The body is typically viewed as an “object of purely mental operations, a thing in which social patterns are projected” (Jackson 1983:329), thus the body has no control over itself. It is this view that expresses the body is just a vessel for the mind to use; a slow, lumbering husk for the quick and rational brain. Csordas states the idea that the body is “not an object that is ‘good to think’ but as a subject that is ‘necessary to be‘” (1993:135), thus completely throwing away the notion that the body has any control.

However the body is fully capable of unconscious operations, such as the beating of a heart or the blinking of an eye. According to Jackson “Gestures and bodily habits often belie what we put into words, and give away our unconscious dispositions, betraying character traits of which our verbal and conceptual habits keep us in ignorance” (198

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