The writing being

Writing shapes us. Beyond the traditional writer, the “writing being” encompasses anyone who writes—from journalists to social media users—whose words transform reality and construct identity.

The “Writer” Before and After the Internet

Sociologist Nathalie Heinich published the book Être écrivain, création et identité (Being a Writer: Creation and Identity) in 2000, based on surveys of 30 French authors, which has just been reissued in 2025 (Folio essais). As a sociologist, Heinich focuses on social roles and the process of personal and collective identification with the social role of the writer, anchoring her analysis in both creative practices and identity or sociological questions: the writer is seen as a producer of texts that later become external to them. She primarily centers on fiction authors, texts that gain autonomy, even outliving their creators in posterity. However, apart from the fame accrued by those who have written, she does not explore the tight bond, as I see it, between words and the self, and she limits her study to “writers” recognized and published as such. It’s also worth noting that her research dates back to 1990, a time before the internet existed. Back then, the definition of a writer could still be relatively stricter than today, with all the nuances of the “literary world,” of course; this was before blogs, before writing platforms that produced bestsellers from texts written on mobile phones, before the massive democratization of reading and writing brought by the internet—especially the advent of Web 2.0 in the late 90s, which enabled ordinary users to publish texts, images, and more for the world to see on platforms designed to host their content, i.e., social media. Furthermore, Heinich does not discuss, for example, people who write projects—architectural plans, film proposals, institutional projects, etc. I do not fault her for this, as she positions her work squarely within the figure of the writer in the early 1990s.

Definition of the “Writing Being”

I propose to address a broader and more open subject, focusing not on the writer but on the writing being. I include in this category writers themselves, poets, screenwriters, essayists, journalists, professionals who draft projects or reports for city councils, individuals who publish texts on social media, and those who keep personal diaries. In short, I encompass everyone under the term “writing being,” not just writers published by traditional publishers.
What interests me about the “writing being” is examining writing not as an object that gains autonomy and might endure for centuries independent of its author, but rather how the act of writing shapes the individual—both personally and collectively. Moreover, this writing can be a collective endeavor.

Examples of Performative Texts

Take the winning bid for the 2028 European Capital of Culture, awarded to the city of Bourges. We say “the city of Bourges,” but in reality, it was a collective of people who brainstormed, wrote, debated, and established various more or less democratic frameworks to produce a text that convinced a committee, thereby securing the label and unlocking significant financial resources. This writing will change many lives, trigger major public spending, create local infrastructure, and perhaps reveal individuals who, through this project, will express themselves as artists or organizers. I deliberately choose a text whose full effects are yet to unfold, where the impact is only beginning. Thus, it’s clear that the authors themselves may see their lives utterly transformed by their text.

Similarly, an author who writes a political pamphlet—take the worst among them, Adolf Hitler with Mein Kampf—produces a text that, however abhorrent, serves as symbolic fuel for decades, propping up the construction of Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s, the outbreak of a world war, the massacre of millions of innocents, and still wreaks political havoc today. I am not saying the text Mein Kampf is solely responsible, as no text is that performative. But the writing being Adolf Hitler used this text as a powerful tool to advance his vile project of destruction, both during his life and beyond.

Near the opposite end, another text, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), was also written by a collective. It deeply founded the institutions of our country and many others, shaping social organization, self-perception, and more. Currently, I am part of a team rewriting the Fribourg Declaration on Cultural Rights (2007) to update it. No one knows what effects this writing will have. But we are acutely aware, through our careful attention to every word and phrasing, of the potential future impact of this text, as it will serve not as law but as a reference—a form of symbolic law.

Reports back to their authors

To be a writer is also to be those people who post on social networks criticisms of authoritarian political regimes like the current French one, and who, in doing so, find themselves imprisoned, because their writings have been interpreted in a certain sense by the justice system, which is unfortunately currently very subservient to political power, whatever one may say; their words have been over-interpreted as calls for terrorism, even if it’s just a matter of expressing disagreement about an ongoing genocide in Gaza, for example.

