“A life so beautiful”, in our time?

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Conference Talk on Rawls

Guanjun Wu
PhD Candidate, Monash University
Guanjun.Wu@arts.monash.edu.au

The paper I prepared for this conference was written in Chinese. When Professor Tong notified me recently that I should make my presentation in English, I found that I did not have sufficient time to translate my entire text into English. Without a manuscript in English, it is not easy for me to clarify the main points in my paper since it is a text of some 60,000 Chinese characters. Thus, what I will do today is to focus on one aspect of my paper, that is, to note some weaknesses and problems in Rawls’s justification in The Law of Peoples. In my Chinese paper, I had compared Rawls’s argument with Kant’s justification of his notion of perpetual peace and Carl Schmitt’s exposition on his famous formula “politics as enemy-friend grouping.” I will not have sufficient time to do this in any detail in today’s presentation.

Let me begin by summarizing Kant and Schmitt in relation to Rawls’s justification in his The Law of Peoples. The two relevant works are: Kant’s Perpetual Peace and Carl Schmitt’s The concept of the Political.  In Perpetual Peace and other related works on this issue, Kant tries to justify the possibility of perpetual peace philosophically and normatively, without using empirical arguments and examples, while in The concept of the Political, Schmitt puts forward his famous idea “politics as enemy-friend grouping” by using realistic and positivist arguments instead of normative justification. For Schmitt, enemy-friend distinction is the “ultimate distinction,” which human beings cannot avoid. That is to say, human beings cannot avoid the state of war and “the real possibility of physical killing”. Pretty obviously, there is a strong conflict between these two viewpoints—the state of perpetual peace versus the state of war. However, these two opposite discourses can hardly constitute real challenges to each other because of the different methods of justification. Kant’s perpetual peace is a normative concept and Schmitt’s “politics as enemy-friend grouping” is a descriptive one. Kant doesn’t deny the historical fact that the human world is still full of warfare. Meanwhile, Kant’s justification on perpetual peace as a philosophical sketch is also not invalidated by empirical examples of the wars and physical killings in the real world of human beings. For Kant, perpetual peace can function only heuristically, as a “regulative idea” rather than a constitutive one. That is to say, perpetual peace is never a simply given, it is always and forever a task, a moral duty for every single human being. From a Kantian viewpoint, the enemy-friend grouping might be historically and conventionally the case, but one can’t say it is always the case.

As a famous contemporary Kantian figure, Rawls, like Kant, believes a “just and lasting peace” is possible. In The Law of Peoples, Rawls tells us repeatedly that what he follows here is Kant’s doctrine of perpetual peace. But is it really the case? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to examine Rawls second book Political Liberalism, from which the problems in The Law of Peoples derives originally. In Political Liberalism, the “original position” featured by “the veil of ignorance” is not the key element any more in the justification of the “most reasonable” social justice principle which Rawls labeled as “justice as fairness.” Actually, “the fact of reasonable pluralism” now plays this role in the justification. In Political Liberalism, “justice as fairness” is not valid to all societies. It is not universal and cosmopolitan, but only suitable to constitutional democratic societies. The tricky part in Rawls’s justification is that he invents a certain kind of “closed society” instead of referring to real ones. Let’s have a look at how he defines such a “closed society.” Rawls suggests that it is appropriate to assume such a society as it contains a complete and closed social system. It is completely self-sufficient, self-contained insofar as it has no relations with other societies. People “enter it only by birth and exit only by death” and have to lead a complete life there. Besides completeness and closeness, the third major characteristic of this society is that its prototype is modern democratic society. That is to say, the “closed society” is already a constitutional democratic society featured by Rawls’ so-called “fact of reasonable pluralism,” without which “overlapping consensus”, one of the most crucial ideas in Political Liberalism, could not be possible.  Besides “the fact of reasonable pluralism,” the Reformation, the development of the modern state with its central administration, and the development of the modern science, according to Rawls, are all crucial historical facts on which the political culture of modern democratic society is based. Now Rawls can easily deal with the communitarian critique and other criticisms of his A theory of Justice by virtue of those historical facts that can lend support to his argument. It is rather easy for Rawls to respond such challenges now: Why are basic liberties more important than other values and interests to the parties in the original position? Why do all the parties in the original position respect each other equally, treating each other as free and equal? In Political Liberalism, since the closed society is characterized by the historical facts and developments of Western societies, such questions can be answered by showing those empirical achievements that constitute the political culture of modern constitutional democratic societies. The “closed society” is such a tricky device: in the first instance, Rawls informs us that it is “appropriately assumed” to be a hypothetical and nonhistorical construction for normative experiment, and in the second instance, it is immediately empiricalized and filled with the long-term historical developments of actual western constitutional democratic societies. Therefore, it is abstract and realistic at the same time. On the one hand, it is, as Rawls tells us, a totally “considerable abstraction”; one the other hand, it is filled with specific, substantial and crucial historical facts in the history of western political thought. Such a “closed society” does not exist anywhere in this real world; however, it also shares many of what Rawls calls the “general facts” that have shaped the “historical developments” of actual modern democratic societies, the most crucial one among which is “the fact of reasonable pluralism.”

