In examining the anatomical identity of the big toe, I am especially interested in the role it plays in the act of walking. ‘A child learning to walk is engaged in attempting to make conscious material unconscious,’ noted the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (who counted Samuel Beckett among his patients); ‘only when this is done can it walk.’19 If one thinks about walking as one walks, if one looks down at one’s feet and attempts to understand it while performing this most unthinking of everyday activities, one simply stops, topples over, or collapses – like Bion’s infant, who cannot walk if she is conscious of learning to do so. In contrast to quadrupeds, bipeds are innately unstable. This is what Arthur Schopenhauer meant when, in a nicely balanced formulation from The World as Will and Representation (1818), slightly vertiginous in its rhetorical effect, he characterized walking as ‘a continuously checked falling’.20
My aim is in one sense the opposite of the child’s according to Bion, since in discussing walking in relation to the big toe I want to render the unconscious material conscious, and in so doing make this apparently spontaneous activity so self-conscious as to seem almost impossible to perform. It is a question of making the act of walking, and the apparatus of meaning on which it silently depends, limp. In ‘Outcomes of the Text’, Barthes points out that, in Bataille’s article on the big toe, the apparatus of meaning is not destroyed but decentred and displaced: ‘it is made eccentric, it is made insecure, wobbly’ [‘il est excentré, rendu boiteux’].21 Meaning is made to limp by Bataille. And, just as a physical limp makes one conscious of the unconscious act of walking, so an epistemological limp might make one conscious of the unconscious meaning of walking.
When Walter Benjamin celebrated ‘the unconscious optics’ to which, as a technological medium, the camera introduces us, he used the example of walking: ‘Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride.’22 In addition to the cinematic techniques of slow motion and the close-up, Benjamin is presumably thinking of the images produced by Eadweard Muybridge when, in the late nineteenth century, he developed the technology of motion photography in order to capture the movements of humans and other animals. The most ordinary of actions, like walking, suddenly seemed both more transparent than hitherto and more unfamiliar.
Focusing on the big toe, analogously, might momentarily make walking, and the philosophical, psychological, and political systems it sets in motion or embodies, to echo Balzac, seem both like a more and less conscious activity than it customarily is. And it might even provide glimpses of a kind of anatomical unconscious.
So, what do we know of a person’s posture during the fractional seconds that, successively, comprise a stride? As Muybridge was compiling Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements (1887), the French physician Georges Gilles de Tourette published an account of his clinical and physiological research at the Salpêtrière into the human gait, entitled Études cliniques et physiologiques sur la marche (1886).
Giorgio Agamben, who points out that Muybridge’s and Tourette’s experiments were almost exactly contemporaneous, has explained in his ‘Notes on Gesture’ that the latter’s findings were based on the ‘footprint method’. This involved smearing the soles of those taking part in the experiment with iron sesquioxide powder, then making them walk the length of a straight line drawn on a seven- or eight-metre-long roll of white wallpaper. ‘The footprints that the patient left while walking along the dividing line’, Agamben observes, ‘allowed a perfect measurement of the gait according to various parameters (length of the step, lateral swerve, angle of inclination, etc.)’.23
As a result of this research, Tourette summarized the dynamics of the human step in these terms:
While the left leg acts as the fulcrum, the right foot is raised from the ground with a coiling motion that starts at the heel and reaches the tip of the toes, which leave the ground last; the whole leg is now brought forward and the foot touches the ground with the heel. At this very instant, the left foot – having ended its revolution and leaning only on the tip of the toes – leaves the ground; the left leg is brought forward, gets closer to and then passes the right leg, and the left foot touches the ground with the heel, while the right foot ends its own revolution.24
In spite of the scientific method Tourette uses to anatomize the human gait, he can finally offer only a narrative of the process, and therefore a kind of fiction. Walking does not have a precisely definable beginning and ending. I prefer a slightly different, no doubt less scientific, fiction than Tourette’s – one that is consistent with the conviction that the human body begins with the big toe.
