In 1992 the World Health Organisation published its tenth revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases. Under the diagnostic code for burn-out, ‘a state of vital exhaustion’ was recorded for the first time. The term sought to outline an end-state, characterised by acute stress, anxiety and depression, of the individual life that had been rendered unliveable. With some prescience, it has come to broadly capture an experience of increasing ubiquity in the UK today, one that can be located within the emerging public discourse that is often referred to as the ‘mental health crisis’.

How might this term help us to understand the origins of this crisis? And what role can exhaustion play in our consciousness of that which constitutes vitality?

Let us first consider exhaustion as it appears in the dictionary: the action of using something up or the state of being used up. In 1897, Émile Durkheim, a founding father of modern sociology, wrote, ‘… all the organism needs is that the supplies of substance and energy constantly employed in the vital process should be periodically renewed by equivalent quantities; that replacement be equivalent to use’. 1 That survival, in short, is a rhythm of use and renewal.

On the one hand then, the use of energy is bound up in the labour of breathing, drinking and eating, in work and play, that which leads to organic exhaustion, to devitalisation. And on the other its renewal. But of what source revitalisation?

Oxygen certainly, food and water are there too, as there is sleep. ‘As solitary and private as sleep may seem …’ author Jonathan Crary writes, ‘… it is not yet severed from an interhuman tracery of mutual support and trust’. 2 Something important is being said here about the nature of the organism, of the individual, and its vitality. Sleep, that is to say the renewal of energy, or revitalisation, is inextricably linked to security and the need for protection.

Whilst as a species we are now, on an individual level, broadly able to regulate the endangerment and insecurity that sleep engenders, sleep itself remains emblematic of a need to rest the body; of repair and recovery. It’s the very same condition Charles Darwin reflected on when he observed, ‘… the naked and unprotected state of the body, the absence of great teeth and claws for defence, the small strength and speed of man, and his [sic] slight power of discovering food or for avoiding danger by smell’. 3

The vulnerability of the human organism could therefore be said to originate a requisite or primitive need, a function that is, ‘… fully as important for the survival of a population as nutrition or reproduction’. 4 It is to say that survival, this rhythm of use and replacement, works only when stabilised through the protection and security afforded by others.

This need might sooner be understood as a bond, a bond of cooperation or social bond, in which, ‘… sympathetic motives take priority over the egotistical instinct’. 5 Think of it as a vital function in its own right, one that when activated, serves to mitigate and diminish the risk of the individual coming to any harm.

This notion can be found at the navel of all human vulnerability; a need of the other in the avoidance of or escape from danger, defence in the event this were not possible, and in sourcing the water, food and shelter needed for survival.

The origination of the state can be interpreted as this protective covering in the modern era. From the provision of healthcare and defence to the regulation of water services and council housing. Institutions themselves, the National Health Service or Armed Forces, perhaps thought of as the ossification of this bond. It is to say that the state stabilises the human organism, a guarantor as it were, that arrives prior to the individual, so that the individual themselves may engage in this rhythm of survival, the use and replacement of energy.

It seems then, that this bond is not in and of itself a source of energy, the very same substance bound up in Durkheim’s vital process, but a gesture or distributary, set to charge, ‘… the general state of vital energy’. 6 As much as survival is a cycle of use and renewal, it is more urgently the practice of this bond, that which could be said to constitute vitality. It is, as Durkheim might put it, ‘… a mutual moral support, which instead of throwing the individual on his [sic] own resources, leads him to share in the collective energy that supports his own when exhausted’. 7

Energy is a useful word when thinking about capitalism. Described by sociologists Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval as the ‘motor of history’, capitalism, has long vitalised the development of the modern Western world. 8

As free exchange has shifted to competition for profit as the principle of the market, a truth no more so apparent than in the last forty years as capitalism has transmogrified into its neoliberal iterant, it has activated an unprecedented charge of the productive forces. These forces are then said to vitalise the economy, which, according to some ideologues, is the source of all individual wellbeing.

Before we consider the ways in which these forces are applied, we should mark these two, somewhat opposing, notions of vitality. On the one hand a bond of cooperation, or social bond that charges what might be described as a social vitality. And on the other, a bond of competition or economic bond, which charges what could be termed an economic vitality.

