LESLIE SCALAPINO AND RON SILLIMAN
What/Person? From an Exchange
This well-known exchange between Leslie Scalapino and Ron Silliman, over his introduction to a selection of work by Scalapino and three other contemporary poets in Socialist Review (1988), begins with Scalapino’s disagreement with Silliman’s distinction between poets “who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history” (e.g., white male heterosexuals, or WMHs) and poets “who have instead been its objects.” Silliman attempts to describe a divergence within aesthetic practice in which the former are motivated to dismantle conventions of narrative, persona, and reference, while the latter “need to have their stories told.” For Scalapino, this distinction is hierarchical and thus derogatory in that it assumes the first group is more predisposed to formal innovation, while the other is more “conventional.” For Scalapino, “no one is free of their narrative,” nor from an obligation to contest it. This debate, which is still not concluded, took place on the threshold of a major shift in the cultural politics of the avant-garde and its relation to identity politics. While black, gay, and feminist liberationist movements demanded the recognition of identity, a new generation of minority writers consider identity not as a given but as a site for exploration. Poets like Harryette Mullen, Renee Gladman, Pamela Lu, Tisa Bryant, Tan Lin, and Rodrigo Toscano took full advantage of the contradictions disclosed in this provocative debate.
Dear Ron,
We agreed on an exchange concerning views expressed in your introduction which prefaced writing (requested and in some cases excerpted by you) by eight poets including myself published in the July–September 1988 Socialist Review. I’ll quote the passage which contained, in my view, the most problematic aspects of your argument:
Progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history—many white male heterosexuals, for example—are apt to challenge all that is supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation of their own subjectivity. That their writing today is apt to call into question, if not actually explode, such conventions as narrative, persona and even reference can hardly be surprising. At the other end of this spectrum are poets who do not identify as members of groups that have been the subject of history, for they instead have been its objects. The narrative of history has led not to their self-actualization, but to their exclusion and domination. These writers and readers—women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’—have a manifest political need to have their stories told. That their writing should often appear much more conventional, with the notable difference as to who is the subject of these conventions, illuminates the relationship between form and audience.
Your argument as I understand it is that white heterosexual men in groups (i.e., elites) being free of their social condition are more able to write formally innovative work than are women, gays, and minorities who by virtue of being caught in their social condition have the need to “have their stories told” and therefore tend to write “conventional” narrative.
The word conventional by definition is value-laden in reference to any art or scholarly/thought form, implying inferiority.
Elsewhere in your statement, you associate awareness of the formation of subjectivity in writing with questioning “the role of the unified subject.”
Though I do not deny the prevalence of ‘conventional narrative’ (the characteristics of which you do not describe more specifically than those of making connections and ‘telling one’s story’) written by many including white men, the argument thus phrased—though you are entirely concerned with radically questioning social structure—is authoritarian. As you know, I wrote a letter responding to your introduction which I intended for publication in the Socialist Review. I was refused publication on the basis that my language was too poetic and did not qualify as political discourse. That is to say, I must speak a language recognized as discourse before it can be regarded as public and as germane.
The issues regarding narrative phrased very simply seem to me to include the following:
No one is free of their narrative. My own poetic construct is similar to yours in wanting to ‘deconstruct’ our illusion or constructions of reality—which I see as including the illusion that ‘elites,’ whatever these constitute, are able to have objectivity by removing ‘themselves’/as critiquing subjectivity. The corollary to this is to say that “radical subjectivity” would seem to = the person recognizing themselves/oneself as ‘marginalized’ no matter what and at all times.
the attitude of
in a setting
aging and dying at
as—that
we
should be
that
My point about development and form in writing was the following: Those in social power and those without it might be equally capable of questioning their subjectivity. But those who are without social power are less inclined to see reality as orderly; for example, less inclined to see the social construction as unified.
The nature of groups is to sustain and nurture members, not to urge them to question themselves or the sense of reality established by the group.
The desire on the part of a writer (such as Flaubert) to remove himself from the writing as a kind of objective camera-lens-like analysis of reality (i.e., the hidden narrator: the illusion, however interesting as an experiment, that one could do this) is in fact similar to your idea of men capable of objectivity by being free of their social condition.
