Bare enterprise: US television and the business of dispossession (post-crisis,gender and property television)

Pawn stars, repo agents, auction hunters and flip men

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey (2005) contends that the crowning achievement of neoliberalism has been to ‘redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income’. This has involved a ‘continuation and proliferation’ of predatory practices understood by Marx as fundamental to the formation of capitalism, including the privatization and commodification of the commons, the conversion of state and collective resources into private property, the ‘forceful expulsion of peasant populations’, the imperial ‘appropriation of assets’ and ‘most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession’ (p. 159). According to Harvey, these ‘primitive’ features of early capitalism have persisted and intensified in tandem with neoliberal discourses and policies. Wealth is redistributed when finance capital is ‘fine-tuned’ as a means of ‘predation’, assets (such as pension funds) are dispossessed and ‘whole populations, even in the advanced capitalist countries’, are reduced to ‘debt encumbrancy’ (Harvey, 2004: 74).

While Harvey analyzes global capitalist processes, reality entertainment ruled by pawn stars, repo men, auction hunters and flip men stages accumulation by dispossession on a micro scale, with local proprietors and small time entrepreneurs (who double as ‘ordinary’ TV personalities) embodying the primitive tendencies of financialization, multinational capitalism and free market rationalities. Their personalized involvement in the everyday redistribution of wealth hinges on the notable expansion of predatory industries targeting the poor and indebted – such as payday loans and pawnshops – in recent years (Rivlin, 2011). By linking accumulation by dispossession to enterprising individuals and ‘fringe’ storefront businesses serving low-income and historically stigmatized clientele, dispossession TV downplays the complexities and widespread consequences of neoliberal capitalism. Yet, it also renders the financial vulnerability of the unemployed, the downwardly mobile and the working poor visible in new ways.

To unpack the stakes and contradictions of dispossession TV, a typology of the programs and their recessionary contexts is in order. As reported in the business press, the financial crisis and subsequent recession triggered a boom in pawnshop business across the United States, as regular clients increased their reliance on the stores and new customers facing unemployment, mounting debt and other financial troubles looked to them for emergency ‘safety net loans’ with exorbitant finance charges (McConnon, 2009). ‘Everyday, thousands of Americans are in need of short-term, small-dollar loans that aren’t available from banks’, proclaimed the National Pawnbrokers Association (2012) of this trend. Pawnshops operate by loaning customers a small percentage of the estimated retail value of personal property (such as computers, electronics, jewelry) presented as collateral; if the loan is not repaid under the terms set by the store, it sells the item and keeps the profit. Such ventures proliferated in the 2000s, with some pawn chains opening mall shops and expanding into new services such as ‘payday advances’ and other high interest ‘debt traps’ condemned by consumer advocacy groups (Lee, 2014). While still stigmatized as a ‘pit stop on the road to despair and desperation’ (Williams, 2013), the expanding US pawn industry was partly mainstreamed by the economic downturn and its aftermath. Within this context, reality television programs revolving around pawnshops appeared for the first time.

Following the ratings success of Pawn Stars (History Channel, 2012-2013–present), set in a Las Vegas store, a slew of imitators and spin offs quickly appeared, including Hardcore Pawn, Cajun Pawn Stars (History Channel, 2012-2013–present), Hardcore Pawn Chicago (truTV, 2013), Combat Pawn (truTV, 2012), Win, Lose or Pawn (CMT, 2013) and Beverly Hills Pawn (Reelz, 2013–2015). With few exceptions, they follow a repetitive formula in which no-nonsense owners and staffers evaluate the market value of possessions, some unusual and exotic, others ordinary and nondescript. The ‘real life’ stores tend to be rundown and poorly lit, with transactions conducted behind bulletproof safety glass. While customers may bargain or bicker over these deals, the action unfolds from the vantage point of the pawnbrokers who are the recurring characters. Hardcore Pawn, set in a family-owned, inner-city pawnshop catering mainly to low-income people of color, is branded as the ‘grittiest’ of the pawnshop shows. ‘As the largest pawnshop in Detroit, every day brings new rewards and new drama’, promises the show’s publicity. ‘Follow the Gold family as they wheel and deal with colorful customers, manage temperamental employees, and squabble with each other; all in the name of making a buck in one of the most troubled cities in America’.

The US repossession industry also boomed in the wake of the financial crisis. ‘One man’s misery is another man’s fortune … with rampant layoffs and rising debts, repo firms are reporting record business’, reported Business Week (Perman, 2009). So-called repo men are contracted by banks and finance companies to confiscate vehicles when their owners default on loans. Operation Repo (truTV, 2007–2014) was the first reality program to revolve around repossession agents in California’s San Fernando Valley. With the tagline ‘It ain’t no joke if you don’t pay that note’, the show cast them as rough-and-tumble entrepreneurs who re-enact ‘authentic’ repossession cases shot in cinema verité style, with actors performing as desperate and sometimes angry targets. On Repo Games, real people facing auto repossession are ambushed when agents show up at their home with a camera crew. As powerful spotlights flood their surprised and disoriented faces, a ‘Repo Report’ summarizing the details of the ‘case’ flashes on screen. This criminalizing set up leads into a quasi-game show in which the indebted are invited to answer trivia questions in order to ‘win back’ their cars while the cameras roll.