On the 4^th April 1979, in a lecture given at the Collège de France as part of his Birth of Biopolitics series, Michel Foucault remarked:

‘… the economic bond plays a very strange role within civil society, where it finds a place, since while it brings people together through the spontaneous convergence of interests, it is also a principle of dissociation at the same time. The economic bond is a principle of dissociation with regard to the active bonds of compassion, benevolence, love for one’s fellows, and sense of community inasmuch as it constantly tends to undo what the spontaneous bond of civil society has joined together by picking out the egoist interest of individuals, emphasising it, and making it more incisive’. 9

Here, Foucault locates something essential within capitalism. Whilst competition might be said to charge the productive forces and therefore the economy, it does so by way of the pressure it places on that which promotes vitality over exhaustion, inasmuch as it tends to obfuscate, and even delegitimise, the practice of this social bond. Think of it as the bond deactivated; the deactivation of Foucault’s bonds of compassion, benevolence, love for one’s fellows and sense of community.

Let us then consider how capitalism is iterated today, how governments have sponsored competition, the economic bond, and the ways in which these forces have been applied so as to stimulate the economy.

In 1944, economist Friedrich von Hayek, a key architect in the remodelling of economic liberalism into its neoliberal iterant, gave the following argument for the incorporation of competition within society:

‘The liberal argument is in favour of making the best possible use of the forces of competition as a means of co-ordinating human efforts … it is based on the conviction that where effective competition can be created, it is a better way of guiding individual effort than any other … and it regards competition as superior not only because it is in most circumstances the most efficient method known, but even more because it is the only method by which our activities can be adjusted to each other without coercive or arbitrary intervention of authority’. 10

As political thought became political practice, most notably in the late 1970s as Margaret Thatcher took office with her Conservative government, the full use of competition and the comprehensive transformation of social life into economic space would begin.

Labour markets were restructured so as to support the casualisation of work contracts, leading to the weakening of trade unions and the loss of worker rights. Productivity was stimulated by measures such as performance-based pay and job security, all the while, ‘… others were made psychologically insecure by dint of the fact that they do the same work as their temporary colleagues…’. 11

The welfare state, as Dardot and Laval argue, ‘… was presented as a burden, a brake on growth, and source of inefficiency’, leading to cuts in public expenditure and the eradication of all norms and regulations that limited competitive dynamics. 12 Now, after some forty years, neoliberal capitalism has ushered in a near total privatisation of services, no social domain left unturned, from health and education to defence and environment.

Given that these services, and the institutions that provide them, were established so as to protect and safeguard, so as to mitigate human vulnerability, their transformation should also be understood in this way. Whilst access to these services, made more and more contingent on and in proximity to capital, rests assured for some, for a great many others it poses a very real risk to individual survival.

We arrive then at an unprecedented phase of economic vitality, a capitalism iterated as it is on the one hand through competition, and a hardworking labour force, that in these late stages is less and less remunerated for the costs arriving prior to employment, such as education, training and periods of inactivity and rest, or after it, including the rebuilding of strength, wear and tear, and ageing. 13 And on the other, an absolute privatisation of social services, which has led to what might be described as a form of state-sponsored insecurity and endangerment. After all, what could be more energising, more motivating for the individual at work, than the risk of harm or loss of life outside of it?

Above all it marks what might be described as the predominance of the economic bond over that of the social, a society in which competition and the prioritisation of economic productivity and individual success triumphs above all else. This will to win, a fight for survival, ‘… extends and imposes the logic of capital on the totality of social relations’, activating a kind of formalisation of social life and totalising inhibition of social bonds. 14

Social connectedness therefore becomes one shot, shallow, or as sociologist Robert Putnam observes, ‘… we use people, and they use us, to solicit more business, advance our careers, sell more products, or demonstrate our popularity’. 15 In short, a society in which the individual is more bonded economically than socially. Sooner a colleague than a friend.

All the while vitality is supposed on the strength of the market, and the practice of competition that this necessitates, we forget the practice of something else; a vital function that has safeguarded the human organism and assured its evolution from inception. It is the inhibition of this bond under late capitalism that lays bare once more that which constitutes vulnerability and survival in us all.

In 1871 Darwin noted, ‘… that states of pleasure are connected with an increase, and states of pain with an abatement, of some, or all, of the vital functions’. 16

It is my belief that the mental health crisis is symptomatic of this condition: the body an organism through which danger is sensed as pain. That the inhibition of the social bond equates stress; that anxiety is, ‘… a growing sense at some visceral level of disintegrating social bonds’, and depression, ‘… the difficulty of identifying the origin of the threat and making plans to control it’. 17 In this sense the organism itself is perhaps capitalism’s fiercest critic. Pain an inalienable form of resistance.

