Resumen de The affections of the american pickers: Commodity fetishism in control society
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
