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Four. Shklovsky’s Hegelianism
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133 I noted in connection with my tabulation of the “fourThings” in chapter 3 that Shklovsky was a left-leaning Hegelian thinker who anticipated the Hegelian Marxism of Georg Lukács by several years—and that the Soviet ban on formalism came out of the Second International Marxist tradition pioneered by Plekhanov, Kautsky, and Bernstein and institutionalized in the Soviet Union by Lenin and Stalin, a tradition that Lukács associated with the “phantom objectivity” of bourgeois reification. According to the orthodox Soviet Marxists , you were either a materialist objectivist or an idealist subjectivist: either you accepted that a thing was a thing and that human thought was passively shaped by the economic base and class position, or you were a “Kantian” who believed in superstitions and fairy tales. There was no middle ground. (Ironically enough, as we’ve seen, the structuralists simply assimilated Shklovsky to the “positive” or positivistic side of this vulgar-Marxist binary, clearing him of “subjectivism” by depersonalizing him, by pretending that he had no interest in the phenomenological construction of things.) The middle ground that Shklovsky maps out between objectivism and subjectivism is, I suggest, specifically Hegelian. We’ve already seen exhibit A of this case, namely, the degree to which the four Things are reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic: Thing 1, the stone as a sensually experienced object, is sense-certainty (sinnliche Gewißheit) or unmediated consciousness (unmittelbares Selbstbewußtsein) as thesis;Thing 2, the stone as algebraically “recognized” or reduced object, is perception (Wahrnehmung) as antithesis; and Thing 3, the poetic representation of Thing 1, which incorporates the algebraic reduction 4 Shklovsky’s Hegelianism 134 Ostranenie: Shklovsky’s Estrangement Theory into a higher (resensualized) experience, is understanding (Verstande) as synthesis . Or, as Hegel writes in the Phenomenology: The object is therefore part unmediated being, or a thing in general, which corresponds to unmediated consciousness [Thing 1]; part a becoming-otherwise [Anderswerden] of itself, its relationality, or being-for-another and being -for-itself, determinateness, which corresponds to perception [Thing 2]; part essence or in the capacity of the universal, which corresponds to the understanding [Thing 3]. The object as a whole is the conclusion/closure/ syllogism [Schluß] or the movement of the universal through determination to the individual, as also the inverse, from the individual through the sublated [aufgehobne] individual or determination to the universal. (Phänomenologie , VIII.1.789, 603; my translation) The stone we step on with a bare foot (Thing 1) is an “unmediated” being or thing because we experience it directly, through our senses, which convey to the brain the overwhelming certainty (sense-certainty as unmediated consciousness ) that there is something hard jabbing at us from underneath our foot. (That our nervous system mediates this experience for us mitigates Hegel ’s notion that this is unmediated being, of course.) This sensual experience of the stone begins to dissipate or “become-otherwise ” after we walk away and perhaps begin to talk with others about stepping on the stone, or even, as the sensual experience grows dimmer in our memories , about the general and vague “experience of stepping on a stone”: here is the dulled or perceptually determined relationality of “being-for-another” that Shklovsky describes as the algebraic reduction of mere repeat “recognition” (Thing 2). The abstract concept or “determination” (Bestimmung) of “stone” is the same for everyone because it has been perceptually reduced to its quality of otherness, to being-for-another. The fading or blurring of the stone’s “unmediated ” or sensual thinginess in algebraic conceptualization is for Hegel a “becoming-otherwise of itself.” When the stone is now represented poetically, in Thing 3, Shklovsky says that it is rendered once again stony, turned back into a stone, which I noted was basically the same thing as making Thing 2 Thing 1, but of course Thing 3 is not just Thing 1. It is Thing 1 and Thing 2 sublated as Thing 3, which contains not only an artistically heightened or transcended version of Thing 1 but also the negated or emptied-out externalization of Thing 2—what Hegel calls the movement of the universal through determination (that stone that I just stepped on) to the individual, which is also, dialectically, the inverse movement from the individual stepped-on stone through sublation to the universal. [44.204.24.82] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:20 GMT) 135 Shklovsky’s Hegelianism Thing 4, obviously, the “algebraically” reduced or objectified image of the literary text, would be a new...