Repossessed! Hard Times (National Geographic Channel, 2009–2013) follows Jam Recovery, a repossession business in New Jersey. As with Hardcore Pawn, cameras document the business routines of the owner and his family/staff, with some personal drama mixed in. The narrative constructs the repossession agents as enterprising individuals whose unlimited earnings are tied to the number of cars they are able to track down and ‘reclaim’. ‘Repossession is a billion dollar industry that affects the lives of thousands of people every year’, claims the show’s publicity, promising an up close look at ‘agents who track down vehicle owners, often under cover of night … waiting until dark to search for clues from family, friends, mailboxes and even garbage’. South Beach Tow (truTV, 2011–2014), Lizard Lick Towing (truTV, 2011–2013) and related shows similarly revolve around the stealth repossession work of agent-entrepreneurs contracted by corporate lien holders to repossess vehicles.

In 2008, the New York Times business section reported a spike in foreclosed home and storage unit auctions, linking both trends to financial turmoil triggered by the economic downturn. While there are many potential reasons why people stop paying the rent on storage units (such as death), industry watchers suggested that financial difficulties were primarily to blame:

As they lose their homes, people are turning more and more to humble cinderblock and sheet-metal boxes to store their stuff. But some people cannot keep up with their storage bills any better than they could handle their mortgage payments, and storage companies are auctioning off their property for a pittance. (Streitfeld, 2008)

This increased auction activity was seized by the TV industry as another opportunity to create and sell entertainment based on ‘real life’ recessionary entrepreneurialism. The televised storage auction dates to the 2011 debut of Storage Wars, which quickly became the A&E network’s top-rated program. The success of that show spawned a cluster of similar programs also revolving around salvage businesses and unpaid storage auctions, including Storage Hunters (truTV, 2011–present) and Auction Hunters (Spike, 2010–present).

In the opening of Storage Wars, a narrator reveals that there are now over ‘two billion square feet of storage’ in the United States, but when bills go unpaid, ‘the contents within are put up for auction’. ‘You can bet your ass we’re going to sell your stuff’, an auctioneer quickly chimes in, as potential buyers speculate on the contents of confiscated units and compete in a dramatic bidding process while animated money flies around in the background. Cameras film the auction and the process of uncovering and sifting through the goods once a unit is ‘won’, while the estimated market value of each object – and the storage unit as a whole – is constantly tabulated graphically on screen. While teasers play up the possibility of scoring antiques and other unusual or valuable objects, buyers often pick through mundane household items with modest resale value. Still, the possibility of ‘hitting the jackpot’ drives the formula, and speculative risk-taking looms large. As with other examples of dispossession TV, the story unfolds from the economic perspective of the buyer-entrepreneurs. The origins of used household goods, electronics, furniture and collectibles found in the lockers go unremarked, with one person’s inability to pay providing the presumed (but never overtly discussed) occasion for someone else’s profiteering. While claims have surfaced that storage auction programs are partly staged by producers who plant the more interesting and expensive items, their representational accuracy is arguably less important than the neoliberal approach to property, enterprise and loss they visualize and circulate. However contrived, storage auction programs illustrate a way of thinking about and acting on financial hardship in self-serving market terms that also circulate in trade journalism, popular culture and a burgeoning slate of how-to manuals for ‘making money from the storage wars’ (Reynolds, 2011). Like pawnshop and repossession shows, Storage Wars and its ilk participate in the process of accumulation by dispossession, and narrate this global tendency as an ordinary business routine.

The subprime lending crisis and the resulting foreclosure of more than 5 million US homes from 2008 to 2011 (Meyers et al., 2011) have also provided material for reality entertainment built around quotidian dispossession and recessionary entrepreneurialism. The surge of foreclosed house flipping programs dates to the 2011 debut of Flip Men (Spike, 2011-2012). That production followed partners who bid on foreclosed houses in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the hopes of renovating and selling them for a quick profit. Other shows revolving around foreclosure bidding and rehab projects soon appeared including Property Wars (Discovery 2012–2013), Flipping Vegas (A&E, 2011–2014) and Flip It to Win It, which follows competing teams of San Francisco Bay area house-flippers from foreclosure auction to rehab to sale. Flip or Flop (HGTV, 2013–present) features a husband and wife team who run a foreclosed home flipping business out of their own home. While home renovation shows predated the recession and have long equated home ownership with everyday self-enterprise (Allon, 2010), foreclosed house flipping programs enact the forced displacement of people from their homes as a business opportunity. The narrative emphasis on competitive bidding, risk assessment and profit and loss calculations connects this strand of reality programming to the predatory entrepreneurialism operating across pawnshop, repossession and storage auction programs. Presenting persistent home foreclosure as an entrepreneurial game, shows such as Flip Men participate in accumulation by dispossession in tandem with other discursive sites, including how-to manuals for house-flippers, business journalism and neoliberal housing policies. In the process, they epitomize the ethic of bare enterprise that cuts across dispossession TV as a whole.

