Non Stop Inertia [Paperback]

Ivor Southwood has incisively tapped into the emotional landscape of the always-available, always-looking-for-work world of precarious labour - and passionately found a way to navigate around and beyond the incessant stupefaction. Writing, from the inside, about the monotonous unpredictability of intermittent work, the privatisation of welfare and its often absurdly punishing routines, an intimately managed emotional labour that is as exhausting as it is pointless, and covering theories of the spread of contingent work in an accessible way, Southwood has accomplished something extraordinary. Non-Stop Intertia registers the tragedy and the farce, elicits anger and laughter and, finally, shows that while it might not always be possible to withdraw one's labour by going on strike, it might be necessary to withhold the emotional connection that is demanded in the exchange. Non-Stop Inertia's witty riposte, in short, is to behave as the robot that we are expected to be, as a way beyond being treated as if one is. A beautiful book. --(Angela Mitropoulos, Queen Mary, University of London, author of Precari-Us?)

In our culture of short-term work, mobile communications and rolling media it seems we are always on the move; but are we really getting anywhere? Non-Stop Inertia argues that this appearance of restless activity conceals and indeed maintains a deep paralysis of thought and action, and that rather than being unquestionable or inevitable, the environment of personal flexibility and perpetual crisis which we now inhabit is ideologically constructed. Written from inside this system of precarious employment and debt-driven subjectivity, illustrating its arguments with actual examples and using theory to make connections and unlock meanings, the book shows how in our constant anxious pursuit of work and leisure we are running on the spot against a scrolling CGI backdrop. As performative labourers, full-time jobseekers, social networkers and consumer-citizens, we are so preoccupied by the business of 'being ourselves' that our real identities are forgotten and our dreams of resistance buried. This text rejects the positive script of the virtual state and suggests that in order to instigate genuine change we must refuse to go with the flow.

Ivor Southwood has worked as a mental health nurse and studied literature and media. He has also done various temporary jobs and is interested in the culture of precarious work.