What does the Russian literary theorist and writer Viktor Shklovsky mean when he says the following?
And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make the stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By “estranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious.”
The key idea/theme in this passage is knowledge and how one comes to knowledge. The passage identifies two sources of knowledge: knowledge gained through the organ of sight vs knowledge of a thing gained through recognition. The passage is trying to convey the idea that the purpose of art is to arrive at knowledge through the former, whereas our ordinary source of ‘knowing’ is through the latter. You see, the former points to the knowledge gained through the groundedness in Being, the direct and immediate apprehension of reality through perception, whereas the latter points to the vast storehouse of accumulated symbols that you already possess, the knowledge you already possess. When one looks at a stone, they are not looking at the stoniness of the stone in all its details and strangeness.
Because the stone has ceased to be strange for the observer. Science has made the object (stone) ‘known’ to the observer, it has a ‘known’ form and ‘known’ characteristics or attributes, and the observer is only interested in the stone insomuch as he can exploit the stone, utilize its properties to achieve some goal, like building a house. When one looks at a stone, they recognize it as ‘stone’, the various abstractions that go with the concept of stone, like its properties. They are not really looking at the particulars of this very specific stone that they’re observing now at this very exact moment. They are really looking at the stone through the lens of abstraction, of the idea of ‘stone’, their previous conceptions or images of the stones that they may have seen in the past, and how these stones may have been utilized as a tool towards an end. A stone has become a commonplace thing. But surely, no two stones are ever the same, even though they may have the same general pattern or color? The exact intricacies and the subtle details of every stone are different, yet these nuances rarely factor into our perception of the stone. The only way an observer would find a stone (or any object for that matter) strange is if that object deviated from its commonly understood properties, which is precisely what art as a device aims at. The device of art is then precisely to convey this strangeness of the object (like a stone) but without altering its physical properties (which is impossible). Somehow art must find a way to complicate the commonly understood form, the commonly understood attributes or characteristics of the object, so as to make the observer really look at the object, to make the perception ‘long and laborious’ as if the observer were a child discovering the stone for the first time, without the past images and abstractions of the object superimposing themselves on this perception. It must be a direct immediate perception of the reality of the stone using the organ of sight, without the lens of memory, thought and language. And along with that, there must be no goal directed towards the future in this perception.