Performing homo economicus

In his 1978 to 1979 lectures at the College de France, Michel Foucault (2008) linked the neoliberal project of late modern capitalist democracies to an enterprising subjectivity – homo economicus. While deregulation, privatization, welfare reform and the collapse of collective bargaining and job security define the structure of neoliberal societies (Duggan, 2004; Harvey, 2005; Rose, 1996), these developments intersect with a fundamental ‘shift in the way in which humans make themselves and are made as subjects’ (Read, 2009: 28). As Jason Read explains, the new regime of subjectivity demanded by neoliberalism involves a ‘massive expansion of the field and scope of economics’, as the free market becomes the dominant grid for making sense of identity and sociality more broadly. The discourse of the economy

becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action – crime, marriage, higher education and so on – can be charted, according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure: it can be seen as an investment. (Read, 2008: 28, 31)

Citizen subjects are also reconceived in market terms, as ‘entrepreneurs of self’ whose principal obligation is to maximize their human capital (Foucault, 2008: 226). Within this grid of intelligibility, the waning social contract, precarious labor conditions and other neoliberal trends can be presented as opportunities for personal gain that, while ostensibly available to all, are understood to be inherently competitive.

Since reality television exploded as a cultural phenomenon in the early 2000s, it has played a visible role in the cultivation of homo economicus. From dating shows to talent competitions, reality entertainment brings market logic – competition, cost–benefit ratios, risk management, outcomes assessment, branding – to bear on personhood, relationships and everyday life (Ouellette and Hay, 2008). Much reality programming to date has been pedagogical in the informal sense of guiding and shaping enterprising individuals through games, contests, makeovers and lifestyle tutorials. Alternately, with no experts, judges or hosts on hand, the ‘real life’ characters of dispossession TV perform an extreme, even caricaturized version of homo economicus already achieved. These over-the-top entrepreneurs embody an unqualified free market relationship to themselves, their livelihoods and social life writ large. They are also predatory and eager to exploit the economic vulnerability of ‘others’ for personal gain. What differentiates this strand of programming from reality television’s heretofore investment in neoliberalism is an ethic of bare enterprise.

Under bare enterprise, as it plays out on dispossession TV, society gives way to self-interested individuals whose subjectivities and rules for living are formulated purely through market principles. This enterprising governmentality, in which personhood is explicitly achieved by dispossessing others, complements the normalization of bare life, as suggested by Giorgio Agamben (1998). Agamben argues that ‘states of exception’ to democracy (as exemplified by concentration and prisoner of war camps) are ever more common in contemporary politics. Individuals and populations deemed noncitizens are denied basic human rights, reduced to ‘bare life’ and tortured and killed without penalty or consequence. The right to decide such ‘exceptions’, Agamben contends, is pivotal to the power and identity of authorities, as the ‘sovereign subject can only be constituted through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corpus, bare life, in himself’ (p. 124). While Agamben contends we are vulnerable to authoritative power over life and death, Foucault emphasizes the dispersion of sovereign power among self-enterprising subjects who called upon to manage and ‘maximize’ themselves in sync with neoliberal discourses and policies. On the reality programming discussed here, homo economicus is empowered to subject ‘others’ to bare life without repercussion in pursuit of these goals. The decision to treat economically disenfranchised people as ‘exceptions’ to the category of human is not made by political or legal authorities but is dispersed among ‘ordinary’ entrepreneurs who embrace accumulation by dispossession as a post-crash business opportunity. Their ‘hardcore’ identities involve the anthropomorphism of free market behavior, as well as a willingness to capitalize on the suffering of others conceived as undeserving of protections. To the extent that the ruthless performance of bare enterprise hinges on a denial of the rights of the poor and the indebted, dispossession TV is also about enacting quotidian power over bare life.

While reality television has long favored calculating and competitive environments, on dispossession TV, homo economicus is performed in an extreme fashion in the ‘natural’ context of actual economic practice (Serpe, 2013). ‘Real life’ entrepreneurs embrace an ethos of profit maximization at any cost and compete aggressively with each other for the best price, score or deal, often going as far as to ‘fake’ each other out to advance their economic success. Rejecting any concern for the ‘moral sentiments’ (Smith, 2010 [1759]), they evidence not so much as a slither of empathy, responsibility or care for those from whom they prosper – the millions who have fallen behind on their bills, lack access to mainstream credit, are unemployed or chronically underemployed and/or have lost their homes, means of transportation and other basic necessities. Casting, editing, scripting and other television production practices converge with recessionary business trends to create these hyperbolic characters and the cutthroat milieus in which they operate: This is not unmediated ‘reality’, but the personification and enactment of a neoliberal ethic in which ‘the only value that matters is the bottom line’, and the ruthless ‘appropriation of the few resources that allow the downtrodden to survive’ are fair game (Giroux, 2012: 41).

