Defamiliarization

Defamiliarization, as it appears in Kornbluh's reading of Marx and Victorian literary realism, names the aesthetic operation by which a text renders the familiar structures of social reality strange — making visible the constructed, contingent, and historically specific character of what ordinarily passes as natural or self-evident. In the argument of this passage, defamiliarization is not merely a literary device (in the Shklovskian sense of ostranenie) but the distinctive cognitive-aesthetic ambition of realism as a mode: to produce, through figural and narrative means, an encounter with reality that interrupts the automatic perception ideology relies upon. For Kornbluh, Marx participates in this impulse insofar as Capital's rhetorical apparatus — personification, metalepsis, and related tropes — does not simply illustrate pre-formed economic concepts but actively works on the reader's perception, suspending the ideological self-evidence of commodity relations and making the "naturalness" of capitalist social forms legible as form.

This aesthetic dimension is inseparable from the psychoanalytic stakes of Kornbluh's argument. If ideology, in the Lacanian-Žižekian frame, operates not through conscious belief but through the lived, perceptual texture of social reality — the way things simply seem — then defamiliarization is a practice that intervenes at the level of that symptomal perception. To defamiliarize reality is to disrupt the ideological suture between the symbolic order and what appears as the real, creating a gap in which the drive-logic of capitalism (its relentless, circular, non-teleological movement) can be apprehended rather than merely inhabited.

In kornbluh-anna-realizing-capital-financial-and-psychic-economies-in-victorian-for, defamiliarization occupies the hinge between literary form and critical theory: it is the name Kornbluh gives to what realist aesthetics does when it functions most rigorously. The concept bridges the source's two central concerns — the Victorian novel as a form of thought, and Marx's Capital as a literary-realist text — by identifying a shared cognitive project. In relation to Ideology, defamiliarization functions as ideology's aesthetic antidote: where ideology, in the Lacanian account, operates through the very structure of perception (Seminar XIV's claim that perception is the model of ideology), defamiliarization works by making that perceptual habituation falter. It is, in effect, a counter-ideological operation at the level of form rather than argument.

In relation to Drive and Personification of Capital, defamiliarization is the literary effect that allows the drive-structure of capitalism to become visible. Kornbluh's argument is that tropes like personification and metalepsis are the rhetorical vehicles through which Marx renders capitalism's ceaseless, looping, non-goal-oriented movement perceptible — the drive's circuit, which normally disappears into the apparent naturalness of economic life, is made strange and thus apprehensible. In relation to Metaphor and Metalepsis, defamiliarization is the cognitive outcome produced by the text's figural operations: metaphor and metalepsis are mechanisms; defamiliarization is what those mechanisms achieve in the reader's encounter with the text. The concept thus sits at the intersection of rhetoric (how the text is made) and ideology-critique (what the text makes possible to see).

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian FormAnna Kornbluh · 2014 (p.118)

Across his career he thus evinced the fundamental impulse of literary realism: to defamiliarize reality.

The phrase "fundamental impulse" is theoretically loaded because it positions defamiliarization not as one technique among others but as the constitutive drive of realism as a mode — echoing the Lacanian understanding of the drive as a constant, structural thrust rather than a contingent aim. The coupling of "literary realism" with "defamiliarize reality" is equally charged: it makes realism's project a paradox (reality rendered unreal to itself), which is precisely the operation Kornbluh needs to argue that Capital is both a realist text and a work of ideological critique.