University of Oregon

Viktor Shklovskij: Différance in Defamiliarization

Author(s): Lawrence Crawford
Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer, 1984), pp. 209-219
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770260
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LAWRENCE CRAWFORD

Viktor Shklovskij:
Diffrance in

Defamiliarization
ROM THE outset Viktor Shklovskij'sformulationsof his theory
of defamiliarization oppose life to death, the vital to the fossilized,
created fullness to eroded emptiness, a graphic image to effacement and
the empty algebraic symbol, aesthetic perception to habitual recognition,
the lively force and beauty of a word at its coining to worn stereotype
and dead metaphor: in 1914, he inaugurated a metaphorics and a rhet-
oric that traced a consistent trajectory for more than a decade of For-
malist literary-critical theorizing. He began (in "The Resurrection of
the Word") by defending Futurist poetic experimentation and neol-
ogisms, protesting against a prevailing "graveyard of language" and
praising Futurism as an indispensable effort to induce perception of the
"word" and, immediately beyond it, of the "world" and its "things":
"Only the creation of new forms of art can restore to man sensation of
the world, can resurrect things and kill pessimism."' He went on to
make well-known attempts to distinguish poetic from practical language
on the basis of the former's perceptibility (oshchutimost).
But Shklovskij first consolidated these views in his 1917 essay "Art
as Device," which can be considered his chief contribution to the first
stage of Formalist analysis.2 In this essay aesthetic perception openly
1 Voskreshenie slova (St. Petersburg, 1914), trans. "The Resurrection of the
Word" in Russian Formalism, ed. Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (New York,
1973), p. 46.
2 "Iskusstvo kak priem," in Sborniki po teorii poeticheskogo jazyka (St.
Petersburg, 1917); rpt. in Shklovskij, O teorii prozy, 2nd ed., Moscow, 1929).
Hereafter cited in the text; page references are to the reprint and translations from
the Russian are my own, but see also the translation "Art as Technique" in
Russian Formalist Criticism, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln,
Neb., 1965), pp. 3-24.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

assumes the central place it had silently occupied in Shklovskij's think-

ing for several years, and in relation to it a host of key Formalist con-
cepts emerge into explicit definition: defamiliarization (ostranenie),
device, roughened form, poetic language vs. practical language, and so
on. Its theoretical efficacy for Shklovskij is obvious. It allows him to
attack contemporary theories of the economy of mental effort in art,
while preserving the concept of aesthetic devices as means for creating
the strongest possible impression on a reader or viewer. For Shklovskij
the function of art is the creation of perception, by the overcoming of
automatization :
Automatizationconsumes things, clothing, furniture,one's wife, and fear of war
... Art exists in order to recover a sensation of life, to feel things, in order to
make the stone stony. The goal of art is to give the sensation of things as seen,
not known; the device of art is to make things "unfamiliar,"to increase the diffi-
culty and length of their perception,since the perceptualprocess in art is valuable
in itself and must be prolonged; art is a way of experiencingthe artfulness of an
object, the object in art being itself unimportant.(p. 13)

Shklovskij begins to treat perception, especially when effected by de-

familiarization, as an origin, a primary (originary) experiencing:
Shklovskij points out that in order to tear the object away from its
habitual recognition, Tolstoy defamiliarizes it by "not calling it by its
name, but describing it as if seen for the first time; an event, as if it were
happening for the first time" (p. 14). This key role of time in Shklov-
skij's theory (a first time, an aesthetic expansion of duration) is later
complemented by his concept of device as the "rotation" of an object in
its semantic space (like "turning a log on the fire"), the shifting of the
object out of its typical association into radically different ones, thus
presenting a fresh and uneffaced side in a sort of textual space for our
perception. Hence, Shklovskij can speak of a "semantic shift" (sdvig)
as a physical metaphor (p. 79). Shklovskij maps out an economy de-
pendent on heightened and lengthened aesthetic perception generated
by the use of defamiliarizing and other types of devices and roughened
forms. His theory, and its rhetoric, neatly invert a common-sense dic-
tum, since for Shklovskij it is the aesthetically given referent of language
which rhetorically is named as the "real" object re-presented and per-
ceived in all its fresh originality-instead of the object referred to by our
practical, daily, or even scientific discourses. According to Shklovskij's
metaphorics, only poetic language can ensure the perceptual presence
of the referent of language. Perception is the center of aesthetic experi-
ence, and perception can only be established by effecting a (textual)
difference: to break down the indifferent recognition of automatization.
Shklovskij's theory deserves to be named an economics of perception
in which the "cost" of perception is the difficulty defamiliarization (and
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 SHKLOVSKIJ AND DIFF?RANCE

