Leigh Claire La Berge is Professor in City University of New York's English Department. Her work focuses on aesthetics and political economy. Her first book, "Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s", tracked the convergences of finance, realism and postmodernism in literature and culture throughout the 1980s in the United States. Her second book, "Wages Against Artwork:  Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art" explored the twin rise of new forms of socially engaged art alongside what she called "decommodified labor," or labor that is not recompensed. Along with Alison Shonkwiler, Leigh Claire is the co-editor of the collection, "Reading Capitalist Realism". She recently published a book about animality and economy entitled "Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary". She is working on a new book called "Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect that Capitalism is a Joke" about her experience with corporate labor, Y2K, and management consultants.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....

00:00 Clips!
00:58 Welcome
02:32 Leigh Claire's Intro
- "In an English department you don't just find people who read novels or who write novels... but also who do philosophy, critical theory..."
- "Relationship between economic forms and the constitution of reality"
- "... different cultural objects... artworks or films or TV shows or novels... mediate between what we perceive as economically real and what might be economically possible" #economics
- #philosophy major, working for a management consultant in Manhattan
- Seeing the corporate world... accounting... profiteering... record-keeping "I was genuinely surprised... this cannot be the way that capitalism works... but it is!"
- Studying #politicaleconomy "manifestly politicised understanding of economic forms and economic structures"
- "Scandals and Abstraction" on financial scandals represented in film & literature
- "Wages against artwork" on art, economy and also animals (e.g. an exhibit of live birds)
- Thinking about animals' presence in the economy
- Explaining political economy to artists "What if you were talking to cats?"
- The ‪@marxforcatsmeow9993‬ video series "The cats loved it!"
- Writing "Marx for Cats" - "A history of the capitalist world system... as told through cats, with cats and for cats"
- "Cats are also amazing anti-work creatures... anti-authoritarian creatures"
- "Cats have been understood to be anti-authority for at least 1200 years"
- Royal lions, wildcat strikes, sabotabbies...
- Animals that can be companion and work animals because "capitalism... it both structures our external reality and our most intimate, internal, familial realities."
12:03 What's Real?
- Growing up nominally #Presbyterian with a lapsed #Catholic father
- "By the time I was 6 or 7 it was clear that church was not going to be for me"
- A very academic household. Professor parents
- Rural Virginia 100 meters from a cow pasture "Every day... I was near or in the presence of cows"
- Dogs & cats at home
- "Why are the cows in this fenced in area... and the dogs & cats live with us and our members of our family... what is the cause of this?"
- At 11 yrs old seeing a cow give birth breech to a calf with a broken leg. Both mother cow and farmer left the calf to die in the snow "I friend and I called a local radio station" then a school project to look after the calf "really changed me... I did become a #vegetarian ... one of the first times that I was able to break out the comfort of my family... and ask them to join me in thinking... helped me start to individuate..."
- Reading Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation" at 11. Watch Peter ‪@Sentientism‬ here:    • "Animal Liberation Now!" - Peter Sing...  
- "Who forms our most intimate communities and who do we want to be in our communities... and what would species have to do with it?"
- Family's religion "it wasn't robust enough to reject..."
- "What my parents wanted from a church was less a sense of religious community than just community"
- "The household that I grew up in... was probably defined by a genuine secular #humanism "
29:15 What Matters?
33:57 Who Matters?
58:11 A Better World?
01:13:22 Follow Leigh Claire
- https://x.com/marxforcats
-   / marxforcats  
- https://cuny.academia.edu/LeighClaire...
- https://vimeo.com/marxforcats
- https://www.dukeupress.edu/marx-for-cats

& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes) #sentientism
#sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all #sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall https://sentientism.info/wall/. Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. E.g.:   / sentientism  .