Defamiliarizing Corruption

Introduction

Approximate time to complete: 50 minutes

Today, we're going to explore a related, but distinct, artistic strategy. Instead of creating a different world, what if we made our own world appear different—strange, new, and unsettling? This lesson addresses the following learning outcome:

Describe 'defamiliarization' (Shklovsky) as an artistic technique for making systemic corruption appear strange and worthy of personal re-evaluation.

This concept, pioneered by the literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, is one of the most powerful tools for shaking an audience out of complacency. For your framework, it offers a direct method for helping creators dismantle the "normalcy" of corruption and reveal it for the bizarre and damaging system it truly is.

In this lesson, we will cover:

1. The core problem defamiliarization solves: habitual perception.
2. How the technique works by making the familiar strange.
3. How to apply this to the specific challenge of critiquing systemic corruption.

Let's begin this journey of making the familiar strange.

Part 1: The Problem of Automatic Perception

Think about your daily commute, the feeling of your phone in your hand, or even the user interface of an app you use every day. After a while, you cease to truly see these things. Your perception becomes automatic. You recognize them, but you don't experience them. The literary critic Viktor Shklovsky called this process "automatization" or "habitualization."

From your perspective as a product designer, this is the classic challenge of needing a "fresh pair of eyes." You can become so familiar with a product you're designing that you no longer see its usability flaws or jarring inconsistencies. You need a new user, someone for whom the experience is not automatic, to point out the obvious.

Shklovsky argued that this automatization robs us of life itself. When we live unconsciously, our experiences are "as if they had never been." The purpose of art, he claimed, is to fight this.

Reading (10 mins):

• Please read the first two sections, "The Problem of Habitual Perception" and "Art's Purpose: Recovering Sensation through Defamiliarization," in the provided excerpt from Viktor Shklovsky's foundational essay, "Art as Technique".
• Focus on: Shklovsky's diagnosis of how habitualization "devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war." Pay close attention to his powerful declaration of art's purpose: "to make one feel things, to make the stone stony."

As Shklovsky puts it, art exists to "recover the sensation of life." It does this not by making things easy to understand, but by making them difficult to perceive. It prolongs the process of seeing, forcing us out of autopilot and into a state of conscious awareness. The technique for achieving this is defamiliarization.

This image captures the essence of ostranenie, or defamiliarization: forcing us to see something common in a strange, new way to understand it more deeply.

Part 2: Ostranenie: The Art of "Making Strange"

So, how does an artist actually "make the stone stony"? How do they disrupt our automatic perception?

Shklovsky's term for this is ostranenie, often translated as "defamiliarization" or "enstrangement." It means presenting common objects or concepts in an unfamiliar way, as if they are being seen for the first time.

Reading (5 mins):

• Please read the first two sections, "Defamiliarization: The Art of “Making Strange”" and "Application in Literature and Strengths," in the article Defamiliarization: The Art of “Making Strange”.
• Focus on: The clear definition of the term and the strengths listed, especially "Enhances Sensory Experience" and "Encourages Critical Engagement."

This technique is especially potent when applied to social systems like corruption. Corruption often persists not because everyone actively supports it, but because it becomes habitualized—a background process, "just the way things are." Defamiliarization is the artistic jolt needed to make people see it again, not as normal, but as the strange and illogical system it is.

To see how this works in practice, Shklovsky turns to the works of Leo Tolstoy.

Reading (10 mins):

• Now, please read the section "Tolstoy's Use of Defamiliarization" in "Art as Technique".

Tolstoy provides two masterclass examples:

1. Describing Flogging: By refusing to use the familiar word "flogging" and instead describing the act in raw, physical terms—"to rap on their bottoms with switches"—Tolstoy strips away the intellectual abstraction. He forces the reader to confront the brutal, absurd reality of the act. We don't just know what flogging is; we see and feel its strangeness.

2. Private Property from a Horse's Perspective: This is a brilliant example of systems thinking. By shifting the narrator to a non-human (a horse), Tolstoy defamiliarizes the entire concept of ownership. The horse cannot comprehend how a person can call a piece of land "mine" without ever visiting it, or call a horse "mine" while others ride and feed it. From this outsider perspective, the deeply ingrained human institution of private property appears arbitrary, illogical, and based on "words, not by deeds."

This is precisely the goal when critiquing corruption. An artist can make the exchange of a bribe, an act of nepotism, or the bureaucratic jargon of state capture appear utterly alien by describing it from the perspective of someone who does not share our assumptions.

This painting serves as a visual metaphor for defamiliarization. It depicts a familiar scene—a person in a landscape—but the broad, impressionistic style makes the world feel new and strange, inviting us to look longer and see differently.

Part 3: Integrating Defamiliarization into Your Framework

While allegory (last lesson) builds a new world to comment on ours, defamiliarization distorts our perception of the existing world. Both are vital tools for your framework because they target different aspects of complacency.

When guiding a creator, defamiliarization prompts a set of powerful design questions. Thinking like a product designer, you can frame these as prompts for "user research" into a corrupt system:

• Identify the "Automatized" Actions: What specific, everyday behaviors are part of the corrupt system? Is it the casual passing of an envelope? The use of a specific euphemism like "facilitation fee"? The unquestioned hiring of a minister's nephew? The first step is to isolate the familiar action.
• Adopt an "Outsider" POV: Who could describe this action without any of our cultural baggage?
  • Like Tolstoy's horse, could it be an animal?
  • Could it be a child who asks naive but profound questions? ("Why are you giving that man money? Did he lose his?")
  • Could it be an AI or a robot trying to logically understand the behavior?
  • Could it be a foreigner from a culture with radically different norms?
• Describe, Don't Name: How can you describe the corrupt act using only raw, physical, or sensory details? Instead of "The official took a bribe," you could write, "The man in the uniform slid the small, thick envelope from the table with two fingers, never making eye contact, and placed it inside his jacket. His shoulders, which had been tense, suddenly relaxed." This forces the reader to see the action, not just the label.

By including these prompts in your framework, you empower creators to move beyond simply stating "corruption is bad." You give them a technique to make the audience feel the strangeness and wrongness of corruption in their bones, prompting a much deeper personal re-evaluation.

Conclusion

In this lesson, we have explored defamiliarization as a crucial artistic strategy for challenging entrenched systems.

Key Takeaways:

• The Enemy is Habit: Our tendency to "automatize" perception allows us to accept even absurd or unjust systems, like corruption, as normal.
• Art as a Wake-Up Call: Defamiliarization fights this by making the familiar seem strange, forcing us into a state of conscious, critical perception.
• Practical Techniques: This can be achieved by describing things as if for the first time, stripping away jargon, or adopting an outsider's point of view.
• Application to Corruption: This technique is ideal for making the "everyday" nature of systemic corruption appear bizarre, illogical, and unacceptable, sparking personal reflection.

Preview of Next Lesson:

We've now seen how to reframe the present through allegory and how to make it strange through defamiliarization. In our next lesson, we will pivot to a method that connects powerfully with your background: "Speculative Design." We will explore how prototyping and imagining alternative futures—both utopian and dystopian—can serve as a powerful lens for reflecting on the corrupt systems of today.