Three Spirits: Breakdowns Present, Past and Yet to Come

This paper is a meditation on processes of social abjection within working-class life, on how they have changed and yet how they remain haunted by the possibility of an otherwise, especially in relation to bodily and mental and emotional pain and distress, anguish and torment, otherwise classified as depression, or nymphomania, or hypersexualisation, or anxiety, or paranoia and so on. Social abjection is a process of rendering certain lives and life experiences as unreadable except as social detritus. Working-class pain is abject, individualised and still often shamed. And the process of abjection is itself painful and not without the marks of struggle. Usually the role of women is to offer comfort and strength, often through classed practices of care and mothering (Crean,2018). But what happens when it is the women whose pain is abject? The haunting I am writing about here therefore is the haunting possibility of a return to a more collective approach to such distress, a return to a sense of future possibility as yet unfulfilled. In order to bring this possibility more fully to mind, I consider Martin Parr’s photographs recently in an exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery and Alisha’s poetry which was posted as part of her work with The Agency, (a creative project with young people). These rather different art works open up the question of how ‘mental health’ emerges as a threshold at which both capital-based violences and a resistant working-class affect can be found.