From my first letter to you:
I once worked as a writer for a labor arbitrator. Arbitrators of course are chosen by the two sides of a dispute to resolve the dispute between them. Almost all arbitrators in the country were white men. Seeking to enter a program to train women and minorities to become arbitrators, I asked my employer about this program. He said, “Those people can’t be objective.”
My point is that, in your view, the conception of transcendence (objectivity) = the critique of the unified subject (that the tendency to view reality via the unified subject is the historical condition of people who are disenfranchised). In fact: the concept of ‘objectivity’ constitutes a unified subject.
The conception of a ‘unified subject’ is merely taught, in certain conventionalizing settings such as school or workshops, i.e., people writing would not otherwise have such a view. Your argument is that this conception is inherent in the ‘experience’ of women, gays, and minorities.
The very notion of the ‘unified subject’ is a white, ‘Anglo’ description which conventionalizes writing radical in its own time such as that of Flaubert or Williams.
I am referring to a different sense of ‘telling one’s story.’
Here are four lines translated from a Yaqui (Native American) song or poem shown to me at Chax Press in Tucson:
walk
walk
walk
walk
The entire poem was composed of such directions. There were no designated persons.
You have a Marxist narration. Supposing there is an acknowledged need for community, which is a theme of the Yaqui poems (I was told). Is the expression of that a ‘conventional’ narration (i.e., the construction of convention, the construction of narrative, which is the community)? And why would that not be innovative?
You are defining innovation as the repository of white men who are supposedly free of connection. Even if they could be free of connection, why should they be? E.g., why would that be viewed as innovative?
I’m defining narrative as ‘constructing.’
My premise, in general and in writing, is that I do not think there is a man, or woman, or society, social construction; though it is there. It is not there.
A primary formal element of your writing is statements.
Best,
Leslie
_______________
Dear Leslie,
Underneath your accusation (“the argument thus phrased … is authoritarian”), there are troubling issues, for poets generally, and certainly for white male heterosexuals (WMHs). What I’d like to do is to use this occasion (and your aid, critical as it may be) as a means of approaching these questions—“identity,” “objectivity,” and “instrumentalism”—with some hope that this dialogue will allow us to go further than I could on my own.
What I did not do was claim that straight white males (or any other persons) at any point in history had access to something called “objectivity.” There is no universal subject position, and without that, the objective—transparent access to an object—is simply an hallucination, albeit one that historically has been used by those in power on (and against) the powerless many. I believe we agree on this.
What I did write was that a group with an historically specific subject position would have an historically specific response. As you put it, “No one is free of their narrative.” I agree completely.
What is historically distinct about the subject position of the white male hetero (WMH) is its relation to power.1 Far from being liberating, this experience of power has been profoundly troubling and confusing for many WMHs. Both in that it exists at all (for it has no legitimate basis) and in the particular forms that it takes: always simultaneously privilege and oppression. Power is always already overdetermined: one cannot escape its stratifi-cations and limits. Power is never our own—it can only exist “elsewhere.”
It is this double-nature of power in its relation with the specific subject position of the WMH that has generated, in some writers, a response I have characterized as a critique of subjectivity (and of the subject itself). Not because of any peculiar aesthetic or analytical capabilities it gives them—there are none—but because of the specificity of privileged oppression.
It’s not an accident that this critique or reaction occurred within a generation that was, for the most part, of draft age during the Vietnam War. For a time at least, the experience of contradiction was neither an abstraction nor an intellectual game.
Historically, an identification with privilege has rhetorically posed its experience in universal terms. Thus, the linked concepts of objectivity, truth, and transcendence (all moments in the same discourse), far from being an option or feasible goal for any or all people, has been rather a strategy for (and by) a specific cluster, one subset of the grouping WMH. The point was never objectivity, but rather identity—what subjective state could imagine a condition through which all other peoples disappear?
Art exists solely in the context of real lives, real communities, complex ensembles of difference. But in a universe in which only the WMH is acknowledged, the WMH as such is no longer perceptible in his own landscape. It was precisely this invisibility that permitted centuries of men to imagine the pronouns he and him as gender-neutral.
You argue that “those who are without social power are less inclined to see reality as orderly; for example, less inclined to see the social construction as unified.” You present no evidence for this very large claim. To cite simply one possible counter-example, the history of organized religion over two millennia would have to be explained away.
