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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
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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?
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