Non-Stop Inertia

"Yes. I put this on the list because I think it’s one of the pithiest and most powerful descriptions of the political economy of inertia. By which I mean these new labour practices in which corporations and the state come together to install a new practice of labour, and a new set of relationships to our own labour, wherein it’s not enough to think of work in terms of financial necessity. It’s not enough that we are looking responsibly for a job; our actual attitude to it is policed. In the world that Southwood describes from experience, it isn’t just that you keep a record of which jobs you applied for that day. The Job Centres ask you to keep a diary of two or three positive things you’ve done this week to find work. He ties this in to the rise of a kind of positive-thinking management culture, which requires that work not only be performed efficiently and punctually and competently, but enthusiastically. “Southwood really anatomises the new culture of the workplace that ties the precarity of finding work and keeping work to this culture of enforced positive thinking” There was a BBC documentary about a call centre in the UK, shown about a year ago, in which the manager of the call centre gets the entire staff to sing. This is all part of the fun and the excitement of work. So, they all sing ‘Mr Brightside’ by The Killers. He’s leading the song, shouting, ‘Come on! Put some welly into it!’ and it all sounds like a bit of fun and sunshine and relief in a demanding workplace. But then he confesses about 20 minutes further on that he fired a couple of people for not singing. Southwood really anatomises the new culture of the workplace that ties the precarity of finding work and keeping work to this culture of enforced positive thinking and action. That’s what he’s describing as non-stop inertia, because you feel like you’re never really getting anywhere. The conditions under which we find and keep work are self-cancelling in so many ways, and yet you have to keep going at a pace that makes your enthusiasm visible. So, it’s both a very funny and a very frightening personal account, and a political anatomy of the precarious state of work. Again, it suggests why burnout might have a special diagnostic place among the different forms of depression that we’re suffering these days."