7 The Big Toe's Resistance to Smart Rehabilitations

Big toe computing points beyond the keyboard, tabletop mouse, and the world of fingers, palms, and hand-held devices. Extrapolating from the theory of French writer Georges Bataille (1995, 87) in his essay “Big Toe,” gathered in the Encyclopaedia Acephalica circa 1929, the interface of the most human yet base part of the human body and computing, both personal and wearable, confounds the low with the high and produces a condition in which the computational intervenes to overcome the horror evoked by the lowly, flat, dirty foot with chipped nails. For Bataille, having lost its prehensile character, the human big toe is idiotic, especially compared with fingers, which are long, light, nimble, and intelligent; distorting while echoing Darwin, no less, on the “great toe” as the most “characteristic peculiarity” of the human, in its nonopposability and hence condition for bipedalism, it remains that in evolutionary terms the big toe is “distinctively human” (Beaumont 2015, 873). Yet, for all the nobility of the human, whose head is elevated and distant from the feet that are stuck in the mud, the civilized big toe insistently imposes its ignobility where least expected, and it troubles our encounter with our own humanity, adding an ineradicable degree of murkiness to our intelligence.