Artwork; Focus on the Existence of the Object A comparative study of Early Wittgenstein and Shklovski's Ideas on Art

In his Notebooks (1914-1916), Wittgenstein announces that ‘artwork is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis’. At nearly the same time, in another part of the world, there was a critic and thinker, who thought art as making objects ‘unfamiliar’. He was Victor Shklovsky. I argue that there is a noticeable and yet unintended similarity and relation between these two aesthetic viewpoints. Wittgenstein and Shklovsky’s emphasis on art is its power to pave the way for the readers (in the extended sense of meaning) to feel things in themselves and ‘out of their normal context’. As Shklovsky claims ‘art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways’; in contrast, through ordinary way of seeing, objects are ‘reckoned as nothing’. According to Wittgenstein and similar to Shklovsky’s attitude ‘aesthetically the miracle is that the world exists. That what exists does exist’. In this paper I attempt to show that the early Wittgenstein’s ideas of aesthetics are in harmony with the Shklovsky’s formalistic theory of art. In this direction, I focus on Wittgenstein’s sub specie aeternitatis’ and Shklovsky’s defamiliarization; because I think that they fill each other’s gaps. An artist defamiliarizes objects and the spectators see the objects sub specie aeternitatis. In Shklovsky’s thinking Habitualization (which ‘devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war’) is very near to what Wittgenstein means by ‘the usual way of looking at things’.