What I have called a critique of the subject on the part of some WHMs is not a transcendent position, but one grounded in position and history. If we reject (as I do) any universalized point of view, those other poetics that superficially appear more conventional are no less radical. I thought that I said as much in Socialist Review. By demonstrating traditional WMH subject positions (such as protagonist, voice, “I,” point-of-reflexivity) inhabited by other subjects—women, homosexuals, people of color—such writing explodes fictions of the universal.
But the agenda facing anyone whose history includes that combination of privileged oppression necessarily will have to be different. The point is not correctness. Nor is it an imaginary future moment where all literary tendencies will merge into one.
I disagree strongly with the nostalgic notion (to which much of the left still clings) that the “trick” to a progressive movement is fathoming how to create a grand universal project or coalition by which to “seize history.” Ours is not a struggle for unity, but rather with unity itself. For the quest for unity leads only to a thousand defeats.
So language poetry (to pick a project) is not—and can never be—the research and development department for “progressive” literature. Rather, it is the practical, day-to-day writing of a real community, complex, historical, positioned, flawed.
Not a struggle for unity (objectivity, transcendence), but rather with the mutual problem of domination in a world of difference. We must not privilege any position, our own included.
Ron
____________
Dear Ron,
I interpreted the (original Socialist Review) argument to be that white (by implication ‘elite’ or avant-garde) males (having perceived the split between themselves and experiences—i.e. the dismantling of narrative) were more inclined to question their own subjectivity than the others mentioned, who are thus thought of as ‘marginal,’ as ‘interest groups.’
The basis of my argument was that anyone as they are in the modern context could perceive the split between themselves and experience (this would actually be a traditionally held view in Asian, Buddhist cultures).
But ‘conventional narrative’ does not express this.
For example, one is taught a definition of one’s humanness when a small female child which is immediately unbelievable to that child—one knows that is not the self.
Regarding narrative, we both are assuming that rebellion from or unpeeling of the layers of the self is an element of awareness. But we are seeing and describing it differently.
Women began to write novels (by the nineteenth century) having a market for these narratives that displayed the people to each other.
The novels portrayed a sense of the psyches of people, for example.
The creation of a sense of private psyche was an expression of the split between oneself and experience.
As such, these were radical expressions which were later commented upon and changed by such writers as Virginia Woolf, using a ‘fragmented’ form to implode even further the previous sense of reality.
Conversely, the collective modern sense of ‘inability’ to make connections is not a given: a fragmented sense of reality is also socially constructed.
Our discussion is partly talking about one current focus of writing which is examining the concept of psyche.
I am currently interested in a form which is a version of the comic book (a written form using frames and without pictures). One element of it is to render itself/‘psyche’ invalid—that it will use itself up as pulp and be regarded as nothing. It is not ‘discursive,’ ‘analytical’ ‘method’—by in some ways reproducing such and not being that.
The conception of this does not exist for those who are far from the highly organized civilization which is based in the view that being free is not having consumer goods.
Not using the mind.
We see as in this—the comic book—one frame at a time.
only not in
the comic book
The (other) is beside herself. In where the mother whales are suckling the babies, stillness, the foam spray of the turmoil being on the outside. She is right next to them, amongst them.
The side of one of the creatures.
mind isn’t in
this
In the hive of the arcade, the intruder foreigner has come in surrounded by a mob—who’re the mirror images, the reverse of the civilization and don’t move.
mind is before
The crowd seeming to jeer at us leaving in droves having it was found later seen banners advertising it as a strip show. Not knowing at the time. And so the young man having been jeered compared it to after coming out, discovered by his classmates, being ridiculed on the schoolbus.
changing them
from inside
and so only in rare instances is the comic book in rapport with the experience of its readers.
the emancipation from experiences
The people who are going to work walking with their briefcases or with shopping bags past the sea on the sand—on their way—the moon in the sky above them.
Our collective sense of not making connections which is seeing as fragmentary series is not a given. […]
[Writing the relation of interior—experience—to social constructing as event changes the language.]
