Practicing writing - we-modes and I-modes

I have been thinking about the writing process - the academic writing process in particular - which is a formal activity with many protocols and technical requirements that must be fulfilled in order to successfully publish. In many disciplines academic writing is increasingly collaborative - specifically, there is more than one author/researcher. Academic writing itself is a practice that is organized around various activities, that is oriented towards knowing and learning, that is sustained by 'wanting' or by 'knowing and relational' gaps and that is supported by material props or objects. And practices generally require some form of sociality in order to be sustained. I am wondering about how sociality plays out in the practice of academic writing (not the peer review process of feedback and commentary but the initial writing process, putting words onto digital paper) - sociality being the human tendency to bind oneself with others in interdependent relationships. Because most academics are by organizational training and design solitary, individualistic actors whose identies are so strictly defined and then valued by their individual cognitive contributions materialized in such limited forms of books and articles. How is it that academics come to write together and are there differences (discernible in the written object) that capture any of these differences? How do we 'value' individual actors in a practice? Why do more and more academics co-author their works - in spite of their institutional value systems which privileges and rewards individual accomplishments. Are they also seeking sociality because sociality has something else, something more 'valuable' to offer to them? Something that can't be seen or recorded on any cv?

Tuomela (2007) writes about I-mode and we-mode distinctions in his philosophy of sociality. He argues that sociality is founded on joint intention and commitment and that these commitments are expressed either as one or the other. I-mode sociality occurs when two individuals with private interests team up to write a paper where they will both 'gain' something, where their goals may overlap but which remain separate and where the 'value' of the practice will also remain more private (recognition by their individual institution for purposes of promotion and evaluation). Though I-mode actors in a practice may benefit through shared knowing and learning, the benefit/outcome doesn't necessarily amplify in the same way as it does in we-mode sociality. We-mode sociality occurs when actors explicitly commit their individual intentions and commitments and become a 'plural subject', an 'irreducible we'. In this version of sociality, the practice may superficially 'look' the same as the I-mode version, the material objects may also be identical, but my intuition tells me something becomes different across the time-space dimension. And does it matter that the same actors collaborate across time and space or is it the type of commitment only that matters? Random speculations for now.

I suspect the power of collaborative writing - be it academic, or 'creative' - is in the writers' choices around sociality (Mead-Bateson, Plath-Hughes, Marx-Engels even, come to mind). I think academic collaboration is more often I-mode sociality but that some (influential) writers' contributions may be keeping we-mode commitments invisible. Literary collaboration is often known or public. But did someone read with and write with Galbraith or Mill or Heidegger? Maybe behind those academic greats there were others who made up an irreducible we at different times? And is there an identity question in practice? Do you get to be 'more' of yourself even in a we-mode practice? Maybe this is another one of those wonderful paradoxes that should be internalized. As a newly 'outed' academic writer, I see these questions and this practice in my future.