Abstract (EN)

The sociogenetics of writing developed in this article is an invitation to understand bureaucratic texts as they are being produced and “in action,” as it were, to focus on the modus operandi of their utterance, and to take seriously the written word as both the outcome and the enabler of a given bureaucratic space and a specific bureaucratic rationality. In particular through signature and acronymization, bureaucratic writing contributes both to depersonalizing the social relations on which it is based and to personalizing institutions, which are elevated to the status of “authors.” The documentary management of officialdom, through its classification or its leakage, sheds light on the tensions between the public and the private life of the written word and its circuits of legitimation. The sociogenetics of expertise practices also gives a concrete edge to a sociohistory of epistemocratic rationality. The research strategy that is proposed here consists in disrupting the traditional dichotomies of the analysis of symbolic forms (internalism vs externalism, texts vs context, author vs reader, sender vs receiver, official vs non-official, public vs private) and in putting in conversation fields that may be dispersed yet share an interest in documentary practices (anthropology of literacy, literary genetics, sociology of the fields of cultural production, sociology of texts and institutions).