Fake Work

”[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

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.