Hence, one can see that Rawls relies tacitly and crucially on certain empirical facts and historical developments to justify his justice principle. Meanwhile, when he encounters other facts which are not supportive of or which even undermine his justification, he can use the “considerable abstraction” side of his “closed society” argument to avoid having to deal with them. “The closed society is,” Rawls writes, “justified only because it enables us to focus on certain main questions free from distracting details.”(p.12) But what are “distracting details” is totally decided by Rawls himself. Empirical facts and historical developments which are selected by Rawls help him relieve the pressure of justification significantly. He responds to the crucial and severe difficulties in his justification by saying that those are already “general facts” which constitute the features of a democratic society’s political culture. Since they are already “facts,” there is no need to justify their “possibility” normatively and philosophically. Rawls often uses such sentences in Political Liberalism: “Historical experience says…” ”Historical experience suggests …” And meanwhile, he won’t mention those other historical experiences or facts which could bring him troubles since the “closed society” is also a “considerable abstraction” when he needs it to be.

However, once the justice principle relies on a set of specific historical developments, it turns to be a transitory form of justice, which cannot be adequately grounded in norms. The normative dimension of justice principle is thus completely lost. In other words, the justice principle cannot be judged on the basis of a given principle’s perceived historical success or failure. This is to say, history cannot justify justice. Rawls himself criticizes Locke for resorting to historical reality in his justification of a right to property. “From a Kantian viewpoint,” Rawls writes, “Locke’s doctrine improperly subjects the social relationships of moral persons to historical and social contingencies that are external to, and eventually undermine, their freedom and equality.”(p.287) However, in the same book, Rawls himself repeats the same fault which he attributes to Locke’s doctrine. The basis of “justice as fairness” is now founded on “historical and social contingencies.” Once historical facts are enlisted in the justification of the justice principle, the logical consequence is the plight of “whose justice?”(Using Alasdair MacIntyre’s term) Historically, there have been different justice principles among different societies and cultures (sometimes even within one society). The conflict among those different justice principles results in what Weber has famously phrased as the war among Gods. The fight with “the enemy of Justice” in the name of Justice has no fundamental difference with the war with heretics in the name of God. Therefore, “justice as fairness” as the justice principle of a historical community will lead only to the kind of argument that Schmitt proposes, that is, a conception of politics as enemy-friend grouping.

Hence, the justice of a “closed society” which is filled with empirical historical reality cannot resist Schmitt’s questioning. Schmitt doesn’t intend to question how a just order is possible. Instead, what he questions is how a peaceful order is possible. We’ve known that a justice principle based on a specific historical development will possibly lead to an enemy-friend grouping. If the social order could not ensure peace in the first place, how could it become a just order? Peace is more basic than justice. A peaceful order actually is the first step towards a just order. Now let’s see how Rawls justifies a peaceful order is possible.

