https://aeon.co/essays/why-shoes-act-as-a-symbolic-foundation-for-human-identity
This leather planet, the world created by shoes, is different from the barefoot world: detached, abstracted, insulated. It is a world less concerned with the topography of the ground and less attentive to its objects and textures. It is ‘duller’ and less ‘sensitive’. At the same time, this artificialised condition releases me from the grip of my physical circumstances and lets me ‘transcend’ the physical world toward my own desires.
The shoe stands as a synecdoche of the wearer. To talk about being in someone’s shoes or to think about what it’s like to walk a mile in someone’s shoes, even to imagine that you have some big shoes to fill, is to contemplate stepping into a different identity – as if the shoes, not the person wearing them, determines who you are. As Elvis sang: ‘Well, you can knock me down, step in my face, slander my name all over the place,’ as long as you lay off of my shoes, my true locus of selfhood. In this subterranean way, we are our shoes.
Perhaps this is what Vincent van Gogh was trying to suggest in his repeated paintings of old pairs of shoes. During his Paris period, and at various other points in his career, the painter lavished his characteristic gift for vivid intensity on worn and cast-off footwear, creating tableaux that, although featuring shoes, seem to encompass an unseen world of meaning. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger avowed that, in Van Gogh’s painting of shoes, he could locate not only the lifeworld of the ‘peasant woman’ who supposedly wore them, but also the meaning of art itself: its ability to transport us from what he calls the ‘boringly obtrusive usualness’ of actual shoes into an encounter with ‘the thing’s general essence’. Heidegger’s commentary on Van Gogh’s painting suggests a parallel between the technologies of artistic reproduction and the technologies of footwear, both of which perform the same breaking-away from the earth to reveal the synthesis of a new world.
In the 1980s, the American cultural critic Fredric Jameson updated Heidegger’s argument, proposing that, if Van Gogh’s shoes represented the earthy, mythic humanism of modernist consciousness, then the representative shoes of the postmodern age, with its glamorous mass-produced surfaces, were Andy Warhol’s ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’ (1980) – which Jameson used as the cover image for his influential book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Jameson understood that shoes are vectors of ontological mobility that carry us out of the world of immediate appearances and into the human world of signs and meanings.
= new reply since forum marked as read