If anything we know about oral society is highly speculative given that nobody has been present at that time, nobody actually wrote protocols of it, and contemporary incarnations of it are already infected with their culture contact with later societies, about the introduction of *writing* we know more. Again, we will not go here into the literature in all its depth and breadth, but concentrate on a few features important for our research into the meaning forms of different dissemination media.

If language is about the dissemination of signs, writing is about the dissemination of *symbols*. Symbols are signs of signs, which means that all problems with respect to the ambivalence of reference and the double bind of paradox are increased and absorbed at the same time, increased by the signs coming in twice, a symbol being the sign signifying a sign signifying something, and absorbed by the possibility to restrict and condition the ways of how a sign may signify a sign. Metacommunication becomes overtaxed, and is relieved by the symbols becoming ritualized signs whose interpretation is restricted to the ability to comment on how to use them.

In communication, the introduction of writing means the catastrophe of the absent getting a hand on the present situation. Writing was invented some five thousand years ago, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, when people began to mark their inventories, to give receipts, and to praise the dead and the kings. All of a sudden, communication has to deal with meaning claims which refer to things and people which are absent and therefore can not be verified nor controlled in the present situation. Another kind of surplus meaning, of overflow, appears which is first dealt with by attempts to call the written communication a dead one, and therefore suspicious one, just in order to sharply restrict its impact on the present, the lively, situation. This is the Platonic solution, also drawing on a rejection of Egyptian bureaucracy in favor of Greek democracy, an attempt to be repeated for every new medium of dissemination to appear, most notably for the printing press and the computer.

Another solution proves to be more helpful. It looks more to the advantages introduced by writing, and less to the disadvantages it involves for the oral control of a social situation. Indeed, the criticality brought about by the introduction of writing may well be that metacommunication finds itself deprived of power and looses its influence to devices able to control the range and scope of writing. These devices control writing by exploiting it. They translate, and thereby restrict, it into new institutions of political administration, trade, religion, the arts, and sciences. But there is a price to all this, and that is the price of a new culture form to be adopted able to positively, as well as negatively, handle the overflow of written communication. Plato's suspicion of its dead hand is just a means to let oral communication not loose all its attractiveness to participants. The speech, talk, and argument on the *agora*, the seduction of the lover, the negotiation between the traders, and the encounter between old and young minds at the academy, all have to find, to redefine, and to maintain their place of oral communication in a society deeply impressed with writing. The society at large, however, needs more than that.

Luhmann's conjecture here consists in assuming that it is the Aristotelian concept of *telos*, or *purpose*, which proves to be suitable in handling the new kind of overflow. The Greek concept of *telos* is a combination of a place to be found with respect to the cosmos already defining which things and which individuals belong where, on one hand, and a purpose to pursue in order to confirm that place and to act in accordance with it, on the other (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 994b). This combination of place and purpose defines a boundary which becomes the reference for a kind of reason which is able to look at both sides of the boundary, keeping outside what belongs outside, and getting inside what belongs inside, all the while taking care of the boundary itself by institutionalizing it and lending it the authority it needs to keep outside what belongs outside, and inside what belongs inside.

Now any one social action just has to raise the question of purpose in order to be able to positively or negatively select among the meaning offers presented to it by oral or written communication. The nice thing about purposes is that they, first, can be preselected by written communication, yet, second, can always be redefined by looking a the situation at hand which evidently needs adaptation to, and, third, can nevertheless be institutionalized with respect to abstract rules and premises of decision which relieve the situation at hand, allow for routine, and demand a kind of legitimation which from inside and from outside the boundary can be varied upon.

The Greek concept of purpose, considered as a device to both draw and monitor boundaries, boundaries of friendship and love, of truth and law, of money and power, of beauty and strength, since it relates to place, and that means to a notion of propriety, property, and appropriateness in accordance with some preordained cosmos, comes with a notion of perfection and corruption which will prove to be influential up to our days. A good and true and possibly even beautiful purpose is one that leads man and soul, action and passion, governance and business to perfection, possible other events threatening all of them with corruption. This is a as simple as forceful distinction which will fascinate political and cultural thinking right up to our days.

The number form which is able to translate this culture form of the literal society into blanks to be filled by things, events, and people, actually by all what will come to be known as *decorum*, is *social strata*, that is, unequal distribution. Inequality proves both stabilizing and stimulating because it allows for appropriate places, for communication among equals sharing both their problems and the solutions to them, and for overt as well as covert mobility. It organizes social closure, exclusion, and control, all with respect to the perspective of purpose, since it is purpose which gives and takes legitimation. Not least, inequality is useful for the calling and crossing of institutional boundaries, because it defines prizes and privileges to be gained and to be lost, and thus a social order to be defended, and to be attacked.

More difficult to answer is the question of how the literal society re-enters its form into itself. If we go back to written communication consisting in symbols, considered to be signs of signs, and if we think of ontology becoming a main occupation for Greek philosophy, then we may assume that indeed *reality* becomes the key which seems to be able to mark the unmarked and thereby to allow for either affirmation or negation. Of course, the re-entry is not done via reality itself, whatever that is, but via the obsession with it, which, however, comes to the same, since this obsession is the basis for poetics (*mimesis*), for rhetoric (*metaphora*), for art (*techne*), and for science (*arche*), which all of them rely on references to an albeit evidently elusive reality, to control what they are doing, and to argue about it.