The Kinetic Materialism of ‘Close Capitalism’: Exploiting and Shaping Health and Wellbeing

ABSTRACT This paper considers health geography's past engagements with capitalism and proposes a basis for future ones. Looking back, it notes a number of implicit, indirect and partial engagements in five core research pillars of the subdiscipline. Looking forward, it then makes a case for a more explicit, direct and full engagement with capitalism informed by a ‘kinetic materialist’ reading of Marx and of capitalist processes. This reading provides insight into a ‘close capitalism’ that has emerged in recent years and its operation through flows of information and affect that enrol bodies, exploiting and shaping their health and wellbeing. It is argued that this is a capitalism knowledgeable of bodies; close to them in the deep understanding it develops of them. That this is a capitalism responsive to bodies; close to them in its tactical, rapid reactivity to them. And crucially that this is a capitalism ‘kind’ to bodies; close to them in its feel‐good manipulation of them. Given the ways this close capitalism is transforming experiences of health and wellbeing, the paper concludes by noting the forms of critique and resistance that future academic engagements with it might involve.