We've been working a lot -- thanks to Briggs and Burke -- with the notion of "print culture" (as originally termed by Elizabeth Eisenstein) and this concept's multifaceted impact on the development of "modern" societies. Eisenstein's use of this term (and you'll have to excuse my perhaps over-interest in this idea -- Jon Klancher has been poisoning my brain again) has kicked up a fair amount of controversy insofar as book historians are concerned. Benedict Anderson, I think, now puts a new wrinkle in the print culture debate in his insistence on a related, though not entirely synonymous term: "print capitalism".
Eisenstein, though careful in her own work to stress that the advent of print culture comes hand in hand with newly possible understandings of texts that render them reproducible objects (and, thus, commodities), never directly references the economic system by which this is made suddenly viable during the age of the "print revolution". (Her constant criticisms of so-called "inept quasi-Marxist social historians", though, may partially explain this reluctance.) Anderson's emphasis on the system of economic relationships which is made possible, in part, thanks to print, by contrast, makes a lot of sense to me. This is, after all, the system to which Benjamin points when he discusses the reproducibility of cultural objects -- a system motivated by the economic necessity of capital, and not simply by a scheme of social relationships which develops around reproducible texts, art, etc.
I would be interested in hearing what others think about distinctions -- if, indeed, you acknowledge any -- between these two concepts. How do you digest the term "print capitalism", and what connections surface between this idea of Anderson's and the chronology previously presented by Briggs and Burke?
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To my way of thinking, and perhaps this is a bit of an obvious conclusion, "print capitalism" is intended to emphasize the business and industry of printing, while "print culture" refers to the new culture of literacy and information exchange that was ushered in by the new ease of printing.
Sometimes, though, the two are so closely related that they're almost conflated: take, for instance, the case of Martin Luther's pamphlets and other texts. Briggs and Burke stress that his works became so widely read and readily sold that, ultimately, print capitalism created--and characterized--the print culture at the time. In other words, the door-to-door Luther peddlers and so on were actually a part of the print culture. So historically the two can't always be separated: consumer exchange was inextricable from information exchange.
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