ABSTRACT
Health is a particularly important concept in the modern west. In disenchanted, secular, and materialist cultures, health acquires a greater symbolic importance. The contemporary mandates for control and release, reflecting a basic contradiction in the social body, mitigate against such a balance. The internalization of controls occurs throughout the social structure and is likely to appear in different forms in lower economic strata. Not only is there a dissemination of middle-class values of self-control, internalized body controls emerge directly from working-class experience. The pursuit of health is bound to reproduce that contradiction. Self-control and release understood as resistance, like their function as cultural mandates, must be seen as two sides of the same coin. Interpretation is itself a political act that occurs in an everyday context. The opposition of control and release is itself fractured by other oppositions.
