Art (at least visual arts and literature), just like thinking, language perception and human memory, is closely related to imagery. Habitualization benumbs our ability to perceive images, turning seeing into automatic pattern-matching. The same can be said about other four senses.
Presenting the habitual in a fresh perspective disarms habitualization and makes us change our mode of perception back from robotlike pattern-matching to full-fledged seeing, hearing and feeling.
The techniques of dehabitualization in literature, according to Shklovsky, include among other methods:
- creative use of language resources (imagery, colorful descriptions, euphemisms and metaphors; dialects, barbarisms, other varieties and registers) and
- narrative techniques (presenting something as seen for the first time — in a very detailed way, focusing attention on minutest particulars which usually remain out of focus; refraining from naming a familiar object and presenting it by way of description; making riddles; choosing an unusual narrator, whose point of view is capable of shedding new light on the familiar, etc.).
A full inventory of such techniques can't be given, because they, just like the things they defamiliarize, become habitualized over time — and artists are compelled to constantly seek new ways of defamiliarizing the familiar.