The action of walking, according to my mythology, begins with the big toe. It is what provides the impetus needed to walk; or at least to maintain bipedal motion. Certainly, it is crucial to the physics of walking, and to an extent that is overlooked in the passage from Tourette’s book that I have cited. Before we raise one foot completely off the ground, when we commence walking from a standing position, we roll our body weight onto the toes of the other foot.
More accurately, we transfer our body weight onto the toes of one foot at the same instant that we raise the heel of the other foot. The toes are in contact with the ground for about three quarters of the walking cycle. And of all these toes, the big toe is the most important. The big toe, which sustains approximately 40 per cent of our body weight when we walk, is what provides the crucial propulsive force needed to take a step.
The big toe is not absolutely indispensable in enabling us to walk, and people who have had it amputated are still generally able to move about on their feet; but it is probably more important, proportionately, than any other component part of the foot’s anatomy in this respect. ‘Toe-off’, as it is sometimes called, provides the essential leverage needed to sustain bipedal motion.
A monograph on the human foot published in 1935 by Dudley J. Morton, the leading medical authority on the foot in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, explains the propulsive role of the big toe with some eloquence:
[The] dorsal movement of the toes … has the effect of increasing the tension of their muscles, and to such a degree that when the leverage effort of the foot against body weight has been completed, the subsequent toe flexion is strong enough to add a final elastic impetus to body movement which gives it smoothness and grace. At this point the stresses have been swung toward the first metatarsal bone so completely that the most important digital effort is performed by the great toe. The phase of bipedal locomotion undoubtedly accounts for the conspicuous size of that digit in man.25
This is eloquent, I think, partly because of its implicit or incipient sense of the aesthetics of walking. The big toe, Morton seems to say, is secretly responsible for the elegance of human ambulation. ‘How do we actually move?” the neuroscientist Shane O’Mara has recently asked. ‘The answer is rhythm,’ he responds, ‘which is intrinsic to walking.’26
In some literal sense, it is on the big toe that the rhythm and rhyme of walking depend.
Indeed, it seems a pity that, when Ancient Greek prosodists chose the term ‘foot’ to measure and calibrate the rhythms of poetic discourse (the name is commonly thought to allude to the movement of the foot as it beats time, though it is possible that it has something to do with the rhythm of walking too), they failed to find a place in their technical vocabulary for the word ‘toe’ too.27 Here is a significant lacuna in the annals of rhetoric and poetics. For the inner mechanics of the metrical foot might most effectively be located in the metrical toe.
The ‘sprung rhythm’ sponsored by Gerard Manley Hopkins – constructed from metrical feet in which the first syllable is stressed, however many unstressed syllables succeed it – is for example unimaginable without the energetic impetus of the metrical toe. This first, stressed syllable perhaps is the metrical toe.
Look at these lines from �
�Hurrahing in Harvest’ (1877), a sonnet written after he had walked home alone from fishing one afternoon at the end of summer beneath what, in a wonderful phrase for the currents along which clouds drift, he calls the ‘wind-walks’; lines marked with Hopkins’s idiosyncratic and often disconcerting diacritics:
I wálk, I líft up, Í lift úp heart, éyes,
Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And, éyes, héart, what looks, what lips yet gáve you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?28
Here, Hopkins’s increasingly complicated, increasingly dynamic rhythms (‘I wálk, I líft up, Í lift úp heart, éyes’) mimic not merely the poet’s movement forwards but his movement upwards – as if this walker-watcher is using the metrical toe, with increasing emphasis or propulsive force, to dramatize an irrepressible momentum, in the face of Christ’s palpable presence in the countryside, that is both physical and spiritual.
