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This talk was delivered on March 20 2015 at Brown University, at the conference “The

Other Daemonic: Estranging the Uncanny” organized by the students of the Department of

Comparative Literature. It was originally entitled “The Twists and Turns of Estrangement.”

Basil Lvoff

The Twists and Turns of Estrangement: On Automated Art and Literary Scholarship

Before I begin, let me thank the organizers of this conference and their honorable

institution. I am really excited to be here.

I would say that the central theoretical problem of this conference is, generally speaking,

the ambiguity of human perception. “Has the uncanny become an all too legible experience?” the

conference organizers ask. The question is perhaps rhetorical, hence the subtitle of the

conference: “Estranging the Uncanny.” But how shall we estrange something if estrangement

itself—as a theory and a technique—has turned into a cliché?

The purpose of my talk is to demonstrate how deceptively simple the idea of

estrangement is—by pointing out its pitfalls and showing what great heuristic potential it still

has. And since there are several major problems implicit in the idea of estrangement, my talk

consists of several vignettes.

As a theory of art, the idea of estrangement originated in Russian Formalism. Viktor

Shklovsky, one of the founding fathers of Russian Formalism, a man who hardly needs to be

introduced, wrote in his Theory of Prose that there are no national plots—that all plots, all stories

are homeless. The same is true of great ideas: they have no citizenship. They belong to

everyone—whoever named them first. Viktor Shklovsky was the first to name estrangement,

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otherwise known as defamiliarization. The same root—as in the word strange—is also present in

the Russian original: ostranenie.

Next year is the hundredth anniversary of Viktor Shklovsky’s famous brainchild. Eight

years after coining the term, Shklovsky remarked: “Poor ‘estrangement.’ I dug it a pit, and

children of all sorts fall into it” (Russkii sovremennik 325). This was written in 1924. It was then

already that Shklovsky realized: defamiliarization has become familiar—estrangement, no longer

strange. Since then, the word has been used numerously and carelessly. This is not to say that

someone used it mistakenly. The problem is that it is impossible to misuse because anything can

be regarded as estrangement. But before I say more, I would like “to begin with the

beginning”—by looking at Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device,” in which he minted the term.

Shklovsky defined it as follows—and I quote with some minor alterations: “The device

of estrangement […] manifests itself when [the artist] does not call a thing by its name but

describes it as though seen for the first time and an incident as if it occurred for the first time” (O

teorii prozy 14). World culture is rife with stories based on this principle. Take Gulliver’s

Travels (in which we first see the pettiness of our kind in the Lilliputians and then our enormous

imperfections in the giants, and finally our beastly nature in Yahoos). Or take The Little Prince,

which is the epitome of the way a child sees the conceited, irrational, and boring world of adults.

I would call this aspect of estrangement ethical and, if you like, even ideological—in the

broadest sense. There is a wonderful study by Carlo Ginzburg that shows the origins of this

epistemological and representational tradition in the philosophy of the Stoics—though I

personally think that its origin lies in times immemorial since we find this kind of estrangement

in every fairy tale and every fable in which animals act like men.

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Yet this does not exhaust the idea of estrangement. And in the same article Shklovsky

declares estrangement not simply a particular type of representation but one of the two dominant

principles of art in general. He defines the second principle as that of “labored form”:

In order to … sense things, in order to make the stone stony, there is that which

we call art. The purpose of at is to give the sensation of a thing … ; the device of

art is the device of ‘estranging’ things and the device of labored form, intensifying

the difficulty and duration of perception since the process of perception in art is

an end in itself and must be prolonged. (O teorii prozy 13)

Simply put, the first principle (estrangement) makes things strange and the second (“labored

form”) makes things difficult to perceive. In fact, these two principles are so close—because that

which is strange is also difficult—that one may argue that the ideas of estrangement and “labored

form” are one.

For Shklovsky, all true art—that is non-clichéd art—is created by estrangement and

generates it. And true art is therefore difficult. But it is not necessarily difficult like Finnegans

Wake or the poems of T. S. Eliot. If everyone wrote like Eliot (what a thought!), at some point

people would get used to this poetry—they would be no longer perplexed by it. At the same

time, an easy-to-read poem can also be difficult in its own way. To prove this, Shklovsky

mentions the verse of Alexander Pushkin. Pushkin’s verse is indeed easy to read, but the

simplicity of Pushkin’s language was not easy to accept for his early nineteenth century

contemporaries, who had been used to the heavy and intricate verse of the eighteenth century.

Besides, Pushkin allowed himself many expressions and themes considered improper by his

older contemporaries, and that which we will call today Pushkin’s elegance was then often

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viewed as his frivolity. This shows that such qualities as strangeness and difficulty are relative

for Shklovsky; they depend on what the readers are used to. If they are accustomed to ditties, one

should write something like Ezra Pound, and this will be strange and difficult. If, however, they

expect to get heavily cognitive poetry, take them by surprise and write something like Lewis

Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”

This shows that the notion of estrangement is not only relative but also negative.

