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Teksti constructive põhimõtted

Lotman, Juri 2006[1970]. Kunstilise teksti struktuur. Tõlkinud Pärt Lias; järelsõna Peeter Torop. Tallinn: Tänapäev.

Lotman, Juri 1977[1970]. The Structure of the Artistic Text. Translated by Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Niisuguse jaotamise mõtteks on osutada, et õige fraasi moodustamisel mingis loomulikus keeles sooritab kõneleja kaks eri toimingut:
  1. seob sõnad nõnda, et nad moodustaksid semantilises ja grammatilises suhtes õiged (äramärgitud) lülid;
  2. valib mingist elementide hulgast ühe, mida kasutatakse antud lauses.
Tekstisegmentide ühendamine üksteisega ja selle lisatähenduste moodustamine seesmise ümberkodeerimise põhimõttel ning tekstisegmentide võrdsustamine, mus muudab nad struktuurseteks sünonüümideks ja moodustab lisatähendusi välise ümberkodeerimise põhimõttel, moodustavad kunstilise teksti mehhanismi aluse. (Lotman 2006: 140)
The essence of this division manifests itself in the fact that when a speaker generates a grammatical phrase in any natural language, he performs two distinct acts: a) he combines words to form chains that are semantically and grammatically correct (marked); b) from a certain set of elements he selects the one used in the given sentence. The conjunction of textual segments, the consequent formation of additional meanings according to the principle of internal recoding, and the equation of segments of a text, which transforms them into structural synonyms and forms additional meanings according to the principle of external recoding, together compose the basis of the mechanics of an artistic text. (Lotman 1977: 79)
Paradigmaatiline ja süntagmaatiline telg. Valik ja kombinatsioon. Autofunktsioon ja sünfunktsioon. Semantika ja grammatika. Sisemine ümberkodeerimine seisneb siin, nagu ma aru saan, süntaktilises kombinatsioonis. Väline ümberkodeerimine seevastu seisneb semantilises valikus, näiteks väliselt sarnaste sõnade muutmine "struktuurseteks sünonüumideks".
Ekvivalents pole surnud ühetaolisus ning seetõttu peab ta silmas ka mittesarnasust. Sarnased tasandid korrastavad mittesarnaseid, luues neis sarnasussuhte. Samal ajal toimivad mittesarnased vastupidi, leides sarnases erineva. Seejuures, kuivõrd selle keeruka ennasthäälestava süsteemi lõppeesmärgiks on uue loomuliku keele tasandil mitteeksisteeriva semantika loomine, siis osutub loomulikus keeles semantilisi ja formaalseid seoseid kandvate elementide roll erinevaks. (Lotman 2006: 143)
Equivalence is not static uniformity and for that very reason it also entails dissimilarity. Similar levels organize dissimilar levels, establishing a relation of likeness in them as well. Simultaneously dissimilar levels perform the opposite task, revealing differences in the similar. Since the ultimate goal of this complex self-adjusting system is the formation of a new semantics not existing on the level of natural language, the role of elements which in natural language are responsible for semantic and formal ties will be different. (Lotman 1977: 80)
St konstruktiivne põhimõte siin on sarnane kummastamisega, aga nüüd semantilis-süntaktilises aspektis, mitte taju (Šklovski), žanri (Tõnjanov) või funktsiooni (Mukarovsky) aspektis.
Ühesuguste elementide liitmine lülideks toimub teiste seaduspärasuste järgi kui eriliigiliste liitmine - see leiab aset sidumisena ning taasloob selles mõttes kõneteksti fraasiülese ehituse põhitunnuse. Oluline on seejuures järgmine: ühe ja sama elemendi kordumine summutab tema semantika tähenduslikkuse (vrdl psühholoogilist efekti ühe ja sama sõna mõttetuseks muutuval lõputul kordamisel). Seevastu kerkib esile nende tähenduse kaotanud elementide sidumisviis. Nõnda toimub ühtaegu elementide endi formaliseerumine ning nende formaalsete seoste semantiseerumine. (Lotman 2006: 152)
The conjunction of identical elements in a chain is governed by laws other than those governing the conjunction of heterogeneous elements - it is constructed according to the principle of addition, and in this sense reproduces the basic trait of supra-phrasal construction characteristic of a spoken text. The following point is essential: the repetition of the same element mutes its semantic significance (cf. the psychological effect produced when a word is repeated several times, with the result that it begins to sound like nonsense. At the same time, the means for conjoining these elements themselves are formalized and simultaneously their formal bonds are semanticized. (Lotman 1977: 85-86)
Sisuliselt poeetiline funktsioon selle puhtal kujul: sõna toob iseennast esile sõltumata oma tähendusest.
Kuid tähelepanelikumal vaatlusel osutub elementide fraasisisese ja fraasuülese sidestamise absoluutne vastandamine kunstilise teksti ülesehituse süntagmaatilisel teljel raskendatuks. Tuues sisse teksti alguse ja lõpu kui kohustuslike struktuurielementide mõiste, võimaldame vaadelda kogu teksti ühe fraasina. Kuid fraasilised on ka teda moodustavad segmendid, millel on oma algused ja lõpud ning mis rajanevad teatud kindlal süntagmaatilisel skeemil. Niisiis võib kunstilise teksti ükskõik missugust olulist segmenti tõlgendada nii fraasina kui ka fraaside järgnevusena. Ja enamgi: selle abil, mida J. N. Tõnjanov nimetas sõnajada "kitsuseks" värsireas, R. O. Jakobson aga selektsioonitelje projektsiooniks ühendamisteljele, moodustavad kõrvuti seatud sõnad kunstilises tekstis antud segmendi piires semantiliselt lahutamatu terviku - fraseologismi. Selles mõttes suhestub ükskõik milline tähenduslik segment (kaasa arvatud universaalne segment - kogu teose tekst) mitte ainult tähenduste lülidega, vaid ka ühe liigendamatu tähendusega, see tähendab, osutub sõnaks. (Lotman 2006: 153)
If we take a closer look, however, we find it difficult to pose any absolute opposition between the phrasal and supra-phrasal conjunction of elements on the syntagmatic axis of an artistic text's construction. By introducing the concept of the beginning and end of a text as structural elements whose presence is obligatory, we permit the wholet ext to be examined as one phrase. But its constituent elements, which have their own beginning and end are costructed along syntagmatic lines, are also phrasal in nature. Thus any meaningful segment of an artistic text can be interpreted both as a phrase and as a sequence of phrases. Moreover, as a result of what Jurij Tynjanov calls the "compactness" of the verbal series in a line, and Roman Jakobson - the projection of the axis of selection onto the axis of combination - the words set together in an artistic text form a semantically indissoluble whole, a "phraseologoism," within a given segment - the entire text of a work) is correlated not only with a chain of meanings, but also with one indivisible meaning. In other words, any meaningful segment is a word. (Lotman 1977: 86-87)
Seda on käsitletud ka Kultuurisemiootika Teesides: tekst on samaaegselt märkide ahel ja ise üks terviklik märk.

Two papers on facecrime

Haywood, Ian 1988. Facecrime: George Orwell and the physiognomy of politics. Textual Practice 2(3): 345-366.

