[Commlist] New book: From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production under Capitalism

*From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production under Capitalism*
by Michael Chanan
Pluto Books

The latest publication in the small but select Marxism and Culture 
series at Pluto Books.

*Summary*

For mainstream economics, cultural production raises no special 
questions: creative expression is to be harvested for wealth creation 
like any other form of labour. As Karl Marx saw it, however, capital is 
hostile to the arts because it cannot fully control the process of 
creativity. But while he saw the arts as marginal to capital 
accumulation, that was before the birth of the mass media.

Engaging with the major issues in Marxist theory around art and 
capitalism,/From Printing to Streaming/traces how the logic of cultural 
capitalism evolved from the print age to digital times, tracking the 
development of printing, photography, sound recording, newsprint, 
advertising, film and broadcasting, exploring the peculiarities of each 
as commodities, and their recent transformation by digital technology, 
where everything melts into computer code.

Showing how these developments have had profound implications for both 
cultural creation and consumption, Chanan offers a radical and 
comprehensive analysis of the commodification of artistic creation and 
the struggle to realise its potential in the digital age.

*Endorsements*
*
*

'Chanan's rich historical investigations of the evolving technologies of 
artistic production provide a fascinating new basis for a politics of 
culture'

- Michael Hardt, author of 'The Subversive 70s'

'Drawing on nearly fifty years of writing and teaching about the media 
and making films, Michael Chanan presents us with a series overlapping 
histories of different media technologies, which is both authoritative 
and original'

- Julian Petley, Honorary and Emeritus Professor of Journalism at Brunel 
University, London

'Michael Chanan's brilliant synthesis, replete with fascinating detail, 
both boggles the mind and deeply educates'

- Claudia Gorbman, Professor Emerita of Film Studies at the University 
of Washington Tacoma
 From Printing to Streaming (plutobooks.com) 
<https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745340968/from-printing-to-streaming/>



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