Fake Work

Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and author of Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art and Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. Her writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, n+1, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Prologue: The Almost End of the World Phase I: Taking Inventory Chapter 1: Millennial TransitionsChapter 2: Quality AssuranceChapter 3: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”Chapter 4: Write What You KnowChapter 5: Teamwork Phase II: Media and Mediations Chapter 6: My Putative PromotionChapter 7: A Total Bitch and an Absolute FraudChapter 8: A Tepid Marxist and a Bubble PoppedChapter 9: My Joke of a Promotion Phase III: Contingency Planning Chapter 10: Continental ComportmentChapter 11: Frequent FliersChapter 12: Floods and FiresChapter 13: The End of the End Afterward: Weeks and Decades Acknowledgements

"[A] memorable portrait of the mad hunger of corporate toil...superbly committed to its own beliefs — truthful, dryly funny and often subtly moving."—Charles Finch, The New York Times“In this brilliant fusion of memoir and critique, La Berge has given us the anti-bildungsroman of the second millennium. As it slowly dawns on her that management consulting is an exercise in interminable interpretation, with no discernible referent, she finds an unexpected use for her training in 1990s poststructuralism, but also has to unlearn everything she thought she knew about corporate capitalism. At once hilarious and deadly serious, La Berge’s chronicle of the absurd tells us more about the logic of contemporary capitalism than any work of standard economic history or organization theory.”—Melinda Cooper, author of Family Values“What if Severance was a documentary? Leigh Claire's Y2K autofiction is a message in a bottle, an artifact from a lost world, a reminder that even—or precisely—when it was most buoyant, the lifeworld of capitalism was most hollow”—Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek’s Bastards and Crack-Up Capitalism