The article brings together two different approaches, the orality-literacy problematic as it was developed in the works of Albert Lord, Walter Ong and others on the one hand, and conceptualizing of biopolitics as it was worked out in the later works of Michel Foucault, on the other. A combination of these two perspectives forms the general background which enables one to see changes in the understanding of authorship, particularly identification of the author as a part of a much broader process through which Western societies actually became societies of documents, used in various domains, in the eighteenth century, that is in the period which marks the beginnings of the era of biopolitics and statistics. At the same time, such a framing of the authorship helps to explain why anonymity has become so unacceptable in the modern era, while it used to be a much more common phenomenon in the past
