Defamiliarization

Well, I really like where you just started, thinking about the act of reading or rereading Lord of the Rings, a fiction that's known to almost everybody, even those who never read the book, thanks to Peter Jackson's films.

Thinking about a revisiting of this story in a spirit of Ostranenie, estrangement or defamiliarization.

This is a-

Right

Is it that, just going off your account of the book, is it that the drug and addiction more generally um wipes your memory like it's so so and not in the way that it's sort of like oh you'll like not remember things so you'll you'll like be hazy but that actually one function of memory or one effect of memory is to create habit right that um habitual actions lose their force.

And this is where I, when I, one thing I do remember from, from white out is that there's like a kind of on, um, deliberately, you know, unmarked, um, engagement with Victor Schlossky and the notion of like estrangement, you know, or defamiliarization.

And so, um, shlovsky famously argues that that the power of artists to defamiliarize has become habitual you know so we do these things and we kind of get acquainted with them and they cease to have they cease to have any sort of real sensory and kind of existential impact and then we have to like recharge them and re and sort of reignite the newness and strangeness of our life you know our environment um and as i remember right like part of what clune is saying is that like In addiction, you know, you actually, like, although the sort of conventional wisdom would be that, like, you're always chasing something that has receded further into the past and dulls and dulls and dulls until it's, like, basically dead.

Actually, you feel this constant renewal that never dims.

And so you could say that what that's doing is not so much... sickening your memory as simply preventing it, you know, or like, or negating one key effect, you know, of memory.

And I also think that, you know, he does say at one point, there are a lot of kind of counterintuitive, you know, things that he arrives at.

One of them is that, um he talks about becoming sober and then having to form new habits and he you know he says that people the conventional wisdom is that uh addiction is a habit or it's a bad habit or it's habit forming but actually it's an anti-habit because it disconnects you from things so it says that habit habit marries you to objects addiction and drugs like distance you from objects right because it's about I don't know, disappearing or repeating something or repeating nothing or something, you know? So he talks about creating these habits of like hanging out with his nephew, I think, or something like that.

And like going for a walk, going for a drive, like these are the ways that you create habits and habits are actually the way also to get new or to get defamiliarized in a way, right? Because if you're not experiencing the world, then it can't be defamiliarized.

mostly right whereas a brecht a play by brecht tries to strip away the ideological illusion that usually supports our sense of reality and create this disorienting effect where we do have to think that's what that's what i was trying to say yeah

By employing the means of verfremdung, which is not… I think it's defamiliarization or something.

Defamiliarization.

Defamiliarization, exactly.

Yes, exactly what I was trying to point to.

The idea that our reality is familiar to us.