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Abstract
This article examines the widespread popularity and criticism of American Pickers, a show that transforms commodity fetishism into televisual fare. The show presents the pickers as model consumers through three types of images-of-affection: action-images where exchange is presented as reality, affection-images that portray positive affection as spiritual possibility, and impulse-images that naturalize production as a source of value. Such representations have generated significant criticism for exploitation. I argue that these criticisms, although instructive about resistance in control society, remain limited because they consider Pickers a representation of reality rather than an active engineering of it. Instead, Pickers should be envisioned as an expression of control society, a business strategy that circulates images in order to generate feedback that can then be tracked, targeted, and channeled. Such strategies enable Pickers to control markets by transforming products and directing access. Focusing criticism on the representations misses these mechanisms and thus lacks efficacy. Instead, Pickers’ representations, despite exposing rather than concealing commodity fetishism, serve to create a second fetish, one that masks strategies for controlling markets and creating unequal access.
Notes
[1] Jason Ankeny, “Mike Wolfe of ‘American Pickers’ Is the New Americana Idol,” Entrepreneur, August 31, 2011, http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220176.
[2] Ronald Bishop, “Dreams in the Line: A Day at the Antiques Roadshow,” Journal of Popular Culture 35, issue 1 (March 2004): 207.
[3] Richard A. Lanham, The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.
[4] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. One (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 164–65.
[5] Ankeny, “Mike Wolfe of ‘American Pickers’.”
[6] “I Rip off Old People … ,” American Pickers—TV Shows—HISTORY Community—Message Board—HISTORY Community—, http://community.history.com/topic/1266/t/I-rip-off-old-people.html (accessed December 7, 2010); “Scam Artists,” American Pickers—TV Shows—HISTORY Community—Message Board—HISTORY Community—, http://community.history.com/topic/20464/t/scam-artists.html (accessed December 7, 2010).
[7] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 182, 178.
[8] Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
[9] I use expression in Deleuze's sense. See Brian Massumi, “Introduction: Like a Thought,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (New York: Routledge, 2002).
[10] Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies.”
[11] Ibid., 179–80.
[12] Ibid., 177.
[13] Ibid., 181.
[14] Michael Hardt, “The Global Society of Control,” Discourse 20, issue 3 (Fall 1998): 140.
[15] Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 39.
[16] Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 181.
[17] Joshua S. Hanan, “Home Is Where the Capital Is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies,” Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies 7, issue 2 (June 2010): 176–201.
[18] Massumi, The Power, 28.
[19] Patricia Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 19–20.
[20] Massumi, The Power, 8–9.
[21] Ibid., 39–40.
[22] “Art of the Deal,” The History Channel website, http://www.history.com/shows/american-pickers/episodes/season-2 (accessed December 6, 2010).
[23] “‘American Pickers’: Trash to Treasure,” ABC News Video, June 3, 2010, http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/video/american-pickers-trash-treasure-10822396.
[24] “Big Bear,” The History Channel website, http://www.history.com/shows/american-pickers/episodes/season-1 (accessed December 6, 2010).
[25] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Fransisco: City Light Books, 1988), 48–51.
[26] Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 181.
[27] Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 132.
[28] Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 181.
[29] Clough, “Introduction,” 20.
[30] Lanham, The Economics of Attention, 6.
[31] Elizabeth Wissinger, “Always on Display: Affective Production in the Modeling Industry,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, 1st Ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 253.
[32] See http://lds.net/forums/topic/37560-american-pickerspawn-stars/ (accessed May 1, 2014).
[33] Russell Scott, “American Pickers Is FAKE!,” The West Coast Truth, http://www.westcoasttruth.com/american-pickers-is-fake.html (accessed March 6, 2015).
[34] The concept of sparks comes from Eric S. Jenkins, Special Affects: Cinema, Animation and the Translation of Consumer Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
[35] Jeff Ignatius, “‘American Pickers’: The Inside Story of the History Channel's Surprise Hit,” River Cities’ Re@der, March 17, 2010, http://www.rcreader.com/news/american-pickers-feature/.
[36] “Grave Robbing,” American Pickers—TV Shows—HISTORY Community—Message Board, http://community.history.com/topic/13268/t/grave-robbing.html (accessed December 7, 2010).
[37] “Smooth Operators,” American Pickers (History Channel, June 28, 2010).
[38] “Scam Artists.”
[39] Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza & Marx on Desire, trans. Gabriel Ash (London: Verso, 2014), 149.
[40] “A Banner Pick,” American Pickers (History Channel, December 6, 2010).
[41] Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992).
[42] Lordon, Willing Slaves, 162.
[43] Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, issue 2 (Summer 2000): 33–58.
[44] Lordon, Willing Slaves, 120.
[45] Ibid., 108.
[46] Ibid., 117.
[47] Ibid., 109.
[48] Mark Andrejevic, ISpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
[49] Brian L. Ott and Diane Marie Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97, issue 4 (November 2011): 363–86.
[50] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 141.
[51] “The Return of Hobo Jack,” American Pickers (History Channel, April 16, 2012).
[52] Deleuze, Cinema 1, 123.
[53] Ibid., 128.
[54] Ibid.
[55] “The Return of Hobo Jack.”
[56] Deleuze, Cinema 1, 125–26.
[57] Ibid., 102.
[58] Ibid., 98.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid., 96–97.
[61] Ibid., 102.
[62] Ibid., 88.
[63] Ibid., 87.
[64] Ibid., 109.
[65] Ibid., 108.
[66] Ibid., 98.
[67] Ibid., 97.
[68] Eric S. Jenkins, “My iPod, My Icon: How and Why Do Images Become Icons?,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, issue 5 (2008): 466–89.
[69] Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 23.
[70] Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” 181.
[71] See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, 1st ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1999).
[72] James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society, Reprint edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 35.
[73] Clough, “Introduction,” 17.
[74] Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy, 30.
[75] Maura Ammenheuser, “‘American Pickers’ Fans Flock to Antique Archaeology Store,” The Tennessean, January 19, 2013, http://www.tennessean.com/article/20130120/LIFE01/301200015.
[76] Ankeny, “Mike Wolfe of ‘American Pickers’ Is the New Americana Idol.”
[77] See http://www.yelp.com/biz/antique-archeology-nashville (accessed February 14, 2015).
[78] Ibid.
[79] Steven Kurutz, “At Home with Mike Wolfe: The Jack Kerouac of Junk,” The New York Times, August 24, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/garden/mike-wolfe-of-american-pickers-at-home-in-iowa.html.
[80] Lordon, Willing Slaves, 120.