Interaction and Interactivity 249under which citizens, subjects and social actors could transcend themselves and their
monologue position, and also acquire a legally empowered status. In particular Civil Law
formulates what Roman law already suggested in that context about a subject's position sui
iuris, which entails emancipation. The Latin manus means hand as well as power. To get out
of the power of an idea or social regimen is in Latin e manu capere – the basis for
emancipation. Enlightenment used the concept with its roots in Roman law and in law in
general: to be in the situation of acting under the guidance of one's own legal power is the key
to be a bearer of rights and duties, as the emerging EU legal system emphasized.
This entire pattern development depicts hitherto unknown worlds and world-concepts.
Communication does not relate human individuals in a one-to-one manner but stems from a
world image in which individuals occupy a place and construct a diversity of realities
according to their various positions, expectations and values. The EU Treaties are made to
secure these places for the Union citizens in all regards. Interaction becomes an inappropriate
concept in that evolution, because it appears too static. Challenges pertaining to that concept
come from within the emerging legal system. The construction of the European Union shows
how nation states can no longer make decisions and policies for themselves in autarchy. Webs
of indeterminacy became a normal context for nation state decision-making and laws. Once
decisions are made, they seem to be grounded in fragmentary assessments that refer
haphazardly to the common good. The sum total of references becames problematic: not only
citizens but also other Member States determined the common good beyond fixed
determination. One particular issue shows this problematic character at hand: the Union's
requirement of a single institutional framework and a single voice and identity on the
international stage. The heart of the matter is here, that the image of public life as related to a
common good is based on a 'public', which is immensely diversified. Nevertheless: there
remains this important tension between the idea of "interactivity" and possible legal practices,
who—as the Napoleonic Code showed—need that subjects of law possess a position in public
life that determines them physically and spiritually. Applied semiotics considers: is law
indeed able to leave "interaction" behind and to perform its actions with legal subjects who
are by definition in a continuous "state of interactivity"?
It is fascinating how Ludwig Wittgenstein's 1958 Philosophical Investigations formulate
his widely recognized "private language argument", saying that a language remaining within
the limits of a personal consciousness—and thus excluding other minds by means of
continuously mirroring its proper position—cannot exist. Those considerations, from §202 to
many paragraphs in the §§ 300, reach from sensations to impressions, from memory to
meaning, from expression to reference and from rule to sign. They sustain Charles Sanders
Peirce's observation that signs never fit exclusively one individual. His observation that
everything can become a sign does consequently not focus a single consciousness and its
proper position in social space, but implies already a different social philosophy! Hence, in
the words of Peirce, there are no signs; in other words: nothing is a sign, nothing is
exclusively a sign, nothing is in essence a sign, a fixed sign, or in any other "is"- regard, but
everything can become a sign! Only dynamic or process sign functions function in the course
of life. He thus emphasizes the human situation as being in process, and introduces the
semiotic subject not as a fixed means to perceive reality but as one of the many ways of
perception. A sign is not a fixed semiotic entity but rather a meeting ground for independent
entities. Semiotics, including their applications in whatever field of communal interest
(scientific theories included) entails therefore a theory about the quality, engenderment and