As capitalism takes on ever newer forms the question now is not how the term vital exhaustion might help us to understand the origins of the mental health crisis, but how, as theorist Franco Berardi poses it, we might, ‘… inscribe the reality of death in the political agenda [,] transforming decline into a lifestyle of solidarity’, so as to reconstitute a vitality for all? 18

If we are to refurbish a critique of capitalism that is fit for the twenty-first century I suspect it will arrive through a consciousness of individual pain as having been derived from this a shared origin.

Every seven years the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey conducts a rigorous assessment of the state of mental health and wellbeing in England. In 2014 its most recent report found that one in six adults now had a common mental disorder. 1 During this same period the NHS would report that antidepressants had been the area with the largest increase in prescription items. The dispensation for conditions including obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic attacks having increased by 108.5% in the period 2006 to 2016. 2

By January of 2018 a ministerial lead on loneliness had been appointed under the remit of Civil Society. This was in part a response to a government report, finding that some 200,000 people had not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month. 3 And by the end of that very same year the UK government would install its first ever Minister for Suicide Prevention.

Some forty years prior Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government would begin exercising a new form of political ideology, one that sought to place free market economics at the very centre of British life. Under the premise that economic prosperity equated individual happiness, Thatcher would begin to activate growth in the economy, by way of competition, and a market force untrammelled by tariffs, quotas and regulation.

When in 1985 Thatcher declared to the Conservative Central Council that ‘the creation of wealth is the most fundamental of all social services’ she would emphasise the important role privatisation played within the developing political discourse. Through the denationalisation of state owned companies such as British Telecom, British Gas and carmaker Jaguar, she would transform large sections of British society into stakeholders of market capitalism and make stocks and shares widely available to the public for the very first time.

London would become the centre of these changes. The financialisation of the City and the opening up of domestic markets to foreign competition would establish the UK capital as an international hub for free trade and enterprise.

Strong private property rights have fostered a culture of marketisation throughout the UK. Over the last few decades, social services otherwise untouched, from healthcare and education to housing and the environment, have all been made increasingly subject to the mantras of privatisation. The Right to Buy scheme is one such example, a key reform in Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister, which gave tenants of social housing the legal right to buy their own home. Another would include the widespread monetisation of the higher education system under Tony Blair’s New Labour government.

In degrading these services to private interest they are inevitably made vulnerable to market volatility. This was no more so apparent than during the recent financial crisis, which began with the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008. The decade that followed was shaped by recession and austerity. The insecurity of precarious housing, zero-hours contracts and the burden of debt informing the habits and rituals of an entire generation.

This period might also be characterised by an omnipresent anxiety, which could be said to at once occupy the effects of free market capitalism and at the very same time give it its vitality. What might at first seem circumstantial; an indirect and impermanent consequence of a developing market logic, could also be seen as the reflective and even deliberate institutionalisation of the conditions that best stimulate competition.

In placing the conditions of human existence, that is to say housing, healthcare, the environment, etc., upon what Adam Smith might call ‘the invisible hand of the market’, survival itself would become contingent on competition. ‘Where equality exists’, Marx determined, ‘there can be no gain’. 4 Greater inequality, marked as it is by insecurity itself, generates anxiety. This anxiety is the fuel of competition, activating the growth of markets and the economic prosperity that is said to liberate individual freedoms.

Competition itself is a bond within society, a bond that when stimulated, serves growth in the economy.

Competition is at once associative in that it brings people together through the spontaneous convergence of interests, namely the exchange of goods, services, etc., and dissociative in that it inhibits the practice of other relational bonds and produces inequality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, dissociation, the action of disconnecting or separating, or the state of being disconnected itself, occupies a central theme in the contemporary visual culture practised and presented in London today.

Consider this first within the domain of nature. There is an inextricable link between the climate crisis and the privatisation of the environment.

Alice Channer is concerned with the materials, labour and production processes that give this pattern form. Take for example Crustacean Satellites (Triple Maja Brachydactyla, Four Cancer Pagurus), 2018, a series of metallised crab shells, hung systematically on circular stainless steel jigs. Channer’s compositions jar on the spontaneous and rational, bringing focus to contemporary tensions existent in industry and nature. In so doing the artist gives form to the pervasive anxiety, which occupies mankind’s deteriorating relationship with the organic environment.

Unearthly visions of nature present themselves in a series of vacuum-formed foam and plastic compositions by Nicolas Deshayes. These works, part of a body entitled Cramps, imbue a certain kind of inhibition, an organic energy subject to stress, a transmogrified life force. Deshayes serves to remind that nature, without prejudice or discrimination, can take on anti-human forms.

