Introduction

* Author’s Note: I dedicate this to Mariia – Never let me go.

The purpose of this essay is to read Victor Shklovsky and William James as thinkers of the recovery of experience. Their common problem is the condition in which reality is already named, classified, and absorbed into practical use before it has been properly encountered. The object remains present, yet its felt existence disappears beneath the ease with which it is identified.

Shklovsky gives this process an aesthetic diagnosis: “Thus life is reduced to nothingness and vanishes. Automatization swallows up things, clothing, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war” (AD, 13). James, meanwhile, supplies its metaphysical explanation. Experience contains more than the isolated objects and conceptual categories through which the world is ordinarily managed, for “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations” and “any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (ERE, 22). Reality therefore includes the transitions, pressures, conjunctions, and continuities through which objects are actually lived, rather than merely the abstract terms under which they are classified.

Read together, they disclose art as the de-administration of reality. Administration here means the conversion of living experience into an authorised categories that determines in advance how something may be perceived and treated.

An authorised name works like the heading on a case file: it tells us how something is to be processed, but not what it is like to encounter it. Stone places an object within a class while omitting the cold weight that presses into the hand; wife identifies a social relation while allowing the irreducible person within that relation to recede; punishment gives an act the authority of law while concealing the body that suffers it; labour converts spent time, trained movement and exhaustion into hours, wages and output; war gathers terror, waiting, obedience, mutilation and grief beneath a single term of policy. The name is not false, but it is radically incomplete. Its danger begins when the administrative description is mistaken for the whole reality, so that the category remains available to thought while the experience itself disappears.

Shklovsky’s estrangement/defamiliarization (ostranenie) is therefore not merely a technique for making familiar things seem unusual. It performs in art what James’s radical empiricism demands in philosophy:

1. James insists that reality includes the relations, pressures, and transitions that abstraction leaves out.
2. Shklovsky devises forms that restore those excluded elements to perception.

James shows that experience is richer than the concepts used to organise it, while Shklovsky shows how art can make that richness visible again. Estrangement is, in this sense, radical empiricism translated into artistic method.

Recognition and the Disappearance of Life

Automatization begins in the ordinary because ordinary life permits the most complete disappearance. Shklovsky derives his argument from Tolstoy’s account of dusting a room and being unable to remember whether the sofa had already been cleaned. The action had occurred physically but had passed through consciousness without becoming a lived event. From this, Shklovsky draws the severe conclusion in his Theory of Prose that “if the entire complex life of many people passes by unconsciously, then it’s as if this life had never been” (AD, 13).

This is not a sentimental demand that every moment become intense. Habit is necessary. It enables the body to act without reconsidering each movement and allows language, work, and social life to continue. The danger begins when this necessary economy becomes sovereign. Recognition then ceases to assist perception and replaces it. One knows what the object is without receiving what it does, how it appears, what relations compose it, or what demands it makes.

Shklovsky’s sequence – things, clothing, furniture, wife, war – shows that automatization does not distinguish between the trivial and the terrible. Furniture recedes into the background because its function is settled. The family may disappear into the roles assigned to them, becoming a recognised relation rather than another person whose interiority remains inexhaustible. War may disappear into strategy, patriotic rhetoric, and historical classification while fear, waiting, hunger, torn bodies, and obedience are suppressed beneath the public word.

Recognition is therefore not the opposite of ignorance. It is an official form of ignorance operating inside knowledge. The recognised object has been made socially legible and practically manageable, but only by excluding whatever exceeds the governing description. Automatization is the capture of experience by its own abbreviations.

This capture is social as well as psychological. Institutions organise perception by stabilising names. The court names an act punishment, the army names a body a target, the factory names exhausted time labour, and the household names a person wife. Once represented under an authorised category, the phenomenon appears already understood. The name does not merely describe the object; it distributes attention, sympathy, responsibility, and permissible action around it.

Art begins where this apparent understanding fails. Its task is not to abandon the ordinary world for a more imaginative realm, but to return the ordinary world from its recognised form to its experiential reality.

James and the Thickness of Experience

James’s radical empiricism explains what recognition excludes. Earlier empiricism frequently treated experience as a collection of separate sensations and then required association, mind or some higher unity to connect them. James rejects the original reduction. Experience already contains conjunction and separation, continuity and interruption, movement, expectation, contrast, and bodily orientation. In his Essays in Radical Empiricism, James asserts that to “be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (ERE, 22).

