Invention as a Social Act

Karen Burke LeFevre’s comprehensive work Invention as a Social Act establishes a continuum of perspectives on invention that describe influences on the writer and his or her invention processes. Perspectives on the continuum include the Platonic, the Internal Dialogic, the Collaborative, and the Collective. LeFevre notes that these positions represent “degrees of emphasis and overlapping views” rather than “adversarial and mutually exclusive camps” (49). I would argue that points on her continuum more specifically describe ways of understanding the inventor, specifically views of the autonomy or interdependence of the inventing writer.

LeFevre’s Platonic perspective describes the writer as working alone, reflectively searching within for the as-yet undiscovered truth. The Internal Dialogic perspective views invention as a conversation carried on with an imagined other self, bridging the gap to the external social world. The Collaborative perspective places invention outside the writer’s mind and situates it in genuine interaction between people, recognizing that both parties contribute to the invention process. Finally, the Collective perspective views society as the “locus of invention” and the inventor as product or even victim of abstract socio-cultural forces. These various perspectives resonate in theorists who discuss the role of audience in invention and in the theories that inform our electronic invention environments.

LeFevre’s ideas seem to fit in well with the postmodern challenging of the Romantic version of the genius inventor/author such as Bakhtinian idea of author as orchestrator of ideas and language. This metaphor emphasizes how authors exist in a realm that is saturated with texts, images, films, arguments, and narratives. In this realm the writer is rarely writing in a vacuum and is therefore not creating something entirely new and is instead working with the discursive sources at hand taking bits and pieces here and there to form a work.

The implications for writers, or scholars and researchers generally, seem significant. There is an implied need for a dramatic redefining, or rethinking of attitudes towards collaboration, both purposeful and unintentional – by this I am referring to our previous class readings and discussions about collaborations and how it is clear that it occurs often without the writer’s acknowledgement. Composition researchers could/should shift the attention from writer as sole creator to a broader definition that allows for the inevitable collaboration that she argues occurs for writers.  It also seems an organic fit for the classroom and therefore as teachers we need to be implementing this perspective into how we teach because it seems more accurate to what really happens as our students write.

Question:

How does, say, peer-review fit into the idea of collaboration/collective invention?