Defamiliarization

Two traditions naming the same operation: make the familiar strange.

• Viktor Shklovsky, 1917 — ostranenie. Russian Formalist core: art removes the perceptual automatism that makes familiar things invisible.
• Bertolt Brecht, 1930s — Verfremdungseffekt. Theatrical alienation effect, prevents emotional identification, enables critical distance.

Long predates either: Borges, Wittgenstein, nouveau roman (Robbe-Grillet), Calvino, much philosophical writing.

When to use

• Writing about something so familiar you've stopped seeing it (your neighborhood, your daily software, your institutional culture)
• Working on a problem in a domain you've internalized — the expert knows too much
• Producing critical writing — surface what is presented as natural
• User research / ethnography — describe what people do without importing their categories
• Stale on your own work — read it as if you'd never written it

Don't use when

• The reader doesn't have the familiar context (defamiliarizing the unfamiliar = incomprehensible)
• You need warm identifying engagement (Brecht's purpose is the opposite of identification)
• Producing transparent technical documentation
• Stuck because you don't yet understand the subject (need study, not estrangement)

Procedure

For writing

1. Pick a familiar thing in your draft.
2. Describe it from a position lacking the relevant idiom — a visiting alien, a child, a 17th-century person, a future archaeologist.
3. Force only physical descriptions. No labels, no shortcuts, no idioms.
4. Read the result. Note what you noticed that was previously invisible.
5. Decide: keep the defamiliarized passage, or use it as research and rewrite the labeled version informed by it.

For analysis / critique

1. Identify what's presented as natural in your subject.
2. Defamiliarize that thing. Describe it without accepting its naturalness.
3. The choices that produced the appearance of naturalness become visible.

For user research

Watch users do something everyone in your domain treats as obvious. Describe without domain vocabulary. Often reveals friction you'd long since rationalized.

Worked example

Subject: writing about software engineering as a profession.

Familiar version: "Software engineers write code, debug, and deploy systems. The work is mostly typing, with occasional meetings."

Defamiliarized: "Software engineers spend the largest part of their day moving small marks of light across glass surfaces by twitching their fingers. The marks form chains that, when read by certain machines elsewhere, cause the machines to perform actions the engineer has imagined. The engineer cannot directly observe most of the actions; they receive reports about what happened. A significant portion of their time is spent identifying differences between what they imagined and what was reported, and adjusting the marks to bring the reports closer to the imagination. Many of these adjustments are minute — single missing or extra marks. Engineers describe the activity using metaphors of building, despite producing no physical object."

The labeled version had hidden the mediation (engineers can't observe the thing they're making), the imagination-vs-report gap (most of debugging), the abstract-physical mismatch (they say "build" but make nothing material). All three are critically important features that disappear under labels.

Anti-slop notes

• "See X with fresh eyes" is a slogan, not a technique. Real defamiliarization uses specific operations — alien perspective, missing idiom, physical-only description.
• Don't fake by adding adjectives. Real defamiliarization removes labels, doesn't decorate them. "The great metal beast roared down the gleaming pathway" is purple prose, not defamiliarization.
• Use locally. Constant defamiliarization is exhausting and self-defeating. Apply where the familiar has gone invisible.
• Don't use as fashionable jargon. Use the operation; don't invoke the term unless discussing the tradition.

Sources: Shklovsky, "Art as Device" (1917); Brecht, "A Short Organum for the Theatre" (1948).