other less important devices) creates for a reader on a plane textually

delimited by spaces of meaning and by the time required to assimilate
and recognize an object deformed/defamiliarized in its poetic sound-
structure or description.
The theoretical consequences of Shklovskij's economic formulation
are far-reaching. Poetic language comes to be viewed as a "real" set of
values and perceptions inside the economy, a "hard currency" of per-
ception; practical language, as an efficient but heavily deflated currency
ruined by automatization. The former is primary and originary, and
underwrites the whole system of language; the latter is secondary and
parasitic, constantly deflating the economy and dissipating the value
(i.e., perceptual presence) instituted by the former. Even more impor-
tant, perhaps, is the general economic theory of literature which
Shklovskij went on to elaborate on the basis of this primary textual
economy. Literature as a whole will come to be characterizedas a closed
system, the historical dynamics of which is a permutating canonization
of members of essentially finite sets of devices, motifs, themes, genres,
motivations, character types, and so on. While this is definitely a sys-
tematic process for Shklovskij, the literary economy is a-teleonomic
(i.e., it "goes nowhere") and-as he claimed in his polemics against
Soviet opponents-"Literature" has a quite selective relation to "Life,"
neither reflecting it nor being necessarily compelled to draw literary
"material" from it. Still, perception qua difference is the principle
governing the system and its activity; worn-out and devalued combina-
tions of motifs and devices have to be broken up and recombined in
order to generate new perception when they themselves are "familiar."
In general, this theoretical field, which Shklovskij maps out for the
definition and employment of what he calls "perception," has been
dominant if not always explicit in much literary theory.

Now Shklovskij never claims to present a "metaphysics"of the sign,

reading, or writing, and he consistently blurs any distinction between
"art" and writing. Therefore, my exposition of the function of language
as a scene of production of difference/perception is a construal of his
theoretical model. Such a metaphysics is nonetheless discernible in his
rhetoric and diction when he describes his ostensibly central concept,
perception. If that concept is read and questioned in the context of the
linguistic sign, then we have to understand perception and the presence
it entails as a transitory duplex mediation of time and space. Time: the
aesthetic object must be temporally prior to a text's being written or
read (since an artistic device like defamiliarization is a restoration of
difference to an object which has "lost" it in the course of a life) and
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the text produces this perceptual difference by a crucial dilation of

reading/textual time. Space: the aesthetic object can only be under-
stood as something spatially exterior to the text to which the latter
"refers" ;3 the text and its signs remain spatially secondary, since while
they are metaphoricallyaligned on a spatial grid of meaning (a semantic
chessboard) in which semantic defamiliarizationis effected by displace-
ments into different contiguities, the perception thus engendered is not
"of" the signs and the text but of objects "elsewhere." The sign and
text are inescapably secondary, substitutional, provisional and refer to
presence elsewhere, at some other time.
Derrida's deconstructive work is directed toward a break with this
sort of "classical semiology" which can only define the linguistic/
written sign as a deferral of or substitution for perceptual presence.
Rather than situating writing in relation to the presence of a referential
object, he situates it in relation to diffirance, a quasi-concept melding
temporal deferral and spatial-material difference. A deconstruction of
Shklovskij's theories and metaphors will accordingly pivot on the roles
of perception, life, and presence.
What Shklovskij wants to show is that the operation of defamiliari-
zation and its consequent perception in the literary system is like the
Windingof a watch (the introduction of energy into a physical system) :
both "originate" difference, change, value, motion, presence. Con-
sidered against the general and functional background of Derridian
differance, what Shklovskij calls "perception" can be considered a
matrix for production of difference. While Shklovskij defines art as a
means for restoring perception of the world, it is evident that for him
"artfulness" is equivalent to sheer difference (which had been lost to
automatization). Diffrance, however, forces us to consider that this
difference, making possible "live" and full aesthetic perception, has to
be simultaneously, paradoxically thought as the "death" or effacement
of the system and its differences, the forfeiture of the time aesthetically
expanded and the "spacings" of meanings achieved, a loss of perceptual
presence from the economy.
Derrida: "The economic character of diffirance in no way implies
that the deferred presence can always be recovered, that it simply
amounts to an investment that only temporarily and without loss delays
the presentation of presence, that is, the perception of gain and the gain
of perception."4Derrida thus notes the gain and loss in the play of text
3 But Shklovskij never develops questions of the referential process or status
of poetic/aesthetic discourse: this is the syncopal blind spot of his theory.
4 Jacques Derrida, "La differance," in Thdorie d'ensemble (Paris, 1968), trans.
"Differance" in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, Ill., 1973), p. 151;
all references are to the translation.