In The law of Peoples, although the topic turns primarily from “justice” to “peace”, Rawls follows the method of justification in his Political Liberalism. In A theory of Justice, Rawls uses the hypothetical and nonhistorical “original position” to rewrite and justify the Law of Nations. Although such normative justification is still kept in The Law of Peoples, it is not as crucial as before. Original position as a device of representation is now only suitable to what Rawls perceives to be reasonable liberal peoples. By doing that, the pressure in the justification is already relieved. Since they are peoples who are free and equal in their democratic societies, there is no problem for them to respect each other equally in the original position. Rawls says, those people, as liberal peoples, “see themselves as free and equal.” (p.33) So in the second original position, all parties know the peoples they represent to be liberal peoples. Meanwhile Rawls also emphasizes that they don’t know the size of the territory, or the population, or the relative strength of the people, or the extent of their natural resources, or the level of their economic development, or their comprehensive doctrine, or other such information. One cannot help but ask, then, how come the parties which are subjected to the veil of ignorance still know their historical identity as liberal peoples, but they don’t know the identities of the people they represent, such as whether they are rich people or poor people. The information regarding whether a people is rich or not is not harder to access than whether a people is liberal or not. Therefore, the original position as a device of representation becomes tricky in The law of Peoples, the parties can get some empirical information even under the veil of ignorance so that they can easily meet the prerequisites of the original position, and for other information which is not helpful to the justification, the veil of ignorance becomes really thick again. Rawls relies implicitly on the “fact” that those peoples are already liberal peoples and have shared historical memories (and as Rawls notes, they even have a common language.) (p.25). That’s why he doesn’t allow a global application of original position in The Law of Peoples. However, once the original position is not purely nonhistorical, it has to encounter other similar types of empirical facts. This has the effect of stripping the original position featured by the veil of ignorance of its previous given function.

In The Law of Peoples, we also encounter a similar sleight of hand in the concept of the “closed society.” For instance, when Rawls discusses the notion of decent hierarchical people, he intends to use Islamic peoples as exemplar. However, Rawls doesn’t discuss any nonliberal Islamic peoples in the real world, instead he invents an imagined one and names it Kazanistan.  Hence, although Kazanistan’s features are not observed, described and summed up from the real world, it can still “borrow” the historical facts and developments of Islamic peoples easily if needed. Meanwhile, other historical facts of Islamic peoples which are not consistent with the decent people Rawls defines are excluded completely. If dealing with a real Islamic people, Rawls has to face all kinds of its historical realities, no matter whether they are consistent with the decent people or not.  However, Kazanistan as an “imagined example” can always be a typical decent people because its features are drawn not from empirical observation in the first place, but defined directly by Rawls himself. Such a people does not exist anywhere in this real world; however, it also shares many “historical facts” of Islamic peoples. Rawls has enough freedom to customize a people totally according to his needs. It is hypothetical and historical at the same time. It is hypothetical when Rawls doesn’t want it to be historical, and it will turn to be totally historical when Rawls needs it to be.

In the Law of Peoples, the empirical justification rather than the normative one is the major method of justification. Those eight principles of the Law of Peoples actually are not selected from a list by the parties in the original position, instead they are conventionally established in history. Rawls himself writes, “These familiar and largely traditional principles I take from the history and usages of international law and practice.”(p.41) This statement makes his (second) original position as a device of representation totally useless. That is to say, if the proposition of the original position is taken out from Rawls’s book, it would not influence the emergence of these eight principles of the Law of Peoples. When stating that “democratic peace is possible”, Rawls directly uses “historical records” instead of normative justification. Rawls says that democratic peace is “a simple empirical regularity.” But once the “historical records” are used in the justification, one has to face all empirical facts rather than those facts he wants to use. Actually, Rawls admits that there are other unpleasant historical records that severely challenge democratic peace as “a simple empirical regularity.” “Given the great shortcomings of actual, allegedly constitutional democratic regimes,” Rawls writes, “it is no surprise that they should often intervene in weaker countries, including those exhibiting some aspects of a democracy, or even that they should engage in war for expansionist reasons. ……Though democratic peoples are not expansionist, they do defend their security interest, and a democratic government can easily invoke this interest to support covert interventions, even when actually moved by economic interests behind the scenes.”(p.53) Facing such historical records, Rawls has to admit that democratic peace is “a hypothesis” or “an ideal” rather than “a simple empirical regularity.” And the justification of such hypothesis is eventually based on personal belief. “If the hypothesis is correct, armed conflict between democratic peoples will tend to disappear as they approach that ideal,” Rawls writes, “I believe this hypothesis is correct and think it underwrites the Law of peoples as a realistic utopia.”(p.54) Now we can see, once the historical records are used in the normative justification, justification itself eventually turns to be personal belief.

