After successful completion of the course, students are able to work with texts (writing and research), and can articulate and mobilise the gesture of defamiliarisation across a range of contexts. They are aware of the correct handling of quotation and bibliography, basic principles of library and internet research, as well as primary forms of argumentation. Participants are be able to perceive, structure, and organize a specific topic in such a way that it can be thoroughly discussed in a seminar paper.

In order to transform an object into a fact of art, it is necessary to detach it from the domain of life, to wrest it out from the web of familiar associations, to turn over the object as one would turn over a log in the fire. 

Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique’ (1917)

Defamiliarisation is a shift in perception which allows things to be perceived anew. But what exactly is the nature of this shift; from where did this impetus for ‘making strange’ spring forth and how can it be mobilised today? 

The seminar will examine the concept of defamiliarisation (остранение, ostranenie; translated variously as ‘estrangement’, ‘enstrangement’ and ‘making strange’), and trace it, forward and back, from its origins in the Russian avant-garde to contemporary and future realisations. The gesture of defamiliarisation is polymathic, multifarious, transdisciplinary: it flies between articulations. Cinematically, this gesture has been linked to Dzviga Vertov’s ‘Kino-Eye’ filming technique of the 1920s, one of which presents the scene of a Moscow street with the camera deliberately rotated sideways. The point of rotating, inverting or shifting the mode of perception causes the observer to see the object as if for the first time. 

This gesture does not need to be limited to visual perception, however. Perception, as writes Vikki Virby in Quantum Anthropologies, is an organ itself: an organ of conception and reconception. ‘It is a desiring organ that seizes upon its own alienness, and in the wonder of the encounter, is reconceived’ (Kirby 2011: 120). In contemporary discourse where the clear distinctions of subject (defamiliarising) and object (defamiliarised) are not so easily delineated, we may think of this device as intransitive; as free from the hierarchical vectors of the subject/object distinction.  

To seize upon one’s alienness: a moment of defamiliarisation. 

We will look at various ways in which this gesture might be mobilised: grotesque bodies, avant-garde texts, surrealist games, sensory deformations, transrational poems, queer transformations, sirens, organs, interfaces, angles, stretching, bending, contorting, tensing, sensing, abstracting, speculating, and the experience of writing itself.

Provisional Program

1. Defamiliarisation and the Knights Move  - Viktor Shklovsky  

2. Shiftology and Transreason - Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh

3. Synvariance - Roman Jakobson

4. Estrangement and Aesthesis - Bence Nanay, Robert Musil, Douglas Robinson

5. Writing Defamiliarisation

6. Estranged Bodies, Homunculi and the Grotesque - Walter Penfield, Warren Gorman, Elizabeth Grosz

7. Form, Formless, Deformalism - Georges Bataille, Kyla Tompkins

8. Queer Defamiliarisation - Rosi Braidotti and Sara Ahmed

9. Sensory/Spatial Deformations: Synaesthesia/Topology

10. Writing Defamiliarisation

11. Writing Defamiliarisation

12. Discussions of texts

Weekly readings, lectures and group discussions of the weekly readings.

Literature

Ahmed, S. (2006), Queer Phenomenology

Bataille, G. (1985) Visions of Excess: Selected writings 1927-1939

Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman

Gorman, W. (1969) Body Image and the Image of the Brain

Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism

Khlebnikov, V. (1922) Zangezi (1922)

Kruchenykh, Alexei. (1923) Shiftology of Russian Verse: An Offensive and Educational Treatise

Firtich, N. (2004), ‘Worldbackwards: Lewis Carroll, Aleksei Kruchenykh and

Russian Alogism’, The Slavic and East European Journal 48: 4, pp. 593-606,

https://www.jstor.stable/3648814. Last accessed 06/06/18.

Latifić, A. (2018), ‘The Kino-Eye Montage Procedure’, AM Journal 15: 23-33.

Musil, R. Toward a new aesthetic, in Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses (1995)

Nanay, B. Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (2014)

Palmer, H. (2020) Queer Defamiliarisation: Writing, Mattering, Making Strange

Robinson, D. Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht

Shklovsky, V. (1990) [1925] ‘Art as Device’, Theory of Prose

Shklovsky, V. (1923) Knights Move

Tompkins, K. (2017), ‘Crude Matter, Queer Form’, ASAP/Journal 2:2, pp. 264-8.

At the end of the seminar, participants will be asked to write an academic paper on a topic related to the themes discussed in class. The paper can be written in English or in German. Only participants attending the course and delivering the scheduled exercises will be admitted to final evaluation. Weekly attendance and active  participation is therefore mandatory throughout the entire semester.

Examples of previous seminar papers can be found at the following link:

http://www.attp.tuwien.ac.at/wahlseminar-architekturtheorie-ss2018

Sample questions

1 - Select an author, thinker, text, artwork or artist which you believe to exhibit defamiliarisation in their work and provide a detailed analysis of this.

2 - Provide your own definition of defamiliarisation supported by quotations, and give some examples of EITHER a) a defamiliarised body; b) a defamiliarised text; c) a defamiliarised concept; d) a defamiliarised space

3 - Choose a building that you believe to be a ‘defamiliarised’ building and produce a critical analysis of it.

4 - How can we use defamiliarisation today? Discuss the ways in which this concept might be mobilised in the digital world.

ATTENTION:  requirement 259.268 Ringvorlesung Methodologie der Architekturforschung