The unabated impact of human ideology on the natural environment is an urgent source of concern and enquiry for a number of these artists. So too the effect of modernity on society itself occupies a central theme in this new visual culture.

The stress that free market capitalism has placed on society, in pursuit of growth and economic prosperity, has weakened social bonds and instituted a culture of self-ascension and individualism. It is as if, Richard Dienst remarks, ‘… the most basic circuits of social life – alliances, obligations, and solidarities – have been hotwired to disseminate corrosively antisocial energies’. 5 This form of dissociation again occupies a key place of interest for an emerging generation of artists living and working in London today.

Inhibition is a key preoccupation in the work of Prem Sahib. In Taken By Your Equivocal Stance III, 2015, Sahib uses the sports hoodie to invoke the tactility of masculine bodies, of their togetherness, whilst simultaneously frustrating the senses, inhibiting touch by way of the glass panelled structures in which they are framed. The close physical proximity described in these compositions only goes to enhance the loss of something far less tangible, a suffocated expression of desire, a cry for a certain kind of love.

For Celia Hempton, somewhat paradoxically, physical separation and distance are tools with which to cope, and make sense of, the disorder and alienation of modern everyday life. In her Surveillance paintings the artist records a series of arcane and mysterious lands she finds in hacked security cameras online. For Hempton, the Internet provides a stillness and clarity, the restitution of an individual agency otherwise lost to a world increasingly saturated by chaos.

Lydia Ourahmane’s live sound piece connects a direct call from the artist’s phone with a single light and two speakers located within the galleries. The speakers transmit Ourahmane, in full presence and live dialogue, from any location in the world for the duration of the exhibition. The light itself signifies active and inactive, the familiar coding of being on and off-line. The piece addresses issues of speech, participation and accountability, the consequence of what and when something is said or enacted and to which community this gesture affects.

Communities serve to provide support. With this in mind Anthea Hamilton’s Leg Chair series could be read as a comment on dependency and the human relationship to the manufactured environment. When Hamilton conflates the chair with the body she combines two forms of support, one organic and the other manmade, so as to render an uncanny, perhaps even jocose, series of sculptural forms. Together, these two images institute doubt in the singly produced vision giving pause to thought upon whom and what the weight of safety falls.

Themes of loss and desire might be said to inhabit the paintings of Issy Wood. In Easter! Security!, 2019, the artist engages the viewer with a seductive depiction of a chocolate Easter bunny. For Wood the bunny not only symbolises the compulsive pursuit of sensation and pleasure outside of one’s own self, but so too a kind of occupation of the mind; a form of management or way of regulating the self in the absence of support from others.

In Eddie Peake’s Komodo Dragon series the body itself is the agent of pleasure. These unadorned sculptural forms, dressed as they are in white with minimal clothing, suggest themselves of absence and want. Each figure thanklessly tugs at the phallic shape that extends itself out into space. There is something desperate in these works, a desensitization lessened only by the lonely, self-sufficient gesture of masturbation.

And what of it all?

Capitalism …

‘… a universal energy which breaks every limit and bond and posits itself as the only policy, the only universality, the only limit and the only bond’. 6 The state exists to regulate this latent potential, to manage capitalism’s energy, its forms and subtypes, so as to shape an iteration that works in its own time. Whilst in choosing to run government like a business the UK has produced a booming, profoundly restructured capitalism, it has also manufactured the loss of something else: a void or lacuna, the neglect and atrophy of the social bond.

The stress, anxiety and depression that has ensued might therefore be seen as a form of generational grief, a clenched fist or pressure on the lungs, a kind of breathlessness. ‘Persons suffering from excessive grief often seek relief by violent and almost frantic movements…’ Charles Darwin says, ‘but when their suffering is somewhat mitigated, yet prolonged, they no longer wish for action, but remain motionless and passive, or may occasionally rock themselves to and fro’. 7 Might this moment be the stranglehold, which precipitates the inevitable suffocation? The paralysis that precedes the collapse?

Whilst much of this suffering remains beneath the threshold of visibility, for many the present iteration of capitalism has undoubtedly rendered life unliveable. As artists labour to intuit loss and use the artwork to interrogate the stresses that have been placed on the environment, society and indeed themselves as individuals, capitalism and its effects are once again made visible. This form of visual language plays an essential role in the refurbished critique of capitalism that is so urgently needed for these unsettled and troubling times.

Whilst this exhibition can and should be read as a sign: the cry of grief, a primal scream; it is above all a remark on the resilience of a generation of young artists, who in spite of it all, continue to produce extraordinary and challenging new art. Through this gesture alone there is hope. This is perhaps the single greatest role of the artist today.