Ricoeur transformed Aristotle's mimesis (representation, imitation) from a static concept into a dynamic three-phase process connecting the world of action, the world of narrative, and the transformed world of the reader. Mimesis₁ (prefiguration) is the pre-narrative understanding of action embedded in ordinary experience—the implicit sense of what agents, goals, and causes are. Mimesis₂ (configuration) is emplotment itself—the creative act organizing events into narrative unity. Mimesis₃ (refiguration) is the transformation of the reader's understanding when the narrative is received. The three moments form a cycle: narratives emerge from prefigured experience, configure it into meaningful wholes, and return to reconfigure the experience of those who encounter them. AI disrupts all three: changing the prefigurative background (what counts as meaningful work), offering to perform configuration (the machine tells the story), and attenuating refiguration (output without appropriation). The arc remains, but its conditions must be deliberately preserved.
The framework is the architectonic structure of Time and Narrative (1983–1985), Ricoeur's most ambitious work. Volume 1 develops the theory through Aristotle and Augustine. Volume 2 applies it to historiography and fiction. Volume 3 addresses the aporetics of time—the irresolvable tensions between phenomenological time (as experienced) and cosmological time (as measured). The AI age introduces a fourth aporia: the collision between narrative time (requiring duration for meaning) and computational time (processing at speeds exceeding human temporal experience).
Prefiguration's disruption is most visible in professional identity. The background understanding of software development—that technical mastery is scarce, that struggle produces depth, that years of accumulation are required for expertise—organized the narratives engineers told about their careers. AI changes the background: mastery becomes abundant, struggle can be bypassed, accumulation is optional. The narratives that made sense against the old background lose coherence against the new. The crisis is not individual—it is collective, affecting entire professional populations simultaneously.
Configuration's disruption is the collaboration Segal describes: Claude offers emplotments the builder did not anticipate, and the emplotments are sometimes superior to what the builder would have produced alone. The collaboration is real. The question is whether the builder maintains authorship—whether the final configuration reflects the builder's judgment or the machine's optimization for coherence. Refiguration's disruption is the appropriation failure: accepting output without integration produces the transformation of the environment (more artifacts) without transformation of the self (more understanding).
Aristotle's Poetics defined mimesis as the imitation of action through narrative. For two millennia the term remained confined to aesthetics. Ricoeur universalized it: mimesis is not what poets do but what temporal beings do to make existence meaningful. The move paralleled his treatment of emplotment—taking a literary-critical concept and revealing it as an ontological structure.
Three irreducible phases. Prefiguration provides the background, configuration organizes experience, refiguration transforms the interpreter—each depends on the others.
Cycle, not sequence. The three moments form a recursive cycle—narratives emerge from experience, reconfigure it, and return to reshape the experience they emerged from.
AI disrupts prefiguration. The background understanding of what work means changes when machines share capabilities—narratives organized around scarcity lose coherence.
AI offers configuration. The machine can perform emplotment—but accepting the machine's configuration without critical evaluation is surrendering authorship.
Refiguration requires appropriation. The builder must integrate the collaboration's insights into self-understanding—transformation cannot be outsourced.