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 SHKLOVSKIJ AND DIFFP RANCE

and signs and characterizes writing in terms of a "trace" that can be

effaced: "The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a
presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace
has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement always belongs to the
very structure of the trace. Effacement must always be able to overtake
the trace; otherwise it would not be a trace but an indestructible and
monumental substance."5The bind in Shklovskij's theory occurs at this
precise point, since defamiliarization cannot be a simple profit or gain
for the economy: he wavers between an implication that a text really
successful in introducing perception will be such a "monumental sub-
stance" (hence escape the wearing-down of automatization) and a rec-
ognition that any given usage of defamiliarization to institute percep-
tion constitutes a (mere) phase in the movement of the literary econ-
omy. What Shklovskij does not, cannot "place" is the functioning of
writing as a supplement to a "lack" of difference (remember again that
"art" restores difference). The paradox of the supplement in Derrida's
discussion6 is that it is "at the same time" too little and too much differ-
ence (a supplements fills a lack, but the supplement is added to some-
thing, supposed to be complete, and thus is extra, disruptive). But this
relation of writing to effacement can only be seen by questioning writing
and the sign, which are presupposed by Shklovskij's economic theory.
If he had explicitly raised the question of writing and the supplement,
Shklovskij's economy would have endangered itself as a theoretical
construct and undermined the relation it supposes between "art" and
"life." Since each successive supplement of perception, each application
of defamiliarizing-deforming devices to current-habitualized literary
norms is established as such against a literary "past," "it is the very
idea of a first time which becomes enigmatic."'7If the economy Shklov-
skij outlines depends on an origin, orginary difference, and presence,
how could it plausibly begin? His economic model is predicated on the
"recovery of the sensation of life," a recuperationof perceptual fullness :
but since we are only in the non-simple "presence" of the text, "life"
can only manifest itself as a memory of an originary experience. Thus
Shklovskij's economy of "art" begins to threaten or at least put in
question the very theoretical partner-"life"-which it was economi-
cally pledged to "restore" and "preserve." Was "life" really "per-
5 Derrida, p. 156.
6 For
"supplement," see Derrida, "La structure, le signe, et le jeu dans le dis-
cours des sciences humaines," in L'dcriture et la difference (Paris, 1967), trans.
"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Writing
and Difference (Chicago, Ill., 1978), pp. 278-93.
7 Derrida, "Freud et la scene de l'&criture,"in L'dcriture et la difference, trans.
"Freud and the Scene of Writing" in Writing and Difference, p. 202; hereafter
the translation will be cited parenthetically in the text.

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

ceived"? If, following Derrida's suggestions, the sign is classically to

be understood as a postponement of perception, a reference to a percep-
tion at some place apart from the text and its signs, then we have to
agree with Derrida that "it is thus delay which is in the beginning ...
To say that differance is originary is simultaneously to erase the myth
of a present origin" (Writing, p. 203). Under the stress of diffirance,
Shklovskij's economy and its agent, defamiliarization, threaten to can-
cel the "possibility" of the originary experience they purport to restore.