'Rebellion meant a look in the eyes.' Winston Smith's description of the mode in which political opposition to the state commences in Nineteen Eighty-Four has bathetic power. The significance of the communication (rebellion) arises from a minute physical gesture ('a look in the eyes'). That disparity attests to the repressive watchfulness of state surveillance techniques. Big Brother's ubiquitous, public stare forces a fleeting, furtive challenge. In order to be a rebel, one must be able both to transmit and to receive the necessary information in a unique moment of private exchange, a flash of intelligence. The reading of faces is a political act. Yet Winston's words do not identify the exact nature of that 'look'. Despite his experiences with Julia and O'Brien, Winston cannot say what a rebellious face looks like; he cannot categorize the all-important signal transmitted from one pair of eyes to another. Like O'Brien's 'equivocal glance' in the Hate Session, the 'look in the eyes' has a tenuous status, hovering on the borders of knowledge and mystery. On this unstable sign rests the instability of Winston's rebellion. The reliability of physiognomical information is therefore crucial for Winston. But it is also crucial for the state, which studies faces for evidence of unorthodox expressions (facecrime). These are dilemmas inside the novel, to which we shall be returning. But the problem does not end there. The critic outside the text must also participate in the struggle to stabilize the sign. The value of the political vision in the novel rests heavily on the intense physiognomic activity that occurs. (Haywood 1988: 345)
  • Nonverbal behaviour is a mode of political opposition to the state.
  • Bathetic means "producing an unintentional effect of anticlimax". Bathetic is different from pathetic, and was coined in 1834 to characerize bathos, "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous".
  • The "minuteness" in "a minute physical gesture" is notable, as it relates to the "effervescence" of O'Brien's brief glance, as well as to the whole idea of facecrime in general - that it cam be something very small and unnoticeable.
  • "Repressive watchfulness" is what produces the majority of dysphoria in 1984.
  • "A unique moment of private exchange, a flash of intelligence" is what Fiordo terms hypersemiotic communication.
  • The possibility of nonverbal communication becoming political is exactly what I want to get at.
  • I don't think there is such a thing as "a rebellious face". Rather, it is a rebellious nonverbal act. Mrs Parsons performs a facecrime by displaying fear when her child shoots Winston at the back of the head with a catapult.
  • It would do well to peel away some mystery from the tenuousness of facecrime.
  • Too bad that not much is told about studying faces for evidence of unorthodox expressions other than from Winston's own point of view, which more often than not is pure speculation.
The definition of physiognomy is 'equivocal'. It refers to the discipline or skill of interpreting faces and expressions as keys to personality. The word also means the countenance itself, the object of interpretation. This duality is often ignored, and the 'reading' is collapsed into the 'text'. A description of a face will strive to seem objective, masking the assumptions that must be made before expressions on the surface of a body can be allowed to correspond to emotions and qualities on the inside. For instance, to say a person has an 'innocent' face or a 'naïve' expression betrays many cultural presuppositions. Physiognomy as a science assumes that facial signifiers are causally related to the underlying signifieds of personality. The interpretative movement is from surface to core, but never back to the conditions of interpreting. (Haywood 1988: 345-346)
  • "Physiognomy" is an archaic term, though. As far as I know it went out of style around WWII, perhaps even sooner. "Countenance", for example, is a 19th century term if there ever was one.
  • Assumptions about nonverbal signs are exactly what I'm studying. These assumptions are exactly what should be at the center of focus in a cultural-semiotic approach to nonverbal communication.
  • Are facial expressions about personality? That sounds like an attribution error. To my knowledge facial expressions are not as "equivocal" as this kind of physiognomy makes them out to be.
Physiognomy has an ancient pedigree. The first treatise was written by Aristotle. Appropriately, he was one of its first victims. In an incident recalled by Parson Adams in Fielding's Joseph Andrews, a physiognomist named Zopyrus declared that Aristetle's countenance revealed him to be a rogue. Public opinion was outraged, but Aristotle confessed he did in fact have many insalubrious propensities, and only his self-control had prevented people realizing this. In Orwellian terms, his facecrime had not been detected. Aristotle's unmasking exposed a fractuce in the procedure at its inception. On the one hand the body is the mirror of the soul: one's expressions are formed involuntarily according to what type of a person one is. One's face therefore will show certain 'tell-tale' signs. The logical conclusion of such a deterministic creed is cataloguing, classifying, and stereotyping, all of which involve grave moral problems. On the other hand, one can exert at least some control over one's features, loosening the tie of signifier to signified, and forcing physiognomy to yield only partial knowledge, blocking its dehumanizing potential. Both camps celebrate the special function of the face as the site of the production and exchange of meaning. The disagreement is not about theory (faces can be read) but about the degree of usefulness: a social issue. (Haywood 1988: 346)
  • "Physiognomy" is an archaic term, though. As far as I know it went out of style around WWII, perhaps even sooner. "Countenance", for example, is a 19th century term if there ever was one.
  • Assumptions about nonverbal signs are exactly what I'm studying. These assumptions are exactly what should be at the center of focus in a cultural-semiotic approach to nonverbal communication.
  • Are facial expressions about personality? That sounds like an attribution error. To my knowledge facial expressions are not as "equivocal" as this kind of physiognomy makes them out to be.
For art, however, the problem is also an aesthetic one. Realism may aim to avoid stereotyping; the use of conventions and types may be the most readily available vocabulary. Art has been intimately involved in studying and fixing kinds of facial expression. One of the most famous exponents is Hogarth, the eighteenth-century satirical engraver and artist. His work contributes to the great age of physiognomy in Europe: the period stretching from Charles Le Brun's Method for Drawing the Emotions (1696) and Expression of the Passions (1698) through Johann Lavater's The Art of Understanding People (1772) to Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), by which time physiognomy was firmly established in the craft of the realistic novel. (Haywood 1988: 346)
Another score for cultural semiotics - that art and literature are heavily involved with nonverbal sign systems, their study and development.
As much as Hogarth deployed physiognomy in his prints, he needed a much more extensive visual vocabulary to perform his satirical attacks. Hogarth noted, for instance, that a grave expression does not tell the observer whether the cause of the expression is a trivial or important matter. (Haywood 1988: 346)
That's because the object of emotion (the so-called stimuli) is subjective.
Roland Barthes was one of the first theorists to attack the idea that a photograph is a 'message without cade' - pure denotation with no connotation. To put it another way, there is no text without interpretation. To believet here can be is to endorse the nineteenth-century illusion that a photograph is an unmediated copy of the real world, in which signifier and signified are fused. Yet most subsequent critical approaches still employ referentiality, a movement from the 'surface' of the photograph to something behind or beneath it. Even semiotics and structuralism suffer from this essentialism, or what Derrida called the 'metaphysics of presence'. For Barthes, 'all images are polysemous' and made up of a 'floating chain' of signifieds which cannot be fixed. (Haywood 1988: 148)
But referentiality is not only deictic, pointing to something in the hic et nunc. Remember relayed or displaced speech - discourse about something that isn't here or doesn't exist at all. That is why Jakobson's referential function is equivalent to the ideational (cognitive) function of symbols, not some sort of "reality" function.
So the self-conscious foregrounding of vagueness and uncertainty, of 'unstable signs', may seem to avoid the dangers of loading physiognomy with objective political significance. But the absent information is still a problem. Orwell wants us to believe the 'candour and ferocity' are actually contained in the face. Without any evidence for this, there is the danger of the militiaman becoming a mere extension of Orwell's consciousness, despite his ostensible function as 'the flower of the European working class'. Yet to specify actual facial detail might particularize at the expense of typicality. The memory of the face of the unknown soldier is nothing less than the objective correlative of the whole war. When Orwell recalls the face - 'oh, how vividly!' - 'the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right'. The face is 'a sort of visual reminder of what the war was really about'. These are remarkable statements. Despite the pointers to perspicuity ('vividly', 'see clearly'), the man's face is a blank, a featureless cipher, which calls into question Orwell's reduction of 'complex side-issues' into impressionistic, firsthand experience which will yield instinctive political wisdom. (Haywood 1988: 351)
The problematic of ambiguous description has deeper corollaries. Ambiguity is in some cases practical.
Nowhere is the danger of this approach more apparent than in his physiognomizing of Big Brother's real-life counterparts Stalin and Hitler. The problem is not in his professed admiration for them, but in the complexion of that admiration. Stalin receives brief treatment in a review written in 1938, where Orwell notes that 'Stalin, at any rate on the cinematograph, has a likeable face.' This is too cursory to be taken very seriously, and in any case Orwell adds: 'Al Capone wsa the best of husbands and fathers.' Still, one might carp at the value of divorcing Stalin's likeable' countenance from political context. The physiognomy of Hitler si much more substantial. Orwell wrote a review of Hurst and Blackett's edition of Mein Kampf in 1940. The review begins dismissively. The book is merely the 'fixed version of a monomaniac' who strives to create a 'horrible brainless empire'. Then Orwell changes tack, confessing: 'I have never been able to dislike Hitler.' There is something 'deeply appealing about him', though Orwell would 'kill him if I could get within reach of him'. Note the opposition between the personal and the political. (Haywood 1988: 353)