Dispossession TV’s capacity to project the complexities and persistence of predatory capitalism onto ‘everyday’ personalities stems in part from the self-maximizing mantras, investment and payoff calculations and ‘seize the opportunity’ tutorials circulating across many reality genres since early 2000s. The characters of bare enterprise have naturalized these (by now) familiar lessons to the point where they live and breathe profitmaking and advance their own interests with tunnel vision. Typically, they are small business owners or contractors motivated not by wages, benefits or job security, but by the desire to amass as much profit as possible during the course of an episode. Risk is always a factor, especially on storage auction and foreclosed home flipping shows, where bidders hoping to capitalize on recently confiscated property proceed with only partial knowledge of what is on the auction block. On pawnshop and repossession shows, self-maximizing, risk-managing ‘economic man’ valorized by neoliberalism takes center stage as well. The entrepreneurial activity repeated with zeal across dispossession TV belies any moral obligation to society or to unfortunate ‘others’ that is not motivated by profit or carefully calculated in market terms.

These are not wealthy CEOs or global financiers: The men (and they are mostly men) of dispossession TV are individual proprietors and entrepreneurs who generally work alone, with families or in small teams of allegiance. With few connections to the ‘one percent’, these ‘real life’ entrepreneurs stand in for (and reflect attention from) the neoliberal policies and forces responsible for accumulation by dispossession, just as the localized settings in which they operate situate bare enterprise outside the tides of global finance capitalism. On reality television, it is not the ‘rich and powerful’ who pursue ‘short-term investments and financial gains’ and close their ‘eyes to the carnage and suffering all around them’ (Giroux, 2012: 39). Rather, ‘ordinary’ people perform this version of homo economicus, and because they are often coded as precarious and working-class themselves, their ‘difference’ from the dispossessed is potentially fragile and tenuous. Just as the repetitive citation of feminine and masculine norms is required to maintain ‘stable’ arbitrary gender identities (Butler, 1990), extreme gestures (such as militant competitiveness, supreme callousness and a complete lack of empathy) are repeatedly evoked to differentiate the entrepreneurs from the victims of bare enterprise. While the over-the-top nature of the performance could reveal the artificiality of homo economicus, the primacy of the family mitigates against this possibility.

As Lisa Duggan (2004) notes, the heterosexual family is central to neoliberalism as a buffer between the free market and its devastating consequences. Families are expected to provide a self-reliant support system in the absence of a collective safety net, a message echoed across reality programs from Supernanny (ABC, 2004–2011) to Wife Swap (ABC, 2004–2013). On dispossession TV, the family is more than a repository of responsibilities disavowed by the public sector; it is also a highly visible nexus of profitmaking activities often managed by a patriarch. On Hardcore Pawn, adult children work for their father, engaging in constant sibling rivalry. On Operation Repo, ‘repo men’ also operate as a family business, with the wife assisting her husband. On Repossessed! Hard Times, the owner brings his teenage son into the business and makes an appearance for ‘career day’ at his daughter’s school. When heterosexual families are not central to the enterprise, male entrepreneurs work alone or with partners, embodying an extremely solitary, rugged form of entrepreneurial masculinity drawn from pre-welfare state frontier mythology. Property Wars, for example, bills Phoenix, Arizona, as a ‘gambler’s paradise’, while Flip It to Win It likens foreclosed house flipping in Northern California to the late 1800s ‘gold rush’. These programs link bare enterprise to hardcore masculinity and nostalgia for an earlier form of unregulated capitalism, a point that Diane Negra (2013) reality-based also makes about gold prospecting shows set in Alaska. Storage auction hunters, also disproportionately male, are similarly constructed as gamblers in ways that infuse the performance of homo economicus with retroactive ‘casino capitalism’ (Giroux, 2014) and Wild West masculinity. Repo men, on the contrary, are cast as renegades (or urban cowboys) who enforce the rules of the banking and finance industries from ‘outside’ the system and fill their own pockets in the process.

Homo economicus is a deeply gendered subjectivity, as many feminist scholars have noted. Male characters do more than simply dominate the recessionary landscape of bare enterprise: They also reject historically feminized ethics of compassion and care and adopt values such as competition, ruthlessness and risk-taking ascribed to powerful men. As Nancy Folbre (2009) points out, the pretense that ‘greed is good’ underscoring the ethic of bare enterprise is inherently gendered, as historically greed has been considered good only for men. Indeed, self-interestedness is also fraught for women due to the sexual division of labor in the home. With the rise of liberal capitalism, women were assigned duties (childrearing, domesticity, emotional labor, family care) assumed to conflict with prioritizing and advancing one’s own interests, making it much more difficult for them to pursue enterprising subjectivities (Brown, 2005). As individual families are called upon to compensate for services discontinued by the state, women’s caretaking labor becomes more crucial, even as women are now expected to ‘maximize’ themselves financially as well. Under neoliberalism, the family home has increasingly become an enterprise zone, and the feminized activities therein have been articulated to everyday entrepreneurialism, from ‘parenting for success’ to extreme couponing to home renovation. Nonetheless, the female performance of homo economicus is layered with gendered assumptions about the family. For this reason, women are clustered on the margins of bare enterprise, as helpers and caretakers but rarely as main characters.

