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Estranging Objects and Complicating Form: Viktor Shklovsky and the Labour of Perception

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Estranging Objects and Complicating Form: Viktor Shklovsky and the Labour of Perception transcultural studies 13 (2017) 160-176 brill.com/ts Estranging Objects and Complicating Form: Viktor Shklovsky and the Labour of Perception Asiya Bulatova The University of Warsaw (Uniwersytet Warszawski) [email protected] Abstract In Viktor Shklovsky’s essay “Art as Device” habitual perception is described as a dangerous practice, which renders one insensitive to the experiences of modernity. Importantly, the subjects’ automatized relationship with the surrounding world dis- rupts their ability to engage with objects. Rather than being experienced through the senses, the object is recognized through an epistemological (preconceived) frame- work. As a result, Shklovsky argues, “we do not see things, we merely recognize them by their primary characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged.” By making the usual strange Shklovsky’s technique of estrangement promises a re- lief from an alienating, consumerist experience of modernity, which “automatizes the object” instead of enabling perception: “in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art.” In this article I trace the development of Shklovsky’s views on literature and the arts as an alternative way of experiencing objects in his writings during and after the Russian Revolution. I will pay particular attention to the relationship between things and words in Shklovsky’s writings produced during his exile in Berlin in 1923. The publication of the Berlin-based magazine Veshch/ Objet /Gegenstand in 1922, shortly before Shklovsky’s arrival, signals a rejection of both recognition and observation as passive consumerist practices. Instead, the manifesto published in the first issue of the magazine invites its readers to create new objects, which here is inseparable from the * This article is part of a larger project financed within the polonez 3 programme by the National Science Centre, Poland. Agreement No umo-2016/23/p/hs2/04129. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation pro- gramme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 665778. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/23751606-01302004Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:56AM via free access <UN> Estranging Objects and Complicating Form 161 creation of new social formations. I will argue that Shklovsky’s 1923 writings provide a rethinking of the word “object” in society, literature and the arts. The function of art is not to “express what lies beyond words and images,” in other words, not to point to a referent that exists as a ‘real’ object, but rather to create a world “of independently existing things.” Keywords Veshch/ Objet/ Gegenstand – perception theories – things in literature – mimesis and representation – Hausmann’s optophonetics – synaesthesia – transsomatic experience … From the stifling atmosphere, from a Russia that has been bled dry and a Europe grown fat and drowsy a single battle cry rings out: STOP MAKING DECLARATIONS AND COUNTERDECLARATIONS, MAKE OBJECTS!1 ⸪ The editorial manifesto printed in the first issue of El Lissitzky and Ilya Eh- renburg’s 1922 magazine Veshch/ Objet /Gegenstand ends with an avant-garde battle cry, “Make objects!” The military rhetoric of the closing passage, how- ever, serves the magazine’s overall pacifist agenda: the war cry paradoxically urges contemporary artists and writers to move away from conceptualising the modern art scene in terms of groups and circles fighting each other for sur- vival and prominence. Published under the title “The Blockade of Russia Is Coming to an End”, the manifesto makes it clear that modern artists can break through the “tedious post-war Monday” only if they end the strife between dif- ferent art groups and movements: “We are not founding any sects, we are not contenting ourselves with surrogates for the collective that are different move- ments and schools. We aim to unite and coordinate the work of all those who genuinely strive to work and not to live comfortably on the proceeds of previ- ous generations.”2 Since, by the early 1920s, a publication of a new magazine 1 El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, “Blokada Rossii Konchaetsa,” in Veshch/Objet/Gegenstand 1–2, 4. My translation. Here and throughout the article I preserve original typography. 