Rawls emphasizes that the Law of Peoples is a realistic utopia. But what is a realistic utopia on earth? According to Rawls, “political philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what was ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility and, in so doing, reconciles us to our political and social condition.” At first glance, such a realistic utopia is quite like a Kantian idea. However, this is not the case. In Rawls’s viewpoint, the Law of Peoples not only may be achieved, but also could be achieved. It exists in the limits of practicable political possibility. In other words, the Law of Peoples is a realistic political project rather than an imaginary ideal. That is the reason when Rawls discuss propositions such as “society of peoples is possible,” he gives his readers four facts including the fact of reasonable pluralism and three others as arguments rather than to provide a normative justification. Just as I have described above, if the Law of Peoples is a realistic project rather than a normative ideal, Rawls cannot only deal with those facts which support his case, he must also deal with those other facts that contradict this realistic project. So many disasters, acts of violence and violations of international law in historical and present realities makes it impossible for the Law of Peoples to be justified in realistic terms rather than as a normative ideal.  Actually, Rawls’s own language in describing his realistic utopia is really vague. The realistic utopia is the limit of practicable political possibility. That is to say, it exists along the boundary of the ideal and the real. It is realistic and utopian at the same time. It is poised between the ideal world and the real world and therefore it cannot belong fully to the one or the other. Meanwhile, it contains the features of the two worlds at the same time. Such a realistic utopia thus operates like the concepts of the “closed society” and “Kazanistan,” turning out to be another tricky invention. Rawls himself tells us what he follows is the tradition of Kantian constructivism. If he could adhere to this tradition strictly, or like Prof Arnason suggests in his very paper which is submitted to this conference—if Rawls could turn to historical sociology systematically, I believe the justification in Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples would be much better, at least, much more coherent and thus more tenable. 
 

Conference Talk on Rorty

Guanjun Wu
PhD Candidate, Monash University
Guanjun.Wu@arts.monash.edu.au

The paper I prepared for this conference is quite different from other papers. I use Lacanian psychoanalysis and discourse analysis to examine the intellectual works on Rorty and related matters by Chinese authors. By this examination, I try to uncover some formative rules of discourse that dominate, at least partly, the production of contemporary Chinese intellectual thought. Luo Di, the “Chinese name” of the American philosopher Richard Rorty, is in no way a transparent mirror of Rorty; rather, “he” is the phantasmic image (or a set of phantasmic images) of Rorty in China, because “he” stands in a totally different discursive space with different formative rules of discourse from where Rorty stands. Therefore, “he” has “his” own unique symbolic significances for a few contemporary Chinese intellectuals.

By comparison with many other contemporary Western thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, etc., one can say that the phantasmic images of Rorty are not absent but somehow comparatively marginalized in the contemporary Chinese intellectual world. However, one can see the features of contemporary Chinese intellectuality by examining these centralized and thematized figures and “ism”s; similarly by examining figures who have been quite marginalized, one can also learn something.

By using discourse analysis on quite a few texts written by Chinese intellectuals including Prof Zhang Guoqing here, I point out in my paper that as a quite salient phenomenon, Rorty’s thought has been generally interpreted by Chinese intellectuals as a special version of “postmodernism” since the 1980s. The intellectuals in contemporary China who regard Rorty seriously as a postmodernist are far more than those who regard him as a pragmatist or an ironist, though Rorty himself far more frequently call himself the latter rather than the former. “Houxiandai”, the Chinese translation of “postmodern”, is frequently understood and deliberated on by Chinese intellectuals in terms associated with “Xiandaihua” – the Chinese translation of “modernization”. From the late 1970s onwards, the post-Mao Chinese Communist Party launched an official project of Xiandaihua jianshe (means, the construction of modernization) which subsumes four dimensions – modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense and science-technology. In the last two and a half decades, the political project of modernizing China through market reform introduced a strong emphasis on “modernization” which quickly became a central topic of Chinese intellectual discourse. During the intellectual movement in the 1980s which is lately called “New Enlightenment Movement”, a large number of Chinese scholars understood their intellectual endeavors as the pursuit of “cultural modernization”, which was complementary to, and even more primary than, the official campaign of the “Four Modernizations”. It is also in the 1980s that ideas under the label “Houxiandaizhuyi” (means, postmodernism) were introduced into the Chinese intellectual world; this trend of introducing Western postmodernist thought reached its zenith in the mid 1990s. When describing this intellectual phenomenon, Prof Zhang Guoqing uses the metaphor “cultural bubble” in his text to refer to this postmodernist trend. By affirming China’s modernization rhetorically as an autonomous subject, Prof Zhang radically rejects the postmodernist trend in China and concludes that “Modernization does not need postmodernism. Fundamentally speaking, postmodernism has no way out at all in today’s China”. Other contemporary Chinese intellectuals such as Beijing-based philosophers Liu Dachun and Jiang Jinsong who also wrote quite a few papers and monographs on Rorty made similar statements.