To unfold this relationship between writing, past/memory, and pres-

ence/perception we must turn to the context mapped by Derrida's
"Freud and the Scene of Writing." For Shklovskij's literary theory, as
for Freud's metapsychology, perception must be placed in (diametric)
opposition to memory. Literature as a historical whole is an inert past,
a dead/deadening automatized memory for the economy-but never-
theless an absolutely necessary backdrop interacting with live present
perception. Shklovskij leaves unwritten memory's implicit threat to
perception as well as the threat to perception ("life" ?) posed by the
real presence of an object. Similarly, for Freud in the 1895 Project,
perceptual pleasure is the principle of life, but an excess of it offers a
deadly threat to the psychic system: hence a direct relationshipbetween
death and sexuality. For Shklovskij writing is implicitly constrained to
mediate and defer perception or meaning by establishing a simulacrum
of presence, a deferral of its object, and writing is absolutely required
to be a repetition (or an iterable activity) inasmuch as the difference it
establishes always tends to be lost to automatization, time, reading,
recognition: writing will always be called upon to repeat its production
of lively difference (as if, ominously, life could not subsist on its own).
Derrida traces the analogous movement of theoretical drives-the same
theoretical "necessity"-in Freud's discovery of the "repetition com-
pulsion" and the "death instinct":
All these differences in the production of the trace may be reinterpreted as mo-
ments of deferring. In accordancewith a motif which will continue to dominate
Freud's thinking, this movementis describedas the effort of life to protect itself
by deferring a dangerous cathexis, that is, by constituting a reserve (Vorrat).
The threatening expense or presence are deferred with the help of fraying or
repetition. Is this not already the circuitous path (Aufschub) which institutes the
relation of pleasureto reality (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) ? Is it not already
death at the origin of a life which can defend itself against death only through an
economyof death, diffe'rance,repetition,and reserve? (Writing, p. 202, modified)
Shklovskij's economic model attempts to put the past/memory into
functional relation to the present/perception through the agency of

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 SHKLOVSKIJ AND DIFF?RANCE

writing; Freud's long search for a model representation of the psychic

mechanism was a search for a system that could preserve the traces of
the past (memory) and yet be constantly and safely open to their present
inscription (perception, effect, pleasure). "Safely" since any pleasure
of perception which cannot be "contained," mediated, and iterated by
the mechanism can be a fatal "overload." Even broaching the problem
in this way threatens Shklovskij's theoretical "life."
In 1925 Freud announced and elucidated his discovery of such an
instrumental model of the psychic mechanism in a short essay "A Note
upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad.' "" The pad is the children's toy, an
erasable writing slate composed of celluloid and waxed-paper sheets
over a wax slab base. Its writing surface can constantly be erased and
re-inscribed (perception, perceptual inscription) and the slab beneath
tends to preserve past inscriptions while making possible new ones
(memory). Derrida draws out the three elements of this metaphoric
representation of the psyche which will extend our comparative reading
back to Shklovskij : the mechanism's self-shielding, its spatiality, and
its temporality. First, "Freud insists on the essentially protective nature
of the celluloid sheet. Without it, the fine waxed paper would be
scratched or ripped. There is no writing which does not devise some
means of protection, to protect against itself, against the writing by
which the 'subject' is himself threatened as he lets himself be written"
(Writing, p. 224). Second, the spatiality of the apparatus is such that
the memory-trace (in the wax slab) and the perceptual inscription (the
pattern of adherence between the slab and the waxed-paper sheet) are
(almost) on the same flat horizontal surface: thus this spatiality seems
to be able to efface the difference of temporality between its two com-
ponents (as if they were not two different layers) and hence "erase"
their mutual threat. Derrida expands on this conjunction of the two
systems of perception and memory: "Writing supplements perception
before perception even appears to itself ... 'Memory' or writing is the
opening of that process of appearance itself. The 'perceived' may only
be read in the past, beneath perception and after it" (Writing, p. 224).
Third, the temporality of the pad (its tracing and erasure via the pe-
riodic adhesion and rupture of its layers), far from being effaced in the
course of the machine's functioning, takes instead a "pivotal" place in
that functioning, affords writing its proper dynamics, assures the very
possibility or capability of perception. Writing depends on erasure just
as (much as) erasure (logically) demands (prior) writing; the present
(perception) demands and dislocates the past (memory). Hence Der-
8 Sigmund Freud, "A Note upon the 'Mystic Writing-Pad,'" The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey, XIX (London, 1961), 227-32.
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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

rida speaks about the "two-handed"work (inscription and effacement)

of writing and trace which is bound up with its peculiar temporality:
Time is the economy of a system of writing. This machinedoes not run by itself.
It is less a machinethan a tool. And it is not held with only one hand. This is the
mark of its temporality.Its maintenanceis not simple. The ideal virginity of the
present (maintenant) is constitutedby the work of memory ... Traces thus pro-
duce the space of their inscription only by acceding to the period of their erasure.
From the beginning,in the "present"of their first impression,they are constituted
by the double force of repetition and erasure, readability and unreadability. (Writ-
ing, p. 226, modified)

