CONCEPT
Emplotment
The configurative act—borrowed by Ricoeur from Aristotle's muthos—by which scattered events are organized into temporal unity, conferring meaning that no event contains alone, and that AI threatens by offering pre-configured narrative structures.
Emplotment (mise en intrigue) is Ricoeur's term for the narrative operation that transforms a succession of events into a story. Borrowed from Aristotle's Poetics and extended into a general theory of temporal meaning, emplotment is the synthesis by which goals, causes, and chance are brought together within the temporal unity of a whole and complete action. It is not a recording of events but a creative act of selection and organization: the narrator decides which events matter, interprets their connections, and arranges them into a plot. Emplotment is where narrative identity is actually produced—the act of configuring experience into the story that constitutes the self. AI collaboration introduces a profound complication: when the machine offers connections, structures, and configurations the human did not anticipate, whose emplotment is this? The answer determines whether the collaboration produces genuine authorship or outsourced narration.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Aristotle's muthos—the organization of events in tragedy—was descriptive, an account of what playwrights