Digital Critical Editions

9. Toward a New Political Economy of Critical Editions Philippe Regnier

9. Toward a New Political Economy of Critical Editions Philippe Régnier Producing critical editions is a reputedly old and not particularly profitable scholarly activity that essentially amounts to establishing, annotating, and presenting a text. What benefit can be obtained, then, by scrutinizing it from the perspective of political economy—especially at a time when critical editions are at last entering the digital realm, whose immateriality seems to open up wide possibilities and advantages, free of charge, to all users? On the contrary, we believe that textual scholarship would have much to gain from questioning itself in terms of political economy, which for ages was the main branch of economics but has now been superseded by mathematical modeling and forecasting. Political economy combines factual considerations, economic theory, and philosophical and legal reflection on national and international institutions that are vested with political authority and in principle commissioned by the nations and established by national states and various international bodies to enforce rules, procedures, and objectives. Back to the Reality Principle The early 2000s witnessed the massive adoption of the Internet. During these years, which are already receding into oblivion, a minority of thinkers regularly advocated the view that the digital medium offered a providential solution to the general crisis that affected publishing in the humanities and social sciences, a crisis acknowledged and bemoaned in all industrialized countries. Earlier pioneers of digitization had based their views on expectations about gains in productivity, decreases in production costs, and quasi-instantaneous distribution. And since scholars who were using word processing and desktop publishing (DTP) applications were learning how to carry out tasks that pre- viously required multiple typographical skills, one assumed they were close to being able to publish works by themselves, alone and at no cost. A decade later, however, this vision has proven to be illusory. To date, except for the case of already digitized text volumes, the digital medium makes operations more complicated for critical editions; extends the duration of the projects; is difficult to harness; and spectacularly blows up the costs of production, diffusion, and IPR (intellectual propety rights) protection costs. Moreover, in the wake of the Internet revolution, the liberal-libertarian ideology appears to prohibit by principle any return on investment. How can such a contradiction be resolved? As a reminder, the mechanism of supply and demand remains a fundamental law of economy, generating trade and creating a more or less free market within which institutions and procedures ultimately determine values. Can digital critical editions escape economy? To what extent can they or should they constitute an exception and, as such, benefit from exceptional measures? The fact is that with the expansion of digital technology, we are entering a new phase characterized by the economization, if not commoditization, of culture in the age of and at the scale of an ongoing globalization. As can be witnessed, immaterial economy has turned into a very real and actually increasingly material economy. For instance, online bookstores, although operating without street-level physical outlets in our cities, tend to multiply transactions and to establish large warehouses in industrial zones. Computer server farms established all over the world by large digital companies now cover physical areas that are comparable to old industrial plants. The vast majority of middle-class and even working-class individuals in industrialized countries, now equipped with personal computers, are insistently solicited through numerous advertisements to acquire not only one but at least two new mobile terminals, such as smartphones, netbooks, or tablets, in order to comply with the standards of homo informaticus. This chapter does not intend to resolve all of these large problems in one sweep, but begins by initiating a reflection about the positioning and the goals of critical editions, two challenges that appear to be grossly underrated within the present context. The Process of Revaluing Texts While critical editions serve the purpose of providing university scholars as well as educated readers and enthusiasts with reliable texts and tools that facilitate reading, it goes without saying that stakes are very different for publishers, who, fromalegalandpracticalpointofview,arecommercialandindustrialenterprises. Although it cannot be denied that the desire and pleasure of the founders of these publishing houses is to contribute to cultural life, the driving force of Toward a New Political Economy 267 publishing companies is primarily to draw profit. From the point of view of the publisher, what counts is the potential of a book to attract readers...