"A horrible brainless empire" could equally well describe the political regime of 1984. Also, note that Big Brother is also equally likeable and despicable, and Winston's feelings towards him do fluctuate along said lines.
Goldstein's heretical writings describe the theoretical rationale behind the enigmatic machinery of conditioning. The effect 'B.B.' has on people can be stated, but its confirmation, its actual performance, can only be witnessed in the 'plot' of the novel, the world of Winston's empirical experience, the world of aesthetic writing (Goldstein's manual has been criticized as a non-literary intrusion into the naturalism of the rest of the novel) and of dangerously uncertain signs. It is in the 'real' world of the novel that B.B's ability to 'focus' contradictory emotions must prove itself.
An initial problem is that Winston is not meant to register a typical response to B.B. Winston's consciousness, which filters the action of the novel, is seditious precisely because it is aware of the ways in which it is being manipulated. Winston can think on a conceptual, theoretical level, though he cannot achieve the systematic overview of Goldstein's manual. Winston's insights are constantly compromised by his experience, which paradoxically may lend those insights greater authority. In order to be able to resist thought control, Winston must be able to understand it, to know what the orthodox response to B.B.'s face ought to be. He must look at the face as a site of political struggle. (Haywood 1988: 354-355)
This is why 1984 is such an interesting case - facecrime is not only present, and active, but it is conceptualized, given a name and a definition.
Without its famous caption, we first see simply a man's face on a large poster tacked to the wall in Winston's block of flats: 'the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features' (p. 5). As Alexander Dallin has observed, there is 'vagueness' and 'uncertainty' in this physiognomy. B.B. is 'about' 45, and There is little to define 'ruggedly handsome', the only specific feature being a moustache (the latter detail has been enough for many readers to find the lurking image of Stalin, Kitchener, etc.). 'Handsome' is surely a subjective response, though Winston is probably meant to be registering the consensus view. (Haywood 1988: 355)
In other words, this "ruggedly handsome" is a perfect example of what I call an ambiguous description. What makes it ambiguous is that it is a Third - a final interpretant - lacking the possibility of various other qualities being affirmed in concrete details. E.g. it is a general symbol rather than a particular index.
The next physiognomical detail introduces the possibility of 'fear': 'It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move' (p. 5). The appeal is to a familiar notion of optical illusion which does not have to be explained further. The importanct point is that 'contrived' alerts us to the fact that this is not an 'unmediated' reproduction of a 'real' face but a construction, a play of signs. The next sentence introduces the caption 'BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU', which seems to follow naturally, when in fact an illusory 'following' movement of the eyes is being invested with purposive intent: 'watching'. The caption has given the face identity: a name (more on this later) and a mind - a 'depth' behind the image. This naturalizing continues when Winston looks at another poster and 'the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own' (p. 6). There is depth on both sides but the power of penetration is B.B.'s. The interaction has the aesthetic appeal of mystery, a considerable elaboration from the mere visual trickery of magnetic movement of the eyes, or the sinister state surveillance of ubiquitous 'watching'. 'Deep' suggests an enigmatic, irrational relationship, which may or may not be typical, and may or may not be reducible to politics. (Haywood 1988: 355)
This is where Ron Scollon's (1998) Goffmanian terms "watch" and "view-sign" would become useful.
State scrutiny, personal paranoia, orthodoxy becoming instinct. Exactly how this watch on deviant signs is maintained is not explained by the manual, despite the mobilization of armies of professionals, including Swiftian scientists: 'The scientist of to-day is ... a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice' (p. 156). The reason why the scientist has turned state physiognomer is ironically because thoughts cannot be read but only deduced. That leaves open the possibility that orthodox responses can be faked, and that is precisely the unstable space that Winston occupies. His facial expressions still remain partly under his control. (Haywood 1988: 358)
This is only slightly disappointing. Winston's own conscious reflections on the topic kind of make up for it and allow for a more general type of speculative theorizing. For example, "unstable space" is a deduction - Orwell, to my knowledge, didn't use these kinds of spatial metaphors.
The totalitarian logic seems coherent, until we examine it with 'minuteness'. The intention of the state is to ossify facial expression: there must be only one sign for the ever-narrowing range of signifieds. Connotation must become denotation. But we are not told how Party members are trained in 'wearing' the 'proper' expression. In the example Winston cites, one must look 'credulous', as if this will mean the same configuration on the face of each comrade. It is also difficult to know how one can mentally police an 'unconscious look', which by definition is involuntary. Presumably facecrime is there to deter, but that exposes the precariousness of the process. If conformity has to be coerced, it is not the 'instinct' the Party requires, and it remains a mere surface, the core untouched. This ambiguity is most strikingly demonstrated during the Hate Sessions. Winston 'could not help sharing in the general delirium': 'Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction' (p. 17). 'Dissemble' and 'control' are at odds with 'instinctive'. The use of the generic 'your' indicates that the description applies to the 'general delirium', which surely is not meant to be seen (by the state, or us) as mass dissimulation. On the treshold of his journey to Room 101, Winston decides that to be successfully loyal
mere control of the features was not enough. For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed youm ust never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that could be given a name. (pp. 225-6)
The irony here is that this paradoxical logic has all the trappings of doublething, to which Winston is still resistant. (Haywood 1988: 359)
Yup, the logic behind facecrime is indeed murky. An analogy with doublethink is certainly possible, but one would need to add a new term to newspeak - doubleact (but adding words is contrary to the idea of newspeak, which is to subtract words). Actually, no, it's a pretty huge assumption that "facecrime is there to deter".
It is worth noting that Winston's role as surrogate narrator of the novel requires him to provide physiognomical details about most characters. There is no space here to look at all the instances, though they are uniformly interesting because all have political ramifications. The faces of O'Brien and Julia warrant most discussion, and I shall be focusing on them shortly. (Haywood 1988: 360)
I suspect that he is a "surrogate narrator" because the whole novel was first intended as a diary, a la Zamjatin's We, but proved more productive if the diary were something extraneous.
'Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.' The mind is a non-state, a vacuum, no longer occupied by thought. The problem for the state is that it has not yet abolished expression, which constantly promises to refer to the meaning 'behind it'. (Haywood 1988: 360)
Is this not a characterization of a "horrible brainless empire"?
The excitement of make-up is not its ability to enhance but its ability to conceal. Winston is lured to the subversive potential of a 'mask', the falsification, the fabrication, of appearance in a regulated world. (Haywood 1988: 360)
That is also the lure of facecrime, for me, as understanding the nature of nonverbal surveillance may prove to unravel ways to conceal dissidence.
The reaching of physiognomy into the realm of the irrational is nowhere more advanced than in the contact Winston makes with Julia and O'Brien. Both relationships commence with highly charged, mysterious glances. In both cases Winston is certain there has been an almost telepathic communication. In both cases he misreads what is 'written' on the other's face. His physiognomical powers are finely tuned enough to mark Julia and O'Brien out as special, but his interpretations are also fatally compromised. (Haywood 1988: 361)
I knew that O'Brien's glance could readily be approached with Fiordo's "hypersemiotics", but I'll try to keep in mind that the same can be done with Julia.
With hindsight we know that O'Brien is faking this look - a very remarkable skill which must lead some readers to disregard the 'flash of intelligence' as mystery-mongering. (Haywood 1988: 363)
I don't think it was "faked". The concept of "doubleact" would come handy for explaining it. I have a theory that O'Brien was there during the Hate Session that time exactly because of Winston, because Winston remarkde that he has seen O'Brien only half a dozen times in just as many years. O'Brien is Thought Police. His "flash of intelligence" may have been intentional, but there was nothing "fake" about it, for it inspired Winston to write his diary. Perhaps that was the goal all along - to give a "go ahead" for making his thoughtcrime manifest.
Orwell believed Zamyatin's We was superior to Huxley's Brave New World because of We's 'intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism - human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is created with divine attributes'. See review of We published in Tribune, 4 January 1946; CEJL, 2, pp. 72-5, 75. (Haywood 1988: 365)
Ooh, finally, a reference to his notorious review.