The (very few) female entrepreneurs of dispossession TV necessarily occupy a tenuous and profoundly contradictory space as they are called upon to simultaneously uphold gender norms and participate in a cutthroat environment. Women who are not relegated to help, meet status struggle to perform homo economicus successfully, as exemplified by Brandi, the female partner of a husband and wife team on Storage Wars, where mostly the male buyers regularly call each other ‘vaginas’ to indicate weakness. To be recognized as an enterprising subject requires demonstrating, over and over with much fanfare, that women can be just as ruthless, competitive, aggressive, self-centered and risk-taking as men. It also entails shunning feminized attributes such as cooperation, compassion and concern for others. When female entrepreneurs do perform this ethic, they still tend to assume primary responsibility for the care of their own families, and this gendered division of labor often manifests as a barrier to, and a check against, the male-coded entrepreneurialism pursued by their husbands and partners. Such is the case on Flip or Flop, HGTV’s attempt to feminize the foreclosed house flipping show for a predominantly female demographic by focusing on a young married couple with a baby. Wife Christina is introduced as a full partner in their home business, a player who drops her child at daycare on a second’s notice to attend auctions and is not afraid to outbid her aggressive male competitors. Christina’s femininity is repeatedly shown to have no bearing on her competitiveness or economic approach to dispossession, as she cares no more about the people who have lost their homes than male entrepreneurs. However, she is still taken for granted as a domestic caretaker – the person who makes the coffee, picks up the baby after the auction, monitors her husband’s aggressive risk-taking and worries about how the business – and family – will survive.

The enactment of a world in which the market trumps everything, and everything has a price, is also ambivalently filtered through race and class. Pawnshop and storage auction programs spend an enormous amount of time assessing the market value of property that has been (or likely will be) confiscated. This relentless focus on the accumulating small-scale profit requires regarding the dispossessed as nonentities who deserve neither rights nor empathy. However, the ethic of bare enterprise does not always correlate with status and privilege. On Storage Hunters, security guards are on hand to closely monitor the buyers, who are coded as uneducated and working-class in dress and behavior, as suggested by the constant ‘bleeping’ offensive language. On Storage Wars, a few of the buyers are collectors or high-end dealers, but many others operate thrift and consignment stores that sell used mattresses, furniture, dishes, electronics, sports equipment and similar low-end items. These entrepreneurs must balance the attributes (such as speculation and risk) that position them competitively on the auction block while also handling the day-to-day management of small businesses catering to a growing need for inexpensive second-hand clothes, furniture and other necessities. While these complexities are glossed over by the thematic focus on competing and ‘cashing in’ on the auctions, what appears on screen as the self-interested disregard for other people’s suffering may be less about a lack of care and more about the entrepreneurs’ own fragile place in the neoliberal economy.

Such is the case with Ivy, a regular character on Storage Wars, who is African American and owns a thrift shop called Grandma’s Attic patronized by working-class people of color. In a typical episode from 2014, he arrives at the day’s auction, where he meets his usual competitors. Tensions are running predictably high, accentuated by dramatic music and close-up shots of the buyers’ faces as they compete in the bidding process. Because the bidders have only a few minutes to scan the contents of the storage locker from a distance, an element of risk contributes to the dramatic build-up. The first locker up for auction is rejected by many of the bidders because some of the objects are packaged in plastic trash bags and the unit is assumed to contain low-end household items. Storage hunters tend to disfavor these types of lockers, believing they are less likely to contain hidden treasures. However, in his quest to fill his thrift store, Ivy sees potential. When he ‘wins’ the locker, he finds that it is indeed filled with domestic necessities, which he methodically sorts and assigns dollar amounts, while a running estimate of the combined value of appears on screen. Ivy’s small business is barely making ends meet, yet at no point does he express concern for the people whose misfortune underpins his score. He matter-of-factly tabulates the modest sums he can charge for a used mattress, a dresser, an old computer, clothing, blankets and similar objects, never pausing to consider who these items belong to, why they were placed into storage, why the rent wasn’t paid and how the owners are getting along without their possessions. Performed for the cameras according to the commercial dictates of the tried-and-true Storage Wars formula, this scene connects Ivy to a detached and predatory ethic of bare enterprise, while downplaying the macro politics, and uneven racial and class implications, of accumulation by dispossession under neoliberalism. At a conjuncture where the economically disenfranchised are increasingly subject to expulsion (Sassen, 2014), abandonment (Povinelli, 2011) and ‘slow death’ (Berlant, 2011), this ethic also differentiates recessionary entrepreneurs like Ivy, who may themselves be struggling financially, from the growing ranks of ‘disposable’ people and populations (Giroux, 2006, 2012) denied neoliberal subjectivity and its promised rewards.

The biopolitics of disposability

The emergence of dispossession TV intersects with, and contributes to, what Henry Giroux calls a ‘new biopolitics of disposability’ in the United States in the past decade. Drawing from Foucault and Agamben, Giroux (2006) argues that by refusing to provide ‘health care, housing, retirement benefits and education’, the state has abandoned the poor, especially people of color, to ‘social death’ (pp. 183–184). The United States, which led the trend of dismantling public welfare programs, now has the highest poverty level in the industrial world, with 44 million people, or one in seven, living below the poverty line and more than 3 million homeless (Giroux, 2012: 47). Giroux traces an overt ‘culture of cruelty’ to lack of concern for marginalized people of color disproportionately impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Such cruelty has escalated and spread since the financial crisis and economic recession, with entire populations ‘ex-communicated from the sphere of concern’ and relegated to ‘spaces of invisibility’. The poor are not only left to ‘fend for themselves’, but they are increasingly expected to do so ‘outside the vision of mainstream society’, or ‘when disruptively present’, cast as ‘redundant, pathological and dangerous’, Giroux (2006) contends (p. 175, 184). Such is the case with the burgeoning strands of dispossession TV.

