The deautomation (V.

Shklovski: "The art as artifice", 1917)

Essentially, the concept of deautomation refers to – and it is easy to understand that they could
numerous backgrounds in the history of literary criticism are mentioned - an unexpected break with the
foreseeable in pursuit of an aesthetic intention. The starting point for the theoretical-critical operability of
this concept was found in an interesting observation by Victor Shklovski: "if we examine the laws of
Perception shows us that once actions become habitual, they transform into automatic responses.
Having discovered the automatism of habit and its disastrous consequences for art, the formalists ...
they worked hard to find the most suitable antidote.
Indeed, in the face of the evidence that the usual, the everyday, is not perceived in an authentic manner,
but simply recognized - and at that time it was referred to as an automated or elliptical perception - the
formalists proposed the need to give a new treatment to artistic material so that certain
elements will take on special relevance and thus draw the viewer's attention, to the point that
he would feel compelled to stop for a longer time in his contemplation. Shklovski stated it with
great clarity

The purpose of art is to provide a sensation of the object as vision and not as recognition; the
procedures of art are the singularization of objects, and that which consists of darkening the form, in
increase the difficulty and duration of perception.

It was understood that the main artistic objective was to return to art a perception
authentic, that is to say, in avoiding indifference at the reception pole. To achieve this, the formalists
they considered it necessary to put certain undoing mechanisms into operation that would cause in the
viewer or reader an effect of "estrangement" (ostranenie). When illuminated in a special way, with
a new light, the work demanded greater attention and the viewer's retina paused on it during the
time needed to understand it and enjoy it, no longer simply to recognize it. With these ideas
he was able to offer a coherent explanation of artistic evolution and also fed the hope of
that boredom will be banished from art: using the appropriate resources in each context - for the
Desautomatization is an essentially contextual phenomenon - the artist could combat it.
As has just been seen, Shklovski defends the primary purpose of art as the singularization of
the objects, that is to say, to restore to the objects their singular, particular, own, and inalienable character, so that
they are truly seen and not just recognized. It has also been seen that one of the most
Usual means that art uses to achieve this goal is to obscure the form to enhance the
difficulty. The basic idea here is that with a difficult form, the duration of the
perception, as the receiver has to spend more time observing the artistic object to understand it
Actually. In this way, art becomes a means to destroy the automatism of perception.
To free the object from automated perception, the artist has various means - to which
We can call them desautomating procedures - aimed at capturing the attention of the reader or viewer.
As Todorov explains, paraphrasing Shklovski:

Habit prevents us from seeing, feeling objects; it is necessary to deform them so that our gaze...
stop in them: that is the purpose of artistic conventions. The same process explains the changes of
style in art: once accepted, conventions facilitate automatism instead of destroying it (Todorov,
1980).

According to Shklovski, then, when actions become habitual, they cease to be perceived and become
simply, recognized, that is to say, the viewer barely pays attention because they glimpse some features
formal to which their retina is already so accustomed that it is not necessary to pay too much attention.
It is necessary then to provoke a sense of 'estrangement' to break with automation and achieve
attract the viewer, arouse their interest. In reality, what the formalists were interested in was not so much the
activity of perception as the techniques and resources that the writer uses to provoke
this effect of "estrangement" that leads the viewer to focus their attention and in this way theirs ceases to be
an automated perception.
The pragmatic considerations underlying this theory are clearly evident, and the
It is curious that, in essence, they were already contemplated in the system of classical rhetoric. For, as has
Lausberg explained that in the configuration of a rhetorical speech, the 'emotional effect' was taken into great consideration.
what the unexpected exerts on man," that is, the "experience of alienation," which comes to oppose
another type of experience, the 'experience of the habitual, whose extreme form is boredom (taedium, fastidium)'
The speaker capable of achieving a high degree of alienation in his audience, explains Lausberg, is
was distinguished by his audacity. It is not difficult to appreciate the affinity that exists between these ideas and those handled by
the Russian formalists when referring to de-automization. Instead of 'alienation', the formalists spoke
of 'estrangement', but the essence was the same, it was about underlining in the field of reception.
artistic the effect caused by the presence of the unpredictable.
In light of what has been presented so far, it is noted that there are four elements that must be considered.
consideration in every phenomenon of deautomation:

The artist who creates the artifice by darkening the form and increasing the difficulty of perception.
2. The procedures used to capture the reader's attention.
3. The receiver, who performs the action of perception and grants the procedure an aesthetic value.
4. The duration of the aesthetic effectiveness of the procedure. Here comes the diachronic perspective, that is,
the awareness that, over time, the unautomating procedures become victims of
Automation then exhausts its aesthetic effectiveness, and it is necessary to resort to other procedures.