Pugliese, Joseph 2009. Preincident Indices of Criminality: Facecrime and Project Hostile Intent. Griffith Law Review 18(2): 314-330.

In this essay, I examine the contemporary deployment of somatechnologies concerned with screening and capturing subjects who are identified by these apparatuses in terms of prospective criminals who have not actually committed any offence but who intend to commit a crime. (Pugliese 2009: 314)
Somatechnologies, huh? I wonder how much these are related to either 'techniquesof the body' or 'biopower'. I am aware that "technologies" has become a catchword for some contemporary quarters of philosophy, e.g. "phatic technologies" and whatnot, but I still like the concept for some reason.
I focus, in the first instance, on the International Association of Chiefs of Police's Training Keys #581: Suicide (Homicide) Bombers: Part I as a document that purports, through a series of preincident indices, to enable law enforcement personnel to identify prospective suicide bombers. I discuss this deployment of biotypological regimes of criminal profiling in the context of the travesty of justice endured by Dr Mohamed Haneef. (Pugliese 2009: 314)
The phrase "biotypological regimes of criminal profiling" sounds slightly more promising than "the politics of physiognomy", but pre-incident indices and pro-spective identification are suspicious terms when it comes to facecrime, as in the context of Orwell's novel the temporal question is a bit murky. Namely, I wish to propose that Winston was essentially coaxed into committing facecrime, and although thoughtcrime supposedly contains facecrime, it is facecrime (his moment of intelligence in a glance with O'Brien) which lead to his thoughtcrime (writing "I Hate Big Brother" in his diary).
Drawing on George Orwell's Newspeak term facecrime, in which criminal intent is seen to be inscribed on racialised phenotypologies in the case of the wrongful arrest of Dr Haneef. I then proceed critically to examine the US Department of Homeland Security's development of Project Hostile Intent - a multimedia and multimodal somatechnological apparatus that is being developed in order to expose criminal intent in screened subjects. I frame my critical analysis of these technologies within biopolitical frameworks predicated on anatomies of deviance and disciplinary regimes of normativity. (Pugliese 2009: 314)
Since Orwell's facecrime makes strictly sense only in the universe of discourse of his novel, this application on real world seems at least slightly dubious. On the other hand, the existence of Project Hostile Intent - or now renamed, Future Attribute Screening Technology - proves my somewhat paranoid suspicion that knowledge of nonverbal communication can be mistreated by the State.
TK #581 announces in its Introduction that it is concerned with offering the reader 'profiles' of suicide bombers in order to enable law enforcement personnel to prevent attacks. In the first instance, suicide bombers are scripted as at once graphically anomalous in the context of normative culture and yet invisible. This paradoxical feature is what gives them inordinate power: they are grossly aberrant in their anti-social values, yet they appear to pass through social spaces without detection. (Pugliese 2009: 315)
These terms may prove useful in my analysis of Winston's anti-social behaviour, although he barely passes through social spaces without detection - his literary fate is at every step spelled out, sometimes quite literally ("You're a thought criminal!" the little boy exclaims before shooting him to the back of the head with his toy catapult).
I evidence this Orientalist marking of the figure of the terrorist, as the text that I have been citing is situated under the rubric of 'Suicide Bomber Advantages'. Under this rubric, the text begins with this first dot point: 'Superior dedication to the mission. A suicide bomber considered a shahid - a martyr who engages in jihad (holy war) and will, upon completion of the mission, bring honor to his or her family and organization and enjoy the benefits of eternal paradise.' From the start, TK #581 marks the figure of the suicide bomber as singularly Muslim. This Orientalist figure serves to colour and frame all the text that follows. The now charged terms 'jihad' and 'shahid' render Islam as coextensively terroristic and violent. Regardless of the fact that TK #581 is purportedly addressed to an international audience of law enforcement personnel, the suicide bomber is homogenised to the singular and monolithic figure of the violent Muslim. (Pugliese 2009: 315-316)
Even here a parallel with 1984 is possible - what else is Winston but an Eurasian spy? He is not only a thoughtcriminal, he is a Goldsteinist!
TK #581 supplies the reader with a series of bullet-point biotypologies organised under a number of sub-headings, beginning with:
Behaviour. Does the individual act oddly, appear fearful, or use mannerisms that do not fit in? Examples include repeatedly circling an area on foot or in a car, pacing back and forth of a venue, glancing left and right while walking slowly, fidgeting with something under his or her clothes, exhibiting an unwillingness to make eye contact, mumbling (prayer), or repeatedly checking a watch or cell phone.
Encoded in this description is a biopolitical regime predicated on schemas of disciplinary normativity. Odd, fearful and dissonant mannerisms beg the question as to what constitutes, conversely, the behavioural attributes of the presupposed normative subject. Delineated in TK #581 is, in fact, the masculinised, white middle-class Western subject: cool, rational, able in both body and mind, a citizen of the world, assimilated to the dictates and codes of normative behaviour. I do not invoke the seemingly formulaic 'white male middle-class' subject for purely rhetorical purposes. On the contrary, it is evident that this hegemonic subject is precisely the figure against which the 'abnormal' behaviour mapped in TK #581 is judged and articulated. In the face of this presupposed normative subject, TK #581 fails to account for the fact that there are individuals who, in the face of traumatic experiences with police and figures of immigration and law enforcement, might display precisely any or all those mannerisms of fear, anxiety, restlessness and fidgeting when in public spaces. This would include non-white, non-citizen, refugee, asylum seekers, undocumented individuals and racialised subaltern subjects whose constant surveillance by law enforcement agents, unconnected to criminal activity on their part, makes them anxious and fearful in the presence of institutional agents. (Pugliese 2009: 317)
In 1984, some schemas of disciplinary normativity is laid bare in instructions about how to pose one's face in publir or in front of telescreens. It might be a good idea to construct a normative subject on the principle of binary opposition, a la Jakobson in "Mark and Feature". The circularity of being fearful of law enforcement because of their brutality and the brutality ensuing from looking fearful is surely not lost on racial minorities, but it's relation to facecrime is somewhat tenuous. "Cool" is underlined because I just checked out because I just checked out Cool (aesthetic) on Wikipedia, where under the rubric "Cool as a behavioral characteristic" it reads: "The sum and substance of cool is a self-conscious aplomp in overall behavior, which entails a set of specific behavioral characteristics that is firmly anchored in symbology, a set of discernible bodily movements, postures, facial expressions and voice modulations that are acquired and take on strategic social value within the peer context." And more importantly: "Cool was one an attitude fostered by rebels and underdogs, such as slaves, prisoners, bikers and political dissidents, etc., for whom open rebellion invited punishment, so it hid defiance behind a wall of ironic detachment, distancing itself from the source of authority rather than directly confronting it." Quite relevant for this discussion.
It is here, caught in the aporetic logic that structures TK #581, that the document self-deconstructs in order to reveal an unreal world whose empirico-positivist biotypologies and indicators morph into groundless, shape-shifting phantasmagoria of spectres, doubles and hauntings. (Pugliese 2009: 321)
When a text starts using these kinds of words, I become suspicious. The fact that the next subchapter is titled "Facecrime and the Faciality of Face" makes my face red in the face of the fact that the first result when googling define:faciality is a 2010 paper titled "This Face: a Critique of Faciality as Mediated Self-Presence", which reveals that "faciality" is a concept proposed by Deleuze and Guattary in A Thousand Plateaus. A thousand apologies, but I don't fuck with that noise. But as much as I'd like to quit right now, I'll push through.
Articulated in this revelation is the symbolic conflation of an object (balaclava) into a racialised ethnic identity (of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance) that marks a criminal figure in advance of the fact of having committed any crime; in other words, a suspect wearing a balaclava that actually obscures her or his face is identified, by default, as being 'of Middle Eastern appearance'. Operative here is what I would term the racialised somatechnics of identity in the service of cultural ponics. Somatechnics refers to the indissociable way in which the body of a subject is always already technologised and mediated by cultural inscriptions. (Pugliese 2009: 322)
Wasn't it "somatechnologies" before? I don't think "biopolitical intextuation" is a thing, is it? Also, how in the hell is any of this related to facecrime?
The face of a figure 'of Middle Eastern appearance' is, in this context, already inextricably interchangeable with the technology of the balaclava - precisely as symbol of the terrorist and the criminal. (Pugliese 2009: 322)
What is technological about a piece of clothing?
The balaclava is a somatechnology precisely because it biopolitically intextuates an ethnic descriptor onto the face of the target subject. (Pugliese 2009: 322)
It does what?
Articulated in the media images that reproduce the face of Dr Mohamed Haneef is the phenotypical face of terror/terrorism. What can be seen to signify in this instance is what I want to term the faciality of the face. The faciality of the face is not a tautology; rather, it brings into focus the inscriptive schemas and discourses that render a face culturally intelligible precisely as identifiable face in terms of tacit knowledge and assumptions. There is never any unmediated visual encounter with the face; rather, the moment of visual apprehension and comprehension is always-already marked by an inscriptive cultural and discursive schematicity of the face before one's gaze: it is the faciality of this schematicity that render the face culturally intelligible and identifiable as face. (Pugliese 2009: 324)
Huh. I stand corrected. This is a pretty interesting idea, although far from what Orwell means by facecrime, which has nothing to do with the identifiability of a face, but the identifiability of a thoughtcriminal through facial expressions. The author nevertheless proceeds to quote Orwell, that a nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, or a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, could give you away. I don't see how this has anything to do with the racial schematicity of face discussed here.
In this final section of this essay, I want to examine the manner in which preindicators, designed to assist law enforcement authorities in the capture of prospective terrorists, are being digitised and technologised through the US Department of Homeland Security's funding and development of Project Hostile Intent (PHI). PHI will be based on 'video cameras, laserlight, infra-red, audio recordings and eye-tracking technology [that] are expected to scour crowds looking for unusual behaviour, with the aim of identifying people who should be approached and quizzed by security staff'. Designed as a multimedia and multimodal system, PHI is being designed to 'pick up tell-tale signs of hostile intent or deception from people's heart rates, perspiration and tiny shifts in facial expressions'. Reminiscent of the sci-fi realm represented by the Hollywood firm Minority Report, the goal of PHI is to 'identify people "involved in possible malicious or deceitful acts" - before they ever commit the crime'. The Department of Homeland Security envisions integrating PHI 'with other technologies aimed at identifying individuals who pose threats to the U.S.A., e.g., biometric tools and databases'. (Pugliese 2009: 326)
This is more like it. Here "technology" actually makes sense. It is also more in line with what can be read in the RAND publication Out of the Ordinary (2004) about a vision for an automatized system for detecting atypical behavior.
With Project Hostile Intent, the target body is enmeshed within a regime of biopower designed, in Michel Foucault's terms, to bring 'life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations'. Pulse rate, perspiration and micro-facial expressions are all digitally calibrated and gauged against what one computer scientist involved in the project has called an 'integrated score of malfeasance likelihood'. Presupposed in this integrated score of malfeasance likelihood is a disciplinary norm that establishes the guiding templates for 'correct', 'normal', and 'appropriate' looks and behaviour against which deviations signal targets that pose security risks. (Pugliese 2009: 327)
Cosmopolotian Quiz: What is YOUR Likelihood for Malfeasance?
In the course of this essay, I have tracked the manner in which a series of somatechnologies are being deployed and developed in order to capture prospective criminals. (Pugliese 2009: 329)
No, in the course of this essay you have presented some good-to-know cases of racial discrimination, quoted some scary postmodern hyperboles, called an item of clothing a technology and dedicated only a few paragraphs to actual technology, only to blow its function way out of proportion with the help of said postmodern hyperboles. I've learned very little about the actual deployment and development of said technologies. Eloquent presentation does not make up for a substantial argument.

The Philosophy of Style

Spencer, Herbert 1892. The Philosophy of Style; Together with an Essay on Style by T. H. Wright. With introduction and notes by Fred N. Scott. Second Edition. Boston, Allyn and Bacon.

