by Jon Lackman | 4 April 2008 | Theory
In the March 2008 issue of Cultural Politics, Johanna Drucker argues that image interpreters need to turn away from the
de-familiarizing effect that was a tenet of the historical avant-garde. The very identity of aesthetic images was in part linked to capacity for making strange (Shklovsky 1917). In our current, profoundly disturbed, cultural condition, no effect of documentation can register upon our numbed and brutalized sensibility … In this extreme condition, a critical shift could be redefined as a task of refamiliarization. Refamiliarization returns images and symbolic expressions to a system of cultural and symbolic production with which they are co-dependent … A radical constructivist systems theory underpins this belief, not a naive holism … Refamiliarization asks images to show the contingent relations of complex systems, to expose vectors and forces of interests, desires, and power. The task of refamiliarization is to show that what is is not entirely simulacral, but connected to the lived experience of persons and peoples, organic beings, within cultural, political, and vulnerable ecological spheres. This reconceptualizes the work that we imagine interpretation can do … As a critical approach, its insights are not limited to the study of contemporary works.
