On Shoes

By
Andy
 – June 4, 2011Posted in: Cipher on a Wall

According to their origins, shoes are functional items. They give a degree of protection against the chance of you stepping on something sharp or unfriendly, and may be designed to offer additional grip, warmth and in some cases, speed, compared with the bare foot. But the face-value function of the shoe is only one element of a rich blend of materiality and narrative that they perform. Many people consciously use their choice of footwear to make a statement. As a child, I remember specifically branded shoes that were able to speak volumes, in my social group, at least: Nike Air Jordans, Reebok Pumps, and of course, Roller Blades. Later there were the football boots, the Doc Martens. Perhaps more than any other item of clothing, I needed those shoes. Somehow shoes had become so well marketed and so powerful, as to track our lives and our cultural histories.

I admit, in recent years my shoe budget has increased again. I have ‘smart shoes’ for the more formal side of my work. They’re relatively uncomfortable, but I like the way they look, and I imagine their lifespan will be short. The wrong scuff on their leather uppers, and I’ll have to replace them with others like them. At the other end of the scale are my running shoes: about as expensive as any footwear nowadays is likely to be, despite my bargain-hunting abilities, but also conspicuous for their short life-span. As highly-attuned equipment as they are, the extreme compression that they repeatedly undergo in five hundred miles is enough to compromise their effectiveness. New shoes several times a year? Perfect, if you’re a shoe manufacturer. Thus, marketing on shoes is marketing well-aimed. This area of maximum wear and tear maximises the need to go and repurchase, and then there’s the consideration of growing foot sizes in kids: where fit is so important. Shoes are objects that speak of our system of capitalist production and marketing, as well as our cultural narratives.

The shoe tracks our development to civilisation and culture with extensive scope. The immediate visual replacement that the shoe enacts is to cover and hide the foot: undoubtedly, itself a powerful symbol. I know people who are disgusted and ashamed by the sight of feet, and I’ve read about others who derive fetishistic excitement from the lower extremities. Apparently it’s relatively common. This polarising power is surprising and fascinating to me: after all, the hand isn’t nearly as powerful. We’ve become accustomed to the sight of our hands, and have normalised their form. The foot, somehow, seems perverse in comparison, an aberration. The difference, of course, is the difference between our own genetic inheritance and the adaptations of some of our nearest cousin species: monkeys and other mammals don’t have such marked differences between hands and feet, and they perform many of the same functions as each other. We are the aberration, the miracle. Our feet mark our humanity — and the reasons for our survival as we now appear. They speak of our life-saving run at ground level: hunting, and moving to avoid danger and colonise new lands.

So, can ‘rewriting the shoe’, or even discarding footwear completely, deconstruct these systems and become a symbol for the reclamation of our psychologies and material realities? Perhaps, but one of the most distinctive characteristics of capitalism is its ability to absorb the forces that would seem to threaten it. Sure enough, this has come to pass with the ‘barefoot’ movement, that on the face of it would seem to strike a death blow to the big-money of the footwear industry. No, this ‘movement’ has instead produced even more extravagantly marketed and high-margin footwear products, essentially moulded rubber soles that cost more than the complex running shoes they replaced. And yet, they’ve been enormously successful, because these shoes promise not merely support and cushioning, but emancipation, healthfulness, and perhaps even enlightenment (depending on who you read!) Unfortunately, I’m priced out of the market for a pair of Vibram Five Fingers right now, so I found myself running in my local park this week with nothing on my feet at all. That’s right: no one at all could profit from my two mile jaunt around the public lawns. And I felt the ground under my feet, and it felt good. My nerves spoke to me from my contact with the earth, and my feet worked as they must have evolved to function.

I’m not hoping for any kind of revolution. On my next run, I put my highly-cushioned running shoes back on, and felt pretty grateful for the wonderful job they did protecting my modern feet from ten thousand impacts with the hard tarmac designed for our automobiles. The two experiences tell different stories: tales of our interface with nature, and mankind’s ability to use tools to give special abilities beyond the body’s natural capabilities. They combine mythologies, stories of rationality and remaking: all of which may have contributed to our survival as a species, as we now are. Feeling the combined contact with all these stories felt like the difference between my bare foot falling on shady ground and in the sunshine: their argument enriched and enlivened me. The foot, in your choice of shoe, is your combined metaphor: nature, paired with ingenuity, cultural narrative, and perhaps additional material capabilities. As we better understand how these can be used in concert, we will go places that were previously unreachable: shoes to help us navigate mountains and the mind.

For more information about the benefits of barefoot living, particularly as a solution to foot complaints caused by badly designed shoes, check out my friend Steve Bloor’s website, ‘Natural Feet’. He’s passionate about this topic, and a professional chiropodist here in the UK.

Tags: , , , , , , ,