Is writing merely a way of recording language by visible marks, or does it have its own linguistic function? Edmund Husserl describes writing as virtual communication. It makes communications possible without immediate or even mediate personal address. By means of writing, the socialization of humanity is elevated to a new stage.

From Assyrian time on, the bulk of writing is in administrative and economic documents, mainly in the form of lists. In referring to the "scriptural economy" Michel De Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life) points to writing as a "triumphal conquista of the economy, that has, since the beginning of the 'modern age' given itself the name of writing." (p. 131) For de Certeau, the installation of the scriptural apparatus is the triumph of a modern discipline." In modern western culture the practice of writing is a myth which gives symbolic articulation to the Occidental ambition to compose its history, and thus to compose history itself." Here, as elsewhere, de Certeau seeks to find archaic processes of resistance within the discipline itself, in this case, forms of orality, and to rehabilitate reading as a nomadic poaching.

De Certeau describes writing as "the concrete activity that consists in constructing, on its own, blank space (un espace propre ) --the page-- a text that has the power over the exteriority from which it has been isolated." (p. 134)