Abstract

A distinctive feature of Russian formalism, something we do not see in Bell and Fry or in Wölfflin and Riegl (or see it more rarely, see Section IV below), is this emphasis on the analysis of everyday perception and the ways in which art encourages us to perceive differently. But it is difficult not to read the concept of defamiliarization as a naïve early statement of what art historians and aestheticians of the second half of the 20th century criticized as the “Innocent Eye” tradition. As talking about the Innocent Eye is now universally frowned upon, defamiliarization has not been taken as seriously as it should have been. The aim of this paper is to revive the concept of defamiliarization by showing that it has nothing to do with the “Innocent Eye” tradition and to propose a new interpretation of it in terms of distributed attention. I conclude that this reinterpreted concept of defamiliarization can be very useful for contemporary post-formalist accounts of the history of vision (and imagination as well as visual attention).