The word Vorschrift holds several meanings in German. In the Grimm dictionary, it is "written before written," in addition, in the older meaning, a "letter of recommendation" and "Pattern for copying or transcribing," and in the newer meaning, "a binding rule of conduct" up to "binding provisions in laws, statutes, orders of all kinds laid down in writing" (Grimm 1854ff.).
## The Norming of the Prescription
In addition to a factual difference and temporal antecedence and posteriority, the difference between a prescription and a transcription thus also brings into play an evolutionary aspect related to law and power: a transcription can also be seen as a deviation from a prescription in the normative sense. This meaning will be of primary interest in what follows. The best-known forms of legally normative prescriptions are legal laws and, in an extended sense, formalized expectations. They couple the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and organizations with the fulfillment and disappointment of expectations and are provided with sanctions covered by political power.
## The Illegal Transcription of the Regulation
Every successful violation of a formalized expectation can be described not only as a breach of law, but also as a prohibited but unpreventable attempt to transcribe this expectation. This occurs "on the fly," secretly and with only particular binding force, must thereby do without written form and, moreover, eludes current observability and attributability. At the same time, every event of this kind also undermines the underlying power-political cover through the emergence of new, initially diffuse and illegal power potentials.
## The standardization of the rewriting of the rewriting of the rewriting
Legally standardized regulations are characterized, among other things, by the fact that the standardization also concerns the standardization process itself: Formalized expectations may not be rewritten in any way, but exclusively in a way that is also prescribed. Then we are dealing with rewritings of the second order, namely with the rewriting of legally normed regulations that programmatically prescribe how other legally normed regulations may and may not be rewritten.
## The violating paraphrase of the paraphrase of the paraphrase
When it comes to the stabilizing repetition of the unlawful paraphrase of regulations, the legally standardized paraphrase regulations of these regulations are also affected: Any repetitive and successful violation of a formalized expectation refers not only to the expectation itself, but also to its rewriting programs.
## Feedback: Uniformity
As soon as it is possible to feed the results of these violations back into the formal structures, an indifference problem arises: It is no longer possible to distinguish whether the communicative results attached to these expectations have come about lawfully or unlawfully and whether the power by which these violations are covered is based on lawful or unlawful sources. This opens up a legal-political uniformity problem, and the question is how to solve it.