248 Jan M. Broekman
His reading formed the basis for diagnosis and therapy. Modern medicine lost most of this
semiotic sensitivity and replaced it by applying powerful techniques of visualization. Reading
a patient's signs transformed into reading and interpreting images, graphics and numbers. A
physician's clinical picture thus became a pictured sample of visual data. However, next to
theology and literature, law maintained its semiotic sensitivity to our days, so that features
such as truth, justice and equilibrium are still an issue of a sign-directed legal interpretation.
Lawyers create meaning through their expert language and their particular understanding of
signs folded in texts. Modern law thus remains a discourse in which an unfolding of semiotic
sensitivity seems essential. That discourse has interaction as the fundamental concept for its
social activities whilst leaving important philosophical implications untouched. The
difference between interaction and interactivity is one of those unrevealed implications.
"Interaction/interactivity" is a theme that profiles legal semiotics in particular. Interaction
exhibits — despite its suggestion of dynamism — a static character. Its inherent sender-
receiver scheme determines the idea of interaction and qualifies it correctly as "action
between (inter) actors". This does, however, not fit our experience that each action in life
focusing on others is never a duplication story but rather the unfolding of a new vision and
interpretation of life! Precisely that awareness is folded in the concept of interactivity. Does
the latter meaning fit law and legal thinking, like it does the meaning of "interaction"? The
question is a central issue in semiotic analyses. The process of "being in a state of
interactivity" changes the quality and substance of all that is meant by "interaction", so that
the two expressions (interaction and interactivity) are not interchangeable. However,
emphasis on interactivity characterizes all sorts of semiotic approaches in contrast to
interaction. Interactivity pertains to all fragments of social reality, not in the least because
most of our social activities are in the first place folded in modes of activity: first of all the
establishment of relations with sub-/objects, and further pertaining to the perceiver(s) of it all.
Changes and variations in the process of activity can take place in one and the same activity
mode. This view leads away from traditional models of communication, which have been so
fundamental and natural in law and social sciences. But what shape has human
communication, lawyers would argue when confronted with semiotics, if one has to accept
that creating meaning is a multifaceted process, which is built upon the acceptance of
indeterminacy and the refutation of invariant stories or definitive codes?
Such considerations emphasize the dynamics of signs and sign formation, and elucidate
how social relations are a process and at the same time a process-result, but never a static
issue engendered by autonomous actors in relation with other autonomous actors. "Activity"
is a keyword that transcends all varieties that take the 'sender-receiver' model for granted.
Postmodern psychotherapy has forwarded the issue of "not-knowing" as a key feature, so that
the therapist's ego does not predetermine the path, which the client's ego has to go, so that
fixed, frozen or monologue constructions begin to change. This is not an ―anything goes"—
philosophy but a forceful attempt to change the speaker-hearer model in communicative
practices. Do not forget how the latter model dominated our occidental philosophies for
centuries, forcing us to understand social life as the mirroring of ego and alter with their
particular focus on representation. But again, no 'activity' is based on fixed positions in public
space that create the social world through departing from the ego either as ego or as alter! We
tend to understand the public space as a space of the politeia, the 'body politics' so
prominently formulated in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, in which positions change and are
understood as changing. This determination of a public space seemed the only condition