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Para-Industry, Shadow Academy

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.