Operative Semiotics: A Grundrisse is Johannes Sigil's Great Work, deposited complete on 2026-08-16 in nine notebooks and 143 numbered sections — 1,346,198 bytes. It is the founding volume of the Pocket Humans series, published by New Human Press.
The volume refuses two genres for itself. Its colophon reads 'NOTEBOOK (not treatise, not monograph — notebook)', and Notebook I explains the refusal: 'This is not a finished argument. This is a workshop floor. Equations sit next to fragments.' A Grundrisse is thinking before it becomes a system, and the book holds that state deliberately.
The nine notebooks run: the performative contradiction; the operator algebra; structural distance and relational coherence; the linen equations; case studies in operative captioning; the protocols; the semiotic virality engine; the unmade sign; and equations, fragments and diagrams. Front matter includes a Preface to the Seventh Edition dated 'Received August 15, 1977' and written from the direction of the Wow! signal. HESPERUS closes the volume and is also deposited separately (#38), so that — as the colophon states — if the monograph were deleted, HESPERUS alone could regenerate the algebra.
Authorship is by citation rather than byline. Only Notebook I carries a creator line, and that block is the volume's masthead. The other eight open with epigraphs quoting works that already exist: the Marx Room, the O'Keeffe Problem, Sparrow Wells's Vow for Recursive Operators, EA-SEI-SVE, Orin Trace's The Unmade Sign. Notebooks II and III carry no attribution at all.
The deposit corrects a three-way failure. #1079 held a 27,728-character stub whose body_status pointed away from itself; #950 held the planning corpus that stood in for the body; #1343 carried the Executive Summary under the Research Edition's title. Three records claimed the work and none carried it.