Para-Industry, Shadow Academy

Abstract

What does it mean to critically theorize a media industry that critically theorizes itself? How should scholars engage, describe and research media industries in which reflexive forms of self-scrutiny, posed transparency and meta-reflection have become dominant and widely circulated forms of commercial screen content and entertainment? In this chapter, Caldwell maps the outlines not of ‘paratexts’ but of what he terms ‘para-industry’. This refers to the ubiquitous industrial and corporate fields that surround and complicate any access to what we traditionally regard as our primary objects of media research – messages, texts, forms, institutions and even audiences. Complicating matters further still are the ways media industries today function as a ‘shadow academy’, by emulating, incorporating or mirroring the very theoretical paradigms and oppositional modes that scholars have developed to maintain their objectivity. The goal here is to more systematically describe an interface zone, something that is arguably foundational to either good social science based communication studies of industries, or humanities-based cinema and media studies of texts. In this account, media texts are per se collective, negotiated, industrial interactions, not the end product of economic or collective negotiation sent or sold to viewers.

Keywords:

• media industries
• reflexivity
• production culture
• para-industry
• para-textuality
• making off

Notes on contributor

John T. Caldwell is the Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. His books include: Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Duke, 2008); Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (Rutgers, 1995); Electronic Media and Technoculture (ed., Rutgers, 2000); New Media: Digitextual Theories and Practices (co-edited, Routledge, 2003) and Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries (co-edited with Vicki Mayer and Miranda Banks, 2009). He is also the producer/director of the award-winning feature documentaries Freak Street to Goa: Immigrants on the Rajpath (1989) and Rancho California (por favour), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002.

Notes

1 From 30 Rock, season one, episode 10.

2 These three divisions within 30 Rock's on-screen chart (‘Domestic Appliances’, ‘Aeronautics’ and ‘Energy’) are terms that align closely with GE's actual organizational chart (which identifies each of these same divisions as ‘Home and Business Solutions’ [which includes Domestic Appliances], ‘Technology Infrastructure’ [which includes Aeronautics], and Energy, respectively). The only GE division that is left off of 30 Rock’s ‘fictional’ on-screen chart is GE capital (a significant omission, surely).

3 While ‘standpoint theory’ has origins in feminist theory and cultural studies, Vincent Mosco has proposed ‘labor standpoint theory’, that adds workers' points-of-view to critical, economic and industrial analysis in The Political Economy of Communication (2009).

4 In sociology, mixing the terms ‘precarious’ with ‘proletariat’ to describe anxious class conditions in advanced capitalist creative economies. See Standing (2011).

5 See Giddens (1991). A good summary of the Brechtian, reflexivity is: Wollen (1972).

6 For discussion of the other five categories, see Douglas (2008).

7 The quote of this twitter broadcast, and the two statements that follow it, are from http://screenrant.com/sons-anarchy-season-5–6-7-kurt-sutter-aco-149044/.

8 I thank Google Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou for describing Google's current ‘transparency’ initiatives, in ‘A New Social Contract: The Role of Transparency in an Information Society’, at the Annenberg School of Communication, 13 January 2012.

9 On my description of ‘contact zones’, see ‘Industrial Geography Lessons’ (2004). On ‘interface ethnography’, see Sherry Ortner, ‘Studying Sideways’, Production Studies, 175–189.