Estrangement cannot happen unless some sort of habit precedes it. This is why Mikhail Bakhtin

attacked Shklovsky, accusing him of being unable to give a positive explanation of art. Bakhtin’s

ally Pavel Medvedev even remarked, mockingly, that art and its unique language as described by

the Formalists is a “parasite” of daily life with its habitual language (Medvedev 88).

Be it as it may, primeval world hardly needs any estrangement—it is originally fresh and

marvelous. For the same reason—one may assume—it needs no art. The words of love or sorrow

uttered by the first man are endlessly strange and beautiful. The necessity for art as a skill, art as

artistry, art as device comes later, together with estrangement. It happens when that which was

primeval becomes habitual. Estrangement is destined to restore the world, or rather our

perception of the world, in its “primordiality.”

This underlying theme of originally ideal and later corrupted world points to the

connection between the ideas of the Formalists and the Romantics. Shklovsky’s contemporaries

noted it, as well as Shklovsky himself—when he admitted that the idea of estrangement may be

found in the Fragments of Novalis (Khudozhestvennaia proza 479). This is something I mention

because Shklovsky’s estrangement, as well as Freud’s uncanny, stem from Romanticism, which,

indeed, seems to be the cradle of modern ideas about art, as Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe

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Lacoue-Labarthe argue among others—though it is also possible to think of some earlier periods,

like the Baroque.

At any rate, it would be wrong to regard estrangement as merely a part of the Romantic

legacy. Estrangement is a twentieth century idea. It appeared as a reaction to the “age of

mechanical reproduction,” to quote Shklovsky’s contemporary Walter Benjamin. And indeed, it

is not only the futurists and other avant-garde artists who spoke about the aging world and the

need to renovate it. Scholars of that time also wrote about it. A good example is Georg Simmel,

who wrote about the rapid habituation of our perception in modern world. In his famous 1903

essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Simmel writes about the modern city (which was also

the favorite theme of the futurists), saying that the senses of the modern city’s inhabitants are

bombarded by multifarious stimuli—bombarded to such a degree that cities’ inhabitants assume

“a blasé outlook” on everything around them. Yet this also strengthens the desire of cities’

inhabitants to shun uniformity and preserve their individuality. This sounds very similar to

Shklovsky, who regarded estrangement as a reaction to the process he called automatization.

There are different ways of achieving estrangement, and 20th century painters, for

example, showed us the power of human ingenuity. Picasso, Dali, Paul Klee, and others showed

objects “outside of the habitual sequence,”1 as Shklovsky wrote in the ‘60s, redefining

estrangement. But—and here we approach one of the major side-effects of deliberate

estrangement—the great self-awareness characteristic of modern artists has led to the

“mechanical reproduction” of estrangement, to quote Benjamin again. I believe this is a good

pretext for a discussion of contemporary (postmodernist) art and the postmodernist mindset,

1 I have not found the original of this definition in any of Shklovsky’s works, but Russian

encyclopedias reproduce it. The definition is perfectly in line with what Shklovsky said about

estrangement in his early works.

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which exploits strangeness, uncanniness, eccentricity, and so on and so forth. An illustration of it

is a website created by two Russian postmodernist artists Alexey Shulgin and Aristarkh

Chernyshev. The name of the website is Artomat.pro.2 As its creators write, “ARTOMAT is a

system for the automated production of art. Select an object, apply certain methods to it, combine

it with another object, place it in an appropriate space, and your unique work is ready!”

(Artomat.pro n. p.) You may see a vivid illustration of what Artomat has produced:

Artomat is an instance of automated estrangement—an oxymoron incarnate.

In fact, this isn’t new either. Thus, I found a description of automated estrangement in

Chekhov’s The Seagull. Here is what the play’s protagonist, Constantine Treplieff, who is a

2 I am grateful to Doctor Radoslav Borislavov for his bringing my attention to Artomat.

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writer obsessed with a search for new forms, says about his rival writer Trigorin: “Trigorin has

worked out a process of his own, and descriptions are easy for him. He writes that the neck of a

broken bottle lying on the bank glittered in the moonlight, and that the shadows lay black under

the mill-wheel. There you have a moonlight night before your eyes” (Chekhov n. p.).