Sterne's intended implication that a knowledge of the principles of reasoning neither makes, nor is essential to, a good reasoner, is doubtless true. Thus, too, it is with grammar. As Dr. Latham, condemning the usual school-drill in Lindley Murray, rightly remarks: - "Gross vulgarity is a fault to be prevented; but the proper prevention is to be got from habit - not rules." Similarly, there can be little question that good composition is far less dependent upon acquaintance with its laws, than upon practice and natural aptitude. A clear head, a quick imagination, and a sensitive ear, will go far towards making all rhetorical precepts needless. He who daily hears and reads well-framed sentences, will naturally more or less tend to use similar ones. (Spencer 1892: 1)
I tend to hold similar beliefs regarding language acquisition. We depart in that I believe that passive reception is not nearly as effective as constant practice - not only reading in English, for example, but also writing in it. These short remarks I have written to my compendium of quotes have gone a long way towards improving my syntax.
Standing as isolated dogmas - as empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that "brevity is the soul of wit." We hear styles condemned as verbose or involved. Blair states that every needless part of a sentence "interrupts the description and clogs the image;" and again, that "long sentences fatigue the reader's attention." (Spencer 1892: 2)
This could very well be used as a counter-argument against Shklovsky's deautomatization. I now have a personal experience - I began reading Blue Lard, as recommended by Ü. P., but had to quit after a few pages because I found the style to be too deautomatized. Why should I read something that only gives me fatigue?
On seeking for some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them, the importance of economizing the reader's or hearer's attention. To so present ideas that they may be apprehended with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point. When we condemn swriting that is wordy, or confused, or intricate - when we praise this style as easy, and blame that as fatigue, we consciously or unconsciously assume this desideratum as our standard of judgment. Regarding language as an apparatus of symbols for the conveyance of thought, we may say that, as in a mechanical apparatus, the more simple and the better arranged its parts, the greater will be the effect produced. In either case, whatever force is absorbed by the machine is deduced from the result. A reader or listener as at each moment but a limited amount of mental power available. To recognize and interpret the symbols presented to him, requires part of this power; to arrange and combine the images suggested requires a further part; and only that part which remains can be used for realizing the thought conveyed. Hence, the more time and attention it takes to receive and understand each sentence, the less time and attention can be given to the contained idea; and the less vividly will that idea be conceived. (Spencer 1892: 3)
This is the first part of the first quote that Shklovsky uses in his "Art as Technique". The underlined part, that is.
How truly language must be regarded as a hindrance to thought, the necessary instrument of it, we shall clearly perceive on remembering the comparative force with which simple ideas are communicated by ideas. To say, "Leave the room," is less expressive than to point to the door. Placing a finger on the lips is more forcible than whispering, "Do not speak." No prase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words. Again, it may be remarked that when oral language is employed, the strongest effects are produced by interjections, which condense entire sentences into syllables. And in other cases, where custom allows us to express thoughts by single words, as in Beware, Heigho, Fudge, much force would be lost by expanding them into specific propositions. Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is the vehicle of thought, there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is, to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. Let us then inquire whether economy of the recipient's attention is not the secret of effect, alike in the right choice and collocation of words, in the best arrangement of clauses in a sentence, in the proper order of its principal and subordinate propositions, in the judicious use of simile, metaphor, and other figures of speech, and even in the rhythmic sequence of syllables. (Spencer 1892: 3-4)
This is the continuation of the first quote in Shklovsky. I was pleasantly surprised to find Spencer appraise nonverbal communication, but saddened a bit that this is exactly the part that Shklovsky chose to leave out and not deal with.
This ingenious paradox rests upon an artificial distinction between language and other modes of expression. Language itself is but a system of verbal signs. Whan Spencer says is therefore virtually this: "Language is an inferior form of expression for ideas which are more easily expressed by other kinds of signs." Language in one sense is indeed a "hindrance to the expression of thought," and properly so; it forces vague and ill-defined thought back upon itself, compelling it to assume the organized form requisite to ordered verbal expression. (Spencer 1892: 4; Scott's note no. 1)
This makes me wonder if I could write my "reader's response to Shklovsky" into a veritable paper that deals, at least a little, with nonverbal communication. In any case it would appear that Spencer is not dealing with "The law of the economy of creative effort" as Shklovsky (2006[1917]: 777) claims, but with "Economy in the Use of Words" (as reads the title of the relevant subchapter).
The creater forcibleness of Saxon English, or rather non-Latin English, first claims our attention. The several special reasons assignable for this may all be reduced to the general reason - economy. The most important of them is early association. A child's vocabulary is almost wholly Saxon. He says, I have, not I possess - I wish, not I desire; he does not reflect, he thinks; he does not beg for amusement, but for play; he calls things nice or nasty, not pleasant or disagreeable. The synonyms which he learns in after years, never become so closely, so organically connected with the ideas signified, as do these original words used in childheed; and hence the association remains less strong. But in what does a strong association between a word and an idea differ from a weak one? Simply in the greater ease and rapidity of suggestive action. It can be in nothing else. Both of two words, if they be strictly synonymous, eventually call up the same image. The expression - It is acid, must in the end give rise to the same thought as - It is sour; but because the term acid was learnt later in life, and has not been so often followed by the thought symbolized, it does not so readily arouse that thought as the term sour. If we remember how slowly and with what labour the appropriate ideas follow unfamiliar words in another language, and how increasing familiarity with such words brings greater rapidity and ease of comprehension; and if we consider that the same process must have gone on with the words of our mother tongue from childhood upwards, we shall clearly see that the earliest learnt and oftenest used words, will, other things equal, call up images with less loss of time and energy than their later learnt synonyms. (Spencer 1892: 5)
This could go well with Shklovsky's notes on the strangeness of foreign language, and of poetry written in another language. But it is also the case that association may work in such a way that - as is my case - if one reads technical (non-fiction) literature in another language, it will be easier to commence academic work in that language, rather in native tongue, which is used mostly for reading fiction, communicating with peers, and going about daily toil. The distinction between "natural language" and "technical language" is relevant here.
If, as all know, it is tiresome to listen to an indistinct speaker, or read a badly-written manuscript, or read a badly-written manuscript; and if, as we cannot doubt, the fatigue is a cumulative result of the attention needed to catch successive syllables; it follows that attention is in such cases absordeb by each syllable. (Spencer 1892: 6)
For some reason it is sometimes the case that a neatly-written and argumentative text is more tiresome than one that is written as if spoken, and full of novel slang expressions.
One qualification, however, must not be overlooked. A word which in itself embodies the most important part of the idea to be conveyed, especially when that idea is an emotional one, may often with advantage be a polysyllabic word. Thus it seems more forcible to say, "It is magnificent," than "It is grand." The word vast is not so powerful a one as stupendous. Calling a thing nasty is not so effective as calling it disgusting. (Spencer 1892: 6)
A very interesting addition to the topic of the emotive function of language. But I wonder why that is - could it be that the greater amount of syllables allows for greater emotional impact in the process of pronounciation? Oh, "A further cause may be that a word of several syllables admits of more emphatic articulation" (ibid, 6).
Once more, that frequent cause of strength in Saxon and other primitive words - their imitative character, may be similarly resolved into the more general cause. Both those directly imitative, as splash, bang, whiz, roar, &c., and those analogically imitative, as rough, smooth, keen, blunt, thin, hard, crag, &c., have a greater or less likeness to the things symbolized; and by making on the senses impressions allied to the ideas to be called up, they save part of the effort needed to call up such ideas, and leave more attention for the ideas themselves. (Spencer 1892: 7)
This problem is at the center of Shklovsky's polemic: when calling up ideas is easy (takes little effort), then the words themselves are not perceived, but recognized. In poetry (and by proxy, all art), attention should be paid to the words themselves, rather than what they symbolize - or at least that's the argument. What I find faulty here is captured best in Spencer's phrasing: when most of the effort goes into calling up the ideas that words symbolize (if they symbolize ideas at all), very little attention is left for the ideas themselves. In this sense it could be said that the ideal poetry of the formalists (e.g. zaum) is not trans-sense or supra-thought, but thought-less (in Estonian, mõttetu).
The economy of the recipient's mental energy, into which are thus resolvable the several causes of the strength of Saxon English, may equally be traced in the superiority of specific over generic words. That concrete terms produce more vivid impressions than abstract ones, and should, when possible, be used instead, is a thorough maxim of composition. As Dr. Campbell says, "The more general the terms are, the picture is the fainter; the more special they are, 'tis the brighter." We should avoid such sentences as: - "In proportion as the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of their penal code will be severe." And in place of it we should write: - "In proportion as men delight in battles, bull-fights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning, and the rack." (Spencer 1892: 7-8)
So this is what people mean when they complain that "legalese", e.g. the language of legal documents, is increasingly vague and demanding (the reader should have a degree in law in order to understand it). It is indeed the case that legal documents contain more abstract terms and "pushing the referent further" by means like "(a) In General. - Notwithstanding any other provision of law limiting the assistance to be provided under this section, beginning on the date following the date of completion of the assessment required by subsection (b)" (S.2277).
This superiority of specific expressions is clearly due to a saving of the effort required to translate words into thoughts. As we do not think in generals but in particulars - as, whenever any class of things is referred to, we represent it to ourselves by calling to mind individual members of it; it follows that when an abstract word is used, the hearer or reader has to choose from his stock of images, one or more, by which he may figure to himself the genus mentioned. In doing this, some delay must arise - some force be expended; and if, by employing a specific term, an appropriate image can be at once suggested, an economy is achieved, and a more vivid impression produced. (Spencer 1892: 8)
That's an interesting use of the concept of translation. More importantly, the selection of suitable images to interpret an abstract word is relevant for the discussion of images in Sklovsky.
As in a narrative, the events should be stated in such sequence that the mind may not have to go backwards and forwards in order to rightly connect them; as in a group of sentences, the arrangement should be such, that each of them may be understood as it comes, without waiting for subsequent ones; so in every sentence, the sequence of words should be that which suggests the constituents of the thought in the order most convenient for the building up that thought. (Spencer 1892: 9)
But according to the Russian formalists, forcing the mind to go backwards and forwards is exactly the point of poetry understood as dynamic speech constructions (e.g. demonstrating qualities of retention as well as protention).

Wright, T. H. 1892. Appendix: The Sound-Element in Verse. In: The Philosophy of Style; Together with an Essay on Style by T. H. Wright. With introduction and notes by Fred N. Scott. Second Edition. Boston, Allyn and Bacon, 61-63.

This gratification (i.e. that produced byt he mere sound of verse) such as it is, is of an entirely positive kind, acting directly on the sense. It would not have occurred to me that there could be a doubt about this, had not Mr. Spencer, in his essay on the 'Philosophy of Style,' taken another view. He ingeniously refers forcible style to economy of the reader's or hearer's attention, and makes out his point very successfully in many particulars; but he seems to me quite to fail in his attempt to bring the effect of rhythmical structure in verse under the same rule. He says, 'If, as we have seen, there is an expenditure of mental energy in the mere act of listening to verbal articulations, or in that silent repetition of them which goes in in reading - if the perceptive faculties must be in active exercise to identify every syllable - then any mode of combining words as to present a regular recurrence of certain traits which the mind can anticipate, will diminish that strain upon the attention required by the total irregularity of prose. Just as the body, in receiving a series of varying concussions, must keep the muscles ready to meet the most violent of them, as not knowing when such may come; so the mind, in receiving unarranged articulations, must keep its perceptives active enough to recognize the least easily caught sounds. And as, if the concussions recur in a definite order, the body may husband its forces by adjusting the resistance needful for each concussion; so, if the syllable be rhythmically arranged, the mind may economize its energies by anticipating the attention required for each syllable. (Wright 1892: 61)
The underlined part is the one that Shklovsky quotes in "Art as Technique" and erroneously attributes to Herbert Spencer. This is actually the appendix, first published as: Wright, T. H. 1877. Style. Macmillan's Magazine 37: 78-84.
"There is surely a confusion here between the intellect and the ear, and between two distinct meanings of perception, namely, the recognition of a syllable as a known word or part of a known word, and the mere hearing of it as part of a series of accented and unaccented sounds. The 'least easily caught sounds' are those which, from softness or indistinctness, it is hardest to recognize as known words or parts of known words; but these are no less easily and completely heard as belonging to the regular series of alternating sounds than the louder accented constituents of the series. As regards the mere act of hearing, the perception of the series is an affection which would be as easily produced by nonsense-syllables arranged in the same rhythm: and as for attention, not less but more of it would seem to be involved in the case of a regular accented series than in prose. (Wright 1892: 62)
On the surface, this sounds a lot like the topic Shklovsky is actually discussing, but since I'm not a linguist I can't yet make heads or tails of it. I can only guess that the problem here is similar to the one pointed out by Shklovsky's critics: that the distinction the process of perception itself and the mode of presentation of that perception is not clear enough.
For against the supposition that the ear is relieved at alternate instants from the strain of its expectant attitude, through foreknowledge of the place of the louder syllables, we must set the fact that in verse it is actively on the watch, and notices with positive satisfaction the rhythmical succession as such; while in an irregular series it is not the least on the watch for the purely sound-qualities of what is going on, but acts as the uninterested and passive conductor of symbols to the mind. The intellectual recognition of the sounds, on the other hand, as known words or parts of known words, is in no way facilitated by their rhythmical succession. There are as many comparatively loud and distinct syllables, and as many comparatively faint and indistinct ones, in a paragraph of prose as in an equally long paragraph of verse: and the sum of mental energy required to identify them is equal in the two cases. The fact that in the verse the ear is aware beforehand at what instant the louder and fainter syllables are coming cannot relieve the intellect of its labour of recognition; for difficulty or ease of recognition is simply a function of the distinctness with which the syllable is heard when it comes, and of nothing else. (Wright 1892: 62)
It sounds like Wright did indeed distinguish between the "practical" and "poetic" use of language. Bingo?