One pictures Hopkins, in his ecstatic mental state, propelling himself through the landscape on tiptoes, almost at a run, as if he aspires impulsively and spontaneously to catch and get caught up in those ‘wind-walks’ through which the clouds drift and dissolve in the skies above him. The technical, Latin name of the big toe is hallux, which is derived from the Greek halmos, meaning to ‘spring or leap’. Sprung rhythm, then, is the poetic equivalent of toe-off.
The big toe is habitually regarded as base, in spite of its heroic labours. It is an ugly, clumsy-seeming, embarrassing part of the human anatomy, perhaps the least celebrated part of all, one that is more often hidden as shameful than honoured; and yet it stops us from stumbling and makes the elastic grace of human perambulation, as mimed by Hopkins’s use of metre, possible. Its ‘digital effort’, in Morton’s formulation, its humble but titanic labour, is what guarantees the ‘smoothness and grace’ that is characteristic of walking in humans; yet it is despised. The languorous grace of the flâneur’s elegantly shod foot as he saunters along the pavement is secretly dependent on the hidden mechanics, the digital effort, of the big toe.
The foot, and the big toe in particular, gives ‘a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud’, as Bataille underlines, even though it is ‘subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rachitic [or rickety]’ (87).
If in a synchronic sense we begin with the big toe, because walking is reliant on ‘toe-off’, then there is also a diachronic sense in which, anatomically speaking, we begin with the big toe. This is the anthropological or palaeo-anatomical dimension of the physics of walking. For, in evolutionary terms, humanity itself, in so far as its history as a species traces what Bataille outlines in ‘The Jesuve’ as ‘the progressive erection that goes from the quadruped to Homo erectus’, can be said to begin with the big toe.29
That is, our identity as a species hinges, or pivots, on the development of the big toe – because it is cause or consequence, or both cause and consequence, of the fact that, to put it in simple pictorial terms, instead of climbing trees we walk across plains. It is responsible for the fact that we are bipedal. In short, it is what makes us human. In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin quoted his old antagonist Richard Owen, an opponent of the theory of evolution by natural selection, to precisely this effect: ‘The great toe, as Prof. Owen remarks, “which forms the fulcrum when standing or walking, is perhaps the most characteristic peculiarity of the human structure”.’30
The basic structure of our body is shared both with our evolutionary ancestors and our immediate relations, that is, chimpanzees and other apes. Obviously, there are quantitative differences between a human and a chimpanzee brain, and the left and right halves of the brain have developed differentially; but anatomically they are directly equivalent. To put it in terms of aesthetics, formally they are the same, even if they have different contents. And this is true of the eyes, the nose, the breasts, the penis and every other body part. The exception is the big toe.
For, in contrast to the innermost toe of both our ancestors and our genetic cousins, the big toe in humans is not, as the thumb is, opposable. We do not have a prehensile big toe. On the contrary, we have one that has evolved to enable us to walk rather than climb; and indeed, crucially, to develop tools. ‘One cannot overemphasize the role of bipedalism in hominid development,’ the archaeologist Mary Leakey, who discovered the Laetoli Footprints, argued; ‘this unique ability freed the hands for myriad possibilities – carrying, tool-making, intricate manipulation.’31
The toe of the human foot is adducted: it is drawn inwards. The toe of the chimpanzee is abducted: it is drawn outwards. Or, to put it another way, if the chimpanzee’s big toe is divergent, like our thumb, then the toes of the human foot are instead convergent (the big toe has aligned with the other toes, or vice versa). In addition, a human being’s middle footbone is far more compact than that of the chimpanzee, making it less mobile and more stable; and these relatively dense, rigid, solid bones can be used to lever the body in walking.
So, even though it now seems that the earliest anatomical changes relating to bipedalism didn’t in fact occur as a result of deforestation, there is no doubt that these features of the emergent human foot would have helped proto-humans to survive in the plains, perhaps giving them an evolutionary advantage over other primates, who were unable for instance to track migratory herds across the savannah. And research in fact suggests that bipedalism preceded distinctive and decisive brain development in humans.32 Simplifying a little, it might be said that it is because the big toe became adducted that the brain expanded and, in consequence, humanity emerged as a distinct species.