But Shklovsky foresaw this. He also wrote—as early as in 1924 when so many artistic

experiments were yet to come—that estrangement is “essential for art but isn’t enough” (Russkii

sovremennik 325). Moreover, he showed that estrangement is also the result of the shifted

perspective of the society. In “Art as Device,” Shklovsky writes:

a thing can be 1) created as prosaic [i.e. habitual, automated] and perceived as

poetic [i.e. artistic, estranged]; 2) created as poetic and perceived as prosaic. This

indicates that the artistic nature […] of a given thing is the result of our way of

perceiving; as for the objects of art in the narrow sense, this is what we will call

them when they were created by certain devices whose purpose was to render

these objects artistic. (O teorii prozy 9)

In other words, one may create an estranged work of art—and it will still be perceived as

automated. This is obvious. But what about unintentional estrangement? Let us consider the

following example: “An oak is a tree. A rose is a flower. A deer is an animal. A sparrow is a

bird. Russia is our fatherland. Death is inevitable.” Can this be called estrangement? –Doubtless.

And it is even more powerful an estrangement as an epigraph to Nabokov’s novel The Gift.

Russia and death, the main topics of the novel, stand in one row with a tree, a rose, and a deer;

bitter judgments about Russia, which is lost but is still a fatherland, and about death, which is

inevitable in spite of our hopes, stand together with other irrefutable axioms of life as simple as

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“an oak is a tree.” But when you look for the origin of this text it turns out to be not a text at all.

These are merely separate examples from Petr Sminorvsky’s Textbook of Russian Grammar.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote about the same perceptual paradox in his famous essay “Pierre

Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Pierre Menard—who is of course a fictitious author—studied

Cervantes’s style so well that he managed to write Don Quixote again word for word, comma for

comma. Yet the same words rewritten in the 20th century acquired a new meaning and felt

different.

I will stop here to conclude.

Sure, the lesson to learn is that art should be dealt with historically. Only a historical

approach to art will allow us to do justice to certain authors. Some will be proclaimed geniuses—

others, epigoni, mere imitators. The Formalists, Shklovsky included, established such history of

art—the theory of literary evolution—a complex and great theory still largely underappreciated

and not taken advantage of.

Yet even the most perspicacious historiography does not solve the problem of decisively

separating estrangement as the result of the author’s intention from estrangement as the result of

the play of nature, when even the most inexpressive text and the most trivial idea can become

strange.

But nature, too, may be seen as an author—I mean our human nature. One may also say

that even random, unintentional estrangement has an author: our perception. Snowflakes aren’t

created by man—yet we tend to view them as a beautiful work of art, and justly so, for our

human perception authored them.

Trying to solve this problem in literature, trying to say what makes literature literary, the

Russian Formalists came up with the theory of the literary fact: any text under certain

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circumstances may be sensed and perceived as literary—and then it is part of literature. What

once was merely a private letter or a diary may turn into a fact of literature one day—not because

people decided so but because they somehow started to perceive it this way. Likewise, what was

a literary fact may cease to be such one day, and today a private letter is no longer a fact of

literature. So much for the dialectics of art.

But can the same dialectics be applied to the humanities, in which our perception plays a

great role, much greater than in exact sciences? If a certain text can be a fact of literature at one

point and then stop being such—can the same be said of a scholarly idea, of a scholarly theory?

Can we regard scholarly ideas as not perpetual as long as the humanities are concerned? Not in

the sense that they die away once they’ve been proved wrong but in the sense that even when

they die away—it is only for some time until our perception decides to bring them back? Let us

assume that the same laws and patterns manifest themselves not only in art but also in our

scholarship. And if in art, depending on whether a thing feels estranged or not, we call it

sublime, good, interesting, or sometimes “sellable,” what about scholarship? If scholarship

abides by the same rules, only the criterion of our evaluation will be different: not goodness or

beauty but truth. Can it be said that the truth of our scholarly ideas—and their energy, which

makes them truthful—is relative and temporal, just as the beauty and strangeness of a work of

art? Can it be said—when it comes not to exact sciences but the humanities—that, similar to art,

we are but toys in the hands of our perception?

These are questions, not statements. They are merely to illustrate how strange and

uncanny even our most eloquent ideas are when applied to such unpredictable creatures as

humans.

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Selected Bibliography

Alexey Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev. Artomat. A System for the Automated

Production of Art. Web. 20 March. 2015.

Bakhtin M.M. / Medvedev P.N. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical

Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Trans. by Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore and London: The

John Hopkins University Press, 1991. Print.

Chekhov, Anton. The SeaGull. Trans. Constance Garnett. URL: http://www.online-

literature.com/anton_chekhov/sea-gull/

Miklashevsky, Konstantin. “Gipertrofiia iskusstva.” By Viktor Shklovsky. Russkii

sovremennik 1 (1924): 325. Print.

Shklovsky, Viktor. O teorii prozy. Moscow: Federatsiia, 1929. Print.

---. Khudozhestvennaia proza: Razmyshleniia i razbory. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’,

1961. Print.