The second prohibition is most important here. Abstraction does not usually deny the object; it denies the relations through which the object becomes a concrete experience. James accordingly insists that “the relations that connect experiences must themselves be experienced relations” and that “any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as ‘real’ as anything else in the system” (ERE, 22):

1. A stone is therefore not exhausted by being correctly classified as a stone. Its experienced reality includes hardness against the hand, weight against the body, resistance under the foot, coldness, surface, age, etc.
2. War includes not only its historical designation but its relations to command, fear, geography, flesh, distance, rhetoric, grief, and memory.
3. Labour includes time, gesture, fatigue, skill, wage, dependence and bodily deterioration.

These relations are not subjective colours added to otherwise neutral facts. They belong to the facts as experienced.

Pure experience identifies the field from which recognised objects are abstracted. James describes it as “the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories” (TRE, 94). It is “a that, which is not yet any definite what, tho’ ready to be all sorts of whats” (TRE, 94). The distinction between “that” and “what” clarifies Shklovsky’s theory. The “that” is the arriving presence before its meaning has been settled; the “what” is the same experience after it has been classified for reflection and use.

Conceptual determination is indispensable, but the problem is the premature victory of the “what” over the “that.” Recognition supplies the finished answer before the relations of experience have unfolded. The name preserves orientation while cancelling encounter.

Ostranenie reopens the “that” inside the “what.” It does not destroy language or return consciousness to an impossible innocence before concepts. It forces concepts to remain answerable to the experience from which they arose. James writes that “Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time” (WPE, 57). Recognition shortens this unrolling; art gives it time to occur.

Estrangement as De-Administration

Shklovsky declares that the “purpose of art is to convey the sensation of things as they are seen, not as they are recognized” (AD, 13). That is, the recovery of temporal and relational density. Seeing does not mean passive optical registration, as recognition already sees in that minimal sense. Seeing is the prolonged encounter in which the object ceases to be identical with its authorised name.

This is why art exists “in order to render the stone its stony quality” (AD, 13). The stone made stony has not acquired a symbolic essence. It has been released from abbreviation. Its hardness, pressure, surface, and resistance return. Ostranenie does not falsify the object by making it strange. Recognition has already falsified it by making it too available. Art undoes that prior distortion.

The same operation becomes ethically acute when applied to social objects. Tolstoy’s descriptions of flogging refuse the institutional name under which the act is normally received. Punishment is returned to movement, lash, body, pain, authority, and spectatorship. The legal category does not disappear, but it loses its power to monopolise perception. The body returns beneath the sentence.

In War and Peace, Natasha Rostova perceives the opera not as the unified cultural object called opera but as painted boards, artificial gestures, exposed bodies, and incomprehensible singing. The social prestige of the occasion no longer governs what she sees. In “Kholstomer,” property is perceived through a horse unable to understand how human beings can claim ownership of living bodies and material things. The animal viewpoint removes the conventions that make possession appear natural. Estrangement does not introduce absurdity; it discloses the absurdity concealed by social agreement.

Form performs this release. For, as Shklovsky writes: “the device of art lies in the ‘estrangement’ of objects and the complicating of forms” (AD, 13). Refusal to name, unusual perspective, over-description, broken sequence, displaced metaphor, and narrative delay interrupt the automatic movement from sign to classification. Form is the organised resistance of experience to recognition.

Its difficulty is therefore purposeful: it slows perception so that the object can be experienced rather than merely recognised. As such, ostranenie “increases the difficulty and length of perception, as the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be drawn out” (AD, 13). Recognition governs by speed. It identifies and moves on. Art resists by making consciousness remain where habit would permit it to pass. The device is counter-machinery directed against the machinery of ordinary perception.

This also means that no device remains estranging permanently. Once an unusual form becomes recognised as an established mark of modernism, experimentalism or literary seriousness, it may be consumed automatically. Ostranenie is not a collection of techniques but a relation between technique and the prevailing organisation of perception. Its measure is whether the form returns something excluded by habit.

The Ethics of Attention

The moral force of ostranenie follows from the fact that cruelty often survives by being recognisable:

1. Violence need not be hidden when it can be named as a procedure or a discipline. Exploitation remains respectable when recognised as work.
2. Domination becomes intimate when recognised in relationships.
3. Organised killing becomes tolerable when received as a policy or necessity.

In The Principles of Psychology, James states that “millions of items of outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to” (PP I, 381). What he means here, is that physical visibility does not guarantee experiential or moral presence. A suffering body may be displayed publicly and still remain unseen if attention has been organised around the authority punishing it rather than the pain it undergoes.

Ostranenie reorganises that attention. It does not guarantee correct judgment, but it restores the object without which judgment becomes empty. Tolstoy need not append the proposition that flogging is cruel when his description has made the body, lash, and humiliation unavoidable. Art works before doctrine, at the level where something first becomes capable of mattering.

James defines the voluntary achievement of will as the effort “to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind” (PP II, 1166). Estranged/defamiliarized form creates such difficult objects. It holds before consciousness what convenience, social interest and official language would rather dismiss. Its ethical force lies not in telling the reader what to think but in making evasion harder.

Art as World-Recreation

If experienced relations are real, then art does not merely copy a completed world; it creates relations through which the world becomes otherwise perceptible. James’s pluralistic universe permits such addition because no form finally contains everything: “Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes” (PU, 145).

Art operates within this escape. Plot rearranges sequence, emphasis, memory, and anticipation, disclosing connections that the recognised world excludes. In The Energy of Delusion, Shklovsky asserts that “the writer uses plot to cleanse the world. It’s as if the world gets entangled and dusty. A writer wipes the mirror of consciousness with his plot” (ED, 146; 139). The dust is accumulated recognition: inherited plots, moral clichés, generic expectations, and official histories. Plot cleanses by reordering the relations through which events become intelligible. Hence “life, extended through art, changes how it’s perceived. The past is seen differently, the future envisioned differently, and the present suffered differently” (ED, 293; 358):

1. Art does not alter the physical past, but it may release it from the plot that had fixed its meaning.
2. It does not determine the future, but it can expose the contingency of arrangements presented as necessary.
3. It does not remove the present but makes the present available to be consciously undergone.

The artist is the person in whom this resistance to recognition becomes a liability as well as a power. Shklovsky writes that “he writer carries a live bird – his heart – in his hands” (HO, 147; 166). Ordinary consciousness protects itself through abbreviation: “We experience life in a thousandth fragment, sparing ourselves” (HO, 149; 167–68). The artist is less fully protected because “he lives without switching off from life. His is unprotected” (HO, 149; 167–68).

Such exposure is not automatically virtuous, as suffering, eccentricity, and heightened sensation do not constitute art. The artist’s task is to convert exposure into form. Without device, vulnerability remains private injury; without vulnerability, device becomes empty ingenuity. Ostranenie is the discipline by which an insufficiently deadened relation to life becomes shareable perception.

Conclusion

Shklovsky and James disclose the same revolt against a worked-over world at different levels:

1. James refuses a metaphysics that subtracts directly experienced relations from reality.
2. Shklovsky refuses an art that repeats the recognised objects produced by that subtraction.

Radical empiricism says that the relation, transition, and felt pressure are real; ostranenie makes them perceptible again.

Art is therefore the de-administration of reality. It breaks the official name without pretending that human beings can live without names. It returns punishment to pain, war to terror, labour to bodily time, relationships to the irreducible otherness of the person, and the stone to its stoniness – whatever Doctor Johnson may say or do otherwise). As such, the purpose art is to make reality difficult enough to appear after recognition has made it too easy to experience.

Sources and References

~ (AD) “Art as Device,” in Theory of Prose (Dalkey Archive Press, 1991 / 1916) by Viktor Shklovsky.

~ (ERE) Essays in Radical Empiricism (Harvard University Press, 1976 / 1912) by William James.

~ (TRE) “The Thing and Its Relations,” in Essays in Radical Empiricism (Harvard University Press, 1976 / 1912) by William James.

~ (WPE) “A World of Pure Experience,” in Essays in Radical Empiricism (Harvard University Press, 1976 / 1912) by William James.

~ (PP) The Principles of Psychology (Harvard University Press, 1981 / 1890) by William James.

~ (PU) A Pluralistic Universe (Harvard University Press, 1977 / 1909) by William James.

~ (ED) The Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (Dalkey Archive Press, 2007 / 1981) by Viktor Shklovsky.

~ (HO) A Hunt for Optimism (Dalkey Archive Press, 2012 / 1931) by Viktor Shklovsky.