While US reality television has long sought to rehabilitate needy and ‘at-risk’ citizens through techniques of personal responsibilization and self-enterprise, dispossession TV evidences no such impetus. Those who rely on emergency loans, can’t pay their bills and lose their belongings and homes are unapologetically relegated to the margins and disregarded. This also constitutes a break from the privatized do-good ethic of precrash productions such as Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (ABC, 2003–2012), which mobilized corporate sponsors, nonprofit agencies and volunteers to assist people whose extenuating circumstances (medical conditions, natural disasters) deemed them ‘worthy’ of assistance. Whereas do-good ventures encouraged empathy and invited viewers to participate in their charitable missions, dispossession TV discourages affective ties and alleviates any moral obligation to assist. On the contrary, its cruel entrepreneurialism hinges on seeing people who lack or lose property as unimportant, marginalized and available for predatory abuse.

The biopolitics of disposability, as theorized by Giroux, draws from the concept of bare life, to the extent that when the economically disenfranchised are hidden from view or rendered less than human, it becomes easier to systemically disregard their basic rights and needs. On dispossession TV, precarious and indebted victims of accumulation by dispossession are also routinely denied legitimate personhood – which sets the stage for recessionary entrepreneurs to exploit them economically without remorse or consequence. While the dispossessed appear (and just as quickly disappear) as interchangeable targets, customers and former owners in transactional scenes, they are never developed as subjects. On the pawnshop and repossession shows, the economically disenfranchised are limited to performing stereotypical, cartoonish versions of themselves – what Laura Grindstaff (2002) calls ‘poor face’. They are also often criminalized through security apparatuses and policing, as exemplified by the uniformed guards on Hardcore Pawn and the simulated mug shots and ‘intelligence’ (name, age, occupation, make of vehicle, payments missed) collected by Repo Games. Social interactions are framed by market logic and focus on prices and dollar amounts. We learn little about the everyday lives and circumstances of the people on the wrong end of accumulation by dispossession, and there is no impetus to assist or intervene.

While escalating levels of financial hardship and consumer debt are suggested by the premise and proliferation of TV programs about ‘real life’ pawnshops and repossession, episodes tend to associate these ‘problems’ with low-income populations. While the enactment of bare enterprise takes the TV viewer into places (decrepit and condemned houses, pawnshops, impoverished neighborhoods) usually ignored by television, it does so in a voyeuristic manner that encourages audiences imagined as White and middle class to peer into ‘other’ worlds. The simultaneous allure and stigmatization of ‘bad’ neighborhoods is a trope across dispossession TV, especially foreclosed house flipping shows. Many foreclosed homes up for auction (especially the greatest bargains) are located in ‘sketchy’ areas with ‘questionable’ inhabitants, low median incomes and underfunded schools. This can be a deterrent in the bidding wars, and when the buyers decide to embrace the ‘extra risk’ involved, they proceed with caution. In an episode of Flip It to Win It, the female partner of one of the buyers is advised to carry pepper spray when she investigates a property in a nonwealthy area. Because potential buyers are only allowed to view the exteriors of foreclosed homes, they must bid with only a speculative guess about the conditions inside. A key source of narrative excitement occurs when the lock is eventually broken and the interior is ‘revealed’. Disappointment often ensues when houses are ‘trashed’, as they will require more investment to rehabilitate and sell for a profit. In an episode of Property Wars, which is promoted as a dramatic gamble involving ‘houses of treasure and houses of horror’, the auction winners enter a house in a low-income area with exposed plumbing, dry rotted walls, roaches crawling around and animal waste piled high in the back yard. He spots an embroidered ‘Home Sweet Home’ sign posted on the crumbling wall, and the camera lingers as he tears it down and mutters ‘not so much’. We do not learn what happened to the house, who lived there under such conditions or why creditors seized the property. On dispossession TV, foreclosed homes are ‘zones of invisibility’, exposed only for hardcore entrepreneurialism staged as reality entertainment.

Debt looms large across these foreclosed zones. While people forced to part with their houses, cars and household possessions sometimes express anger, anxiety and sadness when their belongings are seized, these scenes are played as spectacle. Devoid of political economic context, these fleeting moments reinforce the discursive construction of indebtedness to a failure of personal responsibility. This pejorative assumption is echoed by the casually judgmental statements of pawnbrokers, repo men, auction hunters and house-flippers who rationalize their role in the dispossession of people who ‘lived above their means’ or pathologically mismanage their finances. But as Andrew Ross (2014) contends, in the current ‘creditocracy’, we are all increasingly subjects of compulsory indebtedness: Going into debt has become necessary ‘not just for material investments in the quality of life of life, but for the basic requirements of life’ (p. 11). Despite all the ‘poisonous talk about profligate purchases of flat screen TVs and dream homes’, the main reasons for the ‘unsustainable growth of debt-financed consumption have been the rising costs of education and health care combined with stagnant income’, Ross (2014: 70) points out. On the programs discussed here, the overconsumed, overmortgaged, low-income masses are the main targets of accumulation by dispossession, obscuring the structural dimensions and widespread implications of indebtedness under neoliberalism. Yet, even the beneficiaries of recessionary entrepreneurialism – such as the husband and wife team on Flip or Flop – admit to being financially unstable and ‘maxed out’ on credit cards. There is a fine line between normality and disposability, admiration and disregard when it comes to debt, signified by the performance of homo economicus and enforced by the intersection of whiteness, gender and class privilege.