Leslie
____________
Dear Leslie,
One might begin anywhere (and, with this topic, it seems one is necessarily always at the beginning, that “getting closer” is not an option, so that the most one can hope for is a useful circumambulation). […]
The question of person is not separable from that of closure, at least for this moment, this discourse, this juncture.
The closed person is defended, complete.
The closed person is autonomous.
The closed person does not require reflection, because reflection is a dividing off, a supplement, a confession of incompleteness.
The closed person is not the body that dies, but the name (the signifier) that could conceivably “live forever.”
So death is not a disappointment, but the jumping-off point—the moment at which the name is free of the body, so that it can (finally) actualize its truly autonomous existence.
Progress begins at the moment of death.
This is why critics still prefer dead poets.
It is also why video games in the arcade keep track of point scores, and list best games by the players’ initials—“I can lose this game [death], but my point score will never die.”
As a boy of ten I found in writing a world I could control in contrast to the other one, anxious, unpredictable, governed by the psychotic grandmother who stalked the kitchen, shouting, in hand a knife.
Closure and consumption, I would argue, are likewise inextricably linked. Marketing wants a simple message. The indeterminacy of a multiply-defined consumer offers immense problems.
All the computer manufacturers want the corporate market, the Fortune 1,000, 500, 100. Yet the vast majority of new jobs—the site of real social development—occur in small businesses, literally Mom-n-Pop operations.
The autonomous consumer prefers Pepsi.
The message presumes completeness.
No ad suggests post-purchase indeterminacy.
Imagine an industry that gave away product,
knowing that it would make a profit
from post-warranty repairs.
Scholars
are the service technicians
of the soul—
in the early years they do installation and configuration,
then later software applications and support,
and finally repair, replacement, and data recovery. […]
Ron
____________
Dear Ron,
Using the mind is not a product of leisure. […]
In regard to “vanguardism,” there is no question but that elites make more changes in culture (i.e. contribute more to evolution) than those who aren’t. The question in that context is what constitutes ‘elite’; it is as you would agree not simply social power—it is also understanding.
____________
[…] What is the distinction between audience and market?
____________
Dear Ron,
What is the separation between information and the unfolding of phenomena? We’ve invaded a country and gotten their ‘leader’ formerly enmeshed in our drug-soaked CIA and we’ve arrested him for drugs our newsmen interviewing people in the street who say to parade him through the streets.
say to execute him. anyone who does not agree is cut off by the newsmen, not allowed to speak. They merely reflect our policy. The trial jury will have to not have heard of the invasion not to have seen the news being on it will depend on their ignorance.
so the unfolding of phenomena is dependent on ignorance. and we would stop it have it come back in if we were not that.
the grey silk dove feeding back in.
and feeding back in is ignorance
itself the purple spurt from the man seen on the retina.
which wouldn’t have happened
and so history is calm throughout feeding back into itself. contemplating.
and so experience itself is convention and we are outside of experience.2
the comic book is to enable people always to be outside of experience.3
There is no relation between the adult and the child and they continually create action.
Actions such as getting naked on the cover of a magazine are narrative which is ostensibly inside experience and therefore rebelling
by being outside of the present convention and, being experience itself.
Leslie
____________
Dear Leslie,
Awareness does not free us from experience—and why would that be the goal? Freedom becomes avoidance when the preposition it invokes is “from.” I’m interested in the freedom to …
What awareness might do is to provide tools for negotiating experience. Awareness of choices within experience might even enable us to choose the phenomenological layerings of experience itself.
In 1949, my mother was a single parent trying to raise two small children while working as a waitress in a donut shop. Realistically, returning “home” to live with her parents may well have been her best option, although the consequences were many. Her father, a foreman in a paper recycling plant in Emeryville, was a silent, emotionally withdrawn person, possibly because he was both extremely shy and hard of hearing. Her mother’s “spells”—today we might call them episodes of severe depression with psychotic features—lasted for months at a time. My brother and I were given my mother’s childhood bedroom, while she slept on the sofa in the living room for the next fifteen years.
I’m personalizing this as much as possible to make a point. Experience, as such, has no value. Value is something that is assigned. We were taught that we had a happy family and I am convinced that nobody believed they were lying when they said this. The distinction between action and discourse was absolute. So it was impossible to know even what our emotions were, let alone what options any one of us might have had. The disjunction between these elements is in no way exceptional. Rather, only through an act of analytic construction can they even be connected.