Lewes, George Henry 1901. The principles of success in literature. Edited by WM. Dallam Armes. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

What is the first object of a machine? Effective work - vis viva [living force]. Every means by which friction can be reduced, and the force thus economised be rendered available, necessarily solicits the constructor's care. He seeks as far as possible to liberate the motion which is absorbed in the working of the machine, and to use it as vis viva. He knows that every superfluous detail, every retarding influence, is at the cost of so much power, and is a mechanical defect though it may perhaps be an aesthetic beauty or a practical convenience. He may retain it because of the beauty, because of the convenience, but he knows the price of effective power at which it is obtained. (Lewes 1901: 165)
Again, Shklovsky turns all this upside down, and studies how the constructor takes care to create friction and reduce "practical convenience".
And thus it stands with Style. The first object of a writer is effective expression, the power of communicating distinct thoughts and emotional suggestions. He has to overcome the friction of ignorance and preoccupation. He has to arrest a wandering attention, and to clear away the misconceptions which cling around verbal symbols. (Lewes 1901: 166)
In "Art as Technique" the point seems to be exactly to create "the friction of ignorance" by not naming the things by their correct names, or from an animal's point of view. It is wilful ignorance that acts in that technique.
Words are not like iron and wood, coal and water, invariable in their properties, calculable in their effects. They are mutable in their powers, deriving force and subtle variations of force from very trifling changes of position; coloring and colored by the words which precede and succeed; significant or insignificant from the powers of rhythm and cadence. (Lewes 1901: 166)
This, I imagine, some formalists (like Tynianov) might actually like. Cf. words as chameleons.
Economy dictates that the meaning should be presented in a form which claims the least possible attention to itself as form, unless when that form is part of the writer's object, and when the simple thought is less important than the manner of presenting it. And even when the manner is playful or impassioned, the law of Economy still presides, and insists on the rejection of whatever is superfluous. (Lewes 1901: 167-168)
Bingo! Shklovsky's very idea, captured decades before he set it to paper.
The reader's pleasure must not be forgotten; and he cannot be pleased by a style which always leaps and never flows. A harsh, abrupt, and dislocated manner irritates and perplexes him by its sudden jerks. (Lewes 1901: 172)
This was me, attempting to read Blue Lard.
But Style appeals to the emotions as well as to the intellect, and the arrangement of words and sentences which will be the most economical may not be the most musical, and the most musical may not be the most pleasurably effective. For Climax and Variety it may be necessary to sacrifice something of rapid intelligibility; hence involutions, antitheses, and suspensions, which disturb the most orderly arrangement, may yet, in virtue of their own subtle influences, be counted as improvements on that arrangement. (Lewes 1901: 189)
This is the passage quoted in the footnote in Spencer's essay, by F. N. Scott, that sent me on an excursion to this book.

Clay, Edmund R. 1882. The Alternative: A Study in Psychology. London: MacMillan and Co.

According to the primary meaning of the word perceive, one perceives not only when he sees, hears, smells, tastes, and undergoes tactile consciousness, but also when he imagines, remembers, conceives, judges, apprehends danger in an emotion of fear or sacredness in one of reverence. According to this signification and the corresponding one of the cognate term, perception, the latter denotes the affectation of mind that is correlated to objectivity, - the mind's embrace of an object. Philosophers have in modern times assigned a narrower signification to the term, perception. Convenience demands another alteration of its meaning, opposing it, as I shall presently explain, to what Leibnitz terms apperception. Accordingly, stripping the word discernment of its connotation of contrast, I assign to it the meaning originally annexed to the term, perception. Discernment and objectivity are correlatives, and perception is a species of discernment. This arrangement is facilitated by the fact that the term, discrimination, has been a synonym of, and can do duty for, the term discernment. (Clay 1882: 19)
In short, even imagination and remembering involve perception, or, to be precise, discernment.
Self-consciousness is the objectivity of an individual to himself. It is therefore a mistake to oppose subjective consciousness to objectivity: it is a species of objectivity. Objectivity is either subjective or non-subjective; in other words, objects are either subjective or non-subjective. What has been accounted opposition of subjective and objective consciousness is really opposition of subjective and non-subjective objectivity. Every normal discernment of which the object comprises all that is objective at any one instant is discernment of a subjective and a non-subjective object, the former comprising what is given as self or the Ego and its appurtenances or modifications, the latter the not-self, the non-moi, the non-Ego. Such a discernment, accordingly, consists of two constituents, one known as self-consciousness, and by Leibnitz more conventiently termed Apperception, the other what refers to the opposed object. The constituent that refers to self and its modifications I term apperception, and the other, perception. It is now obvious that I am conservative as regards the meaning of the term, perception, and that my innovation affects only the import of the term, discernment. (Clay 1882: 21-22)
This distinction may go a long way towards drawing distinctions in relation with autocommunication and private signs.
Subjective objectivity includes the body of the subject and certain of its states and changes. In every normal discernment embracing all that is at the time objective, the subject apperceives his body. In sense-perception he apperceives the perceiving organ, e.g. in seeing he apperceives the eyes. We apperceive the expression of our faces, the attitudes and motions of our bodies. (Clay 1882: 24)
What I have naively termed "nonverbal self-communication" is accounted for here by the term apperception.
We see in others, and they see in us, signs that are given as signs of emotion, when the putative subject is ignorant that he is undergoing the emotion ascribed to him. How often does resentment shoot its arrows at us when the subject believes himself not only to be free from anger but to be actuated by regard for our interest or by pious zeal. We frequently discern emotion in ourselves which is given as having had a latent beginning and growth. People of conduct are led by their vigilance to the discovery of kinds of emotions that never manifest themselves in vulgar experience. It achieves what is known in mystical language as discernment of spirits. The discovery penetrates even to emotions, which, when discerned, are found to be the conscious sides - the faces or appearances - of states of the heart that are moulds of emotion, states of which "mood" is the common name. For example, one comes to detect an emotion that signifies a tendency to anger at a time when the heart is altogether free from anger, - nay is disposed to mirth, although with a tincture of irony. Or one may detect an emotion significant of a mood that is a mould of low and trivial sentiment. The discerned events are given as being emotions, - emotions that existed antecedently to, as well as at the time of, the discovery. If the datum be true, if the events be indeed what they seem to be, are they not Consciousness of which the subject is ignorant? (Clay 1882: 26-27)
The first part concerns what I have labelled "nonverbal ethics" - e.g. others are able to perceive our emotions better than we able to apperceive them (we feel, but do not see, the action of our facial muscles), but when they report on our expression and thus our emotions, the result may be that resentment shoots its arrows at us. Anger disposed to mirth with a tincture of irony concerns one of the more complicated problems in the psychology of emotion - the so-called "blends". The author aptly distinguishes emotion from mood by the latter having "a latent beginning and growth", e.g. duration. For my study on "facecrime", I can take away from this that I should not be so interested in the emotive function - which is an intentional expression of emotions - but rather in expressions of emotion that the subject is ignorant of.
The innovation exposes a genus hithero unknown, and is innocent of any greater infringement than the transfer of a name from a species to its genus. I was shut in to the alternative of inventing for the genus a new name or transferring to it that of one of its species. The aversion of the mind to new names I deem a sufficient apology for my choice. It was impossible to avoid a shock to mental habit. I trust it wll be found that I have avoided the greater violence. (Clay 1882: 28)
I feel ill at ease with concourse, which now seems like an unpromising candidate for naming body language in literature.
I have now to explain what I understand by the terms distinctness and indistinctness. They denote undefinable attributes of objects. When a tree is an object of visual perception and attention it is a distinct object, and its qualities, e.g. its solidity, colour, form, etc., are indistinct objects. When a grove is an object of visual perception and attention it is a distinct object, and those of its trees that are nearest to the centre of the field of vision may, if not too remote, be distinct objects. In the second case, the trees near to the circumference of the vision may be indistinction. The qualities of a tree that is an indistinct object are more indistinct than those of a tree that is distinct. Of distinct objects those that are objects of attention are more distinct than those that are not. Thus we see that there are degrees of distinctness and of indistinctness. It is essential to the object of attention to be distinct, but objects of inattentive discernment are not necessarily indistinct. (Clay 1882: 30-31)
This is eerily reminiscent of Michael Polanyi's distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness.
Indistinctness supposes objectivity. What is not an object cannot be indistinct.
There are two well-marked degrees of indistinctness, viz., that which does and that which does not, exclude knowledge of the indistinct object. The indistinctness of normal inchoate consciousness, e.g. the ignored light, is an example of indistinctess that excludes knowledge of the object. Let indistinctness of this degree be distinguished as abditive. The indistinctness of objects near the circumference of the field of vision is an example of the kind that does not exclude knowledge. Let it be distinguished as inabditive.
Distinctness graduates, through instances, into inabditive indistinctness, and the latter into abditive indistinctness, as neighbour colours of the rainbow graduate one into the other, equally excluding a detection of boundary and doubt of the existence of specific difference. For example, the graduation excludes the possibility of ascertaining a minimum of distance from the centre of the field of vision beyond which a thing that, within the distance, would be distinct, is indistinct. (Clay 1882: 31)
Thus, the indistinctness of something in the centre of the field of vision is abditive, while the indistinctness of something on the edge of the field of vision is inabditive. We do not notice the minimum light reaching our eyes when we close our eyes, and thus have no knowledge of it; while we do notice things in our peripheral vision about which, although they are indistinct, we can still have knowledge.
In order to explain what is denoted by the term, Knowledge, I must take a liberty with the term, thesis, assigning to it a partially new meaning. I trust that the importance of the new signification, to which no other known term is, by its connotation, so well adapted, will be found a sufficient apology. I employ the term, thesis, as denoting a thing which, when objective, is verbally expressible by a proposition and not otherwise. (Clay 1882: 32)
Not sure if this would help be define thesis for my own experiment with quasi-Peircean trichotomy borrowed from Santaella Braga. I think I've had enough of this excursion.

