Cultural Identity Politics in the (Post-)Transitional Societies

Cultural identities from the bottom up – labour relations perspective
which may provoke the “contradiction between the development of productive forces
and the relations of production, namely the regime of private property” (Cohen, 2006:
69). The Internet is today the best example of such contradiction: the technological
means already make it possible that all texts from all over the world could be available
to anyone at home, but the private appropriation of the technological means impedes
this huge project of cultural democratization. In a situation like this, the “dead labour”
is a voluntary gift to the one who has the means to explore its potentials for economic
use. Therefore, examinations of technological progress demand more precaution than
certain philosophers have shown, since from technological progress itself and only from
it we cannot deduce revolutionary social theory.
(2) Labour
Our second point will be labour. As we know, the authors do not write books but
manuscripts (Chartier, 1994: 9). 2 Many different professions participate in the changing
of an author’s manuscript into a book: editors, designers, proof readers, printers,
booksellers and so on. The labour of all these people is important for the production of
a new book; their working skills are rare and highly specialized, but they are nevertheless
replaceable. In the context of the publishing industry they take the position of wage
workers, not differing much from employees in other kinds of industries.
What about the author and his or her labour The purpose of all the kinds of
labour we have described so far is to change a manuscript into a commodity, while
the author’s pursuit cannot be simply described by these terms. The manuscript comes
into the publishing labour process as a semi-finished product which has in the process
of publishing the function of a “raw material” or “reproductive material”. With this
assessment we come to the third point, to the subject of labour.
(3) Subject of labour
The subject of labour in publishing or its raw material is the manuscript which the
author has submitted to the publisher. It is, therefore, a subject of past labour from a
previous labour process.
This conclusion is more important than we imagine. It marks the point at which
the author joins the publishing process as part of commodity production, after the
completion of the manuscript. The manuscript itself was created in circumstances
which could be, with no offence to the artist, described as artisanal, by which we want
to emphasize that it differs from commodity production. This means that it cannot be
compared with commodity production; similarly, the work of the author can hardly be
measured by the usual standards of commodity production. How many words has he
2
Chartier here quotes Roger E. Stoddard: “Whatever they may do, authors do not write books.
Books are not written at all. They are manufactured by scribes and other artisans, by mechanics
and other engineers, and by printing presses and other machines” (Stoddard, 1987).
131