The big toe, then, is the most peculiarly human part of our anatomy. And the one that guarantees our unique status in evolutionary terms. As the authors of a clinical textbook on the human foot summarize the point, anatomically modern humans, who emerged some 150,000 years ago, ‘are the only living primate, indeed they are the only living mammal, that is an obligatory striding biped’.33
Obligatory bipeds are animals that rely solely on their hindlimbs for support and propulsion when walking on the ground. All other primates are characterized by optional bipedalism. Other primates have a mixed ‘locomotor repertoire’ – in other words, they use a range of means of mobility that includes, for example, balancing, hanging, jumping and quadrupedalism, as well as occasional bipedalism. For this reason they have a divergent hallux.
Humans are by contrast committed to a single locomotor mode – ‘obligate bipedalism’. It is this that explains the other architectural features that, despite their anatomical similarity to the equivalent parts of primates, are characteristic of our bodies in particular: the long, straight legs; the protuberant buttocks (which, in contrast to those of the ape glimpsed by Bataille, conceal the anus); ‘the flat stomach, the flexible waist, the straight spine, the low shoulders, the erect head atop a long neck.’34
The causes of the evolutionary shift to a flat, non-prehensile, in brief, modern human foot, are still debated; and the answers that scientists tend to volunteer only raise further questions. It might be the case, for example, that bipedal feet developed in humans as an adaptation enabling them to carry food or infants. It might be that they developed in order to minimize exposure to the tropical sun and so preserve energy in a hot habitat.
Conversely, it is possible that, for some reason, humans’ forelimbs were used for purposes other than locomotion for prolonged periods, and that bipedalism came to be the most efficient means of locomotion as a result. For instance, some scientists claim that humans first learned to walk in trees, on an arboreal rather than terrestrial surface, using their arms to suspend and support themselves from higher branches. It is also possible that it was the development of an upright posture – perhaps in order to facilitate displays of aggression or virility – that created the evolutionary conditions for bipedal locomotion.35
The consequences, or coterminous developments, of bipedal locomotion, to which the
quotation from Leakey alluded, are almost as debatable as its causes. Recently, for example, one group of anatomists and evolutionary biologists has argued for the co-evolution of human hands and feet, positing that ‘evolutionary changes in the toes associated with bipedalism caused matching evolutionary changes in hand anatomy that may actually have facilitated the emergence and development of stone tool technology.’36
These biologists propose that when Australopithecus afarensis, a partly arboreal, so-called facultative biped, evolved into Homo, an obligate terrestrial biped which probably did a good deal of long-distance trekking, a change that occurred about two million years ago, the directional selection on the lateral toes for locomotion ‘may have caused parallel changes in the fingers that provided further performance benefits for manipulation’.37 According to this thesis, the morphological development of the toes, which became adapted for long-distance walking or running, increased the length and robusticity of the australopiths’ thumbs, and so made it possible for humans to achieve the sophisticated, precise tool-making that gave them such an evolutionary advantage.
In a rather different register, of course, Freud speculated in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) that what he rather cartoonishly calls ‘man’s decision to adopt an upright gait’ led directly to ‘the decline of the olfactory stimuli’, and hence to the association of bodily dirt and smells with shame. ‘The beginning of the fateful process of civilization, then,’ he concludes, ‘would have been marked by man’s adopting an erect posture’ – that is, by becoming an obligate biped.38
The emergence of the big toe is, according to this perspective, responsible for the beginnings of civilization, and for the history of repression that defines it. Hence the big toe is in effect the precondition of sexual fetishism as well as one of its privileged objects. It sets in motion the hierarchical opposition of high and low, head and foot, mouth and anus, ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ of the body, that imparts such libidinal force to the second, de-sublimated term in each of these pairs. This is an additional sense in which human beings could be said to begin with the big toe.
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