The drive to unity

I was reading Kant's aesthetic theory for my class this week, and I came across his argument that all art drives toward unity. He thinks we find pleasure in unifying disparate things we never thought could go together. When I read this at first, I thought, 'what? That's not even close to being true. Doesn't Kant know that "fragmentation", différence, truth with a small "t", etc., are in vogue? Unity! Blah!'

As a test case, I thought to myself, what about Michael Henake's film "Code Unknown" (Code innconu récit incomplet de divers voyages). It is a story of an event in a street in Paris: a young white man drops a wrapper in the lap of a woman begging; a young black man, seeing this, comes to the aid of the woman's honor, and tries to get the white man to apologize; the young white man's brother's girlfriend comes to his defense (not knowing what he did); the cops get involved, and the black man spends a night in jail for disturbing the peace.

The rest of the film is composed of scenes prior to the incident and after the incident, with no apparent reason. The reason I thought of this film is that the scenes almost all start in a character's mid-sentence, and end just as abruptly. In addition, we hear sounds off-camera, and these things seem to be important for the film. Clearly, I thought, this is an example of a pleasing film that is fragmented in a very "postmodern" way! Harvard Students Against Unity (HSAU) was my cry!

Yet when I started to discuss with myself what I liked about the film was that all of these off-camera events and sounds were actually just as important as what happens on camera. Then it struck me: I like that because I can bring all these "absent" events - with the help of a little imagination - into what happens on camera. In other words? I can see the unity in the overall work!

Guess what folks. This is exactly what Kant says: there is no "objective" unity in the laws pertaining to the world. There are laws, but it takes us seeing them as having a purpose that brings them into unity. This, I'm afraid, explodes all my postmodern fantasies, precisely because it means that for there to be fragments there must be a unity already.

So, I guess I'll have to hand in my HSAU union card.