Semiografia

This text inaugurates Semiography — a theoretical-methodological procedure conceived by Guilherme Gonçalves Machado, in Rio de Janeiro, in February 2026 — as a dual gesture of phenomenological apprehension that mobilizes, in the dimension of panchronic inventory and prospection, the different traditions of semiotics: Roland Barthes' semiology, Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semiotics, Algirdas Julien Greimas' narrative and discursive semiotics, Charles W. Morris' pragmatist semiotics, Iuri Lotman's semiosphere and the Tartu-Moscow School, Patrick Charaudeau's semiolinguistics, and Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic semiotics. The dual number — a grammatical category attested in Indo-European, Ancient Greek, and other languages — is taken as an operative category designating the constitutive pair inventory/prospection, in functional isomorphism with the grammatical dual that designates natural pairs (two eyes, two hands). Panchrony (CASTILHO, 2010) is mobilized as a symmetric and dual dimension in relation to synchrony and diachrony, projecting in potency in both temporal directions without reducing itself to either. The concept of valency — transposed from chemistry to linguistics by Lucien Tesnière (Éléments de syntaxe structurale, 1959) — is resignified as theoretical valency: the capacity for epistemological bonding that an object of study requires to constitute itself as an object of scientific research. The passage from the dual (ambivalence) to polyvalence constitutes the semiographic axiom: the question of how many and which theoretical valencies an object of study is capable of mobilizing to constitute itself as a full scientific object. A typological gap is identified in the available classifications of scientific research — notably in Marconi and Lakatos — for naming and qualifying inaugural procedures of theoretical creation. Semiography inscribes this missing typology as a programmatic task, affiliating itself to the long genealogy of scholiasts, glossators, and commentators — from medieval scholasticism to rabbinic commentary — and claiming Erich Auerbach (Mimesis, 1946) as an operational predecessor of the panchronic and polyvalent comparatist gesture. Semiography adopts as its existential axiom that sign regimes are not confined to art or to the school, but operate in any domain of experience where there is production of meaning, in resonance with the classical Latin tradition (Seneca, Cicero) that affirms the primacy of life over institution.