Specters of Wellness: A Material Critique of Discursive Analysis in Alternative Health Movements

In this article, I examine the rise of vaccine and alternative health discourses within mainstream politics. I discuss the benefits and limits of discursive biopolitical analysis in analysing such discourses as a symptom of the ongoing crisis of neoliberal monopoly capitalism. Putting Italian, Japanese, and German Marxist theory in conversation for the first time, I propose the framework of "everyday materialism" to excavate the relationship between collective and individual health experience under monopoly capitalism. I use a case study of a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview to demonstrate the analytic value of everyday materialism, arguing that his conceptualization of alternative health attempts to resolve the contradictions of monopoly capital through hyper-individualist consumption. I conclude that everyday materialism provides a pathway to contextualizing social health movements in the historical conditions which have created them, and provides an alternative to hyper-individualist conceptualizations of health by collectively situating health.