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Can situations of « doing things with writing » be termed acts of writing? Can Austin's theory of speech acts serve as a starting point for a pragmatic anthropology of writing? By looking at a variety of writing and reading situations, ranging from the spectacular (political graffiti) to the banal (putting up a street-name sign), the article seeks to define groupings for different types of acts of writing. The interaction between an ethnographic approach to these practices and an analysis of the often unusual utterances which characterize displayed writing leads to a reassessment of the importance of spatial situations. The role of the « site » and of the specific position of the writing within the urban environment seems relevant to the construction of meaningfulness in these utterances, which are often a-syntactic and non-deictic.