252 Jan M. Broekman
Peirce's idea that the human subject is an order in itself, and the self itself is for itself a
sign, forms the basis for an observation that combines literary and visual semiotics. That
image could be finalized in a legally correct and elaborated citizen participation as explored
today in the legal system of the European Union. Is not the ultimate goal of legal rhetoric
(sustained by legal semiotics) to create an emancipated opinion, combining visual and verbal
elements of discourse? 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 offensively stated: two faces conceived within the boundaries of the 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 irrelevant in semiotic perspective. Faces are in essence interactivity; they cannot
become a sign outside that realm and they are just for 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 and precisely what Peirce described as 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!" As a
consequence, the semiotics of interactivity is about human individuals embedded in the
encompassing energy of change and transition, which we often vaguely indicate as 'culture'.
Faces are culture 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 an evolving position in the
process of growth and development.
Where law and legal discourse want to fixate an individual as being in interaction, they
do so by means of using, for instance, concepts such as right, identity, or property. 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. The 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 Peirce's category
Firstness. Here is the key notion that can serve as a basis for any deeper understanding of our
thesis pertaining to the shortcomings of "interaction" and the surplus value of "interactivity".
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 proper 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 this question when they have
law and legal discourse as their frame of reference and at the same time see a human face.
Are they aware, how ours is the age of semiotics, the method of questioning and research, of