Another example: a text I wrote nearly three years ago, “Et si on changeait de posture”, on how to work in the cultural field with young people and digital technology, has earned me regular requests from cultural institutions to come and help them implement what I describe in the text. So this text has a personal social impact on me, and a collective impact on local authorities, and will transform cultural projects in towns, museums and so on. And yet this text is not a project like that of the European Capital of Culture, it’s a text of reflection on a subject that concerns many people in the social, educational and cultural fields, and the sharing of these reflections leads to desires for action, for change, for improving public action. We’re no longer talking about a novel to be read by a greater or lesser number of people, who may or may not become symbolically famous, but about a text that transforms. On the other hand, it can also undoubtedly transform on its own, without my accompaniment, without my even being aware of it.

This writing being, engaged in the world, sometimes even in spite of himself, in places he wouldn’t have imagined, like the people who get imprisoned for their texts, seems to me worthy of a close look.

The process of symbolization

In psychoanalysis, the process of symbolization means that what we represent outside ourselves will contribute to building us, in our personal narrative, in the identification of who we are, but also biologically, as this process operates in the form of neuronal connections that are in themselves a physiological phenomenon and have major personal physiological impacts. This process of symbolization also shapes the way we react in the moment, spontaneously. Our emotions will themselves be transformed by our being writers: what we write will not modify us in the same way as what we don’t write. I’m not necessarily talking about denial, because we may not deny things we don’t write. But we know very well that what is not symbolized remains in “suffering” and drives our actions, our gestures, our emotions, without our having the lucidity to perceive what drives us. The lack of symbolization leads to what we call psychosis.

Writing a diary, for example, which is widely practised, is an enormous self-builder, as it enables us to put into words what haunts us, what moves us, or what makes us happy. It’s not just a question of putting difficult things down on paper. Anything put down on paper contributes, through symbolization, to our personal construction.

Symbolization through writing is also a collective process. When we have common references, either because we read the same things, or because we’ve read each other’s writings, or even listened to each other talk, this enables us to symbolize in the collective. Human groups, communities, as we call them today, be they family, sporting, professional, business or inter-company networks, intellectual or artistic, are writing beings linked by their personal and collective symbolisations, which come together through the words they share. Some of them write their own words, which makes it all the easier to unite these communities. This writing being of some will enable the community to form in a more profound way, because of the resonance of symbolization between the collective and the personal.

Generative artificial intelligences

And finally, there is a very important anthropological shift in writing that began publicly on November 30, 2022: the fact that we can now ask a machine to write for us, with ChatGPT being the first, launched on November 30, 2022, and the most well-known, are tools that can be asked to write in our place or assist us in writing. In this supportive relationship, there is this machine assistance that ultimately makes its incursion into meaning and content. Whereas before, we didn’t fully perceive how machines were changing our ways of writing: the arrival of the typewriter, the computer, word processing, layout software, blogs, Twitter with its 140-character limit—all these writing technologies seemed to remain relatively external to meaning, to the content itself, to the imaginative process. In reality, they of course already had an impact on this process, but with word-generative artificial intelligences (since they can also generate images, sounds, or even websites), we can ask a machine to create symbolized content in our place. And in doing so, if, for example, we ask ChatGPT to write the bid for the European Capital of Culture 2028 for us—and I have no doubt that ChatGPT was indeed used to help draft this bid—well, our writing being is no longer just organized in a dialectic between the personal and the collective, but is now caught in a triad of personal, collective, and machinic. And perhaps if I ask ChatGPT to write a cultural project proposal for me, for instance, that project might be the one selected, changing my life. So, the writing being is now intrinsically linked to the machine’s textual productions. These textual productions by the machine have an impact on the world, on my personal, social, and professional identity, etc.—almost as much, depending on how it’s used, as what I can write myself or in groups.

How writing shapes us today

I’ve offered this initial overview of the concept of the writing being as a way to bring, as a step in understanding the world, the contemporary role of writing into the very process of life and human actions—across their full psychosocial scope and in their connection with technologies that humans now use in relation to writing itself.

I don’t know where these anthropological changes are leading, but I find them incredibly rich, fascinating, and undoubtedly empowering for us humans toward more conscious symbolizations, perhaps toward more real constructions in the sense of the bonds that constitute us and over which we have, as writing beings, a far greater capacity to act than before, I believe.