Shaking the habitual: a synthesis between Bakhtinian dialogism and Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation through relational aesthetics

This essay constitutes an attempt to synthesise Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s definition of art as proposed in "Art as Technique'' and Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogicity. It will incorporate themes from French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s book Relational Aesthetics , which heavily rely on the relations between viewer and art. Central to this attempt is Shklovsky’s concept of defamiliarisation - a roughening of the perception. Taken together with Bakhtin’s ideas on multivoicedness, and Bourriaud’s inter-subjective aestheticism, defamiliarisation can be seen as a powerful tool through which to establish a dialogue between subject and object-a dialogue that engenders, authors, and creates art. Shklovsky also states that the object is not important for art to happen. This view, when taken to its logical extreme, contends that everything and anything can be art, which many critics consider to be a damaging notion. Detractors of this perspective will often gripe about how art becomes meaningless with such assumptions, and that this leads to a nihilistic interpretation of-not just art-but of the grander project of life, but this paper rejects this fearful attitude and instead strives to surpass petty existentialism for a more constructive mindset. This stance already reeks of a postmodern interpretation of art and therefore, as David Shepherd has said, runs the risk that any Bakhtinian interpretation does. Namely, that of "seeming to rehearse the tired gesture by which the Soviet theorist is burdened with the credit for having [...] always already anticipated and surpassed the most significant theoretical trends of recent decades'' [Shepherd, 1989, p. 91]. However, the crux of this synthesis lies precisely in the interplay between the three perspectives; it is neither Bakhtin, nor Shklovsky, nor Bourriaud who has the singular concept which leads to a more positivistic infusion to add to this meaning-denying philosophical stance. Instead, the radical implications contained within all three authors’ works come together in dialogue, and only then are able to form a more constructive aesthetics of art and artfulness.