Over time, the concept of de-automation was broadened by Tinianov and Mukarovski. These
authors strived to ensure that this concept was not conceived as a static principle, and contributed
then the notion of function. Its goal was to make clear that it is not the sum of artifices that grants the
poeticity to a text, but rather the function that those artifices play. They wanted to draw attention to the
the fact that in all artistic construction there is always a clearly dominant constructive principle
marked by the scale of aesthetic values in force in each specific era. The modifications in the scale of
Aesthetic values provoke a change in the dominant principle, along with the functions it entails.
different literary elements play within a work. In this way, the concept of
deautomatization acquires a diachronic value: it does not refer to a deviation from an absolute norm, but rather
to a diversion for aesthetic purposes regarding a changing norm. But these issues lead already to the
problem of literary evolution, about which the formalists also had much to say.

(D. Viñas, History of Literary Criticism, Barcelona, 2002)

***
For Mukarovskij, the receiver experiences estrangement towards the literary text they receive, paying more attention
interest in the language mechanisms of the text, in the nature of its linguistic artifice. The receiver is seen
induced to strive to interpret the literary message, which delays the communicative process. The
communication is not direct, it is not automatic, but deferred from the literary text as a work of art.
In the process of deautomation, rhythm, rhyme, figures, perspective plays, and
narrative viewpoints and the alteration of the logical-chronological order of the narrated events.
The purpose of literary language is primarily aesthetic. In literary language, what is primarily of interest is the language itself.

language. For most Russian formalists, literary language is characterized as dialect

noun of the common language. Jan Mukarovskij, within the Prague Linguistic Circle, developed, in this
same meaning, the important formula of the intentional violation of the common linguistic norm, which became
a defining feature of poetic language. But the Russian formalists, as a whole, did not manage to establish a
unanimous attitude in the consideration of literary language in its relations with common language. For Jurij
Tynjanov, for example, the poetic code is independent of the common and the literary languages of verse and of
prose are clearly different from each other.
 The concepts of literariness and poeticity are differentiated by García Berrio.1literariness refers to the
artistic specificity possessed by verbal artworks that use mechanisms of literariness in any of
its levels; in this way, a text is characterized by having literary specificity when it contains
certain metric schemes, when the syntactic structure of their parts is altered, when
it tends to plurivocality, when it is fictional, etc.. The concept of poeticity, on the other hand, refers to the value
Aesthetic that the works achieve. Literariness is not a guarantee of poeticness, but all works that achieve
Poeticity possesses the characteristic of literariness. Speaking of literariness, García Berrio expresses himself in the
I conceive literariness as the specific property of verbal texts.
conventionalized as literature, in terms of cultural decision, an option or initiative
restricted, enacted at the moment of constructing under a singular model of 'norm'
a certain type of verbal text with artistic intent. The literary is therefore a modality
concrete of the general artistic. We all recognize the failed poem or story of the amateur.
circumstantial the will of its author to create a literary object. But if it is understood and...
clearly distinguishes between literariness as an artificial execution of certain 'procedures'
of the language -Viktor Shklovsky- and poeticity as a sentimental result and general aesthetic effect
-Benedetto Croce-, the literary option of any value is immediately and easily discerned.
"poetic" (A. García Berrio, "What is it that poetry is", cited, p. 180).

1
Cf. A. García Berrio, “Linguistics. Literariness/Poeticity. (Grammar, Pragmatics, Text)”, cited, pp. 165-168; A. García
Berrio, The imaginary construction in 'Cántico' by Jorge Guillén, cited, pp. 49 and following; A. García Berrio, 'What is it that the
poetry is,” cit.; A. García Berrio, Theory of literature, cit., pp. 69-198 and A. García Berrio and M. T. Hernández, The
Poetics: Tradition and Modernity, cited, pp. 69-71.