Disjunction the world/the work of art

The future in life

As opposed to the work of art, life and the world do not advance, patterned and necessitated, toward a single result. There is not assured closure in life as the future “is anything but given in advance” (There is plenty of critical work on indeterminism in Aristotle). The future is not fixed, and thus no determination of true or false can be attached to a proposition about the futre. The world of the future is one made of the contingent and the unpredictable. 

Artwork and life

For Aristotle (and later for Westerns poetics), design becomes essentially a synchronic endeavor. Thus, the causality that form events in a narrative differs from the causality that we expect in life. According to Aristotle, art is different from history in that the former tends toward a “single result” whereas the latter does not (Poetics, 62). Hence, artwork (such as literary narratives) operate by both backward and forward causation.

It is partly because of this causal necessity that contingency is ruled out of the artwork. The artist may believe in freedom of the human will, of contingency as an operative structure of the world, but when the artist works in an aesthetic project, Aristotle continues, a certain order of time is locked in to advance toward that “single result”. In Aristotle’s Poetics, this single result is understood as closure, which is predicated on completing patterns while also creating a sense of necessity.

If closure completes a pattern and creates necessity, contingency simply cannot coexist with the patterned and necessitated. The latter defeats the former’s cause for being.  

The temporality of the artwork remains radically different from that in real life.

    

Harmony

In Poetics, Aristotle tells us that the attainment of harmony effaces all traces of contingency, which is viewed as not different from disorder and the potential reign of chaos. Harmony recreates a perfect unity in which every piece occupies a certain place and role. It is not harmony per se, but the tight unity achieved by harmony that ensures that there is no room left for the contingent.

Aristotle defines the contingent as something that can either be or not be.

Thus, Aristotle disparages any structure that does not advance unity, such as the episodic plot. In episodic plots, one part could be easily added or subtracted without materially altering the outcome of the whole. An absence can go unnoticed, while further additions can continue without consequentially affecting the whole. The episodic structure is vile, for Aristotle.