In this sense, the project of China’s modernization actually constitutes their very intellectual horizon from which they deliberate philosophical issues and tackles all intellectual trends. In Lacanian terms, one could say that this modernization project constitutes their fundamental fantasy. A curtain screen of fantasy conceals the irreducible inconsistency of the Symbolic Order and makes it run smoothly; in other words, it is the way in which people organize and domesticate their jouissance. The fantasy screen is the vista from which people see the world and with which people are enabled to look at reality and enjoy their lives in this Symbolic world. Without a certain fantasy screen, reality falls into total chaos and trauma emerges from this chaotic state, until the very fantasy screen is repaired, or another fantasy screen is constructed. Thus, deep trauma emerges from inside when their very fantasy of Xiandaihua (modernization) is threatened by the advent of Houxiandai (postmodern); which is to say, the smooth running of the Symbolic is put into danger if this tendency is not held back; and what could happen next is, in turn, that the jouissance is going to be overwhelmed by the traumatic loss of reality.

How has this fantasy screen been historically formed? I discuss this by analyzing Jiang Jinsong’s monograph on Rorty. In China’s history, roughly since the mid nineteenth century, what has been sharply broken by the Western military and intellectual intrusions is not only the (originally fantasized) “consistency” of the (“traditional”) Chinese culture and societal organizations, but also that of the language, i.e., that of the signifying chain. Over the past one hundred years, Chinese language was radically and systematically reconstructed, especially during the period of the “May Fourth” New Culture Movement (from the late 1910s till the late 1920s). In this sense, Western intrusions in the nineteenth century was, for the Chinese people living at that time who spoke not the same language which today’s Chinese people speak, the intrusions of the Real. I explain what this phrase means in my paper on page 8.

Since the late nineteenth century, the Chinese people have deeply experienced a grave trauma due to the quick destruction of the “original” fantasy screen – to some extent, the orthodox Confucianism – through which people lived their lives and understood their world to be a harmonious and consistent system and by which the jouissance is continuously domesticated. The “May Fourth” New Culture Movement deeply overthrew the symbolic authority of Confucianism which, roughly speaking, constitutes the fundamental framework through which the Chinese people see and understand reality. The large-scale anti-traditionalism from the “May Fourth” Movement onwards, which Lin Yü-sheng famously phrases as “totalistic iconoclasm”, broken this very fantasy screen which the Chinese people deeply shared with each other in the nineteenth century and before, which explains the cosmos in terms of such symbolism as the ideas of Heaven and Earth (tiandi), yin-yang, and the five elements (wuxing), and by means of which the world is conceived as a harmonious and consistent system. That the relative continuity of this Confucian mode of thinking over a thousand years was drastically and severely put into question and into great danger by the Western intrusions, the intrusions of the Real, in the mid nineteenth century thus caused the grave trauma that many Chinese intellectuals, as well as common people, see themselves as having suffered since the Opium Wars  and that they continue to see themselves as suffering.

In the last one and a half centuries, what the Chinese people did to soothe this grave trauma is to refantasize a new screen by means of which the gap opened up by the failure of the Symbolic to account fully for the Real could be reconcealed and the inconsistency of the Symbolic caused by the intrusions of the Real could be reeffaced. Jiang Jinsong’s description shows that China’s modernization project has been fantasized by many “great men” through “repetitive deliberations and discussions in the last one hundred years” and it has already become “a basic agreement”. In this sense, it has become a new fantasy screen that relieves the grave trauma caused by the intrusions of the Real (that is, Western intrusions). In other words, what “those great men” tried to achieve is, in Lacanian terms, to make up the gap between the reality (China) and the Real (the West), and thus makes the Symbolic run smoothly again and reorganize the jouissance of the Chinese people. The Symbolic Order named for “traditional China” is the projection of a harmonious and consistent system destroyed by Western intrusions.

