What is the "structure" that is common to both the political and semiotic forms of representation? One way to think of it is as a triangular relationship: representation is always of something or someone, by something or someone, to someone. It seems that only the third angle of representation need be a person: we can represent stones with dabs of paint or letters or sounds, but we can represent things only to people. The other two angles can be occupied by people but need not be: I can represent a man with a stone, or a stone with a man; but it would seem very odd to speak of representing either a stone or a man to a stone. There also may be a fourth dimension to representation not captured by our triangle, and that would be the "intender" or "maker" of the representation, the one who says, "let this dab of paint stand for this stone to someone." This more complete picture of representation might be mapped as a quadrilateral with two diagonal axes, one connecting the representational object to that which it represents, the other connecting the maker of the representation to the beholder:

contexts other than the one that the origin can force to modify (extend, generalize, etc.) its definition (continuity, function, dimension, dot product, limit, etc.), so that it allows the conditioning of the context or the particularities of the functionality in each context.

In other cases, a functionality may give rise to different objects depending on the context in that is observed and the properties and relationships acquired by the functionality of that context (integral defined, curve, etc.). The definition of the object has to determine the conditioning of the context

that characterize the object or functionality in this context.