Seasonal Associate (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) - Softcover

Heike Geissler; Kevin Vennemann; Katy Derbyshire; Chris Kraus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1635900360 ISBN 13: 9781635900361

Publisher: Semiotext(e), 2018

Synopsis

How the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt: a writer's account of her experience working in an Amazon fulfillment center. No longer able to live on the proceeds of her freelance writing and translating income, German novelist Heike Geissler takes a seasonal job at Amazon Order Fulfillment in Leipzig. But the job, intended as a stopgap measure, quickly becomes a descent into humiliation, and Geissler soon begins to internalize the dynamics and nature of the post-capitalist labor market and precarious work. Driven to work at Amazon by financial necessity rather than journalistic ambition, Heike Geissler has nonetheless written the first and only literary account of corporate flex-time employment that offers "freedom" to workers who have become an expendable resource. Shifting between the first and the second person, Seasonal Associate is a nuanced expose of the psychic damage that is an essential working condition with mega-corporations. Geissler has written a twenty-first-century account of how the brutalities of working life are transformed into exhaustion, shame, and self-doubt.

About this title

Review

...chillingly effective, not least for its accumulation of details, which seem both aggressively banal and freighted with an excess of symbolic meaning....The ubiquitous linguistic debasement and corporate doublespeak is made strange and new again, the small humiliations and injustices pile up along with their psychological and social consequences.

--Harper's Magazine

Geissler's account of her time at Amazon is more than a workplace exposé. Hovering somewhere between memoir, cultural criticism, and fiction, it's a compelling meditation on the psychological and physical harm of working for a large corporation in a society driven by neoliberal economic goals.

--Christian Century

...Geissler is exploring questions of labor and identity in the twenty-first century and the ways in which work does and does not define us. If this book was simply a chronicle of her time working at Amazon, it would be compelling enough--but the narrative risks she takes pay off, making it so much more.

--Words Without Borders

Edition details

• Publisher: Semiotext(e)
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1635900360
• ISBN 13: 9781635900361
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240