остранение: Notes on Viktor Shklovsky and Defamiliarisation

Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) 

Defamiliarised by Stephen Alexander (2026)

 

'The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult ...' 

 

 

I. 

 

I noted in a recent post on queer defamiliarisation that the idea has its origins in a concept that arose within Russian formalism, termed ostranenie, and which refers to an artistic technique of making ordinary objects in the everyday world magically appear new and strange [1]. 

 

And because I have been asked by la maîtresse de la chambre bleue to expand on this, I thought I'd write a post in memory of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian literary theorist, critic, and writer who coined the term остранение in an essay titled 'Art as Technique' (1917) [2].

 

 

II.  

   

Shklovsky is one of the major figures associated with Russian formalism, a school of literary theory that was big in the years before and after the Revolution, exerting a significant influence on writers and thinkers such as Bakhtin (who went on to influence a generation of structuralists and semioticians in turn).

 

Whilst formalism was a diverse movement - producing no unified doctrine  and no consensus amongst its proponents as to what it was they wished to achieve - a key idea was that poetic and literary language posseses specific qualities which can be systematically analysed without having to know anything of the author's biography, psychology, or socio-cultural background.

 

I don't know if Lenin approved, but Stalin was certainly not a fan, declaring formalism to be a form of bourgeois aesthetic and intellectual elitism. For Stalin, there was no art for art's sake and nobody needed those who seek to stand above or outside of Soviet society, or make things difficult for others to understand. 

 

However, whilst the names of those artists and critics who fully embraced and affirmed the strict guidelines of Socialist Realism during Stalin's rule are now largely forgotten, Shklovsky is still highly regarded as one of the most important literary and cultural theorists of the twentieth century.

 

As indicated above, he is perhaps best known for developing the concept of ostranenie; usually translated as defamiliarisation or estrangement (or queering, as we now like to say). His main argument was that art had a duty to revitalise things (be they words, images, or objects) that had become boring and overly-familiar; to smash the cliché and the stereotype and make help us view and think things differently. Why see a urinal when you can see a fountain?  

 

In sum: the purpose of art, for Shklovsky, is to defamiliarise the world and problematise form and this idea greatly influenced 20th-century art and theory, from dadaism to postmodernism.

 

Let me close this post with a famous (and, arguably, the most crucial) passage from Shklovsky's 1917 essay:

 

"And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object: the object is not important ..." [3]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] I say it has its origins here, but, of course, there's really nothing new under the sun and one might, if one were so inclined, trace out a long history of making strange; the Romantics certainly knew about so-doing and, indeed, even Aristotle insisted that poetic language must appear strange and wonderful so as to make the things it described appear likewise. 

      Shklovsky's defamiliarization can also be linked to Freud's notion of the uncanny, Bertolt Brecht's estrangement effect [Verfremdungseffekt], and Jacques Derrida's concept of différance.  

 

[2] This essay - sometimes known as 'Art as Device' - can be read as a pdf online: click here. The passage quoted at the close of this post is taken from here (translator unknown). The essay can also be found in in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 1998), and in Viktor Shklovsky: A Reader, ed. and trans. Alexandra Berlina (Bloomsbury, 2017). 

 

[3] Viktor Shklovsky, 'Art as Technique' (1917). 

 

 

On the Rise of the Useful Idiot

 Adapted from the poster for I Am Greta

(a documentary film dir. Nathan Grossman, 2020)

 

I. 

 

Byung-Chul Han says that the idiot has all but vanished from our society. But Han is not using the term idiot in its familiar modern sense (i.e., to refer to a stupid person). 

 

Rather, he's returning to the ancient Greek term from which it derives - ἰδιώτης - which refers to a private individual who prefers to think their own thoughts rather than simply subscribe to common sense or conform to popular opinion (even at the risk of appearing ignorant or foolish). 

 

For Han, the idiot is thus a type of outsider or heretic; not so much uninformed as unaligned with any party or cause; someone who values freedom and opposes the violence of consensus [1]. The idiot, in brief, is the kind of person attracted to philosophy, a practice born - like psychology - of idleness and characterised - like art - by its uselessness [2].   

 

 

II.

 

Unfortunately, however, there's more than one type of idiot in this world.

 

And if the type of useless philosophical idiot privileged by Byung-Chul Han has all but vanished from contemporary society, the political idiot who prides themselves on their allegiance to a cause, party, or ideology and happily makes themselves useful to such is, it seems, proliferating in number ...

 

Some commentators may clutch their pearls - or even reach for the smelling salts - when they hear the term useful idiot [3], but it's a widely accepted term within political discourse [4] to refer to someone who believes they are fighting for a just cause and have history on their side, without fully appreciating the consequences of their actions or the extent to which they are being cynically manipulated by nefarious forces.  

 

Many supporters of Extinction Rebellion, or Black Lives Matter, or those we currently see larping for Palestine on streets and campuses across the Western world, are probably well-intentioned idealists; i.e., perfectly sincere in their views, but they are politically naive to the point that idiocy hardly even covers it; closing their eyes to reality and shutting their ears to reason, they unwittingly assist in the destruction of their own culture, history, and society.   

 

Notes

 

[1] See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler, (Verso, 2017). And see also the post 'On Heresy and Philosophical Idiotism' (20 Nov 2021): click here. 

 

[2] Nietzsche famously asserts in Twilight of the Idols (1889) that idleness is the beginning of psychology (and is therefore the result of vice). 

      Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, writing in a Preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) claimed: "All art is quite useless." He later explained in a letter what he meant by this: "Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way." Similarly, philosophy is simply intended to open up a space for thinking - nothing else. Wilde's letter can be read in full here. 

 

[3] For those gentle souls who prefer a slightly less harsh-sounding term, it might be noted that some commentators speak of useful innocents, whilst those within the intelligence community apparently refer to unwitting agents.

 

[4] Frequently used during the Cold War to describe those susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation, the phrase useful idiot was (ironically but mistakenly) attributed to Lenin by the Russian human rights activist and Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. Lenin may have liked to use it, but he certainly didn't coin it, and nor is it found in any of his writings.