III. Background

B. Invention as a Social Act

Around the time Ede and Lunsford were investigating collaboration, Lefevre wrote Invention as a Social Act (1986), one of the foundational works in the field on the influence of other people on the act of invention. Lefevre rejects models of invention based on a single isolated writer (which she characterizes as a “Platonic view of invention”) as both incomplete and potentially constraining on invention processes. Instead, Lefevre argues for a social definition of invention:

Rhetorical invention is better understood as a social act, in which an individual who is at the same time a social being interacts in a distinctive way with society and culture to create something. Viewed in this way, rhetorical invention becomes an act that may involve speaking and writing, and that at times involves more than one person; it is furthermore an act initiated by writers and completed by readers, extending over time through a series of transactions and texts. (1)

Though she is quick to note that a social model of invention does not detract from the agency or responsibility of a primary composer, her revised model of invention opens up considerable new routes for investigating invention as a more broadly distributed, socially situated act. Of particular interest to this study is her definition of invention as an act that is “extend[ed] over time through a series of transactions and texts”, which situates invention not as a single moment of insight located in the mind of a writer but rather as an ongoing process that spans across time through multiple interactions and documents. It is precisely this distribution of invention across time and webtext drafts, noting particularly fruitful interventions from other people, that I document in this chapter.

Expanding on her definition, Lefevre highlights seven social aspects of invention that form the basis for her discussion. According to her modle, rhetorical invention is social because 1) the inventor exists as a socially influenced “self”; 2) invention is enacted with socially shared symbol systems such as language; 3) invention builds on knowledge developed by people throughout history; 4) writers invent with an imagined audience in mind; 5) other people (such as editors and collaborators) are involved in the act of writing; 6) invention responds to the influences of powerful social entities; and 7) the products of invention are received, evaluated, and used based on the social context of the time (33-34). Although my study focuses particularly on her first and fifth dimensions of social invention (the direct acts of other people on webtext composing and design), the other dimensions play a role in the project’s overall discussion. For example, webtexts could not be created without the infrastructures of powerful institutions (Eyman and Ball 2015), without technologies developed out of particular social systems and ideologies (Selfe and Selfe), without an audience to potentially receive and value their knowledge-making work (Purdy and Walker), or without socially shared symbol systems for understanding text, images, and videos not only separately but also in their combination across modes (Kress and van Leeuwen).

Furthermore, by capturing traces of all aspects of the composing process, digital autoethnography provides a mode of investigation into the role of the socially influenced self in conversation with other composers’ invention strategies. Although the “self” as webtext inventor is not the main focus of this study, the socially contextualized personal and affective dimensions of webtext composing encountered both in my own data and in the narratives of other composers suggest that this might be fruitful ground for further research.

Others since Lefevre have continued to develop socially attentive approaches to rhetorical invention in the act of composing. Bawarshi, for example, focuses on the relationship between invention and genre, which Miller characterizes as a type of social action requiring negotiation based on shared cultural conventions. Bawarshi examines the role that genres play in “maintain[ing] rhetorical conditions that sustain certain forms of life--ways of discursively and materially organizing, knowing, experiencing, acting, and relating in the world” (9). According to his model, genres impact a composer’s invention by providing both the rhetorical problem to solve and the forms via which to solve it. In focusing on genre, Bawarshi investigates a significant aspect of the contextual social conditions in which invention occurs, though not necessarily the relationship between invention and concrete interpersonal collaboration that serves as the focus of this chapter.

Likewise, Ulmer's starting point for invention begins with a “mystory” in which composers consider social influences such as family, pop influences, and other institutions, as well as their own positioning in these broader networks. These mystories consist of “a series of individual websites, devoted to different areas or institutional experiences,” through which the composers are encouraged to note emerging patterns in their selected visual and verbal narratives (22). These narratives help composers “understan[d] cultural dymamics and inven[t] new forms of expression” (Santos et al., “Mystory”). In their discussion of Ulmer’s work, Santos et al. present several examples of webtexts developed through a mystory approach to digital invention. Each example is a highly personal, multimediated approach to representing multifaceted social context from the perspective of the composer’s lived experiences.

However, my interests for the purposes of this chapter are not an exhaustive exploration of the social conditions that contextualize webtext composing (though I encourage such a study for future research). Rather, I want to focus on the interventions of distinct, embodied persons at particular moments in the development of a webtext’s design, and how these moments shed light on the broader social dynamics of webtext invention. From here I narrow my discussion from foundational considerations of the relationship between people and invention in composing contexts to a particular focus on the relationship between invention and collaboration in multimodal composing contexts.