On storage auction and foreclosed house flipping programs, the dispossessed are often invisible in a literal sense. The former owners of homes, furnishings and other personal possessions are anonymous and absent, registering only as looming specters of financial dysfunction and disorder. The focus on entrepreneurial activity overshadows the unstated trauma and suffering of ‘others’. Like their contemporaries in pawnshop and repossession productions, these men are highly calculative, market-oriented, self-interested subjects who conduct their business without affective sentiments. If passions flare, the reasons are always economic – an investment wasn’t worth the risk, a family member or partner makes the wrong call on a deal, a competitor gets the upper hand. This ‘all-business’ approach to dispossession is exemplified by an episode of Flip Men in which the former owner of a foreclosed house appears briefly on screen. The male partners – who buy and flip foreclosed houses in Salt Lake City, Utah – have unknowingly purchased what they call a ‘hoarder house’. After several scenes in which they examine the interior and assess the ‘financial cost’ of the discovery, they are shown hauling furniture, trash bags and cardboard boxes out of the house when the woman suddenly appears and claims, ‘This is my stuff’. Elderly and walking with a cane, she approaches the house, her face blurred by computer graphics. The flip men put on a show of ‘helping her out’ by having her belongings hauled away, presumably to storage, at their expense, but they do so purely out of self-interest, as speed is of the essence in the rehab business and she has a small car and no funds to hire a truck and movers. Unlike reality programs that revolve around the diagnosis and transformation of ‘hoarders’, Flip Men has no interest in the woman’s next move, let alone her so-called disorder. Indeed, they subtly mock the value she attaches to her things, sarcastically calling her boxes and trash bags ‘valuables’ as an inside joke between them and audience, which is assumed to know the belongings are worth nothing in market terms. At the conclusion of the episode, we are told that ‘getting rid of the hoard’ was simply an unexpected ledger entry in the rehab’s cost–benefit ratio; the whereabouts of the presumably homeless woman is not mentioned. As with other examples of dispossession TV, the ethics and human consequences of dispossession are rationalized in bare market terms. Lacking market value, the woman’s ‘things’, however meaningful to her, are coldly disregarded as well.

On dispossession TV, disregard for the dispossessed often unfolds in tandem with a disavowal of the ‘social life of things’ (Appadurai, 1988). As scholars of consumer culture have aptly demonstrated, goods convey much more than the sum of capitalist processes. Imbued with meanings and sentiments, things intersect with social rituals, identities and relationships. The social histories of houses, the significance of family heirlooms, and the uses of preowned trinkets, souvenirs, toys and similar items found in storage lockers are downplayed, their ‘value’ recognized only in market terms. ‘Other’ people’s possessions – and the lived experiences associated with them – are stripped of social meaning and appropriated as raw material for another round of profit accumulation. Commodity fetishism operates here in a double sense, as both the manufacture of these goods, and the feminized labor involved in the social reproduction of home, family and social life, are hidden from view. The second erasure is especially crucial for removing any residue of emotion, sociality and care from the rubble of foreclosed homes and dislocated consumer objects. Under bare enterprise, the only thing that matters is the price.

The return of the dispossessed?

Dispossession TV gives cultural form to everyday accumulation by dispossession, enacting financial precarity and mounting debt as an enterprising game in which victims are denied personhood and only the most ruthless versions of homo economicus stand a chance at the ‘prize’. However, watching this programming over many months leads me to think it could also be an important cautionary tale – an uneasy farce about the brutality of capitalism or a flashing sign that the fantasy of the consumerist ‘good life’ (Berlant, 2011) so ingrained in US television culture since the post-war era has reached its breaking point.

Because the enactment of bare enterprise revolves around the iconographic remainders of an American Dream that no longer exists (if it ever did) – the private homes, vehicles and belongings of people who lost their jobs, couldn’t afford their house payments, defaulted on their credit cards or became ensnared in subprime loans – television can’t rationalize the historically layered structures of feeling evoked by dispossession entirely in calculated market terms. In his work on the Paris arcades, Walter Benjamin (2002) suggested that the ‘ruins’ of consumer culture have as much to tell us about the capitalism of the present as the past. Could it be that proliferating pawnshops, concrete lots of repossessed cars, sprawling warehouses of stored household goods and rundown foreclosed homes are equally revealing? Even with the heavy hand of scripting, casting and editing, reality television makes the ruins of our own recessionary consumer culture visible. Could this endless video loop of deterioration and despair tell us something about our own times? Can the meanings and affective sensibilities buried in these structures and artifacts be completely appropriated by homo economicus? Certainly, the extensive visual archive of dispossession indexed across the programs offers a range of interpretations and potential uses beyond the confines of the commercial formula. ¹

