Of course, this kind of historical reckoning is at odds with the conventional Western view of history as an account of "real" events and processes. At the heart of that view lies a distinction between reality, the actual making of history, and representation, the terms in which its story is told and acted on. Mitchell (1986), a literary critic, has recently argued that this distinction is basic to modern Western thought; it certainly underlies the familiar contrast between text and context, the concept and the concrete. But, as Mitchell goes on to suggest, representation itself is also believed to have two distinct modes: realism, where images aim to be faithful re- flections of the world; and rhetoric, where those images, by their very form, evaluate the world as they portray it. The first tends to be seen as the medium of factual historical narrative, the second, of interpretive poetics. Philosophers, semioticians, and historians have disputed the soundness of this distinction as an analytic principle; few, perhaps, would defend it any longer. Yet its effects on our ways of seeing have been profound (cf. Friedrich 1979:442). Above all else, it leads directly to the assumption that poetic modes of representation are less true, more ideological, than are realistic narratives of the past. Poetic forms belong, at best, to the separate realm of aesthetics or mythology; at worst, to the dirty tricks of ideology. Either way, however, rhetoric is usually held to distort the collective imagination, breathing false life into sober social facts. In the final analysis, then, there can be no poetics of history.