Art as Technique

Shklovsky, Victor 2006[1917]. Art as Technique. In: Richter, David H. (ed.), The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Third Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 774-784.

Poetry is a special way of thinking; it is, precisely, a way of thinking in images, a way which permits what is generally called "economy of mental effort," a way which makes for "a sensation of the relative ease of the process." Aesthetic feeling is the reaction to this economy. This is how the academician Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, who undoubtedly read the works of Potebnya attentively, almost certainly understood and faithfully summarized the ideas of his teacher. Potebnja and his numerous disciples consider poetry a special kind of thinking - thinking by means of images; they feel that the purpose of imagery is to help channel various objects and activities into groups and to clarify the unknown by means of the known. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 775)
This sounds reasonable, seeing as poetry is indeed more dependent on mental images than prose. To say that it is "thinking in images" on the other hand seems odd, as the material of both poetry and prose is still words, is it not? I'm reminded of this: "In answer to a statement by Degas that he was full of ideas but couldn't manage to say what he wanted to say in a poem, Mallarme's reply was: "My dear Degas, one does not make poetry with ideas but with words" (Valery 1939/1958: 63; in Waugh 1980: 60)
"Without imagery there is no art" - "Art is thinking in images." These maxims have led to far-fetched interpretations of individual works of art. Attempts have been made to evaluate even music, architecture, and lyric poetry as imagistic thought. After a quarter of a century of such attempts Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky finally had to assign lyric poetry, architecture, and music to a special category of imageless art and to define them as lyric arts appealing directly to the emotions. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 775)
Is this all that different from attempts to evaluate music, architecture, and lyric poetry as sign systems?
Or, as Potebnya wrote:
The relationship of the image to what is being clarified is that: (a) the image is the fixed predicate of that which undergoes change - the unchanging means of attracting what is perceived as changeable. [...] (b) the image is far clearer and simpler than what it clarifies. (Potebnya 1905: 314)
In other words:
Since the purpose of imagery is to remind us, by approximation, of those meanings for which the image stands, and since, apart from this, imagery is unnecessary for thought, we must be more familira with the image than with what it clarifies. (Potebnya 1905: 291)
It would be instructive to try to apply this principle to Tyutchev's comparison of summer lightning to deaf and dumb demons or to Gogol's comparison of the sky to the garment of God.
[Translators footnote:] Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873), a poet, and Nicholas Gogol (1809-1852), a master of prose fiction and satire, are mentioned here because their bold use of imagery cannot be accounted for by Potebnya's theory. Shklovsky is arguing that writers frequently gain their effects by comparing the commonplace to the exceptional rather than vice versa. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 775)
The whole point of "deformation" in this sense consists in the reversal of the technique: instead of explaining something extraordinary in terms of something ordinary so as to make it clear, something ordinary is explained in terms of something extraordinary.
Many still believe, then, that thinking in images - thinking, in specific scenes of "roads and landscape" and "furrows and boundaries" - is the chief characteristic of poetry. Consequently, they should have expected the history of "imagistic art," as they call it, to consist of a history of changes in imagery. But we find that images change little; from century to century, from nation to nation, from poet to poet, they flow on without changing. Images belong to no one: they are "the Lord's." The more you understand an age, the more convinced you become that the images a given poet used and which you thought his own were taken almost unchanged from another poet. The works of poets are classified or grouped according to the new techniques that poets discover and share, and according to their arrangement and development of the resources of language; poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them. Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the ability to create them. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 776)
This is a crucial piece for understanding Tynjanov's theory of literary evolution: the words and images themselves don't change, but how they are used (e.g. the "technique" of their "arragement") does.
We know that frequently an expression is thought to be poetic, to be created for aesthetic pleasure, although actually it was created without such intent - e.g., Annesky's opinion that the Slavic languages are especially poetic and Andrey Bely's ecstasy over the technique of placing adjectives after nouns, a technique used by eighteenth-century Russian poets. Bely joyfully accepts the technique as something artistic, or more exactly, as intended, if we consider intention as art. Actually, this reversal of the usual adjective-noun order is a peculiarity of the language (which had been influenced by Church Slavonic). Thus a work of art may be (1) intended as prosaic and accepted as poetic, or (2) intended as poetic and accepted as prosaic. This suggests that the artistry attributed to a given work results from the way we perceive it. By "works of art," in the narrow sense, we mean works created by special technique designed to make the works as obviously artistic as possible. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 776)
This discussion predated, and possibly influenced, Mukarovsky's discussion of the intentional component of the poetic function. To make a piece of work as obviously artistic as possibly is quite possibly one of the interpretations of the "poetic function".
The conclusion ["poetry equals imagery"] stems partly from the fact that Potebnya did not distinguish between the language of poetry and the language of prose. Consequently, he ignored the fact that there are two aspects of imagery: imagery as a practical means of thinking, as a means of placing objects within categories; and imagery as poetic, as a means of reinforcing an impression. I shall clarify with an example. I want to attract the attention of a young child who is eating bread and butter and getting the butter on her fingers. I call, "Hey, butterfingers!" This is a figure of speech, a clearly prosaic trope. Now a different example. The child is playing with my glasses and drops them. I call, "Hey, butterfingers!" This figure of speech is a poetic trope. (In the first example, "butterfingers" is metonymic; in the second, metaphoric - but this is not what I want to stress.) (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 776)
Another congeniality with Mukarovsky. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the origin of the practical / poetic distinction. Note that what is here meant by "practical" is essentially "referential", "cognitive", "communicative", "ideational", etc. elsewhere. The aspect of being "a means of placing objects within categories" is a major part of this. Attracting the attention of a young child, on the other, is "appelative" or "conative", but this function has not yet been formulated (Bühler, a year later, in 1918).
Poetic imagery is a means of creating the strongest possible impression. As a method it is depending upon its purpose, neither more nor less effective than ordinary or negative parallelism, comparison, repetition, balanced structure, hyperbole, the commonly accepted rhetorical figures, and all those methods which emphasize the emotional effect of an expression (including words or even articulated sounds). (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 776-777)
Notice also that the "emotive function" does not yet stand on its own here. Also, there is a relevant contrast between English and Estonian translations: here all these methods "emphasize the emotional effect of an expression" while in the Estonian translation all these methods are equated with the notion of "figure" and is said to "intensify the perception of object (the work's own words or sounds can be the object)". That is, "emotional effect" is replaced with the auto-referential aspect of the poetic function. Yet this is also the case with Benjamin Sher's translation, in which the relevant passage reads that a poetic image is eqial to other poetic devices, and "equal to all these means of intensifying the sensation of things (this "thing" may well be nothing more than the words or even jsut the sounds of the literary work itself)."
But poetic imagery only externally resembles either the stock imagery of fables and ballads or thinking in images - e.g., the example in Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky's Language and Art in which a little girl calls a ball a little watermelon. Poetic imagery is but one of the devices of poetic language. Prose imagery is a means of abstraction: a little watermelon instead of a lampshade, or a little watermelon instead of a head, is only the abstraction of one of the object's characteristics, that of roundness. It is no different than saying that the head and the melon are both round. This is what is meant, but it has nothing to do with poetry. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 777)
I doubt if it has absolutely nothing to with poetry. In Jakobson's works you can probably find examples of just this kind of abstraction of characteristics used in poetry in the sense of selection.
The law of the economy of creative effort is also generally accepted. [Herbert] Spencer wrote:
On seeking for some clue to the law underlying these current maxims, we may see shadowed forth in many of them, the importance of economizing the reader's or the hearer's attention. To so present ideas that they may apprehended with the least possible mental effort, is the desideratum towards which most of the rules above quoted point. [...] Hence, carrying out the metaphor that language is a vehicle of thought there seems reason to think that in all cases the friction and inertia of the vehicle deduct from its efficiency; and that in composition, the chief, if not the sole thing to be done, is to reduce this friction and inertia to the smallest possible amount. (Herbert Spencer, The Philosophy of Style (Humboldt Library, vol. 34, New Pork, 1882), pp. 2-3.)
[...] Petrazhitsky, with only one reference to the general law on mental effort, rejects [William] James's theory of the physical basis of emotion, a theory which contradicts his own. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 777)
What is important for me here is that Spencer's quote contains some physical terms that may become important later on: friction could be the basis for the common Estonian translations, "tõrge", "takistus", "pidurdus". And inertia could be related to the word having, in the poetic function, a "mass" of its own. And we may also note the relevant difference between this and Benjamin Sher's translation, where the sentence about James reads, "Petrazhitsky dismisses James's theory, in which the latter presents the case for the corporeal basis of the effect". What effect, exactly? Eestikeelses (Vikerkaar-e) versioonis: "Üksnes viitega vaimujõu kokkuhoiu üldisele seadusele heidab Petražitski kõrvale talle põigiti ettejäänud James'i teooria afekti kehalisest alusest" (e.g. closer to Sher's version, although not "effect" but "affect" which probably was misspelt in Sher's text).
Even Alexander Veselovsky acknowledged the principle of the economy of creative effort, a theory especially appealing in the study of rhythm, and agreed with Spencer: "A satisfactory style is precisely that style which delivers the greatest amount of thought in the fewest words." (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 777)
