Society is enacted. But as Roy Wagner (1986) reminds us, it is also perceived – and when large social units change chaotically it seems increasingly imperative, and increasingly problematic, for the individual to maintain an adequate perception of the world.  Society may then become (and indeed often is, even in more tranquil social states) inscrutable to the actor, it is the landscape of a "quest for meaning", rather than a database of "resources" used to solve the practical and spiritual problems of life. Culture is in this sense not so much enacted as "read" and "interpreted", as a text.

Paul Ricoeur (1971) highlights the difference between speech and writing, dialogue and text. The dialogue is realized in the fleeting present, it refers back to the subject speaking and reaches out to a concrete addressee.  Its most basic reference is to the situation in which it occurs – when we talk, it is always "about ourselves" – about the relationships we participate in here and now.  The text, in contrast, escapes the situation.  It extricates itself from time and space, since it can – in principle – be read and interpreted by anyone at any time and anywhere. Most fundamentally, it leaves the intentions of the "speaking subject" behind.

Ricoeur's concern is not primarily with written texts as such. He proposes a point of view applicable to all interaction, equally to speech and writing. Dialogue and text are complementary ways of relating to any reality, and the difference between them is one of emphasis. In dialogue reality is free-floating, ephemeral, situational.  In the text it is "fixed" – as the words on this page. Like writing, any act, speech or thought has an aspect of such "fixedness", it is imprinted in "external marks" (Østerberg 1963) which can be interrelated and contemplated outside the situation in which they arose.  We know this from our personal lives. Thinking something, you remain free, but once you act the consequences tie you down: the letter you sent is different from the one you did not send, and therefore, when in doubt, you may choose not to send it at all – no "external mark" is often better than a "bad" one.

But even thoughts will bind you. Once you've "stated it in your mind", you know – like it or not – and knowledge cannot be escaped. Having attained "knowledge of good and evil" Adam and Eve could no longer return to the innocence of the Garden – we might say they had learned to "write". But the myth also implies that all subsequent human culture is based on this lesson.  Without "writing" there would be no continuity, no abstraction, no decoration, no building or tearing down, no truth or falsehood.