“Experience regarded as ‘lower class’” is an hallucination of the middle and upper classes. As always, you take extraordinary care in your wording of this statement—nowhere does it say who is doing the regarding.
At first this seems obvious—dualism is constructed upon opposites: self/other, presence/absence, now/then, mind/body, here/there. Difference recedes into infinity. BUT, on either side of this slash mark is something that has been astoundingly reified and reduced. Direct experience is a social construction. You say as much and I agree.
Ironically, the famed (or notorious) relativism of the poststructuralists too often simply substitutes relativity itself as a reified form, displacing this condition without resolving it. A blind spot, institutional power, organizes the terrain, so that many otherwise honorable, otherwise intelligent young scholars do not even see how (or why) they restrict their interpretive moves to always already canonical texts. A refusal to do so—a recognition that an honest poststructuralism would require not just a revolution of the critical canon, nor even the literary canon, but of the concept of canonicity itself, is what makes Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 such an extraordinarily courageous (as well as brilliant) book. It is not an accident that R&R has no chapter divisions, no linear argument—it would be impossible to outline—nor that its footnotes (!) should prove to be possibly the best history of modern American poetry we have yet had in print. Nelson shifts subject position (and subject) on almost every page. R&R’s expository strategy is one of refusing to let the argument—and with it the object of discourse—freeze into any fixed form. Not coincidentally, it’s a grounded, eminently practical discussion as well.
There is, I want to say, no such thing as an essential definition. Think of the competing possibilities. Each of us possesses race, class, gender, and sexual identity. It can be argued that each of us also has an historic, if not always personal, relationship to religion, nationality, and even generation (and this last term reveals just how historically specific “essentials” can be). The category class, even in its narrowest productivist sense, requires fixing class background, class position, class stance, and directionality. Michael Omi and Howard Winant have chronicled how even race is historically constructed. And, as the recent revolutions in Eastern Europe (and they can all be legitimately described as such, even in the narrowest sense of that term) have shown, mobs demanding the production of basic goods—while resisting in the workplace any speedups in their own productivity—one’s status as consumer may be as, or even more, important than one’s status as producer (Baudrillard’s thesis has been verified) in the constitution of one’s subjective perception of identity.
All of these categories occur prior to the instant of direct perception. Dualism can occur only when an entire host of these terms are suppressed simultaneously, enabling one term to subordinate the others and thus to found an Other (which, in turn, has its own subordinations).
The ensemble of categories that constructs identity can neither be denied, it seems, nor taken for granted. Chantal Mouffe makes a point worth raising here. As one of the first theorists to articulate how and why the politics of new social movements differ substantially from the modernist Enlightenment model of a class-centered politics, she has been working for several years to respond to the fundamental(ist) charge that such initiatives only fragment “the people united” and keep them from their utopian goal of a world in which class as well as class conflict dissolve into a unitarian homogeny of political correctness. Mouffe has raised the question of the desirability of any such utopia, dependent as it would be on the repression of specific interests, on the repression of specificity itself.
The objective of Mouffe’s alternative, which she calls radical pluralism, is not a static utopia, but “a chain of equivalence among the democratic demands found in variety of movements—women, blacks, workers, gay, ecological, etc.—around a radical democratic interpretation of the political principles of the liberal democratic regime.” For her, these are radically opposed impulses: “The logic of democracy is a logic of identity, a logic of equivalence, while the liberal logic is a logic of pluralism that impedes the realization of a complete equivalence and the establishment of a total system of identifications.”
The phrase “chain of equivalence” indicates that we are exactly in the terrain of hypo- and parataxis. A politics of pure hypotaxis can only succeed through the mass subordination of every element. A politics of pure parataxis will never complete a thought. Recognized as such, the question of politics itself must be transformed—it must cease to be a project. It must become, instead, a process. As such, politics does not have an end. There is no “final conflict” toward which history rushes (unless it should be with nature, but that is another story). Mouffe puts it this way: “The common good can never be actualized, it has to remain a vanishing point to which we should constantly refer, but which cannot have a real existence.” Here the problem posed by dualism—what Mouffe calls the necessary frontier of the Other—has ceased to exist. What we have instead is “an unending ‘war of position.’”