Vt. Tõnjanov ja "värsirea tihedus".
And Andrey Bely, despite the fact that in his better pages he gave numerous examples of "roughened" rhythm [...]
[Translator's footnote:] The Russian zatrudyonny means "made difficult." The suggestion is that poems with "easy" or smooth rhythms slip by unnoticed; poems that are difficult or "roughened" force the reader to attend to them. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 777)
затрудняю - raskepäraseks tegema
These ideas about the economy of energy, as well as about the law and aim of creativity, are perhaps true in their application to "practical" language; the were, however, extended to poetic language. Hence they do not distinguish properly between the laws of practical language and the laws of poetic language. The fact that Japanese poetry has sounds not found in conversational Japanese was hardly the first factual indication of the differences between poetic and everyday language. Leo Jakubinsky has observed ["O zvukakh poetischeskovo yazyka", Sborniki I (1916): 38.] that the law of the dissimilation of liquid sounds does not apply to poetic language. This suggested to him that poetic language tolerated the admission of hard-to-pronounce conglomerations of similar sounds. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 777)
I stand corrected: the distinction between poetic and practical language was originated by [Y]akubinsky. Here's an excerpt from the quoted essay, "On the Sounds of Poetic Language":
The phenomena of language must be classified from the point of view of the speaker's particular purpose as he forms his own linguistic pattern. If the pattern is formed for the purely practical purpose of communication, then we are dealing with a system of practical language (the language of thought) in which the linguistic pattern (sounds, morphological features, etc.) have no independent value and are merely a means of communication. But other linguistic systems, systems in which the particular purpose is in the background (although perhaps not entirely hidden) are conceivable; they exist, and their linguistic patterns acquire independent value. (Jakubinski 1916; in Lemon & Reis 1965: 108)
This is most likely where notion that poetic words "aquire a weight and value of their own" (e.g. autonomy) comes from.
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 778)
Since William James in Russian Culture is of no help here (dealing only with how William James influenced the theory of trans-sense language, zaum), I'll turn to James himself. At one point he quotes a very accessible passage by the French psychologist and philosopher Léon Dumont:
Every one knows how a garment, after having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of cohesion. A lock works better after being used some time; at the outset more force was required to overcome certain roughness in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already. This saving a trouble is due to the essential nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is required. The sounds of a violin improve by use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibres in the wood at least contract habits of vibration conformedd to harmonic relations. This is what gives such inestimable value to instruments that have belonged to great masters. Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes, when it flows again, the path traced by itself before. Just so, the impressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous system more and more appropriate paths, and these vital phenomena recur under similar excitements from without, when they have been interrupted a certain time." (Dumont [Revue Philosophique 1] 1876: 324; in James 1890: 105-106)
Another relevant passage concerns the aspect of habit becoming "unconsciously automatic":
Man is born with a tendency to do more things than he has ready-made arrangements for his nerve-centres. Most of the performances of other animals are automatic. But in him the number of them is so enormous, that most of them must be fruitful of painful study. If practice did not make perfect, nor habit economize the expense of nervous and muscular energy, he would therefore be in a sorry plight. As [the British psychiatrist] Dr. [Henry] Maudsley says:
If an act became no easier after being done several times, if the careful direction of consciousness were necessary to its accomplishment on each occasion, it is evident that the whole activity of a lifetime might be confined to one or two deeds - that no progress could take place in development. A man might be occupied all day in dressing and undressing himself; the attitude of his body would absorb all his attention and energy; the washing of his hands or the fastening of a button would be as difficult to him on each occasion as to the child on its first trial; and he would, furthermore, be completely exhausted by his exertions. Think of the pains necessary to teach a child to stand, of the many effocts which it must make, and of the ease with which it is last stands, unconscious of any effort. For while secondary automatic acts are accomplished with comparatively little weariness - in this regard approaching the organic movements, or the original reflex movements - the conscious effort of the will soon produces exhaustion. A spinal cord without [...] memory would simply be an idiotic spinal cord. [...] It is impossible for an individual to realize how much he owes to its automatic agency until disease has impaired its functions. (Maudsley [Physiology and pathology of the mind] 1867: 69-70)
The next result is that habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed. (James 1890: 113-114)
There's enough interesting material here to merit a comparison with Shklovsky.
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. "If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been." And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 778)
How habitualization devouls clothes, specifically, is evident in Dumont's passage: "a garment, after having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new". This, apparently, is bad. Yet when it comes to the aspect of prolonging the perception, there is a related idea in William James:
Within the psychic life due to the cerebrum itself the same general distinction obtains, between considerations of the more immediate and considerations of the more remote. In all ages the man whose determinations are swayed by reference to the most distant ends has been held to possess the highest intelligence. The tramp who lives from hour to hour; the bohemian whose engagements are from day to day; the bachelor who builds but for a single life; the father who acts for another generation; the patriot who thinks of a whole community and many generations; and finally, the philosopher and saint whose cares are for humanity and for eternity, - these range themselves in an unbroken hierarchy, wherein ecah successive grade results from an increased manifestation of the special form of action by which the cerebral centers are distinguished from all below them. (James 1890: 23)
The distinction between "machine-like", automatic, immediate impulses and more highly intelligent action consist the length of the "loop-line". In this sense habitualized life is non-existent, even animalistic, while deautomatized life is intelligent, aesthetic.
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it - hence we cannot say anything significant about it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways. Here I want to illustrate a way used repeatedly by Leo Tolstoy, that writer who, for Merezhovsky at least, seems to present things as if he himself saw them, saw them in their entirety, and did not alter them.
Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing something he avoids accepted names of its parts and instead names corresponding parts of other objects. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 779)
Describing, instead of naming, is one means of estrangement (making strange).
Tolstoy uses this technique of "defamiliarization" constantly. The narrator of "Kholstomer," for example, is a horse, and it is the horse's point of view (rather than a person's) that makes the content of the story seem unfamiliar. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 779)
Another way, which really amounts to the same thing, is to change the point of view. I say that it amounts to the same thing, as the horse is not supposed to know "the accepted names of its parts", whatever it may be (the institution of private property).
Anyone who knows Tolstoy can find several hundred such passages in his work. His method of seeing things out of their normal context is also apparent in his last works. Tolstoy described the dogmas and rituals he attacked as if they were unfamiliar, substituting everyday meanings for the customarily religious meanings of the words common in church rituals. Many persons were painfully wounded; they considered it blasphemy to present as strange and monstrious what they accepted as sacred. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 781)
If that does not touch upon the "code selection" aspect, I don't know what does.
Now, having explained the nature of this technique, let us try to determine the approximate limits of its application. I personally feel that defamiliarization is found almost everywhere form is found. In other words, the difference between Potebnya's point of view and ours is this: An image is not a permanent referent for those mutable complexities of life which are revealed through it; its purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object - it creates a "vision" of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 781)
But can't you know an object through a "vision" of it?
We have supplied familiar English examples in place of Shklovsky's word-play. Shklovsky is saying that we create words with no referents or with ambiguous referents in order to force attention to the objects represented by the similar-sounding words. By making the reader go through the extra step of interpreting the nonsense word, the writer prevents an automatic response. A toad is a toad, but "tove" forces one to pause and think about the beast. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 782; translator's footnote no. 26)
Could this be the case with "tresses" in Powys's sonnet?
And in my article on plot construction I write about defamiliarization in psychological parallelism. Here, then, I repeat that the perception of disharmony in a harmonious context is important in parallelism. The purpose of parallelism, like the general purpose of imagery, is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception - that is, to make a unique semantic modification. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 783)
This may go a long way towards clarifying whether deautomatization concerns perception or (re)presentation.
In studying poetic speech in its phonetic and lexical structure as well as in its characteristic distribution of words and in the characteristic thought structures componded from the words, we find everywhere the artistic trademark - that is, we find material obviously created to remove the automatism of perception; the author's purpose is to create the vision which results from that deautomatized perception. A work is created "artistically" so that its perception is impeded and the greatest possible effect is produced through the slowness of the perception. As a result of this lingering, the object is perceived not in its extension in space, but, so to speak, in its continuity. Thus "poetic language" gives satisfaction. [...] The common archaisms of poetic language, the intricacy of the sweet new style [dolce stil nuovo], the obscure style of the language of Arnaut Daniel with the "roughened" [harte] forms which make pronounciation difficult - these are used in much the same way. (Shklovsky 2006[1917]: 783)
More of the same. Now to write my letter [lugejakiri] to Shklovsky.