Jiang’s imagining of an ongoing unity of Chinese intellectuals in the form of their “agreement” on advancing China’s modernization over the last century is what one might describe as the new fantasy screen from which many contemporary Chinese intellectuals understand the (symbolic) significance of their works and derive pleasure from their self-appointed mission to advance this modernization project. To some extent, this fantasy screen of modernization has also been deeply shared by most Chinese common people since the early twentieth century.

The above analysis shows that over the last one hundred years, a new fantasy screen has fantasized, that is, the fantasy of Xiandaihua (modernization), which has gradually shared by most Chinese intellectuals, as well as many common people. Through this screen, China’s reality is fantasized to be on the correct, consistent and harmonious process toward the future; in other words, the Symbolic Order (of China) is fantasized as a harmonious system again, a system fully aiming at modernizing itself.

In this context, Luo Di, along with “other postmodern thinkers”, comes into China as an intruder of the Real – a fantasy breaker, a trauma maker. He is accused of threatening the vision of China’s continuous advance through the modernization project as a common “goal”. To describe this vision as a shared fantasy screen is to say that these Chinese intellectuals project a reality of China as a country whose people are attempting to recover the former harmonious and consistent system that the Chinese are imagined to have enjoyed in the days when China was a great imperial civilization. However, Luo Di steps in this commonly shared fantasy with great threats, thus makes Chinese intellectuals to experience themselves as encountering a new “dilemma”: the very fantasy screen, the modernization project itself, is questioned in the place it originated; and people there, to some extent, “is ready to discard” it.

In the process of concrete discourse analyses, I find many discursive or linguistic similarities among those texts written by Chinese intellectuals, such as similar metaphors, tropes, words, writing styles, etc. From that, one can find some fundamental formative rules of discourse in contemporary Chinese intellectual circles. Many intellectuals share the same fantasy screen, that is, China’s modernization project, through which they develop their philosophical thinking and evaluate contemporary Western ideas. These phatasmic images of Rorty ––– Luo Di as a trauma-maker, Luo Di as an American philosopher who “does not highly value the Third World’s cultures”, or Luo Di as an inspiration-provider to China’s “ongoing modernization campaign” – are all produced by the very same formative device of discourse. Rorty’s thought is deemed as “a dead end” when Luo Di is regarded as an enemy against China’s modernization project; it is deemed as “a new perspective to advance our present cultural discussions” when Luo Di is regarded as a helpful friend of the same project.

From the above analysis, one could say that China’s modernization project, the fantasy screen shared by many Chinese intellectuals, as well as common people, constitutes some fundamental formative rules of discourse in contemporary Chinese intellectual circles, which (fully or partly) dominate the production of Chinese intellectual discourse. In my paper, I also discussed other renewed phantasmic images of Rorty in the recent intellectual debate which is frequently titled as 自由主义与新左派之争, the debate between liberalism and the new left. But I don’t have time to read these analysis here. People who are interested in this part could read my paper from page 21 to 25.

One can see that Rorty is very different from Luo Di(s), his phatasmic images in China illustrated in this paper. According to Rortyan ironist thought, these differences cannot be avoided or effaced because ironists “do not take the point of discursive thought to be knowing”, and “do not think its point is to find a vocabulary which accurately represents something, a transparent medium”. From these very differences, one can disclose some the formative rules of discourse, in Rorty’s terms, the criteria “which contextually define the terms of a final vocabulary currently in use”.

Also, Rorty’s marginalization in the Chinese intellectual world in comparison to other contemporary Western thinkers like Habermas or Hayek, to some extent, is partly related to his ironist style of thought, which refuses to philosophize the world in a harmonious and consistent way, refuses to picture an ideal model of society as the future of humankind, refuses to depict an ultimate or foundational element (or a set of elements) as the hidden key(s) of linear development and progress. By reading Rorty’s marginalization in Chinese intellectual discussions as a symptom of Chinese desire for modern power, one can see what this Chinese “fantasy-screen” cannot admit for discussion.