This war occurs not only between people, but within every person as well—the battle or the self-determination of every category active or latent within our psyches. Our goal should not (indeed, cannot) be the stasis of resolution but learning to balance and negotiate never-ending tensions.
For the poet trying to think her or his way through the poem, this means that social context must be understood as dramatically active. A white male “new formalist”—Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Dick Allen, Frederick Feirstein, or Timothy Steele—seeks maximum hypotaxis, a poetry that reinforces the most traditional modes of privilege. A lesbian involved in the same project, such as Marilyn Hacker, has to be read differently. Her work challenges the possessors of privilege but not privilege itself—indeed, it longs for it. The social logic of rhyme and meter manifests a universe made possible precisely by the terms of her own subordination. Gertrude Stein had no such ambivalence. Neither does Judy Grahn.
Sarah Schulman, in After Dolores, makes use of the mystery novel to turn its presumptions of value on its head (right side up). The lesbian heroine solves nothing by the end of the book. She remains obsessed by the same lost love as on page one. Schulman rejects both hypotaxis (subordination through justice/traditional form) and parataxis (identity as transcendence).
My point here is much as it was in Socialist Review—that none of us is privileged, yet each of us is positioned. The question of politics in art can only be how conscious we are of the multiple determinations that constitute position, and the uses to which these understandings are put.
Ron
____________
Dear Ron,
I concur with many elements of your last letter; insofar as it states or interprets my argument in certain ways, I must briefly summarize mine.
In “experience regarded as lower class,” I was of course referring to the hallucination of that. (The creation or conception of a division between experience and oneself.)
It ‘seems’ that change, political and phenomenal, arises from this division. And the process of such, maybe a ‘dialectic of history,’ is a fabrication.
At the same time my belief is: one does not have an ‘actual’ knowledge of reality if one regards oneself as one’s experience.
In regard to narrative, for me these thoughts imply the following:
that we are not experience—and also that all analysis/theory (anyone’s, or the academy’s which has a format for a paper or a poem) is a false conception of what is ‘objective,’ which creates a reality—it is producing itself.
narrative is the ‘meeting’ of these. This is a relief, as it reveals that one is not ‘actually’ inside any convention.
My Best,
Leslie
NOTES
1 In practice, of course, this has never been a pure experience. White males are divided into thousands of overlapping subcategories that inevitably stratify lives and perceptions. So even to imagine a category as general as the “white male het” will always miss each individual within that group. I don’t expect anyone to recognize himself in my description.
2 It seems to me the heart of the dialogue which I’m seeing as implicit in your argument and in many current interesting works such as James Sherry’s Our Nuclear Heritage, is quintessentially dualistic (and aware of that): that narrative or “storytelling” itself is convention, arising from or concomitant with the conception that experience itself is convention. Analysis, which is itself culturally determined, is to be awareness which frees us from experience.
The dialectic of the expression of this conflict is the following. Viewed critically, this struggle of Western dualism may (as a direction of writing melding with criticism) lead to being trapped in and by its convention of analysis.
Experience regarded as ‘lower class.’
3 See my #2 letter.
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from The Person (1991), 9:51–68.
KEYWORDS: avant-garde; narrative; race; identity.
LINKS: Leslie Scalapino, “War/Poverty/Writing” (PJ 10); Ron Silliman, “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy” (PJ 10); Steve Benson, “Personal as Social History: Three Fictions” (PJ 7); David Bromige, “Alternatives of Exposition” (PJ 5); Beverly Dahlen, from “The Tradition of Marginality” (PJ 6); Michael Davidson, “‘Hey Man, My Wave!’: The Authority of Private Language” (Guide; PJ 6); Norman Finkelstein, “The Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry” (PJ 9); Pamela Lu, from “Intermusement” (PJ 10); Travis Ortiz, from “variously, not then” (PJ 10); Rodrigo Toscano, “Early Morning Prompts for Evening Takes; or, Roll ’Em” (PJ 10); Hung Q. Tu, “Very Similitude” (PJ 10); Ellen Zweig, “Feminism and Formalism” (PJ 4).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: see Silliman, “Migratory Meaning” (Guide) and Scalapino, “Pattern—and the ‘Simulacral’” (Guide).