The Exception as the Rule in Art, Law, and Science

Abstract

The Exception as the Rule in Art, Law, and Science Peter Steiner (bio) Wir bitten euch aber:Was nicht fremd ist, findet befremdlich!Was gewöhnlich ist, findet unerklärlich!Was üblich ist, das soll euch erstaunen.Was die Regel ist, das erkennt als Missbrauch … —Bertolt Brecht, Die Ausnahme und die Regel.1 If in 1917 when Shklovsky coined his most famous concept "ostranenie"—known in English either in its nominal form of "defamilarization" ("estrangement") or as a verbal construction "to make strange"—it was a puzzling neologism,2 the intervening century has brought about its thorough domestication. Today it seems virtually impossible to add something new to our knowledge of it. Defamiliarization has been compared to Socratic irony (Hansen-Löve 22), the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius (Ginsburg), Nietzschean "critical history," (Kujundžić 18-9), and Derridian différance (Crawford). Its genealogy has been traced back to Hegel (Paramonov), Henry Bergson (Curtis), and William James (Erlich 155) to mention just the most obvious inspirational [End Page 1215] sources. Meanwhile, it penetrated the discourse of many disciplines (Tulchinskii) some of which at the time of its coinage did not exist, such as cinematology (Oever), translation theory (Buzadzhi), or gender studies (Hollinger). And this it did despite (or, perhaps, just because of) its pronounced conceptual vagueness, also well illustrated (cf., e. g., Laferrière, or Sternberg). If neither strictly original nor analytically precise, why has the term "ostranenie" resisted so successfully the onslaught of time? In my paper, I will argue that this is so because the way Shklovsky formulated this concept fitted exceedingly well into the choir of voices challenging, in the early years of the 20th century, the time-honored positivist paradigm of knowledge. Its flaws, these dissidents decried, were legion. How applicable, they were asking, are the reductive mathematical-logical models of rationality to the study of social reality given the obvious fallibility of human subjects and the innumerable contingencies of their actual existence? Are scholars the detached beholders of the data at hand representing them just as they are rather than, in fact, involved agents interpreting the world—whether by default or by choice—from a partial perspective? And can bottom-up inductive reasoning infer, from the predictable repetition of phenomenal data, the universal laws for every and all experience and knowledge? It is the unexpected, deviant, and abnormal—the anti-positivists defiantly proclaimed—which should serve as the defining moment of any inquiry! To illustrate my thesis, I will draw examples from writings of scholars who are never or only very rarely juxtaposed to Shklovsky or compared to each other: the German legal scholar-cum-political philosopher Carl Schmitt3 and, in a somewhat more circumspect way, the Viennese philosopher of science Karl Popper. I am fully cognizant of how incongruous this trio looks from the cultural or political perspective and how intellectually disconnected these thinkers might seem.4 Yet (and this will be my chief point) in carving up the subject-matter of their respective inquiries, the aesthetician, the jurist, and the philosopher of science used quite analogous heuristic stratagems. All three of the above scholars whose theories I will compare, advanced them as a reaction to the prevailing practices in their [End Page 1216] disciplines which they found wanting. In Shklovsky's case, his earliest publications (with which I will be primarily concerned) railed against the contemporary definitions of art fashioned—in the spirit of positivism—after mathematics or physics. Like Potebnia's famous "general formula of poetry (or art): 'A (image) < X (meaning),'" according to which the aesthetic effect comes from an uneven ratio of images to meanings (the former must be always smaller than the latter) (100) or Veselovskii's differentiation of poetic and prosaic style in terms of their respective conservation of mental energy (273-6)—a concept he borrowed from Herbert Spencer. Art, Shklovsky argued vis-à-vis Potebnia, is not always "thinking in images," (Iskusstvo 60) and poetic style does not save mental energy, as Veselovskii would have it, but rather squanders it (62). With equal vigor the young Formalist denounced the laissez-faire tenor of the Symbolists' taste, because it was oblivious to the fact that "the arts...