2 Ibid., 3. My translation. transcultural studies 13 (2017) 160-176 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 05:35:56AM via free access <UN> 162 Bulatova was likely to announce the birth of yet another art movement, publishing an explicit critique of Modernism’s group structure calls for a rethinking of a contemporary art scene. The manifesto offers to think about the international community of artists not as divided into numerous nucleus groups with clearly defined centres, but in terms of collectivity which is seen as “an inherent qual- ity of the mature humanity.”3 Ehrenburg’s 1922 book And Yet It Moves!, which first laid out ideas later repeated – often verbatim – in the opening manifesto of Veshch, describes various modernist groups and their members. The list abruptly ends with Constructivism, which makes the division into groups irrelevant. Drawing on Lissitzky’s 1922 text “PROUNS” published in De Stijl, Ehrenburg concludes that there is no place for art groups and movements in a society envisioned by Constructivists, a society of new individuals who learnt to dissolve art in the collective life, like a lump of sugar is dissolved in a hot cup of tea.4 The agenda of creating radically new individual and collective consciousnesses for contemporary humans is clearly outlined in Lissitzky’s 1920 text titled “supre- matism in world reconstruction” (sic). Suprematism, an art movement founded by Lissitzky’s famous mentor Kazimir Malevich in 1913, in this text is presented not as a group of artists adhering to similar aesthetic principles, but rather as a doctrine that supersedes Hebrew and Christian worldviews and, surprisingly, communist ideology: “AFTER THE OLD TESTAMENT THERE CAME THE NEW – AFTER THE NEW COMMUNIST – AND AFTER THE COMMUNIST THERE FOLLOWS FINALLY THE TESTAMENT OF SUPREMATISM.”5 Although both the editorial manifesto in Veshch and Lissitzky’s article pres- ent the Russian Revolution as an essential step in creating the new world and new art, as it promised to eliminate outdated concepts – “the rebuilding of life cast aside the old concept of nations classes patriotisms and imperialism which had been completely discredited” – communism is not the final, but only the first stage in world reconstruction. Katerina Clarke pointed to the Constructivist belief that “a new man and a new consciousness could be cre- ated less by individual acts of perception than by establishing a totally new aesthetic-cum-material environment.”6 Although communism promised to 3 On the concept of nucleus group see Milton A. Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Mod- ernist Group, 1910–1914 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004). 4 Ilya Ehrenburg, I vsio-taki ona vertitsa! (Berlin: Gelikon, 1922), 85–87. 5 El Lissitzky, “suprematism in world reconstruction,” in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, trans. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 327. 6 Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 51. transculturalDownloaded studies from 13 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2017) 160-176 05:35:56AM via free access <UN> Estranging Objects and Complicating Form 163 prepare the ground for the restructuring of daily life, in Lissitzky’s prognosis, it is a rather transitory stage, and “in the further stages of development […] communism […] will have to remain behind.” Suprematism, which will replace it, claims to share with its predecessors the impulse for remodelling society as a whole, as well as renewing individual consciousness and cognition. In presenting the founding of suprematism as an important milestone in twentieth-century history, at least as important as the communist revolution, Lissitzky attempts to write it into the narrative of ongoing human evolution. The role of suprematism in the titular “world reconstruction” is that it “revealed for the first time in all its purity the clear sign and plan for a definite new world never before experienced.”7 In this description it is unclear whether Lissitzky is talking about a material reconstruction of society or an alteration of human consciousness and perception with the help of modern art. What is clear, how- ever, is that the suprematist reconstructive potential can be actualised only through the rejection of any attempts at the “recognition of an absolute form which was part of an already-completed universal system.”8 Relying on “recog- nition” as an ultimately dangerous practice that impairs one’s ability to see and therefore to experience the world is a cornerstone of Viktor Shklovsky’s early theories which see the renewal of perception as the main function of arts and literature. Shklovsky’s attack on a habitual aspect of perception and its negative influ- ence on creative practices started in one of his earliest texts “Resurrection of the Word” (1914) which is based on his 1913 talk given at The Stray Dog Cellar, a meeting place for modernist artists, writers and theorists in St Petersburg. Ironically, it was here, in a speech, that Shklovsky first voiced the idea that “practical” spoken language has a negative effect on human perception of words, “when they are used in everyday speech, when they are neither fully spoken nor fully heard – then they become familiar, and neither their inter- nal forms (images), nor the external one (sounds) are experienced anymore. […] We do not experience the familiar; we do not see but only recognize it.”9 In his famous essay “Art as Device,” published only three years later, in 1917, Shklovsky argues that relying on recognition affects one’s cognitive functions, and, as a result, automatises our habitual perception, in Shklovsky’s famous phrase, “eats things, clothes, furniture, your wife and the fear of war.” The sub- ject’s automatised relationship with the surrounding world not only impairs 7 Ibid.
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