Taken for Granted: The Remarkable Power of the Unremarkable by Eviatar Zerubavel

Author:Eviatar Zerubavel [Zerubavel, Eviatar]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Gender Studies, LGBT Studies, Gay Studies, Minority Studies, Discrimination & Race Relations, Literary Criticism, Semiotics & Theory, Social Classes & Economic Disparity, Lesbian Studies
ISBN: 9780691177366
Google: RXKYDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0691177368
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

Artistic Foregrounding

Activists and academics, however, are not the only ones who try to subvert prevailing semiotic asymmetries by purposefully foregrounding the conventionally unmarked. So, indeed, do artists.100 After all, “maintaining the familiar as strange is fundamental to disciplined creativity,”101 and by “remov[ing] objects from the automatism of perception” art in fact helps make them unfamiliar.102 In “mak[ing] things the object of attention rather than of habituated action”103 it thus promotes deautomatization and therefore defamiliarization.

Consider, for example, poetry, aptly characterized by Novalis as “[t]he art . . . of making an object strange,”104 an idea more explicitly developed later by Shklovsky, who viewed it as specifically designed

to counteract the process of habituation encouraged by routine everyday modes of perception. We . . . cease to “see” the world we live in. . . . The aim of poetry is to reverse that process, to defamiliarize that with which we are overly familiar, to “creatively deform” the usual, the normal.105

The very role of poetry, in other words, is therefore to foreground by deautomatizing.106 Lamenting the fact that “in consequence of the film of familiarity . . . we have eyes, yet see not,” Samuel Coleridge, for instance, praised poetry’s ability to “awake[n] the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom.”107 More specifically, added Percy Shelley, it “strips the veil of familiarity from the world” by “mak[ing] familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”108

The role of art in deautomatizing our perception also underlies Bertolt Brecht’s vision of the theater’s ability to “estrange the familiar, and problematise the self-evident”109:

Before familiarity can turn into awareness the familiar must be stripped of its inconspicuousness [and] labelled as something unusual.110

Characters and incidents from ordinary life . . . being familiar, strike us as more or less natural. Alienating them helps to make them seem remarkable to us.111

In fact, he specifically characterized such an “alienation effect” as a way of helping the theatrical audience avoid taking ordinary human occurrences for granted112 by turning the object of their attention from “something ordinary, familiar” into “something peculiar, striking and unexpected.”113

A somewhat analogous epistemically subversive effect can also be accomplished by turning the theatrical spotlight on the conventionally ignored, as exemplified by Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, as implied by its very title, essentially revolves around two minor, “background” characters from Hamlet.114 The same overall epistemic goal is likewise accomplished in films featuring habitually ignored “background persons”115 such as housemaids (The Help), butlers (The Butler), or backup singers (20 Feet from Stardom), as well as in books such as Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, which simply chronicles a three-day stream of mundane, “infra-ordinary” occurrences as part of a conscious attempt to capture “that which is . . . not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens.”116

Indeed, that is precisely what many artistic photographers also try to do. In sharp contrast to tourists, who usually gravitate to conventionally marked “attractions,”117 they often opt to take pictures of their unmarked, “ordinary” surroundings.

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