With these threads we can draw out the theoretical blockage or bind
into which Shklovskij's economy moves by its relation of perception
and memory.
The outlines of Shklovskij's metaphysics of writing now emerge a
little more distinctly. While seldom referring to the sign and writing,
these "unnamed"concepts govern the economy Shklovskij articulates.
Reading-as-perception occupies writing's place in the theoretical
schema. A writing machine which produces (literary or textual) differ-
ence is thus unnamed and out of sight from Shklovskij's theoretical
point of view, but he is quite insistent on the reproduction of difference
and its inscription onto the reading subject in the perceptual process.
First, the spatiality of writing affords Shklovskij a functionality
homologous to the functionality it affords Freud. Shklovskij's discus-
sions "naively" show us how, on the same "flat" surface of a page in
Tolstoy which defamiliarizes the experience of the opera, the same kind
of interplay between perceptual- and memory-systems finds a literary-
textual mirroring as Tolstoy's writing disrupts, erases, and respaces
the memory traces of an inert and automatized literary memory, what
Barthes has designated as the "already-read."The same flat surface of
the written page "binds together" a quasi-infinite literary past (too
weak to induce perception), a mnemic depth and also the surface/skin
of perception, the (re)production of aesthetic difference on/with these
dead memory traces through recombinations, naive simplicity of de-
scription, and other factors constituting the device of defamniliarization.
Thus defamiliarization and perception spring from an (illusory) non-
disjunction-an adhesion in space-of these systems.
The temporality of Shklovskij's implicit theory of writing situates
his vision of literary-historical dynamics. Instead of implicit or con-
ventional conceptions of literature as a continuous flow of writings
within a continuous temporal framework (e.g., a theory of direct
"father-to-son" inheritance), Shklovskij's notion of an ongoing viola-
tion of (paternal) norms in which earlier devalued, even archaic forms
(in a deviational relation, say, from the "uncle to nephew") are recom-
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 SHKLOVSKIJ AND DIFF?RANCE

bined helps us move toward a nonlinear and discontinuous conception

of writing-in-time ("literary history"): hence Shklovskij's frequent
metaphor of the oblique chessboard movement of the knight.9 But
Shklovskij neglects the discontinuous periodicity of the writing ma-
chine, its two-handed dialectics: for him it is still a simple writing in
time, and accumulation of writing(s) over time, whereas what is re-
quired is to stress very explicitly the dual nature of the writing machine
which differance exposes. Only thus by relating oneself to inscription
and erasure can questions of intertextuality ("literary history") be
forcefully broached in all their dimensions (what texts Tolstoy's text
relates itself to and disrupts as well as those which it resembles). But
such an appreciation of the temporality of the writing machine, of its
unpredictably periodic adhesion and rupturing between its layers or
textual components is fatal for the whole theoretical-economicconstruct
Shklovskij has built up.
Derrida assesses the "fatal" nature of Freud's compulsion to repre-
sent the psyche or psychic mechanism by the metaphor of the writing
pad in terms of the death instinct and Freud's own relation to it:
That the machine does not run by itself means something else: a mechanism
without its own energy. The machine is dead. It is death. Not because we risk
death in playing with machines,but because the origin of machinesis the relation
to death ... Representationis death. Which may be immediately transformed
into the following proposition: death is (only) representation... A pure repre-
sentation,a machine,never runs by itself... Abandonedto itself, the multiplicity
of layered surfaces of the machine is a dead complexity without depth ... Far
from the machine being a pure absence of spontaneity, its resemblance to the
psychic apparatus,its existence and its necessity bear witness to the finitude of
the mnemic spontaneity which is thus supplemented.The machine-and conse-
quently, representation-is death and finitude within the psyche. (Writing, pp.
227-28,modified)
Here, the import of these final pages of Derrida's text on Freud may
provisionally be understood as the "realization"of death-within-life, of
the paradoxically upset versions of "perception"and "memory" which
remain in force once the question of writing is explicitly brought into
play. We saw the function of the top, celluloid layer of the pad for
Freud: to protect the psychic apparatusfrom (an excess of) perception
that would rupture the apparatus. But when he finally solves the prob-
lem of modeling the psyche as apparatus,nothing protects Freud's writ-
ing-pad model from its own metaphor, its own conceptual suppositions,
from the consequences of representing the psychic apparatus by a me-
9 It seems quite possible that the analogy of the chessboard and its shifting
interrelations of elements may have been (or become) a covert reference to Saus-
sure in Shklovskij's discussions of defamiliarization, literary heritage, and nar-
rative process (for which the chessboard offers a model of gambits and responses).

