ABSTRACT
How do I know the difference between you and me and how do we share our beliefs in the same? How are we made so obedient and so predictable? As a minimalist approach to these questions I imagine human thought-and-action as a double helix. It is assumed firstly, that man is a semiotic animal, a species whose individuals are kept together and apart by their use of signs; secondly, that every sign within itself combines elements of drastically different ontologies. This invisible world is then captured in a three-dimensional coordinate system whose axes are those of identity, difference, and intentionality. While the resulting map is anchored in fix-points of silence, the real world of socialization and understanding is always in flux. The paper closes with a pastiche on Carl von Linné’s Flora Suecica; in the current world of thought-and-action, signifier and signified are assigned the same ordering functions as stamina and pistil once were in the world of plants. How do I draw the invisible lines of the taken-for-granted? How do I project a dematerialized point onto a transparent plane?