I also wonder whether it is really possible to entirely erase disenfranchised populations and rewrite the meaning of things, however gallant television’s endorsement of (and participation in) bare enterprise may be. While Giroux sees the intensifying neoliberal culture of cruelty as a seamless certainty, might there also be contradictions and fissures worth pointing out? In her attempt to understand ‘modern forms of dispossession, exploitation, repression and their concrete impacts on the people most affected by them and on our shared conditions of living’ Gordon (2008: xv), Avery Gordon offers a concept she calls ‘haunting’ that is potentially useful for thinking about the archive of dispossession compiled and circulated endlessly by reality television. In Gordon’s analysis, haunting refers not to literal ghosts, but to the way in which ‘abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life’ (Joseph, 2014: 15). It occurs as an ‘animated state’ in which a ‘repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely’ (Gordon, 2008: xv). While Gordon finds expressions of haunting in cultural forms such as fiction and photography, it is worth considering her analysis in the context of industrialized television production.

While there have been a few much-hyped storylines revolving around suspected ghosts as well as spooky incidents involving voodoo, charms and psychics on the reality genres discussed here, my point here is that programs revolving around dispossession are also potentially ‘haunted’ in ways that exceed reality television’s enterprising plot. The old woman who appears out of nowhere on Flip Men, her face blurred out by the producers, could be read as haunting. On many episodes, house flipping entrepreneurs discover to their dismay that former owners have ‘left their mark’ by removing cabinetry and light fixtures or leaving behind costly messes. Mysterious forces coalesce to stymie the quick and dirty renovations as well – electrical wiring won’t work, plumbing fixtures are broken, toxic mold appears, houses flood. In the episode involving the female hoarder, a loud noise shocks the viewer and the male rehabbers soon after her departure: The furnace has suddenly and unexplainably blown up. Or, amid the frenetic bidding wars, suspenseful reveals and running concern with market value emphasized on Storage Wars, the camera may pause on a broken doll, raising unauthorized questions: To whom did she belong? What was her name? Where is she now? A haunting.

In her conversation with Athenea Athanasiou in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013), Butler theorizes dispossession both as the unjust and increasingly widespread loss of land, citizenship, property and livelihood – and as a concept that opens up new ways of thinking about political subjectivity. One of her arguments is that we need to upset the ‘natural’ equation of agency with individualism, and particularly with the individualized self-enterprising subject under neoliberalism. Butler points out the extent to which ‘legitimate’ subjectivity has always been closely tied to possessive individualism and property ownership. While this can be an important genealogy to evoke in struggles to reclaim land, citizenship, property and livelihood, she makes the case that it is also worth thinking about the possibilities of dispossession outside this framework. Following Butler, another question raised by dispossession TV might be as follows: What type of political subjectivity become possible in the absence of personhood and property ownership?

US television’s harsh new turn stitches neoliberalism, and the subjectivities it favors, into long-standing investments in possessive individualism. But the callous abandonment of the indebted, disenfranchised and dispossessed to the biopolitics of disposability also renders the harshness of free market policies visible in new and potentially important ways. There are no feel-good transformation narratives, no experts on hand to motivate multiplying numbers of have-nots to become individuals in the ‘proper’ (and prosperous) sense. As a result, the programs analyzed here construct an unusually static image of US society – while some entrepreneurs will survive and thrive, vast populations are relegated to a place of anonymity and permanent social and economic dislocation. In this respect, dispossession TV deflates, however inadvertently, both the foundations of individualism and the mythology of American classlessness.

In State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, Isabell Lorey (2015) points out that normalization of precarity under neoliberalism means ‘living with the unforeseeable – with contingency’ (p. 1). Like Butler, she sees neoliberal market rationalities as both an abuse of power, and as an opportunity to ‘undo’ the naturalness of possessive individualism, and historically specific, bourgeoisie, ‘male-connoted ideas of autonomy and freedom’ (p. 29). Lorey sees hope in the ‘virtuosity’ of the multitude. Rather than struggling for recognition and ‘better’ representation, she points to new political ‘forms of formlessness that channel governmentality’ into ‘new modes of living in disobedience’ collectively (pp. 102, 109). While dispossession TV callously disregards the indebted and the dispossessed as interchangeable nonindividuals, public gatherings worldwide have rejected individual solutions – and the ethic of bare enterprise – in different terms. In the United States, these assemblies have branched out from Occupy Wall Street to radical projects such as Strike Debt and local campaigns to collectively ‘occupy’ everything from shopping malls to foreclosed houses. The reality programming examined here circulates within, and draws attention to the same socioeconomic milieu that has given rise to these ‘formless’ collectivities and might be appropriated to advance their political purposes. On its own, dispossession TV does not register or encourage new forms of resistance, which is not surprising given the industry’s own aggressively free market priorities. We are not likely to see television shows such as Operation Occupy and Hardcore Debt Relief anytime soon.