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

chanical writing apparatus. In one sense the psychic system "is" (a

form of) writing, but in view of this "absolutely necessary" supplemen-
tary representation of it-the "fact" that the dead writing pad is such
an apposite representation, the "fact" that Freud was compelled to
offer any such representation or metaphor-we are inescapably forced
to acknowledge a theoretical backlash, a fatality within the (psycho-
analytic, theoretical) system which recuperates the whole play of meta-
phor, the whole system of theoretical constructs in Freud's writing:
the fatality of representation draws us into a larger web of relations
between death, sexuality, "perception/memory," and life.
This very point knots and unbinds all the threads of our comparative
analysis of Shklovskij's textual economy. This troublesome "celluloid
sheet" is non-materialized in Shklovskij's theoretical construct but is
now easily and obviously recognized: it is the "transparent" (cellu-
loid) difference between "art" and "life," the silent difference between
real and aesthetic "perception" which Shklovskij implies but does not
and cannot explicate. "Art" is necessary to "recover"-to supplement
-"life" in Shklovskij's terms, but the mechanism of art or of aesthetic
perception must implicitly and imperatively be protected from its the-
oretical partner in the economy, from a real perception or presence. One
realizes how-in a movement of Freudian denegation-Shklovskij's
formulations negate or cancel out the existence/possibility of "real"
perception: variously, by (1) the familiar Formalist denial of a link
between literature and life, connoting their status as non-conmmuni-
cating vessels, (2) always, as if compulsively, referring to real experi-
ence in terms of empty, dead, and automatized repetition and recogni-
tion, and (3) implicitly locating real perception at an unspecifiable
temporally anterior and spatially other place, at a mythic "first time"
of naive experience, the loss of which to automatization is to be restored
by aesthetic perceptual fullness. The ostensible center of this Shklov-
skian economy of defamiliarization, effort, delay, perception and pres-
ence-what orients the whole economy, regulates its time and space,
its activities, successes, and general history as a system-is in "fact" an
illusion, mirage, or blind spot: a theoretical "fiction" of a noncognitive
aesthetic perception which represents its object, which is "like" real
perception but is (somehow) more "real"than the real, more efficacious
in affording the full and live presence of its object than real perception.
"Under" or "behind" this ontologically "clear celluloid" shield of dif-
ference, "art," "literature,"or more pertinently, writing "itself" can be
protected in its functioning, can mediate and repeat simulacra of per-
ceptual presence, illusory re-presentations of the real (real "life") with-
out danger of real perceptual presence shattering the aesthetic economy
or its apparatus.
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 SHKLOVSKIJ AND DIFFfRANCE

But nothing protects Shklovskij's theory or economy from the 'fatal'

consequences of writing-as-representation.'0 "Trapped" in representa-
tion (in an understanding of writing as a re-presentation of its/an
object), in references and drafts drawn on a perceptual presence writ-
ing cannot yield or make good for him, Shklovskij's theory is "fatally"
unable to postulate the question of writing (instead of "art" in terms of
"device") in such a way as to grasp that "automatization" is inherent
in representational writing itself, in its very economy (as much as, or
more than in our perception of a supposed referent of such writing),
that the hemorrhage of difference inside the literary economy is an
inescapable factor in writing-as-trace, in writing as dissemination of
meaning and difference. Shklovskij's mis-recognition of the "death in-
stinct" (the self-erasure or rupture) of/in his own writing and the-
orizing, this movement of "unwitting" supplementation of difference
(whose repeated loss remains theoretically unaccountable) forms the
pathos of this century's first systematic theory of literature.
University of Minnesota
10 What should be noted is that Shklovskij, unlike Freud, did not strive to offer
a concrete metaphorical representation of writing itself; for Shklovskij, writing
is representation. Whereas in some of his early texts a word is a sign whose own
object side (the materiality of the signifier) can be the object of attention (as
in the case of Futurist word-work, trans-sense language, and so on), in his general
poetics Shklovskij's formulations posit an immediate transit between the "word"
and its referent-object: the textual level is erased, or better, the entire problem-
atic of the text and sign is (a) voided.

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