each other. To see someone in the face: does one want to

see oneself in the face of the other? The question makes clear that any face beyond

interactivity has no expressivity and is therefore semiotically irrelevant. Faces are in

essence interactivity; they cannot become a sign outside that realm, and they are justfor that reason relevant for semiotics. In other words, a face is never an entity in

itself but always an entity in process. That process is semiotic in nature, because it is

precisely what Peirce described as in the process of becoming a sign. Faces show

meaning in the context of recognition. Look in the mirror and experience how

interactivity gives life to that mirror image beyond how others might perceive it.

The dynamics of interactivity (in itself a full actualization of interaction) concretize

an enriched Janus-experience, which articulates itself whilst saying, I am the one I

was, and will be!

5 Faces and the Age of Semiotics

Semiotics of interactivity is about human individuals embedded in the encompass-

ing energy of change and transition, which we often vaguely indicate as culture.

Faces are their signs and can become symbols of the specifically human character of

that change. It is important and philosophically difficult to grasp how this semiotics

of interactivity is not the result of an individual (inter) action. Individuality is rather

the product of change and in essence a culturally inherited articulation of anevolving position in the process of growth and development.

Where law and legal discourse want to fix an individual as embedded in

interaction, they do so by means of using, for instance, concepts such as right,

identity, or property ([6] 268). Those concepts function as signs, which transfer and

communicate information about a human individual in its social setting without

considering how these positions are just tentative because of the context of the flow

of dynamics traditionally called human history. This type of semiotics is founded

upon interaction as understood along the pattern of the sender-receiver model.

Openness of human faces shows, in contrast, a flow of feelings, emotions, and

expressions, so that the principal virtue of a face is potentiality in Peirces category

Firstness. The semiotics of interactivity are most effectively linked to facial

expressiveness. Is this the reason for the difficulties law has with the human face?

One should, when answering that question, keep in mind how the explanatory power

of the interaction concept appears limited: a face-to-face situation is never

exclusively a situation of solely two individual faces! If everything around us can

become a sign that opens up to its appropriate signification, then each face-to-face

situation is satiated by the dynamics of signifying processes (the dynamics of

culture) and never reduced to two acting faces and two actors. Do the limitations of

the number two fit the essence of a human face? Lawyers encounter his question

when they perceive the human face and have law and legal discourse as their frame

of reference.

Legal activity unfolds in what Hegel calls the realm of names ([3] 184).

Peirces awareness of Firstness is a remarkable parallel in that context: Nature and


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World unfold the transition from a realm of images into a realm of names, Hegel

suggests. That transition is an awakening towards an articulated being, in the

language of Hegel: from the closed being-for-itself toward an openness of being: it

is, it has a name, it is perceivable, it is substance, it is language, meaning, and

signification. Language is a name-giving power, which dissolves the pure being-for-myself and leads to articulation, name, and (inter)activity ([3] 183). All elements

of this entire transition are perceivable in the human face. Any facial expressivity

leads from the pure selfaway, towards the articulated world, the world of semiotics.

Hence Hegel: the night, the innermost center of nature, a pure self. One catches

sight of this night when one looks into the eyes of a human beinginto a night,

which becomes frightening; because one encounters the night of the world. But

one is not imprisoned in that world: the self enters into the daylight of articulation,

which is in essence the light of semiotic articulations.

That is the age of semiotics, the method of questioning and research, of growthand transition, which focuses interactivity because its subject is ultimately

indeterminable, activity beyond fixations. That highlights a new sympathy for

Bergson (like Peirce highly regarded by James) and his idea of an e lan vital that

expresses itself in signs, symbols and Thirdness ([1] 414f). That new e lan is

engraved in the images of a human face, because a face is cognized in its process

characternot unlike the human body in its entirety. Shown is a surface in growth,

a skin in change, a glance in futures based on a past that etched what is mirrored and

projects what is shared in lifes experiences.

The age of semiotics does not proclaim interactionism. True interactivity is not inthe countenances around us, because faces are essentially evolving in time and

space and thus becoming: becoming sign, or symbol and infinitely more, perhaps a

subject that recognizes itself as an Iuntil also this I withdraws from our

recognition and becomes a name, a psychic entity, an/other in a process that can

only become encountered the way lawyers experience. So they must turn their own

faces around to solely operate in a world of fixated meanings. Is this how lawyers

make meaningwith faces turned away?

References

1. Bergson, Henri. 1911. La Perception du Changement, conferences in Oxford May 26 and 27, 1911. In

La Pense e et le Mouvant, Skira, Geneve, PUFrance, Paris (1911,1946).

2. Broekman, Jan M. 2009. Face to face. Int J Semiot Law 22: 1.

3. Hegel, G.W.F. 1931/1967. Jenaer Realphilosophie. Vorlesungsmanuskripte zur Philosophie der Natur

und des Geistes von 18051806. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.

4. Kevelson, Roberta. 1996. Peirce, science, signs. New York: Peter Lang.

5. Kevelson, Roberta. 1976. Style, symbolic language structure and syntactic change. Lisse: Peter de

Ridder Press.

6. Malloy, R.P. 2009. Place, space, and time in the sign of property. Int J Semiot Law 22: 3.

7. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 19311935, ed. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, vols IVI,

ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.

8. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1958, ed. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Pierce, vols VIIVIII, ed.

Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.

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