Introduction

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 provides the aesthetic diagnosis when he states that “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 a philosophical perspective with the claim that experience contains more than the isolated objects and conceptual categories through which the world is ordinarily managed.

As he explains: “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-automatization of reality. Automatization here means the conversion of living experience into authorised categories that determine 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. To use some examples from Shklovsky:

1. Stone places an object within a class while omitting the cold weight that presses into the hand.
2. Wife identifies a social relation while allowing the irreducible person within that relation to recede.
3. Punishment gives an act the authority of law while concealing the body that suffers it.
4. Labour converts spent time, trained movement and exhaustion into hours, wages and output.
5. War gathers terror, waiting, obedience, mutilation, and grief beneath a single term of policy.

There is an original violence in naming, already implicit in the Adamic scene in Genesis, where the creatures pass before Adam and receive the names by which they will thereafter be known. The name makes the creature intelligible, memorable, and available to human thought, yet it does so by compressing the excess of the living thing into a category that can never contain it. What begins as an indispensable act of cognition can therefore become an act of possession: once the name appears sufficient, the creature itself recedes behind it, with the word arriving before the experience and instructs consciousness what it is seeing.

Shklovsky’s estrangement/defamiliarization (ostranenie) is 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. Ostranenie 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).

None of this requires every moment to be lived at full intensity. Habit is one of consciousness’s necessary economies: it allows the body to move without inspecting each gesture and lets language, work, and social life proceed without perpetual interruption. The problem arises when that economy hardens into the normal form of perception. Recognition then begins to stand in for encounter. We know what a thing is called, where it belongs, and how it is ordinarily used, while ceasing to register its particular appearance, its resistance, its relations to other things, or the demands its presence might otherwise make upon us.

Shklovsky’s sequence – things, clothing, furniture, wife, war – gathers force because each term is more serious than the last. Familiarity first makes objects disappear into use: the chair is simply sat upon, the coat put on, neither quite seen. The same dulling can enter human relations, where a wife or husband is gradually apprehended through the settled habits of marriage rather than as another person whose life remains partly unknowable. War is the most terrible extension of this. Once it has been taken up into strategy, patriotic language, and historical explanation, one can speak of campaigns, victories, and necessity while the actual experience of war – fear, waiting, exhaustion, mutilation, obedience – slips behind the words used to contain it.

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. Thus, automatization is the capture of experience by its own abbreviations.

The problem deepens once these habits of recognition are built into institutions. Such terms are necessary because institutions could scarcely function without them. Yet they also determine what will count as relevant, and therefore what can be overlooked. Once the name appears to contain the reality, judgment proceeds within the category while much of the experience that ought to trouble that judgment has already disappeared. Take the following examples:

1. Extraordinary rendition: the transfer of detainees between states outside ordinary extradition or deportation procedures, sometimes into secret detention and circumstances carrying a risk of torture.
2. Voter: political parties and politicians reduce people to electoral types — loyalists, swing voters, abstainers, demographic blocs – so that complex political judgments become preferences to be measured, targeted, and translated into electoral support.
3. Housewife: compresses a whole field of activity and identity into a domestic role, with childcare, cooking, cleaning, household budgeting, emotional labour, social obligations, and often unpaid economic contribution disappearing behind the apparently self-explanatory category.

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 begins as a quarrel with the traditional empiricist habit of treating experience as a succession of discrete impressions or sensations, with their connections supplied afterwards by association, habit, or the organising activity of mind. James thinks this starts too late. We do not first encounter isolated fragments and then discover that they are related. Rather, continuity, transition, resemblance, difference, and succession are themselves given in experience. A genuinely radical empiricism must therefore admit the relations between things as fully as the things related.

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 of importance here, for 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).

Take my evening cup of tea. The ritual is to use my Wigan Warriors mug and settle into the rocking chair in my library with a book. The experience includes the warmth of the mug in my hand, the tarry taste of the tea, the motion of the chair, the weight of the book on my lap, the quiet of the room, and the presence of the authors gathered on the shelves around me. For James, these relations are not additions made by the mind to otherwise separate objects; they belong to the experience itself.

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 gives us the answer too quickly, before the relations that make up the experience have had time to emerge. The name helps us find our bearings, but it can also make us feel that we have already encountered the thing simply because we know what to call it.

Ostranenie reopens the that inside the what. It does not destroy language or return consciousness to an impossible innocence before concepts. Rather, 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, while art gives it time to occur.

Estrangement as De-Automatization

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, but 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 but 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, while art undoes that prior distortion.

Turning to literature, Tolstoy’s descriptions of flogging show the ethical stakes of ostranenie more clearly. The word punishment carries the sanction of law and, with it, a ready-made account of what is happening. Tolstoy breaks that account open by returning attention to the physical act itself: the blow, the body that receives it, the pain that follows, and the authority exercised over the person being punished. The legal category remains in place, but it no longer exhausts the event.

In War and Peace, Natasha Rostova perceives the opera not as the unified cultural object called opera but as painted boards, artificial gestures, 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. As such, ostranenie does not introduce absurdity but discloses the absurdity concealed by social agreement.

For Shklovsky, it is form that makes this recovery possible. As he writes, “the device of art lies in the ‘estrangement’ of objects and the complicating of forms” (AD, 13). The refusal to name, unusual perspectives, over-description, broken sequences, displaced metaphor, and narrative delay interrupt the automatic movement from sign to classification. Thus, form is the organised resistance of experience to simple recognition, forcing perception to tarry with the object rather than pass immediately beyond it.

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, briskly identifying and moving on. Art resists by making consciousness remain where habit would permit it to pass over unharried.

The device is a kind of counter-machinery directed against the machinery of ordinary perception. Habit shortens the route between seeing and knowing, allowing us to recognise the object and move on almost without attending to it. Artistic form interferes with that efficiency. By delaying recognition, dislocating perspective, or making the familiar awkward again, it forces perception to take the longer way round and recover what routine has taught us to overlook.

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. In that sense, it is thoroughly pragmatist: the device must earn its keep in experience. Its value lies in the result it produces – whether it interrupts habitual recognition strongly enough to return something that habit had allowed to disappear.

The Ethics of Attention

To demonstrate the moral force behind ostranenie, we can look to Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist. The Board of Guardians at the parish workhouse has developed a perfectly respectable administrative language for what it is doing: Oliver has received the supper “allotted by the dietary” and therefore, within the terms of the institution, has been fed. Dickens makes that description impossible to accept at face value. We see boys scraping their bowls, sucking their fingers for stray drops of gruel, and finally drawing lots to decide who will risk asking for more. The word dietary remains technically correct, but Dickens restores everything that the category leaves out – above all, the simple fact that the children are hungry. Mr. Limbkins’s shock when Oliver asks for more exposes the moral absurdity of the workhouse regime: what appears to the Board as an intolerable breach of discipline appears to the reader as the entirely reasonable request of a hungry child.

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 person can suffer in full view and still go unseen when everyone’s attention is fixed on the authority carrying out the punishment rather than on the pain of the person receiving it.

Ostranenie shifts attention back towards what habit has allowed us to overlook. It cannot tell us in advance what judgment to make, but it can make judgment harder to evade. Tolstoy does not need to stop and explain that flogging is cruel once he has made the reader attend to the body, the blows, and the humiliation of the scene. Art does not make the judgment for us but restores the experience that any serious judgment has to reckon with.

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). The 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 relations are themselves part of experience, then art need not simply reproduce a world whose meaning is already settled. By altering sequence, emphasis, perspective, or association, it can bring different relations into view and make the familiar world appear differently. James’s pluralism leaves room for this because no single description gathers reality up completely: “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 provides a space in which experience can escape the settled descriptions that ordinarily contain it. For Shklovsky, plot can perform just such a recovery by changing the order and emphasis through which events are ordinarily understood. In The Energy of Delusion, he writes 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 metaphor recalls his earlier account of automatization. Familiar stories, habitual judgments, and received explanations accumulate until we cease to look closely at what lies beneath them; by arranging events differently, plot clears some of that away and allows them to be seen afresh.

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.

For Shklovsky, the artist is someone less able than most of us to let the world pass unnoticed. That openness to experience provides the material of art, but it also leaves the artist unusually exposed to what ordinary habit allows the rest of us to overlook. As he writes: “the 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). Shklovsky’s point is that most of us survive by dulling experience, allowing repetition and habit to blunt what would otherwise press too sharply upon us. The artist cannot do this so completely. He remains exposed to the intensity, strangeness, and pain of things that ordinary consciousness has learned to pass over.

Such heightened exposure is not enough by itself to make an artist. What matters is the discipline required to give intense personal feeling a form through which it can be clarified, shaped, and shared with others. Ostranenie is one means of doing this: it turns private perception into an artistic experience capable of altering how another person sees.

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, while ostranenie renders them perceptible.

Art is therefore the de-automatization of reality. It does not free us from names, categories, or habits, but it can expose the point at which they begin to substitute for what they describe. The achievement of ostranenie lies here: in forcing language and perception back into contact with the recalcitrance of things, with bodies, with pain, with the stubborn particularity that classification smooths away. Shklovsky’s stone becomes stony again because art refuses to let the word stone settle the matter – something Doctor Johnson, whatever the philosophical merits of his refutation of Berkeley, seems to have discovered with his foot. Its task is not to make the world strange for